Shared Links (weekly) March 26, 2023

Shared Links (weekly) March 26, 2023

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute
It’s All About Flexibility

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.

Shared Links (weekly) Jan. 1 2023

Shared Links (weekly) Jan. 1 2023

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute
Linked – The Myth of the Brilliant, Charismatic Leader

Linked – The Myth of the Brilliant, Charismatic Leader

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

As I’ve heard many people say, the problem is not that having managers is bad; it’s that there are so many bad managers out there. We don’t treat managing and leadership with the attention and importance it deserves, mainly because we don’t realize how much it matters. Good management is boring. (A point made in more detail in the link below) I say that because good management has no drama and no chaos. It’s pretty simple communication about expectations and follow-through. Unfortunately, those managers don’t get highlighted in magazine features because they aren’t interesting. But that’s the point. Good management isn’t there to be entertaining in a reality-TV kind of way; it is there so that the team can get the job done.

Linked – Why public chats are better than direct messages

Linked – Why public chats are better than direct messages

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

But, here it the real world, this doesn’t always work out very well. You really need the culture to be one where everyone is used to working asynchronously and checking the public channel for chances to help out the team. It sounds like that is both the expectation and the reality at this company but for a lot of us the reality is very different. Posting something in a public channel where no one gets a notification that a message is being posted generally means no one sees it. So we go back to using private channels or tagging people in the public channel in order so that we purposefully interrupt them. We haven’t developed a culture where asynchronous communication works and I suspect it’s because we don’t really want it. We want people to respond to us now. We don’t trust them to get back later and, to be fair, we don’t give our peers reason to trust us because we spend all of our time putting out fires and frequently forget to get back to people.

In many cases, it’s a humblebrag. “Oh I saw your message but then I got involved in important things because I’m an important person and never got back to you”.