A challenge for anyone who wishes to lead:

Don’t be threatened by good ideas coming from subordinates.

Instead, rethink your role in their lives.

You are now in a position to help foster new leaders, and to help those in lower ranks rise, and bring their ideas to fruition.

Poor leaders are threatened by this, and can only imagine themselves being replaced.

Good leaders know that helping others succeed is good leadership.

Even if those we help wind up outshining us.

This is one of the greatest joys of teaching: having our students do what we could never have done.

And resting in the pleasant knowledge that we helped them just a little bit along the way.

(Images: a monarch butterfly in the McCrory Gardens at South Dakota State University, and a monarch butterfly preparing for its final migration south. I photographed the one at SDSU while visiting there to learn more this summer. It’s a nice reminder of mutual benefit: plants need pollinators, and pollinators need plants. They both need soil, and soil needs them. Et cetera ad infinitum. I photographed the other in Brandon, South Dakota this autumn. The monarch migrates, but it only makes part of the migratory journey on its own. Each migration winds up involving multiple generations of monarchs. We are all in this together.)