Leadership Strategies: When to Act
When Dan took the position as manager of the sales department he thought he had it nailed. He was the super sales guy and had been the go-to man for years. So, why was he so jittery about this promotion? Maybe it was because within two months of taking this job he was told to cut his workforce by two-thirds.
He would wake up in the morning with a sick feeling in his stomach and go to sleep at night with a dull throbbing headache. Even the respite of Sunday to relax was a joke. He would be up early pouring over statistics and analyzing data that all said the same thing. It’s a tough world out there.
He stopped watching the news, especially the business channels that kept insisting it was much better than last year Dan felt stuck, like he was living in molasses. Everything he did felt like it was in slow motion, each step was an effort.
He pulled out his old workbook from his leadership development seminar. It was too rah-rah for these times. It was from the glitzy years when being a leader was easy, all you had to do was show up. Now you had to lead your team out of the woods. Problem was, he had never been in such a deep thicket where you could not see the sky, not get direction from the sun, all you could see were trees and more trees and not much else.
He wanted to call a team meeting and yet as the new leader he didn’t know what to say. Then he had a dream. It was one evening when he fell asleep late at night on the hammock in the backyard. It was a stupid dream about visiting a chiropractor who kept clicking his back into place.
The session ended with the chiropractor, a small Yoda-type man saying, “I can’t do this alone. Unless you help by taking care of yourself you may as well save your money.”
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