Over the past 6 months I’ve been in the luxury position to take time to further center myself and better live my equilibrium.
Among other things I’ve continued to dive into stoicism (a journey that will never end). Meanwhile the Daily Stoic iBooks meditation is the first and last thing I read in bed every night and morning.
Over the last few days I’ve been thinking a log about this meditation:
These are the characteristics of the rational soul: self-awareness, self-examination, and self-determination. It reaps its own harvest. … It succeeds in its own purpose …
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.1-2
As Ryan Singer in the book mentioned above put’s it:
“First, we must look inward.
Next we must examine ourselves critically.
Finally we must make our own decisions – uninhibited or by bias”
I had the opportunity to spend a lot of quality time with trusted people and collect precious feedback. That resulted in positive affirmation for some things I had a gut feeling about.
And that helped me to be clearer in my thoughts and trust my gut feeling even more. So today, when I read the changes at Basecamp David and Jason at Basecamp announced, my heart was jumping to see how they have the guts to make decisions!
And my inner self was smiling because I’m generally strong in making decisions and much of what they decided on resonated with me (and I already had decided on). Partially out of rationale, partly out of gut feeling:
1. No more societal and political discussions …
The work place I’m responsible for is a work place. It’s no family, and it’s no club. It’s as open and welcoming as possible. Regardless of sex, gender identity, nationality, color, race, religion, ancestry, national origin, citizenship, sexual orientation, age, marital status or disability.
Societal and political discussions are essential! And we should have more of them. But outside and disconnected from the workplace. Still we are one holistic individual, we’re not schizophrenic and turn off one character when we enter the work world. We should be authentic, but be very aware in which context / role we are acting every moment.
2. No more paternalistic benefits.
I’ve tried to motivate / incentive employees to e.g. do more sports by paying fitness benefits. This felt good and at the time I was proud about it. But these things are highly individual choices and it isn’t the responsibility of the company to influence them.
However, in my personal feedback talks with employees I often referred to the “Wheel of Life” or “Wheel of happiness”. And that I like that concept and encourage people to assess their happiness state. However I made very clear that me and my business can only help in the areas “Business/Career” and partially “Personal Growth” and to some extend in “Finances”. The rest is happening outside work.
(found via google image search and copied from The Start of Happiness)
3. No more committees.
There is a german saying: “Wenn du nicht mehr weiter weisst, gründe einen Arbeitskreis.”
A lot of committees take speed out of an organisation and discourage decision making. Decision making is vital. It’s up to a leader to take decisions that can’t be taken by individuals or a team. No need for additional overhead, just take a decision (or escalate it).
This is also slightly related to the non-politics or societal discussions at work. Not at my business. Google seems to have a strong culture for that (but also reaches it limits if the wine lovers group starts fighting the breast-feeding-moms or they disagree with the group of people bringing their dogs to work and the pastafarians). I believe in a world where all of these discussions are welcome, but outside the workplace.
4. No more lingering or dwelling on past decisions.
Let me just quote and repeat what Jason wrote: “It’s time to get back to making calls, explaining why once, and moving on.”.
5. No more 360 reviews.
Yay! Finally. I’m happy I resisted to that trend for so many years. Constant manager/employee feedback it is. I promise, for the near future I’ll continue to stay away from them.
6. No forgetting what we do here.
I believe in a world where each individual can make it’s own choices (as long it is in accordance with the law and not discriminating/hurting others – also see above). And it’s also everybody’s personal decision which movements to join and where to spend energy. But at my workplace we’re making mostly software and that’s a big enough problem to solve.