Career
The Pandemic Has Exposed the Fallacy of the “Ideal Worker” (via Harvard Business Review)
The “ideal worker” comes from the 1960s where a household has a breadwinner/homemaker couple. Having to work from home without schools and childcare available, those without children look more like the ideal worker. Granted, these times are not about telework, but about working through a crisis. Going forward businesses will need to consider how to best employ telework.
The Downside of Flex Time (via Harvard Business Review)
Working from home typically leads to flex time where you don’t have aligned hours of work. This genie is difficult to put back in the bottle. This article gives some guidance about when to use what channel (and for what purpose). Leadership can help by modeling the desired behavior.
To Avoid Burnout, Work Less and Ignore ‘Productivity Propaganda’ (via Steve Stamm)
“Since the Industrial Revolution, the dominant philosophy of work has centered around productivity as the only metric that’s important for success. As work culture developed, we’ve internalized the idea that any time that isn’t spent doing something is wasted time. Worse, we’ve been made to believe that if we aren’t struggling and hustling, we don’t deserve our success.” We need to make time to decompress instead of filling all available time with activity.
Leadership
Lead Your Team Into a Post-Pandemic World (via Harvard Business Review)
Safety is important, but so are other things like self-esteem, meaning in context of the crisis, and a want for truth. This post covers how to handle human needs during the shelter-in-place, reopening, and post COVID-19 phases.
What Family Businesses Can Learn from the Military (via Harvard Business Review)
- Orient the family business to a fast-changing, dynamic environment.
- Appreciate the contextual difference between chaos and business as usual.
- Exercise adaptive leadership.
- Organize the family business to operate in VUCA environments.
- Foster a growth mindset.
- Practice well-being.
- Bolster trust.
Google Spent Years Studying Effective Bosses. Now They Teach New Managers These 6 Things (via Software Lead Weekly)
- Growth mindset, values
- Emotional intelligence
- Manager transition (from individual contributor)
- Coaching
- Feedback
- Decision making
Process
Don’t Let Your Company’s Intranet Become a Junk Drawer (via Harvard Business Review)
- Take the burden off the IT department
- Put managers in the driver’s seat
- Get employee buy-in
- Obsessively track metrics
- Integrate content with cloud systems
Time Traveling with Progressive Summarization (via Software Lead Weekly)
As someone who takes copious notes, I’m interested in organizational process. This one has you consider layers of information:
- Original source material
- Initial notes, in complete sentences and written in your own words
- Initial emphasis by bold-facing complete ideas
- Secondary emphasis by highlighting the best of the bold text
- Short summary on top of existing notes
- Remix the ideas