mine?

[quarrel]

I received an unexpected lesson in leadership the other week.

Seattle has an annual chocolate industry tradeshow. There are panels, and talks, and Q&A with experts, and a dealer room. The event ran smoothly by and large. There was a bit of chaos in the entry lobby, and the tasting panels received more people than they expected, and perhaps too many simultaneous speaking events were scheduled in the larger halls, but things were as peaceful and orderly as one might expect.

When one tasting presentation ran out of its first batch of samples before the trays reached the back of the room, the speaker was on top of things before a single response from the audience. (A single polite response was, in fact, all the audience ever gave.) The speaker expressly and conspicuously instructed that the second trial’s samples be distributed beginning at the back of the room. Meanwhile, she had her assistants — all of whom she seemed to know or at least expect to be there — break the bars for the remaining trials into smaller pieces than they had for the first two, so there would be more of them. Her presentation itself was paced well and she presented herself as authoritative.

The next speaker was the diametric opposite of that woman. He bore all the personality traits of the archetypal bumbling professor. He didn’t know his assistants, or whether they knew how to turn off the room’s lights. He didn’t have plastic wrap spread over the area where he knew he’d be cutting open messy cacao pods. His presentation was largely random comments on series of personal photographs from his trips to cocoa-growing countries. More than once he had to browse his computer to find the next folder to show. He even accidentally opened all the icons on his desktop while the audience watched. No one knew when his talk ended or whether he was taking Q&A because he never announced either. Near the end of his time slot, he simply transitioned from addressing the entire room to chatting with people in the first couple of rows.

The contrast in audience behavior was astounding. The latter grew increasingly unruly and disrespectful. They talked with each other. They talked on their phones. When the speaker eventually began distributing trays of the raw cacao pod seeds he’d de-husked for people to taste, no one knew how many there were going to be. Coupled with the fact that each tray held less than two dozen and they all started at the same spot, the situation eroded into every man for himself. Audience members at the ends of rows, being the ones who pass trays back once their own row is done with them, found themselves beleaguered by multiple petitioners all requesting that they be the next recipients, since they got none last time...and when, of necessity, some of those petitioners were not granted these requests, they took handfuls of contents immediately for themselves and their companions before the trays could move.

It was a stark lesson in the power of leadership to influence others’ actions even when it isn’t directed toward controlling specific behaviors, and at just how quickly people switch between comfortable peace and self-centered callousness.