Today’s Tuesday Reading is from Frances Janz, Project Manager at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a MOR program alum. Frances may be reached at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.
What a journey through my MOR program! From “Lead, Manage, Do” to thinking strategically to influencing others to growing others to developing emotional intelligence — we’ve covered a lot of topics. I initially felt compelled to come up with some grand insight that sums it all together. Something like a MOR Leader Is… {fill in the blank}. But thinking on it, there’s no single answer to that statement. Each one of us has developed our own end to that sentence. And I think that’s how it should be. All of our personalities, life circumstances, and career circumstances are different, so it makes sense that to “lead from where we are,” we would all have a different answer.
So, instead of some grand, summary insight, I’ll share something my grandpa told me when I was in high school. He never graduated college, but he had a great sense of its worth. This came from the few classes he did take. He had hated high school and wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of continued education until he went to college. There’s one thing his teachers did differently from high school that changed his mind: they didn’t take attendance. The way he described it was that his college professors didn’t care if you showed up or not. They trusted you to know your own mind: if you valued your education, you’d show up to learn. And if you didn’t, well, that was on you. “They treated me like an adult,” he summed up.
They treated him like an adult. I don’t know why that idea had such an impact on my life. Maybe because when we’re teenagers, that’s all we want, right? To be taken seriously and allowed to make our own decisions. And to be trusted that we’ll accept the consequences of our actions.
Regardless of why it stuck with me all these years, it’s had a lasting impact on my career. When I became a people manager, the company I was at had a two-step approval process for sick days: get sign-off from the leadership team and your direct supervisor. Remembering my grandpa’s story, I told my team to assume they had my approval because “We’re all adults here, and I trust you to know when you’re in a state to be productive and how to manage your time off. If a problem arises with that policy, we’ll address it then, but otherwise, I trust you to make the decision.” One of my team members was an intern-turned-full-timer who had just turned 18. His response was, “We are all adults, huh?”
So, why am I rambling on about high schoolers and approving sick leave? Because I think this simple idea — of treating people as adults and trusting them — flows through many of the MOR teachings. When we delegate, we show our team that we trust them to handle those tasks. When we invest in our people by developing their talents, we’re saying that we trust that they can continue to grow as a person and are capable of new things. When we practice emotional intelligence, or influencing techniques that take others’ perspectives into mind, or even when we make an effort to get buy-in from our team, we’re sending a message that we understand that, like us, others have a reason for their decisions, and those reasons may vary from our own, and that we’re willing to hear how those reasons may impact their perspective on what we’re suggesting.
To return to my opening thought — A MOR Leader Is ____ — I encourage you to take however you end that sentence and turn that phrase into motivation to treat others as adults.
How often do you feel treated as an adult at work?
Last week, we asked where are you with the 28-day practice habit:
- 17% said currently doing this
- 20% said have done so in the past, but not currently
- 46% said haven’t done so and excited to try
- 17% said haven’t done so, and don’t plan to at this time
Almost half of us said we haven’t instituted the habit of a 28-day practice, but are excited to try. If you are in this category, what is your next step? What is the one thing you can do today to move you toward doing so? Intentionality leads to results.