Let’s just say the way that it is. We’re living in a wigged-out world.
Anxiety, we’ve never seen more of it. Depression, we’ve never seen more of it.
According to Gallup’s most recent poll, people have never been unhappier than they are right now. So even if everything’s beautiful and ducky at your organization, people are coming in with their own problems. And so you’ve got to decide if you’re going to be an employer that helps to heal, or if you’re going to compound the problem.
Now, here’s the rub. As an employer, you have a lot that needs to get done. You have to deliver for your customers, and there are outcomes that need to happen, and happen quickly. That can be stressful on your team members and you. Let’s just call it what it is. And yet, if somebody says “This is just too stressful for me, I need to go someplace else,” God bless them because out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Yes, we live in a world where I don’t know any place where people aren’t saying “Here, they’re asking us to do more with less. Faster with fewer and do it better than ever.” That’s the world we live in right now. We’re all called to do five to 10 times more than we thought we were capable of just 5–10 years ago.
There is a need to constantly elevate skills. There’s the need to teach people to think about the fastest way from A to B because I see so many people who think they’re performing.
It showed up on our national research study where 75% of people believe that they perform in the top 10%. Hello, okay, that that is mathematically impossible. And yet people believe it to be true. And they’re not bad people.
They just think they’re working harder. But it’s not about working harder. It’s about working smarter. And the companies that help their people learn to work smarter will win the race to be able to stay intact. But it’s not just about the company, it’s not just about the profit. Every good business owner, every great entrepreneur, every great executive gets that there is something that fills our soul, about watching our people grow and thrive and get better at what they’re doing and go home at the end of each week feeling like a like a superstar.
I was just in a huddle the other day and I was watching one of my team members who a year ago, was kind of struggling, wasn’t really getting it, and wasn’t producing a lot of work. And I heard all the things she was doing and said, “Who are you? Look at you now.” And I mentioned something to her, and I think her lips touched her ears with the smile that someone had noticed who she is now, because now she’s a powerhouse.
Now she’s someone who knows that if you give her the impossible task, give her until two o’clock, is what she’s thinking. Whereas before the impossible task would have just been met with defeat and giving up.
And here’s the thing, its why people run marathons. They don’t run marathons, because they’re aren’t cars to transport them. They run marathons because who they are at the end of a marathon is someone who says “I can do hard better”.
We’re in this game to teach team members how to do hard better and to accomplish the impossible and feel what it feels like to know that you might have an S on your chest when he open up that shirt.
We all want to be someone who is a contributor. With 8 billion people on the planet, we don’t want to be someone who just consumes food and oxygen, we want to be someone who contributes in a big way with our lives. That’s what our soul is calling for. Let’s give it to them.