Put on your Red Shoes

We knew in that moment that the resources we had at our fingertips were profoundly powerful.We couldn’t unsee what we had seen and there was no going back.We knew we would adopt again.Adopt again they did.Five of their eight children were born outside the United States.Regardless of whether they joined (木) 02:42:17url=http://pointingatears.blogspot.com the family by birth or adoption, all eight children were immediately thrown into military life and have endured countless deployments, training activities, and extended separations from the father who’s committed to both them and the military.Stability can be a potent force in any group, but it’s [banner.zol.ru/noteb/adclick.php?bannerid=2677&zoneid=10&source=&dest=http://pointingatears.blogspot.com especially] important in the raising of children.Eight months turned into three years of living apart, Leia says.We couldn’t seem to catch a break from the deployments and training events that prevented us from living together as an intact family.We faced one false summit after another. Despite those disappointments, solo parenting, and time apart, Leia continued to grow their family through adoption.While her husband was deployed overseas, she also traveled to other continents and transitioned emotionally and medically fragile children out of orphanages and into their home.When life felt chaotic, Taylor says that Leia brought stability to stormy circumstances.The last time we’d lived together, we had two children, Leia says.Taylor needed to deploy overseas again.He came home from his first day at work to a house full of unpacked boxes and children with the stomach flu.He had to give his very pregnant wife the bad news.It was crushing for our family, Leia says.Even though everything felt out of control, our family just thrived because we decided we would do just that, Leia says.She reached out to this new town and started finding people who she could lean on, even if they were just getting to know each other.She started a fitness group and created relationships with women in town over shared workouts.In the back of the ambulance, she sent Taylor a simple email about what was going on.When he read it from continents away, he immediately called her.That email should have been a phone call! he joked.She laughed as she ran between the emergency room and the waiting room to [http://www.swindonweb.com/pages/click.asp?a=1033<=site_idno&ls=1&ap=250&link=http://pointingatears.blogspot.com nurse] their newest baby.What would you have done from the other side of the world? she responded.Stability in those moments of uncertainty came not only from Leia’s ability to set a calm tone, but also from the individual relationships that their children forged during trying times.Our kids have gotten to experience life as a full spectrum because my husband was gone so frequently and, without extended family to rely on, the kids often had to sacrifice fun for practical. The entire family embraces the daunting and complex together.Love is a verb. They believe that love should express itself through action, and that this brand of love builds deep bonds and lasting trust.Mindful, loving parenthood is clearly an important form of leadership.Although Leia’s experience is an especially dramatic example of parental leadership, you don’t need to parent eight children to serve others at home.Engaged parents are leaders every day.With a full medical docket, a full home, and an empty bank account, Leia and Taylor knew that orphan care shouldn’t end with their last adoption.They knew that they might no longer be able to adopt, but they still had more to give.That’s when they started a jerky company.From 2016 to 2020, when the pandemic shuttered their shop, Sage Harvest Gourmet Jerky funded 17 surgeries, provided 12 adoption grants, and contributed more than $140,000 to orphan care.One Big LessonLove shared between people is a powerful stabilizing force.Our relationships ground us in our commitments to each other, even as our circumstances become uncertain or quickly change.Could I Get Fired for This?For Sean Kelley, being a leader and a human being at the same time isn’t complicated.Just before Sean left his last role, the company’s talent management leaders called him in for a meeting.What was he doing so well?Employees are humans, Sean told them.He laughs retelling the story now.13For more than 20 years, Sean built teams at some of the world’s largest and most influential tech companies.Before he left the company in 2020, he led the Worldwide Operations Talent Acquisition team, which found and recruited candidates for a huge variety of Amazon’s departments.When he started in the role, he led a team of about 240 people.Sean joined the firm a few months after a New York Times investigation revealed a workplace culture at Amazon that routinely ran employees into the ground.Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.14 When Sean took the job, the company’s prevailing culture hit him right away.You could feel the human toll of the pace of growth immediately.I had people crying in my office and I didn’t see leaders around me speaking out that things needed to change, Sean says.The company had a mechanical approach to talent, knowing that if one person leaves, there are plenty of people to replace them.They were truly ‘head count,’ lines on a spreadsheet.He needed to lead with intentionality in that environment.Plus, I knew from experience that this would lead to exceptional results.From Day One, Sean’s job looked just like the Times article.To refocus the culture on his team, he had to make changes right away.I had to just stabilize them.I had to fire a couple of managers who I thought were really bad humans.I think with leaders who lead with their heart and kindness, people underestimate that you sometimes have to do that kind of stuff.Within months of his starting, the team could tell that Sean was serious about practicing what he preached.Firing abusive employees started giving the rest of his people reason to believe that things would improve.They all knew that those people were mean and disrespectful and a whole bunch of other things.So they all sat up when those people didn’t come to staff meeting for the first time.I told them that there’s a way that we’re going to lead together.I’m going Footer&af_web_dp=http://pointingatears.blogspot.com to show up and do my part.Early in his tenure at Amazon, Sean heard a knock on his office door.A member of his team walked in, shaking and with tears in his eyes.What are we going to do? he asked Sean.Sean invited him into the office, asked him to sit down, and assured him that he wasn’t going to get fired.Together, they’d take some breaths, calm down, and reassess the situation.Sean didn’t actually know what was going on behind the scenes.Could I get fired for this?I’m new here, he thought.Sean went to his boss and got the lowdown.The email was a big deal, but there was a process to deal with it.They’d research what had happened, explain it clearly, and get an answer back to executives within 24 hours.The recruiter wasn’t fired, and life moved on.By the time Sean announced that he would leave Amazon four years later, that same recruiter had become a manager.He sent Sean a [https://www.daysout.co.uk/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Daysout.woa/wa/redirect?company=Drusillas+250×250+-+Nov2016&url=http://pointingatears.blogspot.com note.Not] only had he thought that he’d be fired during that incident, but he thought he’d be fired during his first conversation with Sean.Years later, he just wanted to thank Sean again for being calm, helping to defuse the situation, and treating him with dignity during a frightening time in his career.I showed that to my boss because it told me how much we underestimated being calm under pressure and just being decent, Sean says.I didn’t need to freak out that guy, but he’d obviously been conditioned to be freaked out.My job was to come in and just take things down a notch.It actually gave him faith in the company, not just me.That’s been true at multiple stops in Sean’s career, and it’s always meant persuading executives to care more about people.Employees are humans, after all, and not just lines on a spreadsheet.Years earlier in his first weeks at the company, a senior executive had cut Sean off during a conversation about the people on his team.They were going through a business review, and as a matter of principle Sean had always started those meetings with an overview of people metrics.That had left quite the impression.Sean nearly left the company, but decided to stay and lead his way.Now, with a new team and a different slate of executives, Sean decided to be bold.Sean joined Nadella’s executive staff meeting and prepared a single slide.It simply Wars - tic tac too flash game. stated that his team would be more successful if it invested more in relationships, and showed some basic math about how to make that happen.They’d need permission to hire 20 more people.I could practically hear him saying, ‘Do not make that ask.’ Sean explained that there was no path to winning as things stood.It’s an organization design question based on taking care of the team as the means to deliver outstanding results. He wasn’t going to delusionally require his team to achieve impossible results, and he wasn’t willing to deal with the human consequences of acting that way.I say that the lights dimmed and everyone else disappeared.[Nadella] and I started floating, Sean jokes.He looked at me, and I had never met this man.He just started riffing.So you’ll hire contractors for these roles, Nadella said.Would you hire contractors for the top engineering roles in the company? Sean asked.Nadella shook his head.So no, I won’t hire temp recruiters for these roles either, because we won’t win.I need the best recruiters on the planet to win for you.The two stared at each other for a minute.Do it, Nadella said.Sean went back to his team.They were all sure that they’d seen the last of him.You’re going to get fired today, one of them had said before the staff meeting.The team would have to keep working hard, but they’d get the staffing to do it properly.A similar story played out at Amazon.It’s a dynamic that leaders from all kinds of organizations can relate to.When I first got there, Sean says, the team told me that nobody wanted to come work in this recruiting organization.There’s probably a reason for that.It turned out that people had half the resources that they needed, so they were getting their asses kicked every day because something wasn’t getting delivered.Instead of figuring out why that thing didn’t get delivered, we were beating people up about it. Progress came slowly, but Sean shifted the focus from beating up individuals to solving their underlying problems.He taught leaders on his team to serve others.He built relationships with the people on his team so that he could understand their unique motivations, dreams, and fears.People around the company took notice.Six months after Sean started, the head of talent acquisition for Europe operations told Sean that she should start reporting to him.The momentum just kept rolling from there.People would tell us, ‘I want to be a part of whatever you’re building.’ And then we started popping up new hires from other parts of the company, he says.That was a secret sauce of mine, because I did stuff!I brought in a marching band.Building energy and team spirit.They wanted me in a costume, I’d put on a costume. The point wasn’t to just put on a show.It was to counteract all the toil that people had become used to at work.If they saw a team that could perform at a high level and seem enjoyable, they’d want to get in on it.Existing team members would be much more likely to stay, too, and they’d be much more likely to do their best work.These people have to love their jobs.They need to love each other and they need to love their jobs.If we’ve got that, then it’s all easy.We just point them at the phones and LinkedIn and say, ‘Let’s do this.’ But if they hate their jobs, they can’t do it.They can’t connect with candidates and sell this as their future.A year and a half into the role, Amazon employees from other organizations wanted to transfer to Sean’s team.That told him that the plan was working, and it raised eyebrows among his peers across the company.They started calling to ask what he was doing.To me, it’s the simplest formula.What is it that tilts me toward win?At a large company, hundreds or thousands of candidates compete for a single opening.The vast majority of those people don’t get a job offer.He regularly checked on survey results from that group.If his team was thriving and treating people well, then even the people they eventually rejected should still be able to say good things about the recruiters they worked with.I’d find the outlier recruiters and ask them how the people they didn’t give a job offer gave them better survey responses than the people who did get an offer.And it was always about offering clear communication, timeliness, empathy, respect, a dose of dignity, and a little bit of feedback. Treating those people well was a reflection of how the recruiter viewed other people, regardless of their immediate utility to the company.I made some assumptions, and for every interview you hold, there are 40 people around that job candidate just waiting to hear how the interview went.It’s a moment to send a ripple of good connection out into the world. That’s one reason why the responses from rejected candidates were so meaningful to Sean.If I saw that number start to dip on a team, I knew that something was out of whack.We weren’t in a healthy place as a team, and we weren’t taking care of our own staff.And in turn, we weren’t sharing the love with the people that we weren’t hiring.All the while, they hired more than 40,000 people for teams across the company in Sean’s last full year in the job.My boss asked me to stick around a little bit longer to make sure that things continued.I said, ‘Hey, the crew knows the plan.They can all run this thing.I’ve been a nonessential player for a while now, readying for this moment.Cultures that treat people with dignity and bond their members with sincere, meaningful [https://www.likemagazine.com.hk/jobseeker/rlinkz.aspx?page=LL§ion=B&item=5&url=http://pointingatears.blogspot.com relationships] simply have a better chance of surviving over time and avoiding rampant turnover.We long for connection.When we find it, we tend to value it immensely.There are certainly other factors that influence stability, particularly in the workplace.They do, however, give leaders the best insight into what’s working, what’s not, and which actions might effectively address an organization’s most fundamental problems.Relationships allow for better diagnoses and more specific solutions.They also create an environment that people actually want to be involved in.This sounds dead simple, and it is.Groups that want to persist over time and retain their people need to start with relationships.Money, perks, and a sense of purpose all help, but they should complement a strong social and emotional network.TakeawaysStability isn’t just about minimizing turnover.Even in chaotic circumstances, relationships can give us solid ground from which to address crazy challenges.Questions for ReflectionThink of a hectic environment in your life.Your group of friends?What kind of stability is important to you?Which parts of your life need to feel settled for you to do good work and feel satisfied?Suhauna Hussain and Johana Bhuiyan, Prop.22 Passed, a Major Win for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash.See RiShawn Biddle, Don’t Kill Remote Learning.Biddle’s essay focuses on the nationwide consequences of eliminating virtual instruction during the Covid vaccine rollout.He doesn’t discuss Grand Blanc specifically.It would be disingenuous to pretend that they should all develop in some pat way.That said, we want to offer you a few tactics to try.They’re hardly comprehensive, but if you’re at a loss for what to do next, try one of these.Draw Concentration LinesIt’s easy to let stress from one part of your life leak into others.Work anxiety is devilishly good at sabotaging time with family and friends, but a fraught situation at home can just as easily wreck that blissful flow state at work.The ability to compartmentalize worry has all kinds of psychological benefits, including the clarity to form stronger relationships.If your mind is elsewhere, your companion will notice.It’ll be hard to have a meaningful conversation and learn about their life and emotional landscape.When we compartmentalize stress, we can really be with someone else, even when we have other unresolved problems.Matt Hasselbeck offers one approach to compartmentalizing.His head coach in college, Tom Coughlin, drew a concentration line around the football field.When you stepped on the field, you had to have your mouthpiece in your mouth, all four chinstrap buckles in place, and your mind entirely on football.As a pro in Seattle, Matt learned another concentration line from his quarterback coach, Jim Zorn.Zorn drew a line at the Roanoke Tavern, a bar between the team facility and Zorn’s home.When he crossed the Roanoke Tavern on the commute home each night, he forced himself to stop thinking about football and focus entirely on his family.And I am now preparing myself to step into that household, not on my cell phone, not thinking about work, not really thinking about anything except being present, just like you would do on a football field.1You can draw a concentration line anywhere and use it to divide any two portions of your life.