Mixing it Up: A Day in the Life Sunday

The best way to solve a problem is to not over think it. As someone with a mind on overdrive, I am on the lookout for ways to slow myself - and my thoughts - down. 

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To my tried and true list of ways to slow down my thoughts, I now add cooking.  The holiday season was a flurry culinary creations: prime rib, peanut butter blossoms, white cheddar Mac and cheese, monkey bread and egg and hash brown casserole. Now, I am on the lookout out for mini-Dutch ovens for the chicken pot pies I have my cooking eye on. 

It's crazy, I know. I can't explain it myself. I haven't solved any major problems yet but breaking and beating eggs does have a certain appeal. Art imitates life and the undercooked monkey bread reflects my impatience but I am a work in progress. 

It's really about hitting the pause button.  Michael Hyatt wrote about the space between the stimulus and response and I am close to cracking the cover on The Pause Principle. There is something to slowing down and stopping to pause for effective leadership, self preservation and, in my house now, culinary adventures.

What is your reset button? And, what's your favorite thing to bake?

How to Disagree with Your Boss

I am unwrapping posts from the archives and mixing the old with the new. Enjoy this post from the past.

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

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Turnover at the top is a fact of life in any organization and the authors provide 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 learning 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.