Whether you are an employer or employee, a manager or a worker bee, a client or a vendor; people need to know what you expect from them and what they can expect from you. When one or both sides of the previously mentioned relationships does not let the other know what they expect; assumptions, miscommunications, and misunderstanding occur. If this continues, it will destroy any working relationship that might have existed and cause people to either become extremely difficult to work with or it will cause them to leave the situation all together.
To successfully convey expectations, a person in the relationship needs to be willing to listen to the other person’s expectations as well; and possibly come to a compromise in order for the working relationship to continue.
The next time you find yourself frustrated at a situation or even a specific person, step back and ask yourself if you have expressed your expectations. If not, now would be a great time to do that.
Alteration, modification, variation, transformation; these all can be used to describe an aspect of life that many people do not like and some are afraid of: change. Many people do not like change because it pushes them out of their comfort zone and makes them redefine their boundaries. In the book, “Who Moved My Cheese”, we find two groups of characters that deal with change in different ways. One group ignores change and tries to resist it at every step along the way. The other group expects change and adapts to it once it happens. In the end the group that expects and adapts to change is more content with their situation and more prosperous than the group that tried to resist change.
In light of this information, I challenge you to not complain about or resist change when it happens, but instead look at it as a new opportunity to excel and expand your horizons!
We post our values on our website. Yeah, so what – who doesn’t?
We live by our values at work. Yeah, so… how do you do that?
Step 1 Decide on the values that you WILL live by, no matter what. We engaged in a series of meetings with our team, surfaced ideas on the values that we both believed characterized our team and to which we were willing to commit, and then began to codify them. Regardless of what those values are for your organization, you absolutely MUST be committed to them. It must permeate your culture, your speech and your actions. We explained it in the opening three sentences of our Values statement:
“We are a high-performance, high-expectation, fun and invigorating place to exercise the incredible skills and talents we have been given by God. We are committed to a core set of values that we believe are non-negotiable. This means that team members must be committed to these values in order to remain on the team.”
Join us over the next several weeks as we walk through our Values (http://www.mclaneintel.com/index.php/about/values) and how we incorporate them into our worklife!
If you’ve ever seen 1999’s Office Space, you know that the main character is disillusioned by a job filled with seemingly worthless tasks. Paraphrasing, he once says that in a given week, he only does about 15 minutes of real, actual work. Of course, it’s exaggeration for the sake of a comedic film, but have you ever felt similarly? Have you ever been assigned a task and thought “is this even worth the time it will take to do this?” or “is this just busywork?” or “why can’t I be given something more productive?” If you have, you may have been assigned Fake Work.
On the surface, Fake Work seems harmless. People feel secure in their jobs because their schedules are filled with Fake Work tasks and unnecessarily long meetings and managers look good because there is never a time when their employees aren’t busy (or, rather, don’t look busy). Smaller companies are better at flushing out Fake Work because fewer employees mean higher visibility internally. So Fake Work is more likely found in larger companies where employees or even whole departments can fly under the radar, performing jobs that don’t need to be done. In case you hadn’t picked up on it by now, Fake Work is bad. Companies that suffer from it obviously suffer from inefficiency in general and a lack of understanding about how their own business operates internally. If they can find the fat, they can trim it off, saving time and resources for the real work that moves the business ahead and increases its margins.
So how do you combat Fake Work? An internal process review or audit would work. It would generate questions and force work flows to be drawn out, revealing where the inefficiencies lie. It will likely take some time to change some processes and maybe even longer to change the company or department culture, but once those are tightened up, it could only lead to good things.
We are creating a culture where EFFORT is a core value. Work hard. Try our best. Don’t quit. As I was reading this weekend, I ran across a great website which did an excellent job of reinforcing this idea. The website is http://www.just212.com. Here’s a summary of the idea:
At 211 degrees, water is hot.
At 212 degrees, it boils.
And with boiling water, comes steam.
And with steam, you can power a train.
It is sometimes that single extra degree of effort that takes our actions from interesting to powerful. Take just 4 minutes to watch their video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toXX3t6n8Vw
In any business sector inside these borders, who is not worried about the economy, the business climate, and the speed of recovery? We have challenges in front of us. We must be smart and proactive in order to grow and prosper when so many others are not. Since I have an interest in technology – particularly information technology, I thought I’d offer some practical help to most effectively use the resources you have available.
Update on "cloud" computing
Almost everyone who has ever used a web browser has heard of cloud computing. But what is it? Thankfully, in order to legislate something, you have to define it so into this mess steps the National Institute of Standards and Technology to guide us out of the fog and into…. the clouds, so to speak. Here is version 15 (yes, 15) of their definition that was posted 10/7/2009:
“Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
Thank goodness our taxpayer dollars are doing something useful.
There is more to their definition but I wanted to point out the three service models by which cloud computing is delivered that may be helpful to you in understanding this new world.
