Chapter 10 of the Tao Te Ching - The Primal Virtue

“I haven’t seen you in a very long time,” I said, “How have you been?”

“I have been better,” she replied. Every muscle in her body seemed to be tense. Her eyes darted around the room and never seemed to remain focused on anything.

“You look very distraught, is there anything I can do to help?”

She looked at me. Her eyes were pleading to give her answers, but her voice could not find the words describe what she needed. She slowly moved her head from side to side and slumped back into her chair. She looked like someone that had been fighting for a long time and finely gave up.

“I was given a major promotion at work a few weeks ago,” she said.

I waited for her to say more, but once again, words seemed to be failing her. “Most people would consider that a good thing,” I said, “Is it not working out like you had hoped?”

She sat up quickly. She looked at me with renewed energy. “I don’t understand it,” she began. “I am good at what I do. I am very good. That is why they gave me the position in the first place. There is no one else that can come close to my skills. But nobody seems to care. Everyone just looks at me like ‘the new boss.’ Most of the people that work for me in my department seem to actually hate me. They don’t want me around. No matter what I try to do to help them, they just push me further away.”

“What do you try to do to help them?” I asked.

“Well, I show them how they can work more efficiently, I try to educate them and pass on my skills and knowledge.”

“Did they ever ask you to?” I asked.

“What do you mean? Why would the need to ask me? I am their leader, it is my job to lead them and show them the right way to get things done.”

“Is it?” I asked. “Is that the job of a leader?”

“Well, what else would it be?”

“A true leader is there to guide,” I said, “Not to instruct. He lets his people come to him and learn from him. In that way, he becomes known for his wisdom, instead of his knowledge. Anyone can become knowledgeable. It is wisdom that people truly respect.”

“But without knowledge there can be no wisdom,” she said.

“Really? I have a friend with a little girl no more than five years old. They have a rule that at eight o’clock in the evening she has to quit playing with her toys and get ready for bed. One night at around eight fifteen he realized that she was still playing with her toys and he reminded her of the rule. She looked at him and said, ‘but Daddy, I am not playing with them. I am using them as toys.’

My friend laughed when I finished that story. “The thing is,” I continued, “that child does not have vast amounts of knowledge. But she showed wisdom beyond the years of even her father.”

“So, you are saying that I shouldn’t teach what I know to others? Should I keep it all to myself?”

“No no no,” I said, “I never said that at all. The knowledge that is not shared is useless. The trick is knowing when to share it.”

We sat in silence for a quite a while. Finely I said, “My advice to you is this; Do the job that you were hired to do. keep what you have until it is time to let go, do your work to satisfy your own sense of honor, and learn to be a leader instead of an instructor.”

“But how to I learn that?” she asked.

“By observing those that you would lead.”

We talked about other things for a while and when it was time to go she seemed to be much more relaxed than she had been before. I haven’t heard from her since that day. But I know her, she learns better than she instructs. I suspect she is doing much better in her new job now.