The article below mentions something we’ve all seen way too many times. The manager who gets promoted, but never developed any of their reports to do their job, and winds up having to continue doing it. In the worst-case scenario, since the culture was not to develop people to replace you, that person is probably also learning the new role from scratch while still doing a large chunk of their old role.
What a waste of time and talent.
Later it occurred to me that mental health should be handled the same way in the workplace. No two people are the same or have the same mental health issues. What I could accomplish work-wise during the time I was medicated and seeing a therapist might not be the same as someone else in therapy. One person might need some time away from work during a crisis, while someone else might need work to be the thing that keeps them living with some day-to-day structure. There will not be one solution that fits everyone. In any of these situations, it will be essential to allow employees to find what works for them and their work. Providing some flexibility will go a long way toward keeping an employee engaged instead of making them feel unsupported and looking to go elsewhere. It might also go a long way toward helping them heal as well, to know they have a consistent source of income that is not at risk.
I’ve said it before, but let me repeat it. Regarding technology, what you learned in college is probably pointless within 2-3 years. What you did at work 5-10 years ago is useless. Continuous learning and upskilling are not optional. Talking about skills-based hiring is a new trend, but it’s the trend that made sense even before it became popular. Your degrees and resume don’t matter nearly as much as what you can do right now and what you can learn going forward.
This is the business world we live in now. There is no cushy job where you can do the same thing in the same place for 30 years. That’s ancient history, and our career plans and hiring practices must match the current reality.
My hypothesis, and the reason for my list above, is that leaders don’t talk about being leaders any more than brilliant people talk about being smart or kind people talk about being kind. They just do it, and it shows. Leaders set the example, help others succeed, and solve problems. They share credit and take the blame. They are constantly learning from others instead of setting themselves apart. People follow them because of those characteristics. These are people you want to follow. They don’t have to raise a flag and beg people to follow them any more than the most intelligent people have to remind you of how smart they are. Their actions show it.
That’s no way to be effective, though, and it’s well beyond the time our work and personal cultures started recognizing that, and it’s beyond time we made changes to stop giving away our focus like that instead of keeping it where it matters. That can look like blocking time out on our work calendars for focused work, ignoring emails and other distractions during meetings, or ignoring our devices when trying to be fully present with our friends and families. Multi-tasking doesn’t work. If you’re being distracted, you are not keeping your focus on what is essential. You’re letting everything else steal your focus. That’s not a good way to be successful in any area of your life.
This is where having a lot of meetings becomes a problem. When you need to do focused work, you wind up doing it after hours. That’s not sustainable. The other thing that this constant multitasking does is it feeds on itself. Picture this, if you will.
You schedule a meeting to discuss the project status. Half of the people at that meeting are squeezing it in between other meetings and thus are multi-tasking during the status meeting. You can watch them on camera answering emails while the discussion is going on, or they are wily enough to do it off-camera but aren’t engaged.
After the meeting, someone sends an email summarizing the conversation, which is responded to by one of the people who were multi-tasking with questions they didn’t ask during the meeting. This prompts another meeting to go over those questions.
Might it work better if the project status was done in writing, asynchronously, and the meeting never needed to happen?