Manager on a Mission

RTO, or "Return to Office," edicts swept corporate America in 2023. After a year or two of sweet-talking, strongly suggesting, and guilting employees to come back to the office, it seemed like CEOs of major companies had returned from a League of Doom meeting in which they unanimously decided it was time to end this ridiculous remote work fantasy once and for all - and RTO was born.

The question I have - and I bet you have too is, Why? Why would companies want to re-commit to the overhead of physical office locations, at least at the same scale they had pre-pandemic? Why, if corporate America is all about productivity - and we were productive at record levels - wouldn’t businesses want to take a close look at what was happening and try to capitalize on it? Or improve on it?

In this episode we try to answer that question. Commercial real estate? Stock prices? Sure, those are probably part of it, but I think there's something else, and you're probably not going to like it.  We also cover the positive things about remote work, as well as the history of it. And finally, we look at how managers can help employees who may be struggling with RTO. Even if you can't change the policy, you can still support your people and make a difference in their day-to-day. 

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Did you know that the word “feedback” was first used in 1919? And it primarily had to do with mechanics. The original definition is pretty dry: the return to the input of a part of the output of a machine, system or process. Yuck. And feedback is the word we use ALL THE TIME in Corporate America to supposedly help our team members do better work.

In this episode, I’m not saying managers should be happy with everything employees do and never provide any guidance on how to improve. I’m saying the terms and the interactions we use matter, and I don’t like the one-sidedness of “delivering feedback.” It sounds robotic and detached.  

Instead, I recommend having coaching conversations or growth conversations. When you just give one-sided feedback, you aren’t really helping your team members solve future problems or truly understand excellence. In this episode, we explore how coaching differs from correcting, and why it’s better for building healthy, high-performing teams.

Coaching is all about curiosity and asking questions. We cover how and why the best managers ask questions, understand context, and clarify expectations - and how they go beyond “feedback” to having growth conversations instead.

If you’ve been on Tiktok or Insta lately you’ve seen all the posts of terrible bosses. And on LinkedIn it seems like it’s just one layoff after another. You’re not alone in wondering if things have gone off the rails in Corporate America. In today’s episode, we look at some of the reasons work sucks more than ever for so many people. 

We talk about the worrying trend of corporations having a lack of consideration for employees AS PEOPLE, including things like stack ranking and yearly layoffs and touch on the whole return to office debate. 

The bad news: We're being asked to take on the work of our team members who have been fired, we’re expected to be available at all times on all of our devices, we’re strategizing on how manage up, we’re working across multiple countries and time zones because of mergers and acquisitions, and we’re also frantically reprioritizing almost every day because senior management never seems to agree on strategy.

The good news: We also talk about how managers can positively impact their teams in this climate, even if they can’t change the corporations they work for. In this episode, I share my 3-step plan for massive motivation in hard times, to help team members get through these hard times. Little moments of humanity and kindness add up and help people feel appreciated when times are hard.

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