• It’s All About Flexibility

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

    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.

  • Linked – Skills, Skills, Skills

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    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.

  • If You Have to Constantly Remind People You’re a Leader, You’re Probably Not

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

    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.

  • Linked – Focus Makes Us Human; Don’t Give It Away

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    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.

  • Linked – The Perks of a High-Documentation, Low-Meeting Work Culture

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    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?

  • You Really Are Interviewing the Company Too

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    I’ve watched more than one interviewer struggle to answer this question, I’ve heard stories of just some really poor answers, and I’ve had interviewers answer this in very clear detail. The ones who were prepared to answer that question were the ones who had already considered the metrics that would be involved in measuring employees and who, frankly, made a better fit. Knowing how you’re being measured allows you to start on the first day knowing what’s expected of you and what is important. How could you not want that? How could you hire someone and not know what success looks like for that hire? It’s not a good sign for you as a hiring manager or for the culture of your organization.