About The Hard Lines

 

       …the blog about rising to the challenge

 

 I have been in the workplace for over forty years now and I will be sharing some of the issues and challenges that I have come across.

What challenging issues have you been avoiding? How do you face your true feelings about a difficult situation, and use those feelings to move you forward? Spending less time in denial or avoidance, taking a stand (no matter how uncomfortable that may seem), and pursuing appropriate action–-these are the steps that propel you towards accomplishment of your goals. And they aren’t always easy steps to take.

 

That’s why I named this blog The Hardlines!

 

I have always been interested in the hard choices. One reason this area appeals to me is that, due to my easygoing temperament, mild manner, and conciliatory values, people have sometimes assumed that I could not make tough choices. More than twenty years ago, I was the director of an employee psychological assessment and referral service at a Fortune 500 company. While the Executive Vice President of HR told me how much he admired my experience and insights, he warned me that I would have to be tough: “These business folks can be demanding, and they will expect tough direction and guidance!”

 

The irony was that in my professional role in that company, time and again I coached and motivated countless managers to actively address difficult employee situations — situations that they preferred to avoid or deny. I’ll never forget the manager who followed up with me two months after an initial conversation regarding a distressed senior supervisor. He said, “Remember that fellow we talked about a few days ago?”

 

A few days ago???  The manager admitted that he had spent the last several months thinking about this situation on a daily basis. It was so ‘front and center’ for him that our conversation seemed much more recent than it actually was and yet he could not call me. That’s how these difficult situations affect us—they take huge quantities of mental energy, which compromises our ability to laser-focus on other tasks.

 

I’ll be addressing all kinds of challenging issues in this blog, and providing some helpful information on how to deal with them. I hope you’ll find it both interesting and helpful. Please feel free to forward it to colleagues and friends. And do let me know what you think–a dialogue is so much more engaging than a monologue!