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The IT industry has undergone huge advancements in the last 20 years since I joined it. I would say, conservatively, that a programmer today, with all of the modern tools and frameworks available to them, is probably 5x times as productive as they were in 2020. I also know that these tools and platforms aren’t specific to the IT industry, that sales, marketing, HR, finance, etc. have all undergone similar productivity revolutions.

Imagine that in 2020 we all spent 40 hours a week producing 40 units of value for our employers. Here we are 20 years later, and that same 40 hours now produces 200 units of value. Where has all of this additional value gone? We’re all making mostly the same salaries as we did 20 years ago adjusted for inflation, and free lunches don’t cost that much.

The answer is that companies have captured almost all of this additional value at no additional cost.

Taking a Step Back

I’ve read economists who believe that the pandemic caused people to reflect on their lives without the commute or the requirement to be in a desk for 40 hours a week between the hours of 9am and 5pm, and we’ve realized that, from a work perspective at least, things are so much better now and we don’t want them to go back to the way they were.

We’ve realized that being in the office wasn’t about productivity but about control, not about culture but about a lack of trust, not about doing what’s best for employees but what’s easiest for employers. Let’s face it, organizing a functional remote workplace is challenging. The last year has shown us that maintaining the culture, organizing geographically dispersed teams, and remotely delivering a high-quality product are all possible, they just take a lot of thought and effort. Effort that companies were unwilling to put in before, because they didn’t have to and the outcome was uncertain.

Now we know that it can be done, and that knowledge changes everything.

The Great Renegotiation

One of the reasons that companies didn’t provide the kind of flexibility that we’ve enjoyed during the pandemic is because they were in a stronger negotiating position. An individual negotiating with a company has very little leverage, and the result has been a race to the bottom of wages, benefits, and flexibility. Even the companies famed for their worker-friendly culture: providing massages, free meals, entertainment, and a gym in exchange for your presence in the office for a specific 40 hours a week, doesn’t sound like a bargain to me anymore. And those are the best in the industry!

What we’ve realized in the last 2 years is that the things that really matter to us, the things that bring more meaning and enjoyment to our lives: more time with our families, more time for ourselves, less pressure to respond in the evening and on weekends, and less time commuting, are all very reasonable demands. They are things that would cost our employers so little, but benefit us so much. Companies didn’t create the tools that have made us all so much more productive in the last 20 years on their own. We all did it together, employees and employers, and we should all benefit from these advancements in a way that has the most meaning to us.

Companies are slowly, so slowly, starting to respond not because it’s the right thing to do, but because our global society, in the face of the pandemic, has started to spontaneously behave like a union in a collective bargaining negotiation. We’ve all realized that the old deal was a bad one, negotiated in a different time in a different context that no longer applies, and collectively decided that this deal needs to be remade taking into account the world in which we now live. I think of this not as The Great Resignation, but as The Great Renegotiation.

A New Bargain

In this new world, we are willing to accept:

• our current, market-based salaries
• our current benefits packages
• being available during some core hours for necessary, synchronous work
• that companies can keep the extra 160 units of value that we’ve been producing each week since the start of the millennium thanks to automation and productivity improvements
• our current 40 hour work week (you should know that this is the next thing we’re coming for #fourdayworkweek)

… in return for:

• no more sitting in traffic for 2 hours a day (does anything seem more stupid and infuriating than this senseless loss of hours of our lives?!)
• no more sitting at a desk just so you can feel good that we’re working
• no more attending meetings that only exist because some people don’t seem to know how to communicate in any other way
• the flexibility to do asynchronous work whenever and wherever we choose
• the right to sit on the couch and rest when we’re actually sick
• the right to attend important family events without the worry that we’ll be seen as uncommitted and receive negative reviews

Companies that are unwilling to accept these terms should be prepared for employees to take their 200 units of value per week to an employer who will, and then be wiling to take their chances in the job market finding someone who is willing to accept turn-of-the-millennium working conditions. People are saying that there’s a labor shortage, but what this really is is the inability of companies to find people willing to accept their old deal.

I’m experiencing this first-hand as I left my job in June, and have been looking for a new one for a couple of months now. I will not even entertain a position at a company that doesn’t meet the above criteria, no matter what other benefits or salary they’re offering. I’ve realized what’s important to me, and will not consider anything that does not provide it. The good news is that while most companies are still catching up to this new reality, there are a lot more opportunities out there than I had hoped. I’m currently talking to a few companies who really get it, and sound like they’d be great partners in my pursuit of a meaningful job that benefits me professionally and personally.

We’re currently living through a very exciting time that I’m sure will be talked about in history books in the decades to come as the time when workers forced a permanent change in their relationship with work. I’m happy to be playing a small part in it, and am very energized by the future that we’re making together. Welcome to your seat at the Great Renegotiation.

My company is performing quarterly performance reviews this month, which means that members of my team are to submit a series responses to self-evaluation type questions, one of which is to describe their role and duties. One of the members of my team responded to that question with a copied and pasted version of their job description from our company’s website.

At first I was a little surprised and frustrated that they would put so little thought and effort into their responses. How could they expect to get anything of value out of our performance review meeting without putting any effort or thought into their behaviors over the last three months. Without that pre-work and serious introspection, our performance review meeting was going to be a waste of time.

Performance Reviews Suck

Then it occurred to me that that was exactly the point. These meetings had been a waste of time everywhere I had ever worked. Human Resources dictates that you must do performance reviews, because that’s what serious companies do. A manager takes hours of their busy week to remind their reports to fill out the company mandated paperwork, and then has to read the responses and schedule a meeting to talk about it. Notes are taken at the meeting, submitted to HR, and then never spoken of again.

I’ve never had the results of a quarterly or yearly review impact my job or career in any way, and I it was very rare that a manager put more than a nominal effort into caring about this process or my career. I would bet that the person who submitted their job description as their thoughts on their role at the company had had similar experiences. Why put in the effort if it won’t have any impact? Why put any thought into a document that is intended to check a box and will go into a filing cabinet to never see the light of day again?

The real question wasn’t why hadn’t they put any thought or effort into the responses, but why would anyone. As leaders, it’s our job to communicate to the team that any effort they put into their career will be supported and reciprocated by us. If they’re willing to put in the time to seriously self-examine your behaviors and determine which of those behaviors support your goals and which undermine then, then so will I. If they want to take a training class to expand your skillset, then I’ll help them manage their tasks and schedule to make sure they can do it.

In the end, once the direct report believes that they are not the only person who cares about their career, then they’ll start to open up to you about their goals, and they’ll be more receptive of criticism because they’ll trust that it’s constructive and coming from a desire to help. This same criticism, given before that trust has been built will not be so quickly or gladly received. In other words, if it’s important to you, then it’s important to me.

Better One-on-Ones

My quarterly performance reviews this month went very well, in part because no one was surprised. Their goals were things that we had discussed at their weekly one-on-ones. Any behaviors that I had noticed that I thought were counterproductive had been mentioned, and a plan for remediating those behaviors had been put in place. Progress towards goals was tracked at every meeting. The performance review had just become a formalized extension of a meeting that we had had weekly for months.

These meetings, like quarterly reviews, had always been painful for me everywhere else I had ever been. They were cancelled more often then not, because my manager had a conflict. This told me exactly where in the list of my manager’s obligations I stood. When we did have them, they were always updates from me to my manager about what I had been working on and when I thought I would be done. In other words, my one-on-one was intended to serve my manager’s need for an update and were always about my job and never about my career.

I believe that one-on-one’s, like a leader’s entire job, is to serve the direct report. My one-on-ones are focused entirely on the needs, concerns, and goals of those I’m meeting with. I only reschedule the meeting in the most urgent of circumstances, and almost never cancel it. Managing my team and their concerns is the most important part of my job, and this meeting is an opportunity to express that.

These meetings don’t have to be dire wastes of time. They can provide real value to the company, to the manager, and to the direct reports. At the end of every meeting I always ask if there is anything I can do to help, anything I can do to support them better, and every week someone says something that they hadn’t volunteered earlier. These comments, which would have otherwise gone unsaid, have led directly to the improvement of organizational processes. These improvements won’t happen if you focus on your needs instead of those of your direct reports.

Here is a summation of advice on how to win at one-on-ones:

1. Don’t reschedule. These meetings are important, and should be treated that way. Exceptions to this rule should be very rare.
2. Take notes throughout the week about things to mention at the meeting. These can be compliments for good work, concerns about behaviors, or organizational updates to share with them. If you don’t note it, you won’t remember to bring it up.
3. ALWAYS focus on your direct report. If you take care of your team’s goals, your goals will take care of themselves. Use this time to find out what they need from you to better succeed.
4. ALWAYS follow-up. If you commit to doing something in this meeting, do it and then provide an update at the next meeting. Nothing will lose you credibility faster than offering to help, but then not doing anything.

With a little effort and the right mindset, you can make one-on-ones and their awkward cousin, the performance review, fun, and informative. There’s so much value in these meetings that goes uncaught, because everyone has learned to expect so little from them. I wish you the best of luck changing that perception where you work.

I spent the first half of my career making a big, and I would expect, very common mistake. I believed that if I worked hard, developed my skills in my spare time, and became good at my job, that my career would progress.

This idea made so much sense at the time that I never really questioned the logic of it. It wasn’t until years later, after I had become good at my job but my career still hadn’t progressed to where I expected that I started to question the wisdom of my plan.

It turns out it wasn’t a plan at all. As I like to say, hope is not a strategy, and that’s exactly what I had been counting on to deliver me the career of my dreams: hope. A plan has a goal, milestones that can be used to measure progress towards that goal, and actionable steps to achieve them. I had none of that. I just thought that if I worked hard, I would get what I wanted, even if I couldn’t articulate exactly what that was.

Finally, after realizing that career advancement isn’t just a thing that happens to those who work hard, I started to put together a plan.

Goal

My plan started with analyzing my strengths and weaknesses. I wanted to aim for something that would accentuate the former while minimizing the latter. This required some soul-searching, and a good, hard look in the mirror to come up with some harsh truths about what I was good at and what I wasn’t.

I had known for some time that I was a good programmer, but that there were those who were much better than I would ever be. Software development just made sense to these people as naturally as breathing, and they were not people I wanted to compete with.

At the same time I realized that what these savants usually lacked was the ability to communicate their complex technical ideas/problems/solutions in a way that non-technical people could understand. I recognized more and more that a brilliant idea, improperly communicated to decision makers, was likely to get ignored, and was therefore useless.

This was an area I excelled in. I could be the conduit between the genius software engineers and the business savvy leadership, translating each group’s needs into ideas the other group could understand and act upon. My goal became to join IT management.

Milestones

How to make this happen? I had been a software engineer for quite some time, and I was successful enough at it that my managers wanted me to keep doing it. How to make the leap to management when all everyone wants you to do is individual contribution?

I decided that my first milestone would be to get an MBA. The decision to get a business degree was as much about signalling the seriousness of my intentions as much as it was about anything I’d learn in the program. Business school was an extreme challenge, but given how hard it had been for me to take the next step in my career I thought that a grand gesture was necessary.

After graduating from business school a few years later, my next milestone would be to find a job where my primary role was not to write code. This would allow me the time and freedom to leverage my new business degree and demonstrate the strengths that I identified during my earlier soul-searching session.

My last milestone would be to finally move into a position where no coding was expected at all. This move would signify the achievement of my years long goal, and allow me to be leverage my strengths to their best advantage.

Own Your Career

I’m happy to say that this move happened almost a year ago, and I’m very happily in a role where I believe I bring far more value than I ever did as a developer. And now that I’ve achieved this goal that I set for myself almost a decade ago, I’ve had a moment to reflect on how it didn’t just happen to me. It was the result of deliberate planning, hard work, and honest conversations with myself.

If you’re waiting for someone else to advocate for your career, if you expect to achieve your goals without having really articulated them, if you are not taking deliberate, concrete actions to get what you want, then you’re renting your career instead of owning it.

Renting your career means ceding control to others who certainly don’t have the same intentions for your career that you do. Renting your career means working hard, but not seeing the desired results because all of your effort isn’t part of a coherent plan.

Renting your career is hope as a strategy, and unless you make the decision to own your career, you’ll always be used by others to accomplish their goals instead of yours. It isn’t quick or easy, but if you pick your nose up from the grindstone for long enough to figure out what you really want and how to get it, it can be done. Best of luck!

Like everyone else, I’d heard lots about mindfulness over the last several years. I’d even gotten into the habit of doing some simple breathing exercises when I found myself getting upset or frustrated about something. When it occurred to me that is.

Most of the time though I was going through life as I always have: with my heart on my sleeve, spending a good portion of each day frustrated, and often not dealing with it particularly well. It finally came to a head one night at the dinner table about a month ago.

My son, who is one of my favorite people in the world, was goofing off and ended up dropping some of his pasta and sauce onto his shirt and lap. He thought it was kind of funny until he saw the look on my face. I didn’t scream or even raise my voice much, but what I said bordered on emotional abuse. It was mean and totally disproportionate to the mistake my son had made. I reduced him to sobbing tears right there at dinner.

Acknowledging you have a problem

My wife and I went out to lunch the next day, and she (carefully) mentioned that I needed to something about my behavior at dinner the previous night, and she suggested a meditation app named Headspace. She had heard about it somewhere, and I was happy to take up her suggestion, because I was pretty ashamed at my behavior as well. That night my meditation journey began.

I started out on the easiest setting, which was frankly all I could handle. Trying to calm and clear my mind, which had spent over a decade on the hamster wheel of constant mobile phone distraction, was more difficult than I can describe. But my motivation was strong so I persisted; meditating with the app every day, progressively for longer and longer periods.

The change wasn’t immediate, but it was far faster than I expected. It wasn’t complete, but it was far more drastic than I would have ever dreamed.

Who are you, and what have you done with myself?

The first thing I noticed after about three weeks of daily meditation was that my pace of walking and talking slowed down, and my voice softened. Nothing the kids did bothered me. I could recognize that what they were doing was wrong, and that they should stop, even taking on a stern voice if necessary, but these were all conscious decisions. Meditation didn’t make me OK with everything my kids did, it put me in control of my reaction to it.

I found myself, for possibly the first time in my life, in complete control of how I perceived my environment and those in it, and how I reacted to everything. I was OK with being in the moment, and the urge to pick up my phone whenever I had a free moment slowly evaporated.

I would go for walks without my phone and see, for the very first time, the color of the leaves, the quality of the light as it passed through the trees, the texture of the clouds, and really feel the wind on my face. I was experiencing Earth like I was a visitor who had never been here before.

It starts with a single step

I know my journey is not done, and I am by no means a finished project, but the impact that meditation has had on my life in the month that I’ve been doing it has been incalculable. It turns out that meditation isn’t at all what I thought it was, and the effect it could have on me is not something I ever could have expected.

You might be wondering what this is doing on a leadership blog, and I’d tell you that this experience has shaped the way I see my family, my co-workers, and those I have been entrusted to lead to a greater extent than any education, learning, reading, or advice I have ever received.

I don’t know if everyone can expect similar results to what I’ve seen. Maybe I was particularly ready to receive this wisdom. I honestly have no idea. I just know that it has made me better at everything that is important to me in my life, and I desperately wish that I’d discovered it decades ago.

I don’t know what your meditation journey would have in store for you, but I would highly recommend finding out.

How do you react to failure, either yours or that of a team member? Do you feel embarrassed? Ashamed? Was it a mistake that you would take back? This reaction is one of the key differences between teams that achieve amazing things, and those that produce the same, predictable results over and over again.

We are taught from a young age to look at failure as a mistake, and the fewer mistakes made the better. We assume that there is an inversely proportional relationship between success and mistakes: the fewer mistakes, the more quickly success must be achieved. The truly brilliant among us have no idea what failure is, and perpetually bask in the constant stream of success that their efforts inevitably result in.

That nonsense is as poisonous as it is untrue. Successful people are that way in large part not because they avoided mistakes; quite the opposite! The story of every successful person I have ever known is punctuated by risks that don’t always work out, failures survived, and mistakes turned into lessons. Successful people are the ones who have survived the most failures, and pushed on in spite of them.

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”

Henry Ford

Leadership and Failure

Leaders should neither avoid risks nor embrace them uncritically. Instead careful consideration should be given to any effort that has a high likelihood of failure, and the following criteria applied:

1. What is the likelihood of failure?
2. What is the cost of failure (discounting the value of lessons learned)?
3. What is the value of success?

Most of you should recognize the above for what it is: a very simple ROI calculation. And, like all ROI calculations, you have to be sure to include the value of all outcomes. The part that gets left out is the value of the lessons that failure can teach.

What is the value of trying something bold and new that doesn’t work out, but teaches an incredibly valuable lesson that can lead to new projects or impact the way your team operates going forward? Is it worth the cost of the initial failed effort? Compare this instead with pursuing the safe approach where failure isn’t possible, but neither is learning anything new. What kind of team do you want to manage? Which of these approaches truly provides the most value to the company?

Leveraging Risk

In order to truly start leveraging risk, it’s critical to get into the right mindset. You can’t expect your team to bring you bold new ideas unless they are seriously entertained, or to try things that might not work if they are chastised for failure. It is important to create a culture of calculated risks, creative thinking, and bold actions, and to do that your team members have to believe through repeated experience these are the things that you value.

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

Winston Churfhill

If you view failure as a mistake, then your team will respond by not taking any of the risks that might result in one. If you view failure as a chance taken and a lesson learned, then your team will follow that lead and will start to produce the truly unexpected and brilliant things that humans are capable of when they aren’t constrained by fear and anxiety. Your words and actions are a major component of how many novel ideas and innovative approaches your team produces.

We all know the importance of developing a plan, and the even greater importance of executing it. Execution of a sound plan is a large part of what separates successful, productive teams from others.

A crucial part of this simple-to-articulate but difficult-to-achieve process is the communication of the plan. I’m not referring to communication with the direct participants of the plan. That falls under execution. What I’m talking about is communication of the plan to the wider team, those who don’t have a task or a deliverable in the plan.

Muster all your resources

This is yet another thing that I’ve struggled with over my career. (Yes, I’m aware that the majority of my source material is my list of greatest screw-ups, but what better topics to discuss than those that you wish someone taught you about earlier?) My natural inclination is towards simplicity in all things. The simplest plan, the simplest changes, the simplest team necessary will lead to the lowest likelihood of introducing new issues that have to be fixed later. The least effort for the most impact is the very definition of efficiency, and in a world of finite time and resources, efficiency has always been one of my main decision drivers.

Where this breaks down is that simplicity in communication dictates that only the members of the team that need to know should be told. The more people you bring into an email chain, the slower and less efficient the execution might become. We also live in a world where our inboxes are constantly flooded with notifications that we don’t really need, and don’t pay much attention to. Why would I spam a co-worker’s email with information irrelevant to them and to our plan?

The reason is that, and you’ll see me revisit this theme over and over, people are not robots. Robots should know only what they need to in order to do their job, and more than that is a waste of time and effort. People, on the other hand, sometimes have information that members of your team don’t. They may be able to point out a better way to execute on your plan, or let you know why it won’t work in the first place.

Finding out why your plan is stupid and taking the time to devise a better solution before wasting any time on it is WAY more efficient than executing a stupid plan very well. Be honest, how many times have you been nearing completion of a long, difficult project when someone from a different team hears what you’ve been working on for the first time and comments “we implemented something like that last year, would you like to know how we did it?” or “we tried that before, how did you overcome [some obscure issue that you hadn’t even thought of yet]?” How much effort would a little communication have saved?

Send it up the chain

Just as important as taking advantage of the knowledge and experience of people outside your team, can be the confidence of leadership. Sometimes, simplicity of communication leads us to tell management “we are addressing problem X, and it will take Y amount of time.” This is exactly what they need to know, and no more. The problem is this leads to Hopeful Leadership (something I hope to address further in a future post), where they trust that there is a plan and that it is being executed, but they really don’t know.

Management may accept that it will take Y amount of time to fix X, but without the details of the plan, and regular status updates, are they going to be confident in your plan or your ability to deliver? Management’s confidence in the plan and its execution is critical to the plan’s success. If management doesn’t know the plan, how can they support you? Are they going to sit back and wait until the delivery date, or are they going to ping you for status updates, and try to “help”? It is in your best interest to not only make management aware of the plan, but keep them apprised of progress towards completing the plan.

In short, simplicity is a worthy goal, but not necessarily with regards to communication. Let people know what you’re team is working on, the obstacles you’re facing, and deliver continual updates to management. When everyone knows the plan, confidence and support go way up. If you want your plan to succeed, talk about it!

I’ll be the first to admit that I am not a natural listener. I’m much more of a talker by default, but over time I’ve learned that if you want people to listen to you more, you should ask them to do it less. It’s been a journey.

The Emergency

The other day, one of my senior engineers was tasked with solving an issue that effected a customer who needed the fix by the next day. Being a high-ability, over-achiever she took on the assignment and jumped into action. It was a part of the application that she was unfamiliar with, so she reached out to the methodical, detail-oriented lead of our offshore engineering team.

I was on a conference call at the time, so I wasn’t really paying attention to their conversation, confident that the problem was in some of the most capable hands at our disposal. The next thing I know, I’m distracted from my meeting by the frustrated shouting of my senior engineer “to just do what I’m telling you!”.

I quickly excused myself from my meeting, walked over to the engineer, and invited her to take the call in our meeting room. I hoped to both remove the unexpecfed conflict from the middle of the engineering team, and to buy a little time to figure out what the hell had happened.

When Reasonable People Scream At Each Other

I was shocked! I’ve experienced tension with co-workers and worked with some difficult personalities over the course of my career, but I had never had anything like that experience with either of these two. They had always been consummate professionals dedicated to working hard and getting the job done.

The gist of the disagreement it turned out was that my senior engineer was trying to get the offshore lead to do a screen share so they could inspect the code together to try to find the problem, and the offshore lead was adamantly against it.

The offshore lead objected that walking the code had a low-probability of success and was a waste of time, to which my senior engineer would exclaim that she didn’t care. Both of them were furious and frustrated, so it took a minute to get everyone calm enough to have any type of discussion.

The REAL Problem

Having worked with both of them for quite some time, it was pretty clear what had happened. My Alpha-type senior engineer has a tendency to take charge when stressed, and the methodical offshore lead tends to become defensive. With this important task and tight timeline, the senior had started by giving orders to the lead, which introduced stress into the situation and made the lead become more defensive (more stress), which made the senior even more insistent (even more stress), and on and on until the intervention.

The harder she pushed, the further he pulled back, until they weren’t even hearing each other. They both had valid points, and if they had taken the time to figure out where the other was coming from, considered their concerns, and shaped their communication accordingly there never would have been an issue. Instead, each was speaking their own language, worried only about their needs, and completely ignoring the other’s concerns.

Talking With Each Other

I took a moment to let the offshore lead know that I understood that the code inspection was a low-probability approach, but that it was the best one we had. If he had any better suggestions we would happily do that instead, but in lieu of a better idea could we please do the screen-share?

The senior got the solution she wanted, and the lead had his concerns heard and was given an opportunity to suggest alternatives. All together, from shouting to cooperation was under ten minutes, and we had a solution by the end of the day.

It was a great reminder that even experienced professionals are people with needs, insecurities, and desires. We may do our best to leave our peculiarities at home when we walk out the door and head to the office, but that’s completely unrealistic. If you want to truly influence someone or encourage a behavior, explaining what you need is never going to be as effective as understanding what they need.

The phrase “you create your own reality’ may seem trite and overused, but it has a real practical side when it comes to leadership. Your mindset and how you frame problems dictates your approach to solving them.

Consider the following scenario:

The Newbie

Your team has been cruising for a while, and producing at a very high level, but some of your senior members have been a little overloaded and could use some help. After some interviewing, you hire a young, inexperienced person right out of college, and welcome them to the team.

Immediately the new person starts interrupting your day, breaking up your productivity with questions about everything from the team’s processes, to the simplest things about their job function, and even where to park and suggestions for where to go for lunch.

You find your productivity collapsing, and become more and more frustrated as they ask more and more questions. Can’t they see that you have work to do? Can’t they just figure it out on their own? Just as your frustration reaches a crescendo, they seem to become more self-sufficient, and leave you alone, and you are able to contribute more independently.

Who wouldn’t be frustrated by that scenario? It sounds awful. Let’s try, however, looking at the exact same situation from another angle.

Flipping the Mindset

Your team has been cruising for a while, and producing at a very high level, but some of your senior members have been a little overloaded and could use some help. After some interviewing, you hire a young, enthusiastic person right out of college, and welcome them to the team.

Immediately the new person starts digging into the problems, trying to learn whatever they can by asking questions about everything from the team’s processes, to the most important things about their job function, and even where to park and suggestions for where to go for lunch.

You find their productivity increasing, and become more and more excited as they learn more and more. Can they see how much they are contributing to the team? Can they just figure it out on their own? Just as their excitement reaches a crescendo, they seem to become more self-sufficient, and they are able to contribute more independently.

Now, doesn’t that seem like a far more pleasant and exciting situation to be involved in? All I did was change a few words here and there, mostly by switching the focus from you to the person you’re supposed to be leading, but it makes all the difference in the world.

Everything Is An Opportunity

In the first scenario, everyone has a miserable experience, the newbie probably receives perfunctory answers to their questions, and eventually stops coming with questions not because they didn’t have any more, but because those questions were so clearly unwelcome. This person is now having second thoughts about accepting the job, and will be more likely to act independently rather than ask for guidance in the future.

By focusing on the positives in the second scenario, you’ve made it fun and enriching for both you and the newbie. You have taken the mindset that they aren’t keeping you from doing your job, making the a contributing member of the team IS YOUR JOB! Every question isn’t a distraction, it’s more knowledge that they have, it’s another problem they will be able to solve in the future on their own, it’s an opportunity to positively influence a fledgling career, and a more enjoyable experience for both of you.

A conscious effort to keep a positive mindset not only leads to better productivity, better personnel growth, and a better team dynamic, but also better job satisfaction for you. If you ever find yourself doing something at work that you don’t want to do, see if you can reframe it in a way that accentuates its value, its challenges, or any other aspect that makes it less of an annoyance, and more of an opportunity.

Mindset dictates behaviors. If you want to display the right behaviors, make sure you start with the right mindset.