You hear the phrase about someone being a “choker” every once in a while. It’s a negative term meaning that the person had victory within their grasp but let it slip away or that someone performs well most of the time but cracks when facing the pressure of an important event. It happened this weekend in professional golf and you see it in other sports as well as in business. Oh sure, sometimes a great performance by a competitor steps up and beats you even when you play well but much of the time, in sports and in business, the person not finishing first wasn’t ready to win. Continue reading
Bad
It’s Friday and I’m writing this on a blackberry so I’m going to be briefer than usual. I will, however, have a food-related thought. We were talking at a business dinner last evening about the best dishes we ever ate (and no, it wasn’t triggered by the TV show). My dish involves foie gras (and we’re not going to have the discussion on the ethics of that stuff now) and someone said “oh, I love foie gras but it’s so bad for you.”
At another point, similar language was used about a failed relationship: “I loved her but it was totally toxic and bad for me so we broke up.” That, of course, got me thinking about business.
There are people working on teams with folks they love but are killing them. They’re bad for you and they’re relatively easy to spot. They criticize without the balance of praise. They are always ready to lighten the mood with a joke but never ready with their piece of a project. You probably know someone like this but hopefully not.
As a manager, your biggest responsibility is the health of your team just as you, as an individual, are responsible for not eating the stuff that’s bad very much no matter how much you love it. Everyone has a bad day – that’s the odd occasion during which you indulge in the bad stuff. But a steady diet of bad food – or bad people- no matter how much they’re loved can be fatal.
What’s on your love/bad food list?
Filed under Helpful Hints, Thinking Aloud
What’s The Rush?
We don’t do politics in this space but sometimes we find lessons for business in things that happen in that other world (OK, more like a different universe). You might have heard about the Sherrod disaster that’s played itself out over the last little bit. Basically, some video was taken out of context and made to appear as if a USDA employee had made racist statements when, in fact, she hadn’t at all. The media jumped on the story and eventually she was fired. Of course, as the real facts emerged, lots of people were embarrassed, including the media, the NAACP, the White House, and others. And all because they rushed. Continue reading
Filed under Helpful Hints, Reality checks
