Fall is my favorite time of year. The mornings are crisp and clear, and I look forward to long drives in the mountains watching the leaves change. This is also the time of year when I remember having several things happen all at once.
I took the Professional Engineering licensing exam on Friday, October 24. That evening we had our wedding rehearsal and dinner. Our wedding was the next day, Saturday, October 25. I can’t believe this year will make twenty-three years we’ve been married.
What does this have to do with a leadership story?
The story is really about what happened — or what didn’t happen — at the reception. We had a room full of people we loved, and we wanted every one of them to feel it. I remember standing in the receiving line before the reception and my wife and I both saying how tired we were. The food looked great, and we had every intention of setting a plate aside for ourselves. We’d talked about it beforehand. And somewhere in the middle of all that hand-shaking and picture-taking, it just didn’t happen. We ate — or more like nibbled — during the reception, because we thought we had food set aside.
We got back to the hotel that night, starving, and ended up calling room service at 10 or 11 o’clock. We still laugh about the fifty-dollar club sandwich we shared on our wedding night.
We’d thought about planning for ourselves. We just never followed through.
Leaders eat last. Simon Sinek wrote a whole book on it, and he’s right. But somewhere between the idea and the reception hall, eat last quietly turned into not really eating at all. A leader who serves others first still has to plan — ahead of time — for what they need too.
How This Translates in Leadership
Eating last was never the problem. Not planning for it was.
You might eat last, but what you’re planning to eat gets set aside first — before the day fills up, before the calendar takes it, before everyone else’s needs arrive and start eating the time you never protected. You plan for yourself first. No one else needs to see this except you. If you don’t, you’ll get what’s left over, not the day you designed.
Plan First and Then Serve
Here’s the encouragement, plain and simple: look out for the people you lead, and look out for yourself. Not one or the other. Both — same as I want you winning at work and winning at home, not trading one for the other.
Eating last is still right. Keep serving your people first. But don’t just intend to eat — plan for it. Decide, ahead of time, what you actually need — rest, a real conversation, a Saturday, thirty quiet minutes — and set it aside before the day gets a vote. Design it in. Don’t find out at 11pm that you never got around to it.
You can go last and still eat. You just have to plan what you want to eat first — or you’ll end up settling for what you can get regardless of the cost.
Twenty-three years later, I still remember that expensive sandwich. Since that date I make a point to set aside what I need first before pouring everything into others.
That is how you Win by Design
— Dr. James Bryant, P.E.