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When work and life collide...

... reverse and restart. This was an important week at work for me. It is business plan week. Despite market turmoil, we pushed hard to get through today and we were virtually ready to go. We worked on our metrics, our strategic initiatives, our past data and our forward looking vision. But as ever, it did not quite go as planned. Even though it has been planned for months!   Friday night, what we thought was a gone virus (that had actually been passed to me) started showing damage as Baby S started to have fever and respiratory difficulties. We have seen it before so we are quick to act. 7 times, more precisely, between January and July. So we assume this is just going to be another 2 day round of ventolin and some screaming on his part and we can get him back on track. By Saturday night our expectation was failing to materialize and by Sunday morning for the first time ever, I carried him into an ambulance after the nurse staff confirmed we had to take him in (am
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Know your Critical Success Factors

What breaks or makes a success? Do you know? Can you tell if you are going in the right direction? ‘Here she goes again on KPIs!’ Not today, that is second derivative of this. Today the question is more fundamental than this. You have a strategy, you have your priorities or areas of focus. But do you know what it takes to get there? Of course I do, isn’t that obvious It is less than obvious really. As an example, at A Little Gesture, our mission is to promote the improvement of living condition for underprivileged children and their families in Mozambique. We believe that access to education and nutrition will help them break the inter generational cycle of poverty. We want to be out of business one day . But how? What do I need to get right - when do you get down to details? It is not about establishing 3 pre schools or sponsoring 800 children, but rather the activities that get me there: I need funding I need to find new donours every year: this mea
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The time of year for Performance Reviews - Dos and Don’ts

I am worried to open my browser on the evaluations website, to find out how many reviews I need to fill in. I have blocked out Friday for this, while I work from home, but we all know how planning days free of ‘work’ often works. Everywhere around me I see people going through the official adjectives list, googling some of them, figuring out what the best term is to define someone who does really well 90pct of the way but then is never able to finish. I appreciate the commitment to do it, but inevitably we all complain.  Very timely, I put myself on a management course on providing feedback and supporting career development this week. Although more focused on the actual discussion, for me it was important to go over a few techniques and I am certain it will set us all in the mindset to write better reviews.  What is a valuable review?  It has clear feedback - no dancing around the issue or vague compliments. How? ‘You did a great job well done!’ vs ‘You have done a g
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I thought it was just me

For #worldmentalhealthday 2017 I put myself out there. I re-post an edited version of that testimonial today, as my contribution for #worldmentalhealthday 2018. Not that I hide it from people that want or need to know, but it is true that I don't put it out there as much as I could, and that does not help other people like me.  In 2015, I entered an emotional roller coaster  that looked like a spiral trending only in one direction . I was constantly sad, tired and disappointed at the world. I lost interest in many things, I did not want to be in large social gatherings,  I lost my bubbly personality. I cried a lot . It did not show at work, but it did everywhere else.  Did something life changing happened to do this? I can't justify it by a single event but there were a series of individual events that were more negative than in any other year. Life was just playing tricks rather than treats that year. As it does many years of our life.  The week before I turned 34
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Working in Teams

For the last two weeks, one of my team members was out. I admit that I panicked when I realised I had given her 2 weeks off rather the one I originally thought. Right in the middle of kicking off budgeting season - I started thinking that once again I oversaw business needs with being ‘nice’ to my team.   I was glad to find out that my fears were unfounded. We are a team now, so this is now possible. And it is amazing. What does it mean to work in a team? It is the typical interview question for small, medium or    large corporations. ‘Tell me when you have has a good (or bad) team experience and how that worked out for you?’ .   And some may think - well actually I work so much better on my own without the distraction of a team, how should I put this to you... At times I considered whether that was the case for me as well. I was often part of small teams in banking, with a wide gap between myself and a more senior person, which would mean I would operate autonomously in a lot
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Where is the credit to the strategy?

Today I break my original plan to do a series on performance metrics as a topic has been lingering on my mind for a few days. Or shall I say a frustration instead.  It is clear by now I am a believer in business planning for established businesses, but mostly I am a believer in establishing goals, a direction and a way to measure progress on them, in order to evaluate late surprises. My view is not necessarily a shared view. In many places, business planning is a tick the box exercise that people need to deal with because management says so. And they go through it as fast and disconnected as they can.  As a new business planning cycle begins, I can feel the angst already. The rolling of the eyes as a new template goes out and the inevitable question of ‘why do we need all this’. There were moments in the past where I thought I was not really a strategist but rather a document producing machine. I too faced my own set planning cycles and wondered, I too challenged the need to
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Why do we measure performance?

Say you have launched a new business area and even planned ahead what you needed to get done across the business, who your new customers would be, where you were going to get revenues from, how you were going to acquire customers, how you would market yourself, how you would produce the goods needed. One day you wake up and something is not quite right. You still have not paid off the initial investment and it feels like this new business area is eating into your (slim) core business profitability. You thought you were investing for growth where it seems like you are getting yourself in a hole. But it is not a deep hole, and you can't quite figure out what is going on. You sit at your desk and ask, what is wrong, what did I miss. If you had no goals on paper, nothing to guide you, how do you know if you are executing to plan, how do you know if the plan is even working. Nothing tells you that your business idea is wrong, but potentially, you may just be going about it the
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