12/02/2019

How Leaders Can Help With Holiday Stress

Consider what you can do to make that culture less overwhelming

The noisiest time of the year, for better or for worse, is now in full swing. Black Friday has worn down our collective feet at the mall, and this blog post is fighting to be heard among the ever-honking airhorn of Cyber Monday. It’s the time of year that can get a lot of leaders feeling competitive. (“Why aren’t we launching the big membership campaign those other folks are?”) But it’s also a time to take a deep breath and not get seduced into a herd mindset.

Indeed, this might be a better time to think about the stressed-out people within your association’s community at this time of year—from employees to members to stakeholders—and consider what you can do to make that culture less overwhelming. I come at this after reading Ron Carucci’s essay in Harvard Business Review on the difficulty of balancing business goals with employee satisfaction. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive, says Carucci, an author and business consultant. But connecting the two requires some culture work.

Part of the solution involves getting away from a perks-oriented mindset to one that focuses on processes that build employee satisfaction. Carucci cites the example of one company that addressed disengagement among its ranks by empowering more middle managers to speak up and share concerns and by making decision-making less top-down. Listening to employees explain what resources they need—and then making a good-faith effort to provide them—can make a big difference. Efforts like those “helped dramatically restore a sense of pride and personal ownership,” he writes.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.