Distraction and anxiety are going to be an an unusually high rate the next couple of weeks if you're a manager based in the US with a high-stakes election happening next week. Take care of yourselves and your team. My leadership-during-electionsadvice from last month can be viewed here if helpful. Let's get to your Monthly Management Memo - as always with something bold, something new, something borrowed, and something to pursue.
Something Bold - Put Disaster Policies in Your Employee Handbook My friend Sarah has excellent recommendations for the kinds of policies and practices you can put into place as more natural disasters occur as our climate changes. Some might require actually putting things into employment handbooks but others are the kinds of things you can just do when one of your teammates is facing some sort of natural disaster or other tragedy (a house fire, etc.).
Something New - The Virtual Assistant Team I Use & Love I've been working with a virtual assistant of some sort for nearly a decade now, and I've worked with a four different firms over the years. These days I'm working with Sundaysafter meeting Ashley Chang at a conference (she's the founder), and it's been a joy and a huge help. Sundays focuses specifically on supporting working parents, and so Kaila (my amazing assistant) helps me for 10 hours a month (I am likely to increase this allotment soon because it's been making such a difference!) with mostly business-related tasks but also sometimes with personal tasks. She's great and I definitely recommend checking out Sundays if you are ready to get some support with all the things you are juggling. Here are just a few of the things they help me with: social media management, website updates, capturing testimonials and sharing them, creating infrastructure for free resources I want to give to the world, sending gifts to my clients and students, bookkeeping and business mileage tracking, adding students to calendar invites for group programs, invoicing, tracking metrics, researching Airbnbs, putting conference sessions on my calendar, and more. Happy to intro you to their team if helpful, just hit reply and I'll make that happen.
Something Borrowed - Does Performance or Trust Matter More? I thought that this was a fascinating insight into team culture and trustworthiness from Simon Sinek. It's a short 2-min powerful and useful video - watch it here.
Something to Pursue - Halloween Considerations This Thursday, many of your employees likely are planning some sort of Halloween celebration. Some of your folks might want to get to a bar with friends. The grandparents and parents on your team might want to get home and get kids wrangled into costumes, fed, and out the door to trick-or-treat before it's too late. Others have a scary movie and delivery pizza on their plans. If you've got a lot of parents on your team, they might have Halloween costume parades at the kids' school they want to watch that happen in the morning. Look at your calendar now - are there meetings that can be canceled? Is it a fun day to bring in Halloween-themed donuts or order some pumpkin-shaped pizzas for an office lunch? These moments are one of your opportunities to show your employees that you care about their lives outside of work.
Bring your team, I'll bring my A-game. I love helping team with workshops on topics of productivity, team culture, and effectiveness at work. Find out more and book a free chat to see if I can be helpful for your organization.