For me, it was Fire Marshall Bill. Played by the then neophyte comedian, Jim Carrey, on the then groundbreaking, way-ahead-of-its-time 90s sketch comedy show In Living Colour, Fire Marshall Bill was when I realized the power of the face.
The premise of the sketch was as silly as it sounds. Fire Marshall Bill proved time and time again to be the world’s worst fire marshall, each sketch ending with him burning himself or his surroundings to a crisp. But it wasn’t the predictable, slapstick, if not arsonous, plotline that had me hooked. It was Carrey’s uncanny facial contortions, some of which looked as if they genuinely hurt, that had me transfixed.
Later in college, my roommate and I would watch Ace Ventura: Pet Detective at all hours of day and night, in all states of sobriety, and, again, I was mesmerized by Carrey’s face. Watching its elasticity during an “Allllllllrighty, then” was the punchline for me, not the line itself.
Even in his dramatic turns, like The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (a top-5 film for me), Carrey’s face told the audience more than the words it spoke. Because the face is a communication tool that often acts independently from the message it means to convey.
As leaders, we have countless faces and their accompanying messaging to decipher. To complicate matters, it’s often not the resting, expected expression, but, rather, it’s subtle changes to that face that gives us pause.
The normally bright eyes of a kindergartener’s “hello” have dimmed ever so slightly.
A child’s normally cherubin expression becomes panicky and shifty when he’s in a large crowd.
A typically stoic teacher’s inability to hide her “big news” behind a face that can’t stop smiling.
The relaxed tension around the eyes and mouth of a soon-to-be-retired case manager’s face.
Whether we work in s one-room school house district or a mega metropolis, it’s not the test scores or scatter plots that provide us with the most useful data. It’s the faces of the people we mean to lead.
Alrighty then?
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