Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you.

Shannon Alder

I never imagined that I would be publishing this newsletter one day without Merryl’s usual column, but here we are today, sharing stories about her instead. In tribute. Good people die everyday. Yet not all of them affirm for us the goodness in humanity and leadership the way Merryl Jubber did. She passed away recently and left a legacy of positive experiences for anyone who took the time to know her – which wasn’t a hard thing to do.  For those who didn’t know Merryl, you can learn from the legacy she left.

Merryl loved people, and was willing to do the hard work it takes to build all kinds of relationships, the relationships that would bring people together and along and because she was so good at relationship building, things got done.

It would have been easy for her to slip into an authoritative power mode, but Merryl’s humility was the real power she had in the relationships she cultivated. Being humble helped her to be known as someone who acted out ethically.

And of course, Merryl was human. I am sure she made her share of mistakes and quietly learnt from them. They weren’t made a second time and she grew and developed because she had a learning mindset.

Gleaning from the tributes inside this special newsletter, her humanity extended to her family, friends and anyone else who knew her. People liked her. She was easy to know, an open book. We all thought we knew her, but now we know that we would have liked to have known her even better and have her stay around longer.

Merryl embodied the mantra of “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Not only did she make positive changes in the people she worked with, but she also cared about them. She believed that positive change and caring about people were intricately linked.

She was the ‘go to’ person for a lot of us. It seems trite to say that she will be missed, or that she went away too soon. But it’s true. The bottom line is that she was a great leader. And when you pull back the curtain of all what that entails, you can see that she was a good person who cared about others. We can all learn a lot about leadership and humanity by following her example.

Goodbye, Merryl. Thanks for the wonderful lessons you taught all of us who knew you, especially about servant leadership.

-Martha