WordFood

WordFood - how we feed or starve our realtionships

- Julia Hubbel

Julia’s ability to get this group of type-A executives to engage in true networking was incredible. She is truly skilled at motivating the group to engage and interact with each other, and her openness and honesty really come through.

— Shelley Stewart, Jr.,
Senior Vice President of Operational Excellence and Chief Procurement Officer, Tyco

June 8, 2012

WordFood for the Tough Jobs

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , — Julia Hubbel @ 3:05 pm

This afternoon I was doing research for one of my WordFood leadership programs and was interviewing a manager at BNSF about her work. She has a demanding job that requires her to be pretty independent, and to take a lot of responsibility for her own results. I asked her, being as much as a self- starter as she is, how much she needs to hear that she’s doing a good job.

At first she said she didn’t need to hear much at all. “I really don’t need that kind of acknowledgement,” she explained. Then the more she thought about it, she added, “but you know, it would be nice to hear once in a while that people know it’s tough out here. Demanding and sometimes thankless. When we go over and above, it’s nice when that’s noticed. So, yes. It matters.”

When I turned the tables and inquired about how she took care of those who attended to her needs, it was a different story altogether. She shared one situation where she needed help from the IT department. She gave fair warning starting in January that she had a drop dead deadline on April 30th. Due to a series of circumstances, nothing was done and she ended up with a brand new IT person helping her at the last minute. This person had other, higher priorities, and often was dragged away. At key moments in this process my client would tell this overstressed IT person “You’re my hero today.”

This front line, brand new, overworked IT kid probably only heard this from my client but it was probably the best thing he heard all day. And he got the job done- at the last possible moment on April 31st, right at the drop dead last second.

While my client may not always think about her needs to be fed nutritious WordFood, she knows how to feed it to others, especially those who do the tough jobs on the bottom rungs. Sometimes we can forget the demands place on people in these positions, and get frustrated with them. Acknowledgement, thanks and recognition go a long way towards helping us meet our goals and making friends for future support.

Who does the tough jobs for you? How can you thank them today?

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