This is the power that more and more employees realize they have. To hire you as an employer and to fire you when you no longer fit their needs. If that bothers you, if that offends your sense of loyalty to the workplace, do me a favor. Go to Google News and search for “layoff”. Do a little light browsing and tell me what loyalty has to do with anything.
In the first case, most organizations I’ve seen only offer some leadership or management training after someone becomes a manager. This is wrong. This is gatekeeping for no reason. There are people on your teams right now who are not managers, but would like to be, and you’re doing nothing to prepare them for that. Someone gets promoted and then you start them on a training program on how to be a manager. That doesn’t make sense. What are they supposed to do on day one with the team that now reports to them?
There are also people on your team with fantastic leadership qualities who might not want to be a manager, or where there’s no opportunity to become a manager. Why wouldn’t we want to support them in becoming better leaders even if their title doesn’t immediately make us think they are one?
Change is hard. It is also neverending. Things change. The new technology provides new opportunities. Leaders should take responsibility to explain that to their people and highlight the opportunities that change can provide. Show them how it will benefit the business.
Then send them to training ready to learn.
All of these things are interwoven. The people who work for you are human, that’s how we are. We aren’t just a worker for eight hours and then everything else for the rest of our time. We are human 24×7 and our wellbeing affects us in the workplace. The workplace also impacts our well-being.
After years of blogging and writing newsletters just to share things I’ve been learning, I’ve decided to dip my toes in the paid-newsletter world.
What do I think is so valuable that I would ask you to pay for it? For the last few years, I’ve been working and diving deep into the Microsoft 365 platform, from the perspective of an eDiscovery professional.
Unfortunately, I do believe we are taught the opposite of this. We are expected to work harder and harder and then use our time off to rest so that we can go back and do it some more. It’s all focused on being a good worker, but this study seems to indicate that we are all better off focusing on other parts of our lives during the time we spend away from work. Maybe, just maybe, we are more than our jobs. Maybe when we spend the energy and focus on other parts of our lives enough to plan them out and be intentional about them, we’re happier.
What a concept.