"Where do you take the kids when there is an emergency?" -pained voice of my dad when I answered the phone.
My dad was at the pole barn, slipped on some ice, fell and laid on the ice for 15 minutes- his whole body in pain. He thought he had gotten the wind knocked out of him. But the next morning when he woke up, he was having trouble breathing, so he called me.
He fractured two of his ribs, which is painful, but not as bad as I'd feared it could be.
When he went to Urgent Care, he told them he'd hurt himself at home, which, technically, was true as he lives at camp. Except that he was working at the time and so he should have said he was hurt on the job and it would be covered under workers compensation.
But this is my dad we are talking about and he hates anything bureaucratic- he doesn't even have a bank account any more (imagine a pile of cash stacked inside of a Bible with a gun sitting on top of it- that's my father's idea of a bank). He was completely opposed to the idea of workers compensation because he didn't want our insurance premiums to go up. I told him not to worry about the camp budget, it would be fine. I appreciated his looking out for the organization, but x-rays and doctor visits aren't cheap and he shouldn't have to pay for it himself, when clearly it was a safety issue at his place of work.
We argued and argued about this and he was adamant that we not file workers comp, regardless of my logic. So I suggested camp just write a check and cover the expenses- he would be taken care of and the insurance wouldn't be affected. He was okay with that arrangement.
But as I thought about it further, I started thinking about every instance from the past 3 years when I found records of something that was mishandled and thought, "why did they do it this way?" J and I have found piles of old files, most with handwritten notes on scrap paper, most that leave out major details or proper documentation. Over and over again, I have shook my head and wondered how this camp has not been sued, gone bankrupt or been closed due to poor management. We are a business. A business needs to have policies, procedures and operate based on a structure, not the whim of whomever is in charge at the time.
From the moment I became executive director, I have spent an obscene amount of time trying to fix things, straighten things out and get us to where we should be. All of my hard work and we have made little progress forward because we had to come from SO far behind.
When I first began this position, I struggled to make decisions, especially if they didn't make everyone happy. I didn't know what I was doing, didn't have any experience, and there were few policies to guide me. I'd been so excited to work for a small organization after being at the YMCA (which is a huge and complex and has a million levels of management). I wanted to get away from all of the restrictive policies and paperwork and from doing things "because that's how they have to be done". But a business, whether giant like the YMCA or tiny like Camp, needs structure, and so I found every manual, staff handbook, piece of paperwork (all the pieces of my former job I'd found annoying and time consuming), and I spent hours, weeks, months, copying and pasting "Camp" everywhere it said YMCA and creating a structure for this mess of an organization.
And so, against my dad's wishes, I called Urgent Care and fixed the mistake, filed a workers compensation claim and went to bed satisfied that as a leader, not every person will like me, agree with me or be happy with every decision I make. I want to be liked, but more than that, I want to know that I've done my best to be fair, consistent, make decisions based on the common good of the camp, and follow policy. This was a great reminder of that and I am happy with how I handled it.
