A wind chime. An umbrella. A large corporate hooray party. Office snacks on demand, at anytime, for free. A bonus check. One that at the age of 23 was a shockingly large one. All are things I’ve experienced in my career during a corporate change management project that constituted employee recognition and perks. Despite the fact that the umbrella was expensive (for an umbrella) because of its cute designer label and the bonus check as I mentioned was large for the context of my 23 year old, living paycheck to paycheck mind (so much so that my new husband and I
Having high expectations of people. Being empathetic. I’ve written about this balancing act before. Are they in conflict with each other, or are they actually complementary? When they seem to be in conflict with each other, which way should we lean? No greater example illustrates this than something I’ve been struggling with lately. In three particular instances (two recent, one a few years ago) I’ve had someone tell me and/or a family member that they are going to do something or take care of something. Not one of these things has been followed through on. Being that one of my first
You all know I hate policies for the sake of policies. Rules follower I am not, so when I see that one of the potential trends in the way work is changing is a swing away from policies, I get excited. Now throwing policies out the window isn’t being adopted by all, case in point this experience I had recently but with the need for innovation and adaptability in order to attract and retain talent and therefore meet customer needs, trends are arising to simplify or scratch policies all together. For example, companies like Netflix have scratched vacation and sick
I’ve always been a list maker. I love to make a list at the end of each work day, so I can draw a red line through item after time the following work day. And, by the way, I don’t just do this for work. I do it for everything: grocery list, kid’s activities for the week, Christmas shopping list, cleaning for the week and the list goes on and on. I’m the queen of lists. That being said, even though I’m a list maker, I’m still not as organized as I would like to be. But, when I began
Quite a while ago, I wrote about the “Es of LEadership” with empathy being one of them. Not included in these essential “Es” was “expectations”. And as the article on empathy points to, sometimes managing expectations and having empathy seem to be in direct conflict. Setting, communicating, monitoring and maintaining expectations is a critical skill for leaders. We must maximize performance of others through effectively setting expectations high and constantly pushing others to reach higher. When we do so, we provide meaningful and challenging work, which has been shown to increase worker satisfaction leading to higher productivity (and profits). Yet