People often portray pride as a negative or an egotistical characteristic. I’m sure when you were younger you heard “pride comes before a fall”. Great authors write about pride as a weakness, a quality to be disliked in people.
CS Lewis wrote “As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on thing and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you.”
In Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennett says “I could forgive his pride…….”
Ok enough of the literary quotes, what is my point?
The Pride I want to talk about is the pride we take in others.
As a husband and parent, I have many moments of pride.
My wife works with young child in schools delivering boot camp style fitness training to help create strong minds and bodies.
Last year my three sons all played rugby in a national final at Twickenham broadcast live to Sky.
My elder daughter has the most amazing discipline and focus on completing her homework.
My younger daughter got a Head Teachers award for kindness and caring for others.
Last week at work I had an amazing moment of pride.
On Jan 1st I took over as Managing Director at my agency and had the opportunity to get the whole agency together to talk about my vision for the business, our 2019 goals and to the new opportunities the await us. I invited the CEO and COO of our parent company who gladly joined us.
I have worked at the agency for many, many years and have been part of our evolution from a print focused design agency to a world leading Product Visualisation agency with an expanding blue-chip client base.
Through all my years in WPP I had never had the opportunity to stand in front of our 240 plus people and tell them just how proud they make me feel.
We rarely take the time to thank people and to praise them because the next project is always on top of us. Last week I made that time and allowed my passion for the business and my admiration for our people to flow.
We are in a very dynamic business and as an agency that helps our client launch new products and brings them to life via high quality visualisation, configuration, and immersive experiences we often face crazy deadlines and I have to ask a lot of our people. The only way we can keep delivering is by having a team all working for each other and all pulling in the same direction. Hopefully our meeting last week gave everyone a clear view on where we are heading and what we need to do to get there.
I started the article with a literary quote and I will do the same at the end. The quote I will end on was written by John Green in the book Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“I'm so proud of you that it makes me proud of me. I hope you know that.”
by Richard Wright
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