Understanding Gray Areas
Using company’s resource for personal issues, especially during working hours, is a big fat NO for workers in many companies. However, supervisors often have to deal with what we always call the gray areas, while at the same time closing one eye on activities and behaviors that legitimately forbidden. They realize that to expel these activities is more harmful than to benefit from it, because many employees have interest, and mainly personal interest, to be within the gray areas.
In some factories, where tools and materials are available, we can find some workers making personal stuffs out of it. Kitchenware, toys for their children, or window frames – all within working hours. Managers often deliberately indifferent about this, because they need these people when jobs need to be completed as fast and as good as possible.
And let’s take a look within a publishing house where a competent junior editor and a productive one, completing his personal novels within working hours. His managers somehow tolerate him, hoping in return they can count on a hardworking, loyal, and motivated junior editor.
So why does even all these talented workers have the same urge to break the rule? Research showed that they have the need to play their “job identity”. An identity that describe self picture showing someone trained within a specific field and making them part of that profession. A profession, perhaps goes as far as “profession”; the most important thing is how colleagues assess someone in the job
Many senior executives fail to understand the needs of “job identity” (so they often think negatively about this gray areas), could be that they themselves haven’t got their own identities. Executives often see themselves pursuing their own personal challenge, and that’s why, when they enter a company, they don’t understand the importance of job identity for their people. For example, an executive in a fashion company might not be a designer, and because of that, he could probably ignore the needs of a designer within the company of recognition from colleagues.
Instead of considering that gray areas is a dangerous issues, leaders can always try to understand the cause of why the gray area appears. It doesn’t mean that they have to accept all the activities within the areas. They would probably spend their time monitoring misuse of working time and other resources – with proper understanding of course, that these gray areas show that there are higher aspirations within workers; one thing that soon will be considered by leaders as a character of employees they look for.
Finding the right person might not always possible, but workers will be more involved and productive when their capabilities is admitted by their boss.
Source: Michel Anteby, Harvard Business School Publishing
Character – The Single Factor That Delivers
How a leader deals with the circumstances of life tells you many things about his character. Crisis doesn’t necessarily make character, but it certainly does reveal it. Adversity is a crossroads that makes a person choose one from two paths: CHARACTER or COMPROMISE. Every time he chooses character, he becomes stronger, even if that choice brings negative consequences.
As Nobel prize winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn noted, “The meaning of earthly existing lies, not as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul.” The development of character is at the heart of our development not just as leaders, but as human beings.
What must every person know about character?
1. Character Is More Than Talk
Anyone can say that he has integrity, but action is the real indicator of character. Your character determines who you are. Who you are – determines what you see. What you see – determines what you do. That’s why you can never separate a leader’s character from his actions. If a leader’s action and intentions are continually working against each other, then look to his character to find out why.
2. Talent Is a Gift, But Character Is a Choice
We have no control over a lot of things in life. We don’t get to choose our parents. We don’t select the location or circumstances of our birth and upbringing. We don’t get to pick our talents or IQ. But we do choose our character. In fact, we create it everytime we make choices, to cop out or dig out of a hard situation, to bend the truth or stand under the weight of it, to take the easy money or pay the price. As you live your life and make choices today, you are continuing to create your character.
3. Character Brings Lasting Success With People
True leadership always involves other people. As the leadership proverb says, if you think you’re leading and no one is following you, then you’re only taking a walk. Followers do not trust leaders whose character they know to be flawed, and they will not continue following them.
4. Leaders Cannot Rise Above the Limitations of Their Character
Have you ever seen highly talented people suddenly fall apart when they achieved a certain level of success? The key to that phenomenon is character. Steven Berglas, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of The Success Syndrome, says that people who achieve great heights but lack the bedrock character to sustain them through the stress are headed for disaster. He believes they are destined for one or more of the four A’s: arrogance, painfull feelings of aloneness, destructive adventure-seeking, or adultery. Each is a terrible price to pay for weak character.
To improve your character, do the following:
- Search for the cracks. Spend some time looking at major areas of your life (work, family, marriage, service, etc.), and identify anywhere you might have cut corners, compromised, or let people down. Write down every instance yo can recall from the past two months.
- Look for patterns. Examine the responses that you just wrote down. Is there a particular area where yo have a weakness, or do you have a type of problem that keeps surfacing? Detectable patterns will help you diagnose character issues.
- Face the music. The beginning of character repair comes when you face your flaws, apologize, and deal with the consequences of your actions. Create a list of people to whom you need to apologize for your actions, then follow through with sincere apologies.
- Rebuild. It’s one thing to face up to your past actions. It’s another thing to build a new future. Now that you’ve identified any areas of weakness, create a plan that will prevent you from making the same mistakes again.
“Never “for the sake of peace and quiet” deny your own experience or convictions” – Dag Hammarskjold
Source: The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader – John C. Maxwell
Mc Cain or Obama
A friend from Singapore visited me last week and as I was in a car picking him up from the airport.
