Accountability for Others

Managers often ask how to hold their employees accountable. This is a difficult question to answer, because one of the biggest variables is your organizational culture. Some cultures support their people when it comes to accountability issues, while others cast blame.

If your culture is focused on learning and growth, you tend to tie accountability with learning and professional development. For example, if Sarah misses an important deadline, the manager will discuss what happened to create that result. Sarah may have had a good reason but didn’t communicate it ahead of time.

Acknowledgments

People don’t need to be acknowledged all the time. In fact, if you’re constantly praising someone, it can become noise after a while.

But that isn’t normally the case. More often than not, we don’t give sufficient acknowledgement to the people who make our lives easier/better/more comfortable. As yesterday was Random Acts of Kindness Day (which I introduced two weeks ago), take a minute to acknowledge someone who isn’t expecting it.

The Benefits of Patience

The more stressed people are, the more impatient they become. When impatient people congregate, mood and morale gets worse…and bad feelings accelerate.

Leaders know the value of patience. Those who exercise it regularly are rewarded by everything from diffusing people’s anxiety and bad moods to making better decisions.

A Toast for the New Year!

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard this dozens of times in the past few weeks, “I can’t wait until this year is over.” It’s not surprising given our current environment.

What with the severely contagious Omicron variant crushing massive swaths of the population or rushing to complete year-end deadlines or worrying about inflation, challenges like these have accumulated quickly and definitively.

Juggling Priorities

Many people take a deep breath at the beginning of December. The realization that there’s only one month left in the year comes as a shock, no matter how many times you’ve gone through it!

The people who succeed are those who manage their priorities effectively. Not all priorities are equal! On the other end of the spectrum are people who are unrealistic about what can actually be completed in the remaining available time.

The Value of Flexibility

In today’s quasi-post-pandemic environment, certain skills have become more important for successful performance on the job. Leaders need to encourage these in their employees, and to provide support if they are undeveloped.

We’ll be looking at three skills over the next few weeks, beginning today with flexibility. This competency takes on renewed significance if you are migrating towards a hybrid work structure, that is, working in the office for 2-3 days/week and work remotely for the balance.

What Does Your Team Really Think?

Without question, improving communication is a perennial workplace challenge. Although communication has always been an issue, it is amplified in this quasi-post-pandemic environment when you consider video meetings, adapting to new technology, managing priorities with limited information, and constant fatigue about the uncertainty ahead.

Layer on the fact that people’s attention span has diminished substantially, what with multitasking, email and text overload, and anxiety over not having enough time.

Women and Burnout

Beginning in 2015, LeanIn.org and McKinsey have conducted annual comprehensive studies of women in the corporate workplace. The most recent report was just released and focused on the impact of the pandemic, issues of diversity and inclusion, and the overall state of work.

This column focuses specifically on their findings related to burnout, which has been continuing as a consequence of the pandemic.

Does Your Company Have a Foundation of Trust?

I’ve been part of several conversations recently where trust issues have surfaced. Some have been positive, reflecting leaders who understand and embrace the benefits of a high trust culture. And others have swung to the other side of the spectrum where lack of trust is creating cracks in the organization.

Why is trust so important?

Pace Yourself

Do you ever feel like a crazy lunatic as you try to accomplish way too many things at once? Of course, you have! Not only do you experience this, but everyone has a different “lunatic pace.” Your threshold may have more or less elasticity than someone you work with closely.

I’ve found that people pick up their pace when they are working with someone who zooms through the day, even though it may be hard to keep up. These are critical moments, because when you constantly try to pace yourself at what is an unnaturally rapid clip for you, you will inevitably miss things.

Leadership is a Mindset

Tag: Communication