Dan Pliszka
Author. Speaker. Consultant.
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Random Thoughts and Musings

#11 of 37 Lessons - You Can Always Change Your Mind

You can always change your mind– If you’re a regular reader, I missed blogging the last two days despite my previous pledge to blog for 37 days straight. Well, I changed my mind. Weekends are still important to me. Therefore, I choose to not blog on weekends, unless I change my mind and decide to knock one out. We’ll see what happens.

This is just one example of changing my mind. There are hundreds of other examples. The important thing is to look at issues from all sides, with different lenses and informational sources. At one time in my past, I would have hesitated hiring someone full of tattoos and sporting bright blue hair. Now, I think, “what does it matter?” There are so many things that are none of our business. Therefore, we should just let it be and tolerate what is. 

The ability to change one’s mind is important because we live in a dynamic world that is always changing. As new and different information comes to light, we can and should re-think past decisions. For example, as a long-time manager of people in the service sector, it was important to me that workers maintain fairly strict “business hours.” Now, however, because of technological connectedness, many workers can do their work from almost anywhere at any time.

The above scenario is still playing itself out in offices around the world, with some managers holding tightly to specific hours of duty because they think people won’t work if the manager can’t see them. I have news for them, if they aren’t going to work, they won’t work at their desk, or from home. Peter Drucker said, “What gets measured, gets done.” So, measure the work outputs and quality. If employees are meeting an established standard, then hours of duty are insignificant. 

After changing my mind about office hours and flexibility, my mantra became, “get the job done.” I stopped worrying about time. If the work got done and done well, that is all that mattered. With some exceptions, there is no need to hold employees’ at work for arbitrary timeframes in the event they may be needed. Most are reachable 24/7 anyway, so why bother locking them in an office for specific periods?

What have you changed your mind about?

 Dan  

Dan Pliszka1 Comment