Five for Five

Today, my blog is short and to the point. Five challenges in five days. Five for Five!

First, I want to challenge all of us in the next week after you read this blog, to go out and explicitly role model the following behaviors:

• Include those on your team you often overlook (we know you do not consciously have “favorites” but try to choose not to hang with your “favorites” this week)
• Recognize the small wins your team members made this week – be specific and sincere
• Reward 5 employees unexpectedly (does not even have to be in your department).  A cup of coffee, a gift card, etc. It is not about the value but about the awareness
• Write 5 personal and detailed thank you notes (or emails)
• Focus on unity

I am frustrated, like many Americans, watching our nation, our workforce, our neighbors, our friends becoming divided and seeing too much focus on “difference”.  Let’s focus on “sameness” because that is pretty easy.

Enablement and inclusiveness are qualities exhibited by emotionally healthy people. As leaders, we need the desire and ability to develop, support and constructively engage our teams.  As I spoke about last week, we need to turn up our awareness and make better, more highly conscious choices and be mindful. Mindfulness.

When we enable and include others, we open up the opportunity to build better relationships – where contribution and discretionary effort become the norm.

Kathy Caprino (Forbes) writes about 7 traits of Inspiring Leadership:

• We need to be clear about the challenges ahead, inspire faith, hope and collaboration, not fear.
• Blame is not in our rhetoric – we should never stoop to recrimination or demeaning, belittling language.
• Our self-esteem should be strong enough to take constructive criticism and critique, and in fact, we should welcome it.
• Our communication style should be positive, with words that inspire greatness and growth in our teams.
• We should NOT surround ourselves only with people who “yes” us – we should surround ourselves with diversity, truth and openness.
• The success that we long for should be success and opportunity for all – not just one faction, group, or organization.
• We must operate at all times with integrity, truthfulness and transparency, even when that’s excruciatingly difficult to do.

Enabling and including others requires an investment.   Sometimes we need to be willing, in the short term, to have something done more slowly than it would take to do it our self. There may even be mistakes made. And being present in conversations requires energy on your part and might mean that it takes you longer to get your own work done.  Including, recognizing, rewarding, and mindfulness are investments today for longer term payoffs tomorrow.  However, the rewards will always pay back this investment many times over. We just need to be willing to make it.  Make this the week you “wow” your team and hopefully they will “wow” you with more positive outcomes.

Together.  We.  Win.

Dave Harmon
People Division
“Kindness is Currency”
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/davidharmonhr

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