The Joe Biden I know: The kind of boss we all hope for

Joe Biden was my senator for the five years I lived in Delaware. These were my formative years--high school! I was selected to go to Girl’s Nation as one of two representatives from our state. While 98 girls from 49 states were in DC learning all we could about legislating, we got to meet the President as well as our Senators and some of our Congresspeople. The interaction I had with Biden helped change the course of how I saw the world and revealed something about Biden that people often talk about as the cornerstone of who he is and why Americans can feel good about him being President.

Biden spent more time with me and the other Delaware teen than most Senators did with the girls from their states. It was no simple meet and greet. He asked what we dreamed of doing with our lives, he hoped one of us would run for office and change the world, he was genuine. He told us we could be and do anything we wanted and to never, ever believe otherwise—in a way that made you believe it because HE believed it. 

That was 1993 (I'm the third girl from the left on the first riser, long cream suit; Girls Nation photo with Bill Clinton). He’s from a bygone era for sure, when politicians overall seemed to care quite a bit more about the greater good of the country over partisan wins.

I was a kid from a working class/sometimes poor, conservative family. And Biden wanted to know about me and what my life was like. He asked questions to find out, not out of courtesy. When he got the gist of my socioeconomic situation he told me to never be too proud to accept help along the way and that when I made it, to remember to reach a hand behind to help others coming up behind me. I felt so seen. I was 17. Raised in a quasi-evangelical, conservative family on “personal responsibility." I was taught that I alone (and God) held my fate in my hands but... as a kid living on the edge financially, I felt I had little power—aside from education—to change my station in life. Reaching out for help, that wasn't part of what I had been taught to do growing up.

This encounter was one of several that year that changed my outlook on life, took me out from the shadow of my upbringing and helped me see what could be. Joe Biden and his message resonated with me then and it resonates now because he has a deep humanity that guides him, a kindness that doesn’t have to be there, but drives his actions. I’ve seen it. He didn’t have to try to see me, or ask me questions or be kind. He just did. He just was. 

The most lasting impacts--other than me reaching out for help to afford to take the SAT, apply to colleges, something I'm not sure I'd have felt was acceptable before that encounter--is that I have worked to be that kind, compassionate, human leader I saw in Biden that day. In my personal life, professionally, to strangers. To see them, reach a hand out to help, believe in them. I don't think I realized that this was where that seed was planted until people started asking me what I thought of Biden. My management philosophy has been to meet people where they are, nurture what drives them and bring them along to where they need to be.

I’ve written quite a lot about being an upstander in a world of bystanders. And about the lack of empathy—and how to build it back—we see in this world. I've paid that hand-up forward and will continue to do so.

There’s a lot of work to be done to bring kindness, compassion, empathy and justice back to this country, but as I sit here staring at this NYT front page endlessly, I am hopeful that Joe Biden's style of being human, of managing, of leading, will bring us to a better place.  

What do you think?