The Day My Dad Got His Tie Laminated to His Neck (And What It Taught Me About Leadership)
I’m going to tell you a funeral service leadership story that I hope makes you laugh first, and then makes you think. Because the most lasting lessons I received about leading well in this profession came from one of the most ridiculous moments in our company’s history the day my father, founder of Baue Funeral Homes, laminated his necktie to his neck. And yes, I mean that literally.
My father, who was the second generation at Baue’s, was one of the most relationship-driven, community-minded leaders I have ever known. He had a gift for connecting with people, for building trust, for making every family feel seen and genuinely cared for. He was brilliant at the heart of this business.
Technology, however, was another story entirely.
One evening, late during visitation/calling hours, a community member stopped by the funeral home with a simple request: Could we laminate a newspaper article for them? My dad’s secretary did this regularly, a lovely, old-school relationship-building gesture where the firm would laminate news articles and send them to community members with a personal note of congratulations. It was warm, thoughtful, and very much my dad’s style of leadership.
But his secretary was gone for the day, and my dad decided he could handle this himself.
He went upstairs to the office, turned on the laminating machine, and carefully fed the article through. What he did not notice, until it was far too late, was that his necktie had also been pulled into the machine. While it was still around his neck.
The machine laminated the tie. Solid, hard plastic. Attached to his collar. And there was not a pair of scissors within reach.
He stood there, alone in the upstairs office, for about thirty minutes, unable to reach the phone, unable to remove his tie, and unable to free himself, until a team member came to check on him and cut him loose.
“Did he ever touch the laminating machine again? Nope. For many years he received a variety of laminated ties as gifts, and the story lived on.”
The Gift of Knowing What Is Not Yours to Do
Here is what I love most about that story. My dad was not embarrassed. He told the story freely over the years and embellished it as the years went on. It became a kind of organizational legend at Baue’s, a shorthand reminder that even the most capable, accomplished leaders have things they simply should not be doing alone.
That story shaped me. Because I grew up watching a man who was genuinely great at so many things, from the care he gave, to his speaking abilities, to his scratch golf game. He was open and honest about certain things he knew were not the best for him to do. And he did it all with humor and without shame. He would always say, “I will leave that to the people who are gifted for it.”
How many of us can actually say that about ourselves?
How many of us, especially as women who have spent careers proving our value, who have stayed late and worked harder and covered more ground than was ever fairly expected of us, struggle to say out loud: “I’m not good at that, and that’s perfectly okay”?
I’ll be honest with you: I struggled with it for a long time. I was a bit of a perfectionist, and admitting a gap in my skills felt dangerously close to handing someone ammunition to question whether I deserved to be where I was. So I pushed through. I tried to figure it out. I spent time on things that drained me rather than asking for help from someone who would have been genuinely excellent at them.
It cost me. And it is time we talk about that cost.
Strengths-Based Leadership Development in Funeral Service
There is a reason the best leadership coaches and researchers in the world spend so much time on strengths-based development. It is not a feel-good concept. It is a performance strategy. When you stop wasting energy compensating for your weaknesses and start investing that same energy in your genuine areas of giftedness, everything accelerates. Your confidence grows. Your impact grows. The people around you benefit because they are getting the best of you rather than a drained, stretched-thin version of you who is trying to be all things at once.
I learned this the hard way and then I watched it transform our culture at Baue’s. When I started hiring people for their genuine strengths rather than their willingness to do everything, when I started building a team of people who were each extraordinary in their lane rather than one person trying to cover every lane, our company changed. Our retention climbed to over 98 percent. Our family satisfaction scores rose to heights we had never seen. The business grew in ways that had nothing to do with me doing more and everything to do with me finally doing less of the wrong things and more of the right ones.
Knowing your strengths is not an excuse to stop learning. Let me be clear about that. You should always be growing, always expanding your skills and your knowledge base. But there is a difference between strategic growth and exhausting self-correction. Strategic growth means you are intentionally developing the skills that align with your gifts and your goals. Exhausting self-correction means you are spending your best energy trying to become someone you were never designed to be.
The Permission Slip You May Not Have Given Yourself
I want to give you something today that nobody may have offered you yet in this profession: permission to be who you actually are.
Permission to say, “I am not a technology person, and I am building a team that handles that.”
Permission to say, “Numbers and spreadsheets drain me, and I am finding someone who is energized by exactly that.”
Permission to say, “My strength is in walking into a room and making a grieving family feel like they are the most important people in the world right now, and I am going to lean into that gift with everything I have.”
That is not a weakness. That is wisdom. That is exactly the kind of self-awareness that separates the leaders who last and grow from the ones who burn out quietly and leave the profession before they ever fully step into what they were built for.
And Please, Learn to Laugh at Yourself
One more thing, and it is not small: my dad got out of that situation partly because he could laugh at himself. He did not let the embarrassment shut him down or make him smaller. He told the story. He made it funny. He turned a moment of feeling completely stuck and ridiculous into a gift he gave to his team for years.
That is a leadership skill. Genuinely. The ability to look at your own fumbles and failures with some grace and humor, to let your people see that you are human, that you mess up, that sometimes you laminate your own tie and need someone to come cut you loose, that humanity is what builds real trust. It is what makes people want to follow you and stay with you.
You do not have to be perfect to lead well. You have to be self-aware, honest, growth-oriented, and willing to ask for help. That combination, paired with a genuine knowledge of what you are truly gifted for, is the foundation of leadership that lasts.
So tell me: What are your gifts? Where do you absolutely come alive in this work? And what are you still doing yourself that you should be handing to someone who was built for it?
Figure that out, lean into it fully, and watch what happens to your career, your team, and the families you serve.
I believe in you! Believe in yourself, always!
Lisa Baue
