So, every week the CEO of the government agency that employs me sends out an e-mail about something that made him think in the past week. We can read it or not. If you respond to the email, you get an answer from him, not some flunky. You can also email him if there's something going on in the company that concerns you, and you'll get an answer. Maybe not the one you wanted, but as the Stones so famously said, "You can't always get what you want."
I'm generally seriously skeptical of things like "team-building" and "corporate culture." I don't expect or want the bosses to be my buddies. I'm not big on employer-sponsored recreational/social events. The firm/agency/company owns 40 hours of my time a week. Outside of those hours, I have a whole other life, and I seldom choose to share it with coworkers.
That said, sometimes the boss comes up with something that catches my interest. This was today's:
Reading about his experience of Facebook, I was once again reminded of Mike the lineman for Florida Power, whom I "met" on the old St Petersburg Times online community forum, where I also first encountered Frostbit. Mike and I were polar opposites. He was a blue-collar guy, an evangelical Christian (member of a TV megachurch), not much of a reader, heterosexual, and absolutely certain that my "lifestyle" was an abomination to God and that I was going to Hell if I failed to repent and change my ways.
BUT, that last part made him really sad, because he thought I was a really good mom, and he truly hated what he saw as sin, but loved the person he saw as a misguided sinner. He was a genuinely decent guy. And he found something to love about someone with whom he disagreed about virtually everything. And I loved that about him. We argued all the time. I cried when he died, but not because I had been mean to him, because I wasn't, nor was he mean to me.
I'm generally seriously skeptical of things like "team-building" and "corporate culture." I don't expect or want the bosses to be my buddies. I'm not big on employer-sponsored recreational/social events. The firm/agency/company owns 40 hours of my time a week. Outside of those hours, I have a whole other life, and I seldom choose to share it with coworkers.
That said, sometimes the boss comes up with something that catches my interest. This was today's:
Find something you love about people. Collin Coggins and Garrett Brown wrote a book about the world’s greatest salespeople, The Unsold Mindset. They shared that the most successful salespeople were not who we all think of as salespeople. They suggested that if you find something you love about the person you are trying to make a pitch to, it is more likely that you will make a connection. We tend to connect with others when we find common ground. When we feel connection, we are more likely to engage.
Taking this concept a little further, the speakers suggested that we are all selling all the time. We don’t necessarily sell a product, but we are trying to influence our children, our partners, our friends, etc. And to do that we really have to see these other people and listen to them.
All of this made a great deal of sense to me, and I started to see additional implications.
In today’s world too many people focus in on their differences and treat those differences as more defining than what they have in common. All too often we see people with different beliefs treating each other as enemies. I accidentally reverse engineered the impact of this through Facebook. I’ll explain.
Over the course of my life before social media I made many friends…and then I fell out of contact with them. With the advent of Facebook (for those of us who have forgotten, Google tells me that on September 26, 2006, Facebook opened to everyone over 13 years of age with a valid email address) I reconnected with old friends. At first, we shared our joint memories and caught up on changes in our lives. But once connected, I kept seeing the things they shared on Facebook. At first it was just weird—we have all had friends who shared a little too much! But over the years it became less about personal sharing and more about ideas. And interestingly, at least for many of my old friends, they did not share positive ideas. They shared their dislike, more often contempt, for the beliefs of others.
If I did not already know these people and my only exposure to them was through their posts, I would conclude that I did not want to know them. I might even conclude that they were mean and hateful. And yet I did know them, and I knew that they were actually good people, good friends to many, loving parents and caring community members. I knew that they were generally kind to people that they interacted with. But online, with a universe of people that they did not know, they were not kind. And based on their on-line personas, I couldn’t see that person that I had come to love.
It is all too easy to focus on differences. But that creates distance and division. Making that worse, in today’s world, we do not see the hurt we cause when we focus on what we don’t like about others—making it even easier to cause that pain. When we focus on what we have in common, on what we love about others, very few of us will intentionally do something mean and hateful. Most of us do not want to cause other people pain.
Taking this concept a little further, the speakers suggested that we are all selling all the time. We don’t necessarily sell a product, but we are trying to influence our children, our partners, our friends, etc. And to do that we really have to see these other people and listen to them.
All of this made a great deal of sense to me, and I started to see additional implications.
In today’s world too many people focus in on their differences and treat those differences as more defining than what they have in common. All too often we see people with different beliefs treating each other as enemies. I accidentally reverse engineered the impact of this through Facebook. I’ll explain.
Over the course of my life before social media I made many friends…and then I fell out of contact with them. With the advent of Facebook (for those of us who have forgotten, Google tells me that on September 26, 2006, Facebook opened to everyone over 13 years of age with a valid email address) I reconnected with old friends. At first, we shared our joint memories and caught up on changes in our lives. But once connected, I kept seeing the things they shared on Facebook. At first it was just weird—we have all had friends who shared a little too much! But over the years it became less about personal sharing and more about ideas. And interestingly, at least for many of my old friends, they did not share positive ideas. They shared their dislike, more often contempt, for the beliefs of others.
If I did not already know these people and my only exposure to them was through their posts, I would conclude that I did not want to know them. I might even conclude that they were mean and hateful. And yet I did know them, and I knew that they were actually good people, good friends to many, loving parents and caring community members. I knew that they were generally kind to people that they interacted with. But online, with a universe of people that they did not know, they were not kind. And based on their on-line personas, I couldn’t see that person that I had come to love.
It is all too easy to focus on differences. But that creates distance and division. Making that worse, in today’s world, we do not see the hurt we cause when we focus on what we don’t like about others—making it even easier to cause that pain. When we focus on what we have in common, on what we love about others, very few of us will intentionally do something mean and hateful. Most of us do not want to cause other people pain.
Reading about his experience of Facebook, I was once again reminded of Mike the lineman for Florida Power, whom I "met" on the old St Petersburg Times online community forum, where I also first encountered Frostbit. Mike and I were polar opposites. He was a blue-collar guy, an evangelical Christian (member of a TV megachurch), not much of a reader, heterosexual, and absolutely certain that my "lifestyle" was an abomination to God and that I was going to Hell if I failed to repent and change my ways.
BUT, that last part made him really sad, because he thought I was a really good mom, and he truly hated what he saw as sin, but loved the person he saw as a misguided sinner. He was a genuinely decent guy. And he found something to love about someone with whom he disagreed about virtually everything. And I loved that about him. We argued all the time. I cried when he died, but not because I had been mean to him, because I wasn't, nor was he mean to me.
Comment