Self Energising

Dear HR Thoughts, are there any tips or suggestions available for self energising?

That is a great question.

If you need self energising, you are being drained. So, let's start at the beginning to figure out just what it is that is draining you. Is it the amount of work on your desk, personalities at work, the type of work you do, social commitments, financial concerns, relationships, health concerns? What can you do to reduce the drain? You have a choice about how you live your life and may need to make some changes. Tough to do, but always an option.

A constant drain means something needs tending to. That something is you. Figure out what you need and ask for it. Simple requests fulfilled to have my daughter put her dirty clothes in the laundry after school or my husband and I sharing attendance at our daughter's activities really made a difference in lightening the load I felt. What requests can you make? Now, make them.

I could make a list of activities that I enjoy but that just would not get to the heart of the question. It really gets down to the question of, are you doing what you love? If you are not as fortunate as Kim who lives her passion every single day at work, ask yourself are you engaging in your passion outside of work. Work is not the be all and end all and a great life exists outside the workplace. Deb at 8 hours & a lunch (one my absolute favorites) writes about this in a recent post  and throughout her blog. Check out your support system for leaks and fill them with family, friends, mentors, community members etc.

With a link to another great perspective providing post, I open this up to others and invite you to chime in with your tips and suggestions for self-energising. 

Remember to breathe.

How Do You Disagree with Your Boss?

"Everybody knows turnover at the top means upheaval. But new research shows just how bad your chances of keeping your job are." Thanks to the authors of a May 2007, Harvard Business Review article, "Surviving Your New CEO" for catching my attention with this lead in.

Turnover at the top is a fact of life in any organization and my medical center is no exception. The likelihood of retirements at the top in the next few years is very high. I like my job and if I leave it, I want it to be on my own terms. So, right to the article I went. The article is great. In it were steps you can take to survive, and even thrive, with a new leader.  If you are not a HBR subscriber, you can read the executive summary here.  

One word of advice from the authors was to "study the CEO's working style" and one anecdote in particular caught my attention. In this, an employee with a reputation for being blunt asked a new CEO how he should disagree with him. Caught the CEO off guard and sure caught my attention. Wow - if there is one area fraught with uncertainty, indecision and well, land mines, this is it. 

So, how do you approach your boss when you don't agree with him or her? More importantly, how do you do it to ensure you are heard and not harm the relationship? If you have worked for someone for any period of time you probably have it figured out but just how painful was it to get there? Let's say that some of my learnings over my years of work have been, well, less than pleasant. My approach, refined over time, has to been to watch, observe and generally work to figure out the working style of my boss and then adjust mine accordingly. I worked to figure it out. Now, what if I had just taken the route of the "blunt" employee and flat out asked? Wouldn't that have saved me some pain and misery and increased my chances of being heard much sooner?!

Blunt employee? No, I think he was rather sharp!