Stating the obvious

So, allow me to state the obvious: funerals, wakes, and memorial services are not fun. They aren't meant to be fun. They're meant to give us a chance to reflect, ponder, say goodbye, and comfort each other. I really believe that when someone dies, they are in a better place; though as a non-Christian I don't have a lot of images or news to share about what that place might be. It doesn't stop me from being sad. But it helps me understand why people I knew are missing from my sight.

Why I am up early today going to a service is complicated and has to do with my job. My job is so complicated to explain and when thinking about this post (you know, five minutes ago) I realized I haven't explained it other than to say that my schedule is a moving target each week, and I'm on the road a lot. I work for a world-wide after school education program. Our business model is that our instructors are our franchisees, and my job is to run this region as the field consultant/franchise development manager. I was hired by the company, so I work for the franchisor, but it is part of my job to have relationships with the franchisees who are also instructors. It is also my job, at times to be all business with them. And it is my job to travel to them to work side by side with them. It is my job to provide ongoing training and professional development. It is my job to set goals with them, and help make action plans with time bounded steps to achieve them. It is my job to be a consultant for operations, business, and the side of this that I am most drawn to, education, student observation, and lesson planning. It is my job to train new candidates and help them get their centers open. It is my job to work with existing instructors on making changes. It is my job to deliver good and bad news, and it is my job to plan lunches, meetings, and the Christmas party. I've eaten a lot of pizza and sushi with these people.

But they're not exactly my colleagues. Some franchisees would say I work for them, since their royalties keep the company's doors open. Some franchisees would say they feel they work for us when they're feeling especially put upon by the company's requirements. I hope that most would say I am their liaison and partner in helping them have more satisfying success in their business in terms of being educators, but also in terms of being profitable.

From the outside, if you saw us eating sushi, it would look like we are friends, colleagues, and equals. But there's an invisible line. I can't be their friends. I can't drink with them, or go to their houses, because that makes business messy and tense. Likewise, I gather from franchisees (from our company as well as other franchise systems) that while they may like their field consultant very much, they too feel the separation in that there are some things they might hesitate to bring up in a conversation with that person . . . just in case the field consultant's "Big Brother" ears are on.

Lines get crossed, and envelopes get pushed, sometimes to the benefit of the working relationship and sometimes to the detriment of it. If I've learned nothing else in my 5.5 years in this position, it's that you can't do this job well without a strong personal relationship with the franchisees built on respect, trust, and integrity. But on the other hand, since it's business, you also can't always fall back on that relationship.

This week the lines have been very blurry because one of my franchisees died. He was a beloved instructor to his students and their parents, and I have eaten a lot of sushi with him. In fact, there have been times where I've eaten with him, his wife, and his son - see above for where the lines get crossed. So, at once, I have been a shoulder to cry on, a business adviser, a counselor, and the action-taker who took charge of making a plan for the center, the communicator who called parents and families, and the only person here in Colorado to represent anything the company needed done.

Looking at that paragraph above, those are the shoes I fill every day at work, including a few others - office manager shopping for supplies and making sure necessary tasks like heating and cleaning are tended to, administrative assistant, party planner, presentation giver. This is because there is no one else here for me to share responsibility with. The difference this week is that it involves the loss of someone important in the colleaguial community I facilitate, even if I'm not exactly a part of that group.

Most weeks I see the benefits and the drawbacks of being on my own out here. I don't participate in office drama, but I also don't get the help and support of colleagues very often. I don't get fed for office meetings, but I get to work in my PJs sometimes. Our jobs have a lot of work hour flexibility, but mine even more so. I have to do my own admin, I get to do a load of laundry on my lunch break (when said lunch break isn't in a car on the way to a center).

Never have a I wished for a team of people to share the load with more than this week. For my readers, please anticipate and forgive what will likely be some pretty profound fogginess and inconsistency in the coming month. Going to the service will be hard, holding a business meeting with a grieving spouse next week will be even harder.

With that, I'm off to the service in as much of a black outfit as I could pull together.