Communication

Career

It’s About Being Intentional
ByMike McBride May 18, 2023July 17, 2024 Reading Time: 3 minutes

As I said, it’s not that being a remote worker means we won’t have any friends. We just have to be more intentional about it. We have to find ways to interact socially with our current friends and be in spaces, physical and virtual, where we can meet new people.

You’ll read plenty of hot takes about remote work. Whether it be how difficult it is to build any culture or connect with your team, you’ll get lonely, you won’t get promoted, or mentored, etc. It’s not that the authors of these posts are lying to you, but they are also unlikely to point out that none of these things have to be the way they are. They can all be overcome when someone decides to act with intention.

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Uncategorized

Linked – The 1 Major Skill That Most Employees Say Their Bosses Lack
ByMike McBride April 11, 2023April 11, 2023 Reading Time: 1 minute

Every poor manager I’ve ever dealt with has been a poor communicator. Almost every shortcoming or problem I’ve seen people have with a manager or coworker could be filed under a problem with communication. It’s THE thing in the workplace. Ideas, expectations, priorities, and everything else in the workplace come down to the ability to communicate. If you cannot communicate clearly, you are lost, and the people who work for you or lost.

Yet how many organizations promote the top performer or their most senior individual contributor without ever considering whether they are good communicators? And how many prioritize teaching them how to communicate as managers?

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Weekly Links

Shared Links (weekly) March 26, 2023
ByMike McBride March 26, 2023March 25, 2023 Reading Time: 1 minute
- Random acts of kindness: 15 ideas for the workplace
- 5 Ways Multitasking Is Bad for Your Mental Health (and 4 Things to Do Instead)– Whether at work or at home, we have all become multitaskers. Realistically, our focus bounces back and forth between multiple things we aren’t doing well.
- What to know about async communication in remote work?
- Psychological Safety – Part 2: How to create and promote it in the workplace
- Less Data is (even) More Than Ever
- It’s Game Over on Vocal Deepfakes –“Real recordings will be called fake and fake recordings will be leaked as purportedly real. I don’t think the general population is prepared for this, and I worry that news media organizations aren’t either.”
- The Uncanny Valley– If tech wants to change its image, it has to recognize the amount of special treatment it’s received both in society and the media.
- Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen
- The workforce well-being imperative
- Microsoft’s Plan To Infuse AI And ChatGPT Into Everything
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Mental Health

It’s All About Flexibility
ByMike McBride January 3, 2023January 3, 2023 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.

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Weekly Links

Shared Links (weekly) Jan. 1 2023
ByMike McBride January 1, 2023December 31, 2022 Reading Time: 1 minute
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Career

Linked – The Myth of the Brilliant, Charismatic Leader
ByMike McBride December 17, 2022December 17, 2022 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.

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