MANAGE, MINDSET, MENTOR

I find that the importance of mentoring is not spoken about much at times when things become busy with the importance of leadership responsibilities, the increasing growth of the organization, and the continual enhancements… all of which are obviously important.

But, as a leader, paying attention to team members is still just essential and cannot be put onto the back burner. A long time ago, I wrote an article “ARE METRICS TURNING PEOPLE INTO COMMODITIES?” where I spoke about the attitude of how organizations and leaders think about employees, and how this can be disturbing.?

In the past several years, there has been a lot of conversation spoken about in the market dealing with layoffs. Laying off employees can often be seen when sales plummet, profitability drops and the organization worries about being in danger.

What has been publicly emerging though has been some strange situations. Times when very large, well-known organizations are enjoying extremely high profits yet decide to reduce their employee numbers significantly. I’m not going to go into details about why this has been happening to these organizations, as different reasons have been discussed by others.

The thing that is an important factor, in my opinion, hasn’t been really tied together with layoffs, or even hiring. My opinion is that employees can often be seen, by these larger organizations, as commodities. You can see my thoughts on this in the article I mentioned earlier.

I have a very different point of view about employees. In fact, I don’t want to call them employees. I prefer to call people who work with Optevo to be team members.?

From the time I’ve been a founder, along with my mentor and also founder, I’ve always felt that each person in our teams is a new star who will grow into an emerging light in the organization.

If we truly want our team members to be fully engaged, fully supportive of our vision and goals, and fully able to ensure that each task is done well and on time. How do we ensure that this will be the reality in our organization? How do we ensure that our team members are aligned to their own goals which also align to the companies goals?

It won’t just happen when left entirely to them. As leaders, we have to know how to facilitate this by mentoring the individuals in the organization.?

It’s not about micromanaging. It’s not about dictating what has to happen, how it has to happen, and when it has to happen. It’s about including each member in the process. It’s about encouraging innovation. It’s about both giving flexibility and autonomy, while ensuring that all the activities are also aligned with the organizational goals.

It’s about having open discussions where everyone can speak about their thoughts, their suggestions and their ideas about how to achieve the goals successfully. There’s a balance between their inclusion within the team and organization. It’s important for leaders to understand how to keep the right balance between allowing autonomy, and helping them when and as required. It’s about creating an environment that supports growth. It’s helping mistakes be admitted, but not feared. It’s about leaders helping them understand why and how a mistake was made and what’s necessary to make things right and learn how to avoid that kind of mistake in the future.?

Treating our team members with respect, dignity and support for their growth and achievement is important. Seeing them as integral in our organization. Taking both their personal life as important as their work life.

It’s why we’ve always said that it’s Optevo’s philosophy: That? “OUR WORK LIFE SHOULDN’T BE OUR LIFE’S WORK.” ?That’s what applies to our internal Optevo members, and our external Optevo users.? Neither our members, nor our clients are commodities. They’re important to us and to each other.

#WorkManagement #Leadership #Empathy