Traditions

#Beingaleader means you need to understand traditions. Yours. Others. The company’s. Not agree. Understand. Why you may ask? Because if you fail to understand the traditions, you will unnecessarily offend, hold back progress and potentially miss out on great opportunities.

So what traditions do you have that need to continue? Ones that make your house a home? Ones that make your family, your family? Ones that make you as productive as you can be? Do you have end-of-year traditions? Do you have celebratory traditions? What makes you, you? These traditions can help create lasting memories and family cohesiveness. From one generation to the next.

In the workplace, there are traditions that others have that need to be looked at as well. Others from different cultures and mindsets? Ones that might seem strange to you but mean a lot to others. Birthdays are treated with different amounts of importance depending on the culture. Other life events are as well. Be aware of your team and their cultural traditions and make them comfortable within the larger group.

Does your company itself have traditions? Are there quarterly traditions? Annual traditions? While they may seem unnecessary or ones that even get in the way of your normal daily routine, company traditions are part of the company culture. For better or worse. Holiday events; ugly sweater contests etc. are all part of these traditions that make your company unique. Personally, I’m not a big fan of some of them but lots of people like them and participate enthusiastically.

There are also company traditions that probably need to change. Annual performance reviews are one that come to mind. They do not achieve their stated intended purpose. They also create a lot of busy work and in the end, as it relates to raises, don’t often allow for differentiation between different peoples’ reviews. They are just often only used to allow justification for keeping some folks from getting what everyone else is getting.

#Beingaleader means you need to understand traditions. There are good and bad traditions. Ones that need to be kept. Ones that need to tolerated. And ones that need to change. But you need to understand them all. Because it matters.