The hypercapitalized and digital world will always throw us fresh distractions, newly minted shining objects to attract our gaze and pull us away from whatever we’re doing.In doing so, loyalty helps create stability in otherwise chaotic environments.I don’t just blindly say it, and it’s not because I’m thinking of when I might need to turn to that person.But when you live your life that way, it turns out that people end up doing things for you.They do things for you that you didn’t even know you needed.In 2016, he left his role as chair of the board of directors, too.His focus shifted to other projects, including his role in starting the Positivity Project and bringing it to schools around the country.The Erwin family had just moved and welcomed a new child, and Mike had a full plate of other work.Still, it only made sense for things to come full circle.Locally owned small businesses offer fertile ground for loyalty in a business world that increasingly sees people as expendable.Keith Moneymaker grew up in the family business, hanging out in his dad’s store and helping after school.When he graduated college, Keith took over.At the tender age of 21, he was in charge of Sweet Dreams Mattresses & More in a small town in central North Carolina.His first few years at the helm were by his own admission full of stress, disorganization, and immaturity.The company was growing even though I may not have taken it 100 percent seriously, Keith says.I was going through with what I’d promised, but that came at the sacrifice of people that worked for me.I threw it all on their backs.5 People would get urgent calls to make deliveries on Sundays or shift their schedules to get something done on short notice.Keith had seen his parents work for themselves and run businesses, so he thought that he and his very small staff could handle whatever needed to be done, whenever it needed to be done.He was concerned about the national chain Mattress Firm running his store out of business, so he decided to do everything possible to be competitive, including being open seven days a week.He didn’t want to be there every day, though.His burden, and the burden for all of his employees, kept growing.Keith’s best friend worked for him.Quit making work suck worse than it has to.Quit needing so much from so few, part of it read.Try promoting a healthy work environment instead of playing [https://www.daysout.co.uk/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Daysout.woa/wa/redirect?company=Drusillas+250×250+-+Nov2016&url=http://fridaymisgivings.blogspot.com Dictator] Tycoon. At the end, Keith’s best friend quit the job, and said he didn’t want to hear from Keith in any way again.So that obviously cut pretty deep, Keith says.We’d been friends for more than 12 years at that point.I tried to reach out once or twice shortly after that, but I’ve yet to talk to him to this day. Their silence has now lasted for eight years.That schism was just one part of a big shift in Keith’s life.He had recently gotten engaged and realized that he needed to spend more of his time and energy on his relationship.Not only could he run his business better, but he should treat people better, too.One observation about the mattress business helped turn everything around.For every mattress store across the United States, when you deliver a bed, you get an old bed back 90 percent of the time.That’s just how it works.If you have an old car and you trade it in to get a new car, they have places for old cars to go.It never really occurred to me to do anything more with it.I just did it once in a [https://www.likemagazine.com.hk/jobseeker/rlinkz.aspx?page=LL§ion=B&item=5&url=http://fridaymisgivings.blogspot.com while] to be nice and help somebody else.That changed in late 2016, when Hurricane Matthew hit southeastern North Carolina.One of his friends had traveled to Lumberton, a town in the middle of the storm’s path, to help rebuild people’s houses.And on top of every pile was a bed, Keith says.He’d bring you a mattress.Not long after, he was headed south with 300 refurbished mattresses to distribute for free.The effort escalated from there.More and more people reached out to Keith for help, whether they were leaving an abusive husband or had just lost everything in a house fire.He even started donating mattresses to underfunded fire departments.I had no organization.I just threw mattresses in my pickup truck. What began as a simple act of compassion started changing the company’s relationship with their community.Everybody saw extreme value in that, because now they were part of something.They were helping somebody get off the floor.As the team did more and more good for others, they started noticing all kinds of other benefits.They felt a deeper purpose in their work and increasing loyalty not only to each other, but also to the people whose lives they improved through the foundation’s work.They also became more firmly rooted in the towns they served.Learning from his failure to treat his best friend properly, Keith saw opportunities to build loyalty with people across all walks of life.If you open up in a town, do something for that community.Support a local baseball team.When people get treated and paid well at work, they tend to stay longer, work better, and free up time for projects they believe in.Empowered people find new solutions to old problems.There’s a training manual [at Sweet Dreams] that outlines everything while still giving people autonomy and empowerment.Every individual is allowed to be unique.Everybody has their own thing that they take and fly with. Keith believes that more leaders should take a similar approach.I think people can free up more time [banner.zol.ru/noteb/adclick.php?bannerid=2677&zoneid=10&source=&dest=http://fridaymisgivings.blogspot.com if] they’re willing to give up just a little control.You can’t have a loyal employee unless you’re trusting them.And they can see you trust them by the responsibilities that you give them. More trust begets more loyalty, which in turn begets even more trust.The loyalty that Keith Wars - tic tac too flash game. and his team show toward their area has come back to them, too.After Dreams 4 All got going, the hometown newspaper featured their work multiple times.7 Ever since then, they’ve had a devout following and lots of new business at Sweet Dreams, including customers from much farther away than they’d been used to.After someone buys a mattress, when we ask them how they heard about us, 99 percent of the time they say, ‘We know what you do with the old beds.’ They don’t even bargain.I’ve found a resource, and I don’t know why nobody else has tapped into it.I’m not doing it for the profit, but my business has been increasing for the past four years, steadily every single month, due to the goodwill and good nature of what we’re doing.Once again, it’s a virtuous cycle.That’s something that national megabrands can’t match, and it’s a collective good for all kinds of people in Moore County, North Carolina.One Big LessonLoyalty to an idea or community can often create loyalty among people.As we find people who share our allegiances, we tend to create meaningful, lasting, and loyal relationships with them.TakeawaysLoyalty is a long game.It only works when we commit to other people without an expectation of material gain, and continue to nurture that faithfulness over years.Like so many other benefits of relationships, loyalty isn’t just about two people.It often swells beyond an individual relationship to include other people or even entire communities.Sometimes being loyal to someone means serving someone else entirely.In cases where we can’t directly pay back a favor, we can still honor that loyalty by paying it forward.Questions for ReflectionHow did acts of loyalty shape your early life?How might you be able to pay forward those gifts from others?Which might you be able to resuscitate with a phone call or some quality 02:40:19What value can you bring to that person’s life, even if it’s unsolicited?This is just one example of the local coverage of Keith, Sweet Dreams, and Dreams 4 All.Your only security is your ability to find a new job.It’s not clear how much any of that accomplishes.For one thing, money talks.Not many people will turn down a big raise to hang around some nice office amenities.They just care less about material perks than the flashiest campuses of Silicon Valley might lead you to believe.Amy Edmondson in the late 1990s.4 In psychologically safe environments, team members feel confident articulating their thoughts because they know that they won’t be shot down or judged by their peers.5 While that safety relies on group norms, it also relies on relationships within the group.As Charles Duhigg notes in his magazine feature on Google’s research, The paradox, of course, is that Google’s intense data collection and number crunching have led it to the same conclusions that good managers have always known.In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.6Great leaders won’t be able to keep every star member of their team.There will always be other attractive workplaces and a laundry list of life circumstances that pull key contributors away.When we spoke to the psychology researcher and human resources executive Sesil Pir, she stressed the importance of stability for moving quickly in the digital world.A lot of organizations are looking to innovate and become more agile, but stability is the foundation for agility, Sesil says.You only pick up flexibility after stability, and then comes speed.That’s how you build agility.7As important as turnover is in many organizations, stability isn’t only about keeping people from jumping ship.It’s also about creating a culture and giving people a healthy environment in which to grow.Let’s start there, with Clarence Garner.You’re Going to Celebrate the OrganizationClarence Garner spent 36 years working in Grand Blanc schools.When we talked to him, he was serving his fifth year as superintendent and preparing to retire.He’d reached the top spot in the school district he’d dedicated his life to.You’re sitting down and getting ready to sign your first contract as a superintendent and your boss says, ‘Oh and by the way, when you go to hire your deputy, your job is to Footer&af_web_dp=http://fridaymisgivings.blogspot.com hire your successor.’ It wasn’t the celebration you might expect upon landing the organization’s top job.That’s a moment where you go, ‘Gosh, shouldn’t we be celebrating me?I’m the superintendent!’ But the board president is telling you, ‘No, you’re going to celebrate the organization.You’re going to grow the organization.’9The board hadn’t selected Clarence as an interim leader or bridge to someone else.That meant starting to assemble the next leadership team right away.He chose a deputy, Trevor Alward, who soon got the exact same request.I told Trevor that he was to identify five to 10 individuals in our organization that he believed could be leaders moving forward, either in administrative positions, personnel director positions, or central office positions, Clarence says.Succession planning all the way down the org chart solidified the district in case anyone suddenly left or fell ill.But that wasn’t the only reason to insist on planning for the future.Trevor’s job was then to identify those individuals and to coach, mentor, and provide professional development for them.So they’re not only invested in your organization, but they see their own future leadership in the organization. That approach also allows leaders to have straightforward conversations about what they need to do to continue developing.This came well before me, Clarence says.It’s simply the culture that the district has cultivated for decades and insists on for younger generations of leaders.Recruiting the right people and evaluating their work is part of this strategy.Just as important is the role of explicit and valued succession planning.By making clear statements about the district’s culture and selecting leaders who practice those behaviors every day, Grand Blanc puts its money where its mouth is.As teachers and staff members see which of their peers get selected for future leadership opportunities, they see more and more reinforcement of what matters to Grand Blanc.Clarence told us about one teacher who’d pick up little pieces of paper left on the floor of the hallway as he walked through the school.That seems so trite.It’s such a little thing.But it showed us that he believed he was no better than the custodian, Clarence says.When you see that in individuals, you know that others will say, ‘I want to emulate that.I want to follow that individual.’That culture gets passed down primarily through relationships.A recently hired superintendent in a nearby town asked Clarence what he should focus on to be successful in the job.The first things that came to Clarence’s mind?Meet with the mayor once a month, meet with the police chief, meet with a committee of parents, meet with the district’s principals.It didn’t have to do with the business of education.Some kids would stay in their remote Virtual Academy, but many would return to physical school each day.One August evening on his porch, Clarence just didn’t feel right about reopening.He took another look at the data for Grand Blanc.Clarence needed at least 90 custodians to clean the schools each day, but only 70 were available to work.That coming Monday, he and the president of the school board would present their reopening plan to the entire community.That wasn’t looking possible.Clarence didn’t think he had enough staff to operate the schools, let alone keep everyone in the community safe.I knew this would hurt, (木) 02:40:19url=http://fridaymisgivings.blogspot.com he says.One group that Clarence relied on to make decisions was his Superintendent’s Advisory Committee, a group of about 20 parents that he meets with each month.One member of the group, though, convinced Clarence that reopening the schools for the beginning of the year would be a mistake.He was a Black father and pastor in the area, and he told Clarence about a pastoral convention that he and his peers attend each year in Detroit.He started listing all of the convention attendees who’d died of Covid in the past six months.More than 20 people had passed away just from that group.That led me to go back to our data, Clarence says.They had lost so many family members due to Covid.As I looked at our school district from a holistic standpoint, that’s a large part of our population that was negatively impacted and continue to be negatively impacted, Clarence says.10 Looking back now, Covid had killed Black Americans at twice the rate of whites by October 2020, and Latino Americans, Indigenous Americans, and Pacific Islander Americans were all dying from Covid at significantly higher rates than white Americans.11After sharing his view with his leadership team and winning their support, Clarence had to [http://www.swindonweb.com/pages/click.asp?a=1033<=site_idno&ls=1&ap=250&link=http://fridaymisgivings.blogspot.com announce] the decision to stay remote.Eight hundred people from the community joined the video meeting.We had about 50 public comments.People threatened to kill me afterward.They wanted to meet me in the parking lot and physically harm me because of what I’d done, but I knew that it was the right decision at that moment. Clarence had anticipated frustration, disappointment, and anger.But the furor still surprised him.About a week after [the announcement,] we started getting communication from people we had never heard from before.Families were saying, ‘I can’t imagine being in that moment having to make a decision like that.You did it, and we applaud you for that.We do appreciate you looking at the safety and the security of our kids and our families.’ The town rallied around improving remote education.Together, they fortified systems to keep kids learning and families safe.It’s forced us to look at things like people who do not have internet access and food security, Clarence says.Grand Blanc held food pickup drives and delivered internet hot spots to families that needed them.Those were problems that were easier to ignore when kids were coming to the building each day.So even in the moment where you feel like you’re drowning in this pandemic, to me, we are actually better today than we were prepandemic.Clarence is quick to say that remote education still has plenty of drawbacks.That mentality has helped it retain young leaders, train them, and promote them into executive leadership as people who cherish the entire Grand Blanc community.This isn’t a band of ambitious mercenaries, ready to jump to another district as soon as a job offer comes through.They’re dedicated to their town.That stability and investment makes controversial decisions, like the choice to stick with remote learning, possible.One Big LessonRelationships don’t just encourage people to stay in a situation, job, or community.They also create a level of stability that nurtures growth for both individuals and the culture of the group.Love Is a VerbFor Leia Capps, stability isn’t about turnover statistics or maintaining an organizational culture.It’s about providing purpose, peace, and calm for her family.On paper, the lives of Leia and her husband Taylor read like chaos.Leia and Taylor have largely lived in separate cities and even separate continents.I often joke that the pace our family keeps when I’m home is so taxing that I need to deploy for a break, he says.If Army life is anything, it is chaotic and uncertain.Taylor attributes that to the leadership of the person he pursued ever since she tore apart his love letter in third grade.For Leia, leadership doesn’t have to include a title, and stability isn’t about control.Although they planned to adopt just once, a trip to a Vietnam orphanage quickly changed that.We couldn’t ignore the scarcity and desperation of orphanage life, and the contrast that it had with the abundant life we were living, Leia says.