A Fresh Breath

The Easter and Passover season is a time for personal reflection for many. How do you renew yourself from a professional perspective?

The Easter and Passover season is a time of personal reflection for many, as well as a time for renewing one’s spirit and celebrating cherished ancient traditions with family and close friends.  In this same vein, I’ve been reflecting on the question of “renewing one’s spirit” from a professional perspective.

Getting a “Fresh Breath”

 On Sunday mornings, I enjoy listening to “Sunday With Sinatra” on the radio.  Recently, they played a clip of “The Chairman of the Board” chatting with the audience in between songs. In the clip, Frank Sinatra was talking about how, after singing his huge hit “My Way” for many years, he got a bit burnt out on the song.  But his audiences always asked for it, so he kept singing the song.  Then one day, he got what he called “a fresh breath,” and it was as if he was singing the song for the first time again.

As an HR professional, you often have to do the same thing over and over again — such as training new supervisors on exempt/non-exempt and overtime pay issues, for example.  You have to “keep singing the song,” even when it has gotten a bit  old for you.  What can you do to “get a fresh breath” and keep going?

Leading Without Saying a Word

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot lately about authentic leadership and servant-leaders.  It strikes me that much of this good and thoughtful writing gets down to simple but vital lessons learned at your parents’ knee: be sincere, kind, and thoughtful; take people and their concerns seriously; listen and support; do as much as you can to help – in essence, an elongated version of the golden rule. Understanding that one doesn’t need to be a CEO to “lead,” here is a small contribution from my own experience of a former colleague and “leader by example.”

A True Gentleman

I met Scott several years ago when I was responsible for managing the HR side of mergers and acquisitions for our company.  He was the VP of Human Resources for a mid-sized business unit that we were acquiring.  It came to pass that due to redundancies, although Scott was clearly an exemplary HR leader, he and his small team would only be with us on a transitional (9-month) basis. (I know – not exactly visionary staff planning on our part, but that is a story for another day).  Over those nine months, I had the chance to work closely with Scott and his team and found them all to be very fine people, taking their cues in the best sense of the word from Scott, who was admired as a true gentleman (and, not incidentally, a highly-skilled HR and OD leader, as well).