Gehan Dabare

Time to rethink this challenge. The reality is that work and life are not distinct and separate things, work is a part of our lives - an important part. So lets move away from this false dichotomy that work and life are two different things. Lets accept that work is part of our life. Then each of us need to decide how we live our lives without feeling like we are missing or sacrificing everything that is important in our life. Learn to be efficient, effective, focused and thoughtful about how we spend our time. It's not about balance it's about how we prioritize, its about how efficient we are, how creative we are and how fast we adopt technology and tools to help us do more, live more, experience more have more fun!

Ask your self why does this matter? What will the promotion do for you? What did others who did get promoted do? Are you willing to do that? Are those actions congruent with your values? Is the price worth it to you? Figure out what your mission is, why this is your mission and what you are willing to do to achieve it. All else is noise and distraction.

The criticality and impact of the project should drive the decisions to work longer, harder, get additional resources, reduce scope etc. Key factor needs to be to have a common understanding of the impact and priority of the project. All decisions will be derived from this singular point.

A business needs to begin with the end impact in mind. What is the business goal? Increase customer uptake of the brand because of the sustainability focus? What is the impact to the bottom line? what is the impact to team morale and productivity? These need to be assessed candidly and without deception. A business exists to generate profits, without profits there will not be investors or money to pay wages. Being honest about this will get the team buy in.

Context is important in figuring out the approach. If your company is adopting a new expense management software or HR system - it doesn't matter if you team is resistant - lets not waste time bellyaching about it - grow up get used to it and move forward. On the other hand you are adopting a tool/process/app for your own use because you feel it is going to make things better - in that case if people are resistant then there is a disconnect and everyone is best served by understanding where that disconnect is. If you and the team do not have a common vision of the future then the resistance to the software is the least of your problems, it is a symptom of much larger disfunction. Time to listen to understand.

Irrespective of the context, you are a leader because people follow you. People follow people they trust. People follow people that will contribute to their success. People follow people they like. Simple be trusted, liked and convince people you will make them successful. How!? How about ask them? Ask them what they aspire to be, what they want, what they need. Care enough to figure out how to help them achieve that. Be a decent human. In the specific context of Risk Management - find common ground - what does everyone agree on? We are all here to identify/mitigate/remediate risk - why because we all care about the success of the company/corporate/nonprofit we are doing the work for. Then build on that.