Ron’s Short Review: Dry academic book. But many of my clients deal in a world of mergers and acquisitions.
Ron’s Short Review: Good to Great is one of the best researched business book. Collins continues his journey on understand why some become great and others don’t.
Ron’s Short Review: Our economy is based on much more than the old supply and demand understanding. This is about being relevant in today’s economy.
Ron’s Short Review: The Heath brothers write great books on story telling and how it can move us and our colleagues, clients, or customers.
Ron’s Short Review: Collaboration is the gold of the future.
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It takes as much work to build great teams as it does to build or become a great leader.
I believe that if you were to ask my family (wife and two daughters) they would tell you that I’m the most patient man in the world…. until I’m not! I seem to have a great deal of patience for most situations but when I run out of patience I don’t come down gradually. Nor do I stair step down one level at a time. My patience ends like a rock being kicked off a 1,000 foot cliff that plummets with the acceleration of gravity until it smashes on the floor of the canyon. My girls actually developed into an early warning system for me. When I would see them quickly jump up and bolt from the room in unison, I began to understand that my patience was approaching the cliff and they had picked up the warning signs.
One of my clients currently has a similar trait. He has a great deal of desire and compassion to grow and develop his team and constantly pushes them to become better then they were the year before. He will start a project that is going to challenge and grow them over time and then gives them enough time to accomplish the task. But, if he is not seeing sufficient progress as critical deadlines approach, his rock will eventually get kicked over the cliff and then he jumps in with great fury and gets the task completed.
Why do we reach this cliff where things go bad in a hurry? A couple of reasons are very obvious to me.
1. Leaders mistakenly assume that members of their team will “see it” (understand all that needs to be figured out in order for the growth spurt to take place) or will figure it out along the way in their effort to complete the task or project
2. A basic misunderstanding of good project management
By definition, a growth experience can’t necessarily be figured out ahead of time. It’s a new experience. You’re figuring out something that you’ve never seen or experienced before. You’ll either not see it at all or if you do you may not execute in a very efficient or effective manner. Leaders often forget their own learning curve experiences. They made these same mistakes years ago or even if it was only recently that they figured it out, they now only remember the end state of the new knowledge, not what they went through to learn the new behavior or understanding.
Leaders must work harder then they expect to help people understand the new expectations, learn the processes it will take to get there, and have a vision of the new normal. Develop patience for the sake of your teams.
Ron’s Short Review: A great model for education, both in the classroom and in the corporation. Fascinating discussion on how our public education system has failed to produce the leaders that we need.
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Why are so many feeling that our Work-Life Balance is out of whack? In this series, I will explore four categories of issues that contribute to the feeling (and actuality):
I have to share a story one of my colleagues told me about Work-Life Balance (Connectedness). She is working with a client that has a culture that is starting to burn people out. No Work-Life Balance. Another consultant had suggested to the leadership team that the situation was getting bad enough that they should do something to help people regain some balance. So the leadership team put out a memo that no one was required to answer e-mails after 8:00pm.
WHAT?
How about a memo that says everyone is required to stop sending e-mails after 6:00pm? No one is going to put their head on the chopping block in a fast paced culture and not read e-mails after eight. But, if you put the restriction on the sending end then the culprit clearly stands out. And my guess is the leaders are the culprits.
I started working with the head of a large division (400+ people) several years ago and he had a reputation of being a hard task-master, expecting people to work above and beyond the call of duty. One of the first things I observed is that he would send emails any time of the day or night and any time on the weekend. His response to the situation is almost identical to the explanation I always get. He would say
“I don’t expect people to respond to me immediately, that’s just my work style. As soon as I think of something I’ll write an email (sometimes to himself) and send it off immediately. I don’t expect my people to respond at night or over the weekend, that’s just my crazy work habits.”
The first thing I asked him to do was learn how to use the delay-send function in Outlook and not let evening emails go out until early the next morning or weekend emails go out until early Monday morning. Within weeks people were making comments to me like:
“I don’t know what you’ve done but things sure are calmer around here these days. It’s a much better place to work.”
Email can be a great tool. Just be careful how it’s being used and pay attention to the unintended consequences.
Ron’s Short Review: My first question is often, “Are you having fun?” It seems to be the best indicator of things going well or not.
Image Source: Jed Sullivan, Creative Commons
Why are so many feeling that our Work-Life Balance is out of whack? In this series, I will explore four categories of issues that contribute to the feeling (and actuality):
I started my first real job in 1969. That means that my working life has now spanned 40 years. That 40 years has roughly been distributed with 10 years in the engineering/construction business, 10 years in the software industry, and the last 20 years as a consultant to a whole range of industries including pharmaceutical, auto, food, high-tech and others. And I must admit that I don’t see people working any harder or longer hours today than I have at any time over the last 40 years. So why is there so much talk about the lack of Work-Life-Balance?
Connectedness!
In the 70’s we communicated by phone or fax. Think about a vacation in Hawaii when the only mode of communication was phone or fax. Not much communication happened with the east coast in particular. It was a real vacation.
I carried my first Compaq “luggable” computer in 1983 (28 pounds). I used email for the first time in 1985. I still remember the day I sent an email to a client in Scotland and he responded within the hour… from Japan! Astounding!
The internet? That didn’t really happen until the mid 1990’s.
I bought one of the very first Blackberry’s in 1999 when they had been on the market for only a few months. It took 5 years for them to sell their millionth Blackberry. Think about that, it was only five years ago that there were a million Blackberrys and virtually no other smart phones. Today, iPhone alone sells nearly 5 million a quarter. And don’t get me started about Facebook and Twitter.
We never get away from it. 24/7 we’re connected. Maybe it’s because I spent much of my career without all of this modern connectedness that I’m a little better at managing it rather than it managing me (my wife will laugh at that statement). But, different than many of my younger colleagues, I believe it is ok to shut it off, not answer that phone, don’t respond instantly to that incoming message. I believe it’s because we don’t shut off this connectedness in the evening when we should be focused on family, or weekends when we should be focused on R&R and getting that job-list done or on vacation when we should be re-creating that our work-life balance seems out of whack.
Don’t get me wrong, I know there are many of you out there working long and hard through difficult times. But this has been going on forever. The difference today is that we never get away from it. Not for a minute, not for a day, and certainly not for a week or more.
Think about it and let me know what you think or what your experiences have been.
I’m going to follow with a few more blogs about Work-Life-Balance. Besides this 24/7 connectedness, I see a few other issues that seem to impact our sense of balance.
Ron’s Short Review: Holding opposing views in our mind at the same time helps us with decision making.
Ron’s Short Review: How our brain actually works and how that impacts our image of management and leadership.