Height
Some people spend years reaching a place from which they could help someone else.
And when they get there, they do.
Sometimes it is a phone call.
A name mentioned in the right room.
An email forwarded.
Five minutes spent on something they had no obligation to look at.
A door they could easily have left closed.
They do not have to.
Perhaps that is precisely why it matters when they do.
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For some time now, I have thought that we measure people’s height the wrong way.
We look at how far they have climbed.
Perhaps we should look instead at what they do with the distance between where they stand and those still trying to get there.
Some turn that distance into a staircase.
Others into a balcony.
And some into a cliff.
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I am not talking about those who cannot help.
I am talking about those who could, and choose not to.
And, more troublingly, those who discover that reaching a certain position has given them something else:
the ability to make the climb harder for those coming behind them.
Because power — even the small, everyday kind found in a company, a profession or an organisation — has a strange property:
the more of it you have, the less it can cost you to change someone else’s life.
What takes three minutes at the top can mean three years at the bottom.
An introduction.
A recommendation.
An opportunity.
A conversation.
Perhaps that is why generosity means something different when the relationship is unequal.
Helping someone who can help us in return contains an element of exchange.
Helping someone who may never be able to give us anything back says something about who we are.
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But power has another use.
Some people do not need to be above.
They need someone else to be below.
It sounds like the same thing.
It is not.
The first kind take pleasure in what they have achieved.
The second need the distance in order to feel it.
They are not always protecting a position.
Sometimes they are protecting the difference.
And that may be one of the quietest forms of cruelty in professional life.
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It requires no shouting.
Sometimes it is simply not replying.
Not mentioning a name.
Not giving someone five minutes.
Closing a door that no longer leads anywhere for us, knowing that for the person on the other side it might lead almost everywhere.
Or, worse, pushing it shut.
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I have met people at the very top who never once needed to make me feel that I was below them.
And others, not nearly so high, who seemed to need it constantly.
Eventually, that taught me something.
Position and height are not the same thing.
Position appears on an organisational chart, a job title, an office door or a profile.
Height leaves a different kind of evidence.
The people who grew because we were there.
The opportunities that existed because we happened to be in the room.
The names we spoke when the people who owned them were not there to hear us.
The doors left slightly more open after we passed through them.
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Perhaps, in the end, how far each of us managed to climb will matter very little.
There will be a much harder question to answer:
when you finally found yourself looking down at someone,
did you reach out your hand —
or did you need the height?