Leadership is everyday lollipop moments, not changing the world
A forgotten lollipop handoff that kept a frightened student from quitting shows how daily influence matters more than heroic feats.
TEDx Talks · TEDxToronto - Drew Dudley "Leading with Lollipops"Speaker Drew Dudley believes leadership is not a distant quest to change the world. It lives in everyday lollipop moments, his term for a small moment that makes someone's life better, often without the person who caused it ever knowing.
He opened by asking the crowd: "How many of you are completely comfortable with calling yourselves a leader?" Wherever he has asked it, a large part of the audience keeps its hands down. In his view, reserving the title for heroic feats talks people out of credit for daily influence.
The story that changed his thinking came on his last day at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. A student told him she remembered meeting him four years earlier, on her first terrified day of school, when she had already decided to quit and ask her parents to take her home. He emerged from the Student Union building, wearing an absurd hat and carrying a bucket of lollipops for Shinerama, Students Fighting Cystic Fibrosis. He gave a lollipop to the young man beside her to hand to her, then teased her parents: "First day away from home, and already she's taking candy from a stranger?!" Laughter spread 20 feet in every direction, and in that laughter she decided she was home.
She was still dating that young man four years later. Dudley himself has no memory of the exchange, which for him became the point. Perhaps his largest impact on anyone came in a moment he never registered.
From that, his definition follows. What should count is how often people spark such moments, notice them, pass them on, and thank those who sparked them. He hopes younger brothers and sisters, and children, will learn to prize that influence on one another above money, power, and titles.
There are six billion understandings of leadership, one per person. Shift one person's sense of what she can do, or how much she is valued, or how much change she can drive, and the whole thing moves. As Dudley put it: "It's a simple idea, but I don't think it's a small one."
Questions people ask
What is Shinerama?
Shinerama is a Canadian student fundraising campaign for cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that causes lung and digestive problems. Students at many universities raise money each fall through events like orientation week sales and shave days. Dudley had worked with it for years when he was handing out lollipops.
Why does thanking people matter so much in his definition?
Dudley argues the failure to tell people leaves those who helped unaware of their impact. He jokes that we celebrate birthdays, for which the only requirement is staying alive for a year, while neglecting the people who improved our lives. Telling them, in his framework, is part of leadership itself.
What if you cannot remember helping someone?
That is normal, and it is central to his point. He did not remember the lollipop exchange at all, yet the student called him an incredibly important person in her life four years later. The lesson is that impact does not depend on memory, only on willingness to act in small ways.