Tackling the Hard Assignments
Tackling the Hard Assignments
Have you ever started cutting up vegetables and finally realized that it was taking longer than expected? Maybe you’ve gone outside to trim your hedges only to find the job harder than you anticipated. Or in a burst of energy, you picked up your ax to chop wood, and were quickly out of breath as you realized how much effort was required.
Then it finally occurred to you that if you simply stopped to hone the edge of your tool; whether a knife, trimmer, or ax, that the job would be much easier. The sharper your implement, the more you can accomplish, very quickly. (more…)
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“The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.”
It’s no secret that many companies are struggling to find the right balance between remote and hybrid work policies for their knowledge workers. After over two years of forced remote work, announcements and retractions of return-to-office dates, remote local hires who have never stepped foot on site, and remote countrywide hires who will never be expected to work on site, many hope there is light at the end of the tunnel. They just don’t know if it’s sunlight or a train headlight. 
The past 19 months have provided an abrupt recognition to many people about the importance of personal self-care. It’s been a wake-up call for individuals to make decisions that support their mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health needs. And while many organizations have adopted new policies and practices to support this, the whole topic of 
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article about a young man named Liam McCoy.1 Liam was born with albinism, a diagnosis characterized by lack of the pigment melanin in his hair, eyes, and skin. His eyes were overly sensitive to bright light, they moved involuntarily to the point that he was unable to make them look at any specific object, and he was extremely nearsighted. He could only see something in a field three inches from his nose and had a visual acuity of 20/2000. Though he had sight, his visual perception was extremely poor, and he learned to experience and understand his environment using cues that were different from those born with normal vision. 
“Belief in what someone can do is more powerful than knowledge of what they can do.”
Imagine that you’ve just been promoted to lead your first team. Some of you will have to reach back in your memory bank to think about this. Others are looking forward to that moment, with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation. Because until you sit in that chair, you don’t quite know what it’s going to be like.