One of the best bosses I've had in my years working on telivision sent the employees this message for Christmas and I loved it so much I had to share it with the readers of my blog. Enjoy and apply to your work; regardless of the field you work at, people think of television as a glamorous job but just like in any other field you have positive and negative employees. At the end of the day is just about people doing their jobs, or not doing them as well as they could. Enjoy this read and pass it on if you like it. The title is:
Fresh Blood
"When presidents are elected, they appoint their own Cabinet. When a new boss takes over they often bring in “their own people”. Whether or not you are in an economy like this, where unemployment is at a 12% high, words like fresh blood can often sound intimidating. No doubt the connotation is often negative. The phrase often accompanied by the excuse of why you were passed over for a position you thought you deserved or quite frankly, when you are going to lose your job. But what if the term wasn’t negative; what if you could make it work for you rather than against you? You can
Our bodies regenerate cells in order to sustain life. To fail to do so would mean the body would die. It’s pretty basic anatomy we all studied in grade school. To decide not to apply that to your own life in the set of skills you posses, the tasks you are charged with or frame of mind with which you look at your job means you cheat the life span of your career.
Adhering to the motto that learning is a lifelong process is a good way to start. In Stephen Covey’s book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” Habit number 7 is Sharpen the Saw: The balancing and renewal of your resources, energy, and health to create a sustainable long-term effective lifestyle.” Covey states that mental development most often comes through formal education and that when leave the external discipline of school, many of us let our minds atrophy.
Highly effective people often challenge the status quo. That’s where real innovation takes place. We can’t afford not to innovate. We live in times and work in an industry that just when you think you” got it!” something new comes along.
To not recognize the real advantage of new blood for a new boss, whose focus is to create change in the least time possible would be like we Cubans say “tapar el sol con un dedo.” I mean you don’t have to hear the words: "That will never work.";“We can’t do that”,"It's been done before." They don’t know the routines and they also don’t require the time and energy to be convinced we’re not going to do it like that anymore. They also come exposed to new schools of thoughts, because let’s be honest they may not have been working as many hours and as hard as we do here to get the Harris working!!!!!! And still put news on the air at the rate we do. But this isn’t an excuse.
No doubt someone with fresh blood comes often with fresh eyes. They manage to find quick solutions to hurdles we’ve learned to live with. In an attempt to reinvent yourself and make sure your not falling in routines and overlooking opportunities it’s helpful to ask yourself when faced with a challenge: “What would someone new do in my job?” Let’s recognize the fact that if someone were named to your position they might find a way to operation more efficient, or a better way to serve the viewers/customers, or enhance the product. But right now you can do it, a lot faster and better than anyone else. Make yourself the best candidate for your own job!
The advantage you as a current employee possess is that you know the company, you know who and what it takes to make things happen, the structure and the social networks. These take time to learn. Time is money. You get to bypass that if you weave into the thread of your professional existence some way to rejuvenate your own professional blood.
I often use the term emotional intelligence (EI) because I believe that it often times more the key to success that IQ . One of the factors of EI is Social awareness – the ability to sense, understand, and react to others' emotions while comprehending social networks. Using this same type of awareness also comes in really handy for innovating in the field of communication and analyzing what works and what doesn’t: Aren’t you a user? Aren’t you a viewer? Aren’t many of you the demo we are looking for? Would you want to watch your own show? Log on to our website? Would you stay awake to see what you are offering. Let’s forget about ego here and stick to practicality. Is your story really that different that IT’S WORTH MY TIME? In the world of bombardment of communication with millions of web pages, Ipads, smartphones and simple responsibilities – I mean we still all have families and hopefully hobbies too, WOULD YOU TAKE PRECIOUS TIME OUT OF YOUR DAY TO WATCH/READ US? Today whatever we compete for people’s attention is our competition. That no longer means other TV stations. We compete for eyeballs. I don’t need to tell you how much there is out there to compete with.
Your ability to look beyond the world you live in and analyze what’s going on in the world around you will help to sustain your career. Expose yourself to new ideas of thoughts and challenging the status quo will bring fresh blood. You be the fresh blood; don’t let someone else be."
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