That's what friends are for....

Seven years ago, last night, I got one of those calls you hate to get: my friend Gregory had died. It wasn’t unexpected – he’d been sick a long time – but   it left a void. In HR circles he was a classic: positive, networked to the max, witty, and wise; and in our circle of friends, he was a real character: quick with a clever phrase that produced a chuckle every time you remembered it. He traveled in lots of circles, and in each he was the one always telling the truth: whether you wanted to hear it, or it was comfortable, or not.  He was honest with himself and that seemed to give him the courage and right to be that with the rest of us: you could count on him for the truth, and that in itself was and still is a hard quality to find. His memory inspires me and all the other friends he left behind to be truthful with ourselves and others every day.  That’s what friends are for…. forever.

Patrick Spencer Johnson (1938 – 2017): American physician and author

Honesty is the best policy....

In the mid-90s I addressed an audience of parents and their kids and asked each group to complete the following sentence: “You have the right to…..”.  The parental group mostly completed it by adding “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”; the kids overwhelmingly said “remain silent”.  Life is about perspectives: each group approached the question from the lens of their own generation’s experiences.  Extrapolate this concept to companies where up to 5 generations are working side by side: supervisors often feel they don’t understand the other generations (like Millennials) and ask for help in managing this multi-generational dynamic more effectively. While there are differences between them, there too are many similarities: one is the expectation that while managers may remain silent, they will never, repeat, never lie or shade the truth. Everyone wants straight and truthful answers to questions: that’s part of what’s known as integrity and is one of the ways to develop trust and respect in the workplace Never underestimate the capacity of your employees to understand and accept the truth; give them that and they’ll rarely disappoint you.

Robert L. Woodrum: Author

You can't make this stuff up....

I was in an airport the other day for an international flight: was through Customs and at my gate with time to spare. Thought I’d get something from the Starbucks there but the line was so long I wondered if some might miss their flights. I thought: nobody’s that crazy to put themselves in that situation. Passports need to be physically checked on international flights and often times the gate agent calls up those who need to do this: in those instances, they know the travelers by sight.  Get this: when they’re announcing last call I see gate agents going to people in that Starbucks line to tell them they have to come and board now or they’ll miss their flight.  The looks on some of those people were priceless: not sure whether to wait to get their drinks or abandon the line to get on the plane. It looked like some didn’t give a hoot about those agents or their fellow travelers – honestly, you can’t make this stuff up. The moral of this story: if you want people to care about you today then you have to care about them every day.

Sir David Wing-cheung Tang, KBE (1954 – 2017): Hong Kong businessman.