It’s Not Greek, It’s Latin

At the time of writing this story, I am currently serving as the president and CEO of a mid-sized science museum.  This is not my first museum nor is it my first round as a chief executive.  I had the privilege of working, and growing up professionally, at a very large science museum.  I logged almost 17 years at that great institution and lost track of how many different titles I held.  I started as a part time camp counselor and ended my time there as a senior manager reporting directly to the president and overseeing a sizeable portion of the organization.  Basically, I had done every job but one, and my boss wasn’t ready to hang it up, so if I wanted to assume the role of chief executive that meant leaving.

Fortunately I was living and working in a major metropolitan city so there were other museums in town.  One of them was looking for a new Executive Director at the same time I was looking to become one.  After completing all the customs and traditions associated with interviewing for such a position, I was extended an offer and became the Executive Director of an arboretum.  What’s an arboretum?  Besides being a tricky word to spell and pronounce, it’s also a type of museum found in the genre of botanical gardens.  More specifically it was a tree museum.  I went from a very large indoor science museum with an Imax theater, a planetarium, a US Navy submarine and 300,000 sq. ft. of galleries to a 200-acre outdoor botanical garden.

A lot of the same basic principles and skills apply.  Both are museums, both have visitors, both have exhibits and educational offerings.  Fundraising, fiscal management and having a board are all part and parcel to the gig as well, so for all intense purposes it was the job I was looking for in the field I called my career.

When applying for a job like this a candidate needs to expect that there will be several rounds of interviews and countless skills and abilities you will need to demonstrate to the search committee.  This process was no exception, and I was run through all the steps.  This is also an opportunity for the candidate to interview the organization.  Chief executives don’t last long if it’s not a clear fit so it’s important that everyone feels good about a selection.  In my case the organization was eager to gain my skills in informal education and exhibits, and I was excited to work with a staff and board that wanted to learn and grow.  We all agreed this was a great match and moved forward feeling pretty good about things.

However, I was left with one lingering doubt.  I was about to take over a tree museum.  I like trees.  In fact, I would go so far as to say I love trees.  At the time I could clearly tell you the difference between a conifer and a deciduous tree, but after that my knowledge ran out quickly.  Deep into my fourth or fifth interview it dawned on me that no one had yet asked me about my botanical background.  Imposter syndrome quickly set in, and I was panicked that I was about to lose a job that I now very much wanted.  I decided the only real option available to me was to address the elephant in the room. I asked the search committee “how important is it that I know all the botany of our collections?”  Almost as if I had asked a ridiculous question, my soon to be board chair said, “oh don’t worry about that, we have a guy for that.”

The guy in question was the arboretum’s curator and someone I would soon become quite fond of and would closely work with for the next few years.  His name is Martin. No pseudonym here because he needs all the recognition and praise he can get.  He is not originally from the United States.  He came here for college, met and fell in love with his wife, and now has two lovely children.  Home for Martin is New Zealand.  He’s got one of those great accents that melts people’s brains.  You could literally listen to him read a phone book and think it was poetry.  He introduced me to Vegemite and cheese on toast and took my love for our trees to levels I did not know existed.

With the interview courtship completed I was anointed as the 7^th director in the 87-year history of this organization.  Our arboretum boasted some impressive facts.  In a little more than 200 acres we had over 2,300 collection trees from six continents, 17 critically endangered species of trees, and we were one of the only arboretums in the world to be originally designed by famed landscape architect James Olmstead.  In fact, his original planning document is framed and hangs proudly in the library of the arboretum.

As an old and established institution in our community, the arboretum had grown tired and a bit stale.  Much work was needed to revive the educational programs and interpretive aspects found in and around the collections.  The good news was that the grounds and the trees themselves were in excellent shape in no small part thanks to Martin.  I set about quickly identifying the projects and improvements we needed to do to bring our museum up to snuff.

While I could have spent all my time working on exhibits and programs (my happy place if I’m being honest), I also had to do the job of being a chief executive which meant meeting with donors and supporters of the organization.  I would be remiss if I didn’t point out a few critical pieces of information.  First, the arboretum is free to visit.  There’s no admission fee which means our dependency on philanthropy was pretty significant.  Second, the arboretum was situated in the second wealthiest zip code in the city.  All of our neighbors really enjoyed their property being backed by our lovely and protected acreage.  This meant that a good number of our donors quite literally lived next door and I could simply walk to their beautiful homes to meet with them.

One of those neighbors was a well-known philanthropist in our city and gave generously to the arboretum.  She also happened to be the past garden club president and a former board member of the arboretum.  Meeting with her meant going to her home that overlooked one particularly stunning portion of our collections to have tea.  She was local royalty and an invitation to tea at her home was to be treated the same as an audience with the Pope or other head of state.  In my first week I was summoned for tea and my board gave me a crash course etiquette lesson.  With my best Lands End shirt and coat (one part executive, one part tree guy) I headed down the trail to her home.

Upon arriving I was stopped dead in my tracks by the beautiful Victorian portico you enter under to ring the bell on a massive set of oak doors.  It wasn’t quite Wane Manor, but it was close.  A very well-dressed woman answered the door and greeted me.  After the appropriate pleasantries were exchanged, I was escorted to the parlor where tea would be served shortly and where I would be joined by the home’s owner.

I had done my homework.  I knew her family’s history, I knew her giving history to the arboretum, and I had gathered some cute anecdotes I was assured would resonate with her.  I was also prepared to lay out my plans for the future of our tree museum and what to expect in the coming months and years.  This was my first major donor meeting as the chief executive, and I wanted everything to go well.  I even brought a bouquet of wildflowers Martin and I had picked from the wedding meadow that morning; again, I was assured she would respond to this gesture favorably.

As I sat taking some deep breaths and willing my body not to sweat, she entered the room.  I was greeted with a surprisingly firm handshake from an 85-year-old woman who stood at least two inches taller than myself.  I was then offered some tea and asked to sit down.  I presented my flowers that she politely dropped into a waiting vase on the table and then launched in with some of my prepared anecdotes.  She politely laughed and opened the door for me to share my thoughts and visions for the future of the organization.  Things were going exceedingly well, and I fell into the trap of believing things were going well.  I was comfortable and for the first time thought “I can really do this job.”  And that’s when I sprung the trip wire and walked myself right into a trap.

“Tell me, what’s your favorite part of the collections?” she asked innocently enough.  I was quick on my feet and told her the Redwood collection was my favorite.  I chose the Redwoods because they were the first trees planted in our collection and they were the only specimen tree I knew anything about.  She pressed for details and within a few sentences my knowledge well ran dry.  I knew better than to try and bluff my way through, so I tried to redirect the conversation.  She would have nothing of it, she had her mouse and now she wanted to play with it before delivering the fatal blow.

My shirt was drenched in that awful stress sweat.  I was zigging and zagging in the conversation but she headed me off at every turn.  She had me dead to rights.  I didn’t know a damn thing about the specimens in our collections and that just would not do.  No matter what else I brought to the table, it was not suitable to “have a guy” who knew all the botany.  Firmly beaten and battered, I left our tea with very clear marching orders.  “Young man, you seem nice enough and you clearly know things about museums, but you simply cannot do this job if you don’t learn about the trees.”  She was right of course.

The walk back to my office in the visitor center felt much longer than the journey I had taken an hour earlier.  But it gave me time to think and formulate a plan.  Upon returning to the office Martin had just finished wiping some mud off his boots and was pouring his next cup of coffee.  He asked, “how’d it go mate?”  I told him what had happened and how humiliated I was and he said, “ya…we all expected as much.”  First, I want to say that I really miss being called mate.  Second, if my whole team knew they were sending me to slaughter why didn’t anyone clue me in?  Clearly I had a little work to do with my team.  But as for the matter at hand, I had a plan.  I looked at Martin and said “dude (that’s American for mate), I gotta learn about the trees.”

And that’s just what happened.  At first the intention was to teach me some basic botany and a hand full of scientific and Latin names of some of the more popular collection specimens.  But very quickly we realized that in order to successfully run an arboretum one had to become an arborist.  Let’s be very clear here, there are many levels of arborist.  I was never going to become a Jedi Knight of the trees, but I could probably get my level one arborist certification.  So I channeled my inner Lorax and we got to work.  Every Wednesday morning for three hours Martin and I would wonder the more than 12 miles of trails out in the collections and we would focus on different parts of the certification process.

I have an affinity for tools, equipment and gear of any and all kinds, so the technical aspects of tree pruning, climbing, and the safety stuff came quickly.  Plant identification came much, much slower.  I’ve never been great with memorization and long lists of scientific things.  Ironic I know given my more than 30 years working in and running museums.  The periodic table kicked my ass in chemistry class and the botanical Latin was all Greek to me.  I struggled immensely but my teacher and guru had a seemingly endless well of patience for me.  If I were him, I would have left me in the woods on the second day.  But he just gave me a bite of his Vegemite sandwich and we kept working.

After three months of hard work the moment arrived to see what I had really learned.  In the botanical garden genre of museums there are two times a year when you really get to shine.  First is the spring as everything comes into bloom and the second is the fall when the leaves change colors and everything is painted in autumn hues.  It’s also a great time to ask the people who support your museum for more of their support by reminding them why they love your garden in the first place.  At the arboretum we had two big donor events each year.  The fall color tour and the spring color tour.

The event boils down to something like this.  We invite all our major supporters to join us for a walk in the collections late in the afternoon but before the sun sets.  We then embark on a walking tour through most of the deciduous collections and some of the confers and point out which trees had turned which color and why.  We all marvel at the beauty of nature, take copious amounts of photos and at the end of the walk pass the hat for continued support of the museum.  It’s lovely in its simplicity and has the added benefit of being highly effective.

The time had arrived and I was to lead my first fall color tour.  Martin felt confident in my knowledge and once all our supporters had gathered, including my tea hostess, we headed off into the collections.  I was in the lead, and Martin and a few of my board members were in the back sweeping up the stranglers and helping some of our slower supporters along the trails.  I had charted a course that would let me start easy, find my groove and end with a bang.  Our first stop was the maple collection.

The nice thing about maples is that there about 12 million species and varieties.  I might be remembering the number wrong but there are a lot.  They’re easy to remember and they are dazzling in their variety of shapes and colors.  When we got to our first stop I waited for the 40 plus leaf peepers to bunch up on the trail and I launched into my prepared remarks.  I started easy with a few common names and then dove off the diving board into the deep end and started dropping some Latin bombs.  In the back Martin was giving me big thumbs up which was some desperately needed encouragement because my guests seemed to be less than interested or engaged.

Let’s pause here so we can talk a bit about my audience.  I’m not saying that all my donors were affluent old Caucasian women, but if you grabbed anyone off the street and asked them to describe the group I was talking to I think they would be hard pressed to come up with a different description.  These were garden club grandmothers.  They knew their plants and did not need me to tell them anything.  But we all agreed to this charade and so the show must go on.  It was a tough crowd and I once again found myself in need of a new shirt even though it was now mid-October.

We moved on to the next section of the collections and I once again leaned heavily into the months of study and apprenticeship under Martin.  Latin terms were coming out of me like it was Sunday mass and these ladies were giving me nothing.  I mean absolutely nothing.  In the back of the pack Martin stood like a proud teacher beaming and continuing to give me the thumbs up.  My brain could not reconcile what was happening.  As a master arborist there was no doubt in my mind that Martin was the resident expert.  If he thought I was doing well then that was it, I was getting all my content correct.  So maybe it was something else.  Could the ladies see the darkened stains of my shirt under my arms?  Were my anecdotes and little plant jokes too corny for their tastes?  I tried speaking louder to the point where I was yelling at them assuming that perhaps the issue was that at their advanced age some were hard of hearing.  Nope, that wasn’t it either.

This went on for another hour and twenty minutes.  It was painful for everyone involved to watch and listen.  As our tour was winding up I began drafting cover letters in my head for the applications I would be writing the next day for my next job because clearly I was about to be fired.  The board members who had joined the tour and were in the back of the pack shared the same confused and sour looks as our supporters.  My run at the arboretum was going to last three months.  My first seat as a chief executive spoiled by some stupid plants.  I was completely devastated and in an effort to provide mercy for all of us, I skipped the last stop on our tour so we could head back to the visitor center for the promised refreshments and social time.

When we arrived back at the visitor center, my assistant was eagerly waiting.  She had been working with me for 15 years at this point and followed me from our previous museum to our new home in the trees.  She was an excellent partner to have and could read me like a book.  She took particular delight in preparing our little spread for the garden club ladies.  We had little sandwiches with the crusts cut off, cookies and mini cakes which I later learned were called pettifors.  How did I learn that?  One of the tour survivors spelled it out for me…very…slowly.  She even asked me to repeat the word pettifor as if to ensure that I understood the conversation and the word.  It was odd.

My assistant found the right time to grab my elbow and pull me aside to ask how things had gone.  I explained the experience and she responded with “oh my God…are we going to another museum?”  I explained that while this was not my intention it was a distinct possibility.  I began to apologize but one of the garden club ladies was frantically tapping her glass with one of her many ringed fingers to let my assistant know that more gin and tonic was needed, but to leave the tonic.

After another grueling and awkward hour of small talk the ladies began to dissipate and head back to their lovely homes overlooking our collections.  This was when my board chair decided to act.  She walked over to where Martin and I were conducting a postmortem on the tour and opened the conversation with “So…” followed by a long dramatic pause.  I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to speak, so I resorted to my wealth of awkward conversation skills developed in middle school and responded with “So…”

My board chair at the time was another prominent socialite in the city and a significant philanthropist.  While her home shared the same zip code as the arboretum, she did not have one of the homes that stared into our collections and my office.  Her husband was an administrator at one of the major hospitals in town and she ran one of the most sought-after landscape architecture firms in the Northwest.  She knew my audience well and the subject material as well if not better than my tutor.  She picked the conversation back up at that point.

“That was a lovely tour Mat, thanks for leading us this evening.  Would you mind if I ask you where you learned all that material that you presented?”  Ah ha!  I did get something wrong.  But now I was in a tough spot.  My tutor, a master arborist, and a guy with two degrees in this stuff who taught me everything was standing right next to me.  I did not want to through my best mate under the lory.  I shot Martin a quick sideways glance.  He just smiled and gave me a piece of his little vegemite sandwich.

I began to explain how Martin and I had spent the past three months working on my arborist certification.  How we had spent hours every Wednesday morning out in the collections learning the different species of trees, the common name and their Latin scientific names.  I explained my dogeared copy of Sibley’s Tree Guide was on my desk and I reviewed parts of it every day.  I made my case to the authorities who were about to pass judgment on my fate.

And then a big grin formed on the board chair’s face.  She looked at the two of us and asked, “So you learned ALL of your botanical Latin from him?”  A quick jerk of her head let me know she was refereeing to our curator, my tutor, my mate Martin.  An image of George Washington appeared in my mind and like him, I could not tell a lie.  “Yes mam I did.”  A pause ensued before she responded.  “Ah, that explains things.  Do you realize you learned all your Latin with a New Zealand accent?”

Do you remember the look on Wiley Coyote’s face at the moment when he realizes his most recent elaborate plot to catch the road runner has failed and instead, he’s going to fall from a dangerous height only to be smashed into the ground and walk away like an accordion?  That was the look on my face.  You see the human brain is a curious little thing.  We have the gift of both speaking and hearing language.  We can form complex sounds with our mouth that allow us to communicate with other advanced primates.  It’s one of the many things that separates us in the animal kingdom from other species.

In fact, the language center of the brain is so advanced that we can make real time adjustments to other primates who speak with different cadences, syntax, and even regional colloquialisms.  What it cannot do well, especially in an older brain, is adjust for mid-sentence code shifting.  Here’s what I mean.  When my mate Martin delivers the exact same information I was delivering, everyone makes the adjustment to his accent.  That’s because everything my mate says sounds that way.   And in his case swooning ensues because there’s a special power in a kiwi accent.  But as I was talking and then suddenly drop in one or two words that are already a foreign language and then add the kicker of his accent, well it just sounds like gibberish.

Problem solved…sort of.  My board chair and I drafted a very funny letter to all our supporters explaining what had happened.  There was an uncomfortable amount of lampooning at my expense, but I was willing to pay the piper in order to get another shot.  The misunderstanding was met with relief and more fun at my expense.  Apparently this story made the rounds at the next few garden club meetings and when I received my invitation to speak at one of their events, there was a surprising amount of giggling and pointing when I arrived.  Those ladies should know better; most of them were grandmothers!

I thought public humiliation was going to be the hardest part of this experience, but I was wrong.  A much steeper hill to climb awaited me.  I had spent months learning this stuff and now I had to unlearn it and then relearn it in my native language and accent.  Think about that for a second.  Have you ever tried to unlearn something?  Let me give you a taste.  Everyone has learned the lyrics to some pop song at some point in their life.  And in learning that song you heard a word wrong but it stuck.  You’re certain that’s the lyric until you belt it out at some party or in the car with your friend and everyone has a good laugh at your expense.  Even when you learn the correct lyric, you still will sing it wrong every time.  That was me, only with pseudo-tsuga and several others of the greatest hits of the arboretum.

I learned a very valuable lesson on the trail that night: context is key.  I was technically proficient that night and there was nothing factually wrong with what I was saying or doing.  I gained the necessary knowledge to be an effective steward of my work.  But I was missing some context ques.  I could not see, or more appropriately hear, how my newfound knowledge was missing the mark.  It took an outsider to connect the dots.  I was also reminded of the power of language.  Even when you’re communicating all the right words, how you communicate matters.

The night was not a total loss.  I learned a few other lessons.  For example, I always keep a clean fresh shirt in my office because in the words of the C&C Music Factory, donors are “gonna make you sweat!”  I learned boards can be a lot more forgiving than I first thought.  And I came to the realization that someday I am going to travel to New Zealand and when I do, I am going to shock the hell out of people with my spot-on botanical knowledge delivered in their local accent.  They’re going to be so impressed!

One quick postscript to this story.  About five months later I gathered the same intrepid group of supporters, and we embarked on the Spring Color Tour.  My board chair was my tutor this time and she had patiently worked with me for months to relearn my botanical Latin.  First stop, the Magnolia collection.  The garden club ladies were much more responsive and patient.  Martin was ambivalent in the back, but big smiles came from the chairwoman, so we proceeded on.  The tour once again ended with finger sandwiches, gin and tonics, and one more awkward conversation.

Standing in the garden of the visitor center my original hostess for tea came up and asked me, “So how did you relearn all of that material and who helped you?”  I explained the painstaking journey I had been on and piled thanks on my board chair and world class landscape architect for her help and patience.  The hostess responded with, “That figures, she’s from Massachusetts right?”  I had done it again.  I learned my Latin with some hard R’s and some long A’s.  Watch out Boston, I’m coming to you with some wicked smart tree knowledge!