Month: June 2010

13

Schedule You on Your To Do List

Susan Mazza | 18 June 2010 | Personal Leadership

Jane Perdue of The Braitewaite Group graciously agreed to guest post here.  Jane is a seasoned HR executive who is now making a difference through coaching, consulting and speaking.  She is also a fabulous writer – definitely check out her blog  Life Love Leadership.  Thank you Jane for sharing your wisdom here.  I am grateful to have you in my inner circle!

Schedule You on Your To Do List

You know how busy you get ascending that ladder of success – the constant swirl of activity focused on the business, your team, your department, results and outcomes.  Time for yourself?  Ah, we’ll try to work that in later. And that later never happens.

In the mid-1990’s I landed my first VP role, overseeing 2800 employees in two states.  For the first several months after the promotion, it was a mad dash of 80 hour work weeks and frenetic scrambling to make everything happen.  Then two firsts occurred in my life:  my very first 360 assessment followed by a sick leave. [click to continue...]

12

Whose Job is It Anyway?

Susan Mazza | 01 June 2010 | Leading Organizations

In the spirit of last week’s post The Responsibility Myth I am sharing a short post originally released in March 2009.

A few weeks ago I was talking with a dentist about the challenges of running an office. It doesn’t seem to matter whether you work in a huge company or a small office, wherever there are people trying to work together there is inevitably an issue I will call “whose job is it?”.

The even more personal version of this issue is “but that’s not my job”. It arises when something isn’t getting done that everyone knows needs to be done.

In my conversation with the dentist we talked about the basics like “whose job is it to take out the garbage?”. He asked, “how does such a simple and easy thing get so complicated?” I’ll suggest it gets complicated the minute we think it’s supposed to be someone else’s job.

So whose job is it to take out the garbage? How about the person who sees that the garbage can is full? [click to continue...]