Head Tale

A former colleague on the Ryan Meili Leadership Campaign v 2.0 (the tall blonde guy in the above picture) recently went viral with a tweet about how he was able to support one of his female employees during Covid.  This even included his story getting highlighted on ABC’s “Good Morning America”!

I’m not a big user of LinkedIn but, especially given his recent viral success, I had to chuckle thinking how Aaron is one of the four people who’ve written a Recommendation for me on that platform.

This is what he said:

Jason directed the social media activity of Ryan Meili’s leadership campaign with extraordinary deftness and capability. Jason, as my manager, allowed me to focus on my areas of responsibility without distraction. He set up an environment where the social media resources, both people and content, were always available when needed; a difficult task in such a variable environment. Jason’s creativity and passion were evident with his ideas for promoting the candidate online and included a fantastic “10 days, 10 reasons” campaign that highlighted some of the less mainstream reasons for supporting the candidate. This fresh approach was very popular both internally within the campaign and externally in the membership. Most importantly, during this highly stressful and long campaign, Jason managed to retain a sense of humour, be well liked by a large (80+) group of volunteers, and balance his authority with approachability. I highly recommend Jason for a senior role in communications management for a campaign or company.

In typical LinkedIn (and really any career/resume related) fashion, this review isn’t “lying”.  But boy, is it exaggerating in places! 🙂

I was Aaron’s “manager” only in the sense that I had gotten on the team first (my memory is that he was involved in a municipal election campaign before coming on board?) and basically claimed that title because I’d been blogging for a few years, had a personal interest in social media, and came up for the idea of a social media “Money Bomb” during Ryan’s first leadership run.  (Meanwhile, Aaron came in with a PhD in Computer Science – pretty intimidating stuff if you’re the “Social Media Manager” whose main academic qualification was having written a few papers about Facebook and Wikipedia while completing an MLIS!) 🙂

And while it is true that I gave Aaron room to do his thing, that’s only because he didn’t need my support or help in any way, shape or form.

Honestly, if I was his manager by title, the reality is that we were more of a pretty balanced team, co-leading Ryan’s social media efforts in various ways.  As you’d expect from a PhD in Computer Science, Aaron was amazing at analytics and data and number crunching and stuff like that.  As he mentions (one other piece of truth in his review), I think I was (usually) pretty good at the “people” aspects of the role – managing and directing the efforts of a very large team of volunteers with a wide range of opinions, preferences and attitudes – and also coming up with some unique ideas.

Not to say we were perfectly matched all the time – Aaron and I didn’t always see eye-to-eye and I remember having disagreements including one (can’t remember the topic) where one of Ryan’s top deputies had to step in to mediate and get us both rowing in the same direction again. 🙁

But that was good learning too and I know much of what I learned on that campaign still informs how I approach relationships with others to this day.  Later, Aaron even labeled us “Brothers from different mothers” or something like that to our group of volunteers (my memory is that some of the disagreement had happened “behind closed doors” in a private Facebook group but unfortunately in front of the volunteers which wasn’t great either.  Again, I don’t remember the exact circumstances but my memory is that frankly, Aaron showed way more leadership than me, by openly acknowledging the conflict and apologizing before I did.  So even more good learning – admit your mistakes, don’t be afraid to apologise!)

Anyhew, that’s all ancient history but still fun to use Aaron’s recent tweet for an excuse to have a walk down memory lane to one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve ever had in politics – such a great group of people, so united in a common goal, and so little of the infighting and “politics about politics” that often happens to distract and dissuade volunteers from being truly engaged.

Here’s another pic, this one of the core of Team Meili v 2.0 having supper the night before the convention vote.  Aaron is sitting next to Shea who happened to be nine months pregnant with Sasha at the time.  I don’t think they discussed it but I have to note my own viral fame from that time period – my most Liked post on Facebook in 2013?  Posting directly from the delivery room as I held my new baby in my lap right after Sasha was born! 😉