Management – Page 5 – A musing Mulcahy

Dealing with the unpleasant gracefully

There’s a creature-wrangler in every home. Depending on the part of the world you live in, the creatures in question might range from the small to very large, the innocuous to the life-threatening. I’m the designated spider-evictor/creature-wrangler in my house. Despite my best intentions, I don’t always do the job with good grace.

The importance of psychological safety

From a team perspective, psychological safety is the bedrock that team success is built on. Successful interpersonal relationships depend on it. In highly functioning teams it often doesn’t get a mention. Safety is one of those things not always noticed when present but is conspicuous by its absence. What follows are some suggestions on how to make your team feel safe enough to tell you things you don’t want to hear.

On Feeling Stuck

There’s a feeling I get sometimes. It’s a stressful, sometimes even anxious feeling. And it comes from feeling stuck, creatively or practically. Having come back from a week’s vacation, I should have been feeling energised, but instead, I had a feeling of a significant loss of traction, and it took me a little while to figure out why.

A loss of inspiration

My writing over the past few months has been a bit sporadic. I’ve been less inspired than usual to write, and fewer connections have come to mind. I’ve been thinking about the causes of this for a while – not wanting to put it down to the situation with Covid-19. I believe I’ve figured out what’s wrong – I’m missing two usually familiar sources of inspiration.

Being present with the “what is”

Many of us are living with the “what if” and “never was”. This is just one of the impacts of a world put on pause by the global pandemic caused by Covid-19. My youngest refers to it as “the germ” – a previously unknown entity that has thrown all of our plans into a heap. We all know people who have had to cancel significant birthday celebrations, anniversaries, holidays or even weddings.

We have lost significant life events to this virus, causing us to ask “what if” and regret the timing of the events we could and cannot control. My suggestion is to focus on the “what is”; to accept and adapt to the present and to make the best of what we have.

Living, in an uncertain time

We are in an unprecedented, extraordinary time. As I write this, something like half of the world’s population is either in lockdown or in a state of restricted movement. It’s a totalitarian dream! We’re all trying to work together to protect our most vulnerable, but at the same time, we need to focus on living and growing. So how do we do that if we’re confined to our homes?

The Danger of Blind spots

(Or, What you Don’t Know Can Hurt You)

We often think of blind spots in the context of driving. There are parts of a car which block visibility – windscreen pillars, for example. We sometimes won’t be aware of objects (other vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists) approaching our car because of those gaps in our vision. If we are not aware of these blind spots, the consequences can be dangerous or even tragic. But what about blind spots in a work context?