Surviving Summer Vacations

The Memorial Day weekend is upon us and while we all look forward to a three day weekend, we first and foremost want to acknowledge the holiday as one to honor those in our military who have sacrificed their lives for our freedom.

Memorial Day also is the symbolic beginning of summer. Summer carries a different feel and meaning than the respect and tribute we pay on Memorial Day. Long days filled with activities; a break from school for kids and most of all-summer vacations with family and friends. Summer means fun.

Among all the summer fun the stark reality is that business does not take a vacation. Deadlines don’t change, customer expectations don’t change.

So summer also brings special scheduling challenges. Vacations mean people are away- so someone needs to cover for you while you are gone. You need to cover for others when they are gone. For the next 90 days there is a good chance that your team will not fully be intact – that is very different than at any other time of the year. Enjoying time off for one of us means juggling work to cover for one another. There remains pressure to perform.

You might be one of those people who will try to stay on top of things by working on your vacation. While your program or business team may require some level of engagement while away, it’s important not to cheat on your family or the recuperative process. It is not fair to you; it is not fair to your family. It may be bad for your health. Vacations should not be stressful. Vacations are meant to be restorative.

Put imapMyTeam.com to work for you this summer in many ways:

Start by running your ‘What You Should do to Re-Energize’ report before you go away on vacation or take that long, extended weekend. It is personalized to what energizes and rejuvenates you. Take advantage of the tips.

When back from vacation-or if after covering for others for several weeks- watch for signs of stress in yourself or in your teammates and use the ‘ How to Succeed Under Pressure’ report to understand and then contend with the type of pressures we may be feeling when we are stretched thin. There are tips to help you and your colleagues stay on track.


Count on imapMyTeam to help you survive the summer vacation season when you are holding down the fort - and to customize and maximize your own down time when you are away from the office. 

Strategy vs. Execution: Which is more difficult?

Stop for a moment and ask yourself: Which is more difficult? Implementing your strategy or executing that strategy? I’ll take an educated guess that your immediate response- at least for most of you- is “execution.”

Organizations today are in a constant state of adaption; they are seeking new ways to achieve strategic organizational change and they are often successful in doing so by focusing their efforts on execution.

Excellence in execution requires far more people working in sync than in developing strategy. The sheer number of people involved in implementing the strategy creates great complexity. Personal interpretation and perceptions of how the strategy should be implemented may or may not be in alignment with the optimal approach to executing it.

imapMyTeam® is a great resource to provide an accurate and authentic picture of how you execute against strategy. The “Getting Things Done” snapshot report will help you understand 3 important areas that contribute to your preferred way of moving things forward. Specifically, it addresses your process for making decisions, moving your decisions into actions and finally working all the various to-do’s populated on your actions list.

The first page of this two-page report describes your usual behavior or most likely way you would approach each of the 3 areas. The challenge to you is to evaluate whether your most likely approach is appropriate given the situation you or the business is in, or if you need to use your self-awareness to better self-manage your behaviors to accomplish what’s needed.

The second page of the report looks at the type of support you might need from the team or others that will help you operate in a way that allows you to do your very best. Sharing this information when asked what you need to be successful, can help speed your effectiveness and minimize misunderstandings. Also, without these fundamental needs being met, we cannot adapt our behavior as described on page one.

“Without strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless.”
                                                                                      Morris Chang, CEO TSMC


Don’t risk rendering your strategy “useless.” Know how you get things done, what you need to support your ability to get things done and be relentless in managing yourself to calibrate your behaviors to the business conditions. 

We Love Mom, But She May Have Gotten This Wrong…

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Treat people the way you want to be treated. Your mother likely taught you this lesson from an early age and the ‘old’ Golden Rule makes a lot of sense.

You want to treat people with respect so they respect you. You are not rude to people because you don’t want to be treated rudely. It is civility. We largely expect it and are surprised when it is absent.
The core of "getting along" is about the rules, understandings and societal norms that, when shared, provide the foundation for stable relationships. We learn about and practice what polite behavior and manners mean in the workplace [and our communities]. You might say that these rules provide a sense of order and civility fosters feelings of well-being and positive relationships.

Even though we largely practice this civility we still don’t get along very well all the time. Our interactions with others, despite our best intentions sometimes lead to unintentional slights or maybe escalate to a full blown misunderstanding or at worst perceived as intentionally antagonistic.
imapMyTeam helps you move beyond the ’old’ golden Rule to the ‘New’ Golden Rule:

Treat people the way THEY NEED to be treated.

That works far better than treating people the way YOU want to be treated.
Yes, we still want you to practice civility, but we want you to consider a new level of understanding that is based on what people need and expect from you when you interact with them.

The imapMyTeam.com reports you access on others are mostly written to that person’s motivational needs. Those motivational needs set the individual’s expectations for the situation and interaction they are in. Those needs can be very different – even opposite on occasion – than the behavior the person outwardly exhibits.

We’re pretty sure mom would agree, using imapMyTeam report suggestions when you are interacting with your colleagues will help you apply the new Golden Rule and make sure you do get along far better with everyone than you might have ever imagined


Don’t forget Mother’s Day 2016, Sunday May 8^th