It’s important to have role models.

And not just good role models, like most people say. I think you should have both: people you aspire to be like and people you never want to be like.

I’ll defend my position on that another time. Today, I want to talk about good role models and the lessons I learned from them. So here are a couple of stories.

When I was a kid working in a sporting goods store, a customer had a really bad day in our restroom. When they were done, every surface in there was covered in human waste. It looked like a tornado had hit the line of porta-potties at a festival.

We all stood outside the restroom door trying not to be sick, and all of us praying that we didn’t get picked to deal with it.

Howard, our store manager, simply said, “I can’t tell you to do something I won’t do myself.”

He put on rubber gloves, grabbed all the cleaning supplies, sighed, lit a cigarette and spent two hours locked in the bathroom sterilizing every surface. And I mean every single surface.

That was a lesson in leadership I’ve never forgotten.

Afterward, he stood at the loading bay door and chain-smoked for an hour. He lit each cigarette with the burning coal of the last one, looking across the parking lot with the thousand-yard stare of a man who would be haunted by this to his dying day.

Howard was a good man. He’s one of the male authority figures — other than my father and granddad — whose voice I still hear in my head today when I ask myself what they would do in a situation.

Another time, at another sporting goods store, I was managing a department. Most of our managers meetings were unmemorable, but one still stands out.

Our regional manager, Doug, convened the meeting to go over inventory issues at our stores.

Doug wasn’t like the rest of us. He was old.

And by “old,” I mean he was maybe in his late 40s or early 50s. I laugh now as I type that out.

The rest of us in that meeting were a bunch of know-it-all 20-something Gen Xers.

Only now, with hindsight and experience, do I understand how irritating we must have been sometimes, and the patience Doug needed to put up with our egos and attitudes. Or at least mine, anyway.

Back to the story: The meeting had bogged down. We were bickering among ourselves about dead stock and inventory shrinkage. There was a lot of finger-pointing, both figuratively and literally.

The whole time we were arguing, Doug had this faraway look on his face. He was clearly thinking about something other than dead stock.

Out of the blue, Doug spoke up, cutting off whoever was speaking. He began:

“When I was growing up in Guelph, Ontario, in the 1970s, marijuana was $14 an ounce. My friends and I would score a bag, get a couple cases of Molson Canadian from the beer store and drive out to the gravel pit, where we’d sit around a fire and play music from our car stereo.”

Still irate at each other, we locked on him like owls spotting a mouse. Almost in unison, we yelled:

“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!”

He smiled, and it was maybe the first time I’d ever really seen him smile.

“I’m just saying,” he explained, “there’s more to life than worrying about missing running shoes.”

After a moment of puzzled expressions, someone laughed. Then we all started laughing.

With the ice cracked, we ended up having a productive meeting.

For an “old guy,” Doug was actually pretty cool.