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Your Judgment of Others Is NEVER Helpful
 Your Judgment of Others Is NEVER Helpful 150 150 Jason Lauritsen
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The new year is here.

As I reflect on 2019, I can see that it was a year of contrasts.

For me, it was a pretty amazing year. My wife and kids are healthy and thriving. Angie and I celebrated our 15-year anniversary. My business is growing. Angie’s campaign for mayor of our community is off to a successful start. Things inside our family bubble lead me to feel grateful, lucky, and blessed.

But 2019 was also a year that brought challenges to those who I love and care about deeply. Divorces (so many divorces), addiction, relapses, deaths of parents and children, serious health issues, layoffs—and the list continues.

My friends and family weathered (and are weathering) some pretty serious storms over the past year.

Through it all, one thing became really clear to me: I tried to empathize with them, but the truth is that I haven’t been in their shoes. I don’t know what a divorce with children involved feels like.  I don’t know what it’s like to experience addiction. I’m fortunate to have never lost a parent or child.

I can’t really understand their journey and what it feels like.

Passing Judgment Is Easy—But It Is Ignorant

At times, the behavior of some of these people didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t understand the choices there were making as they navigated their crises. It was easy to pass judgment on their behavior.

My judgment doesn’t help; it only hurts. And it’s ignorant. I don’t understand what their reality looks like to them. I can’t understand their mindset in a particular moment. Because I haven’t been there.

What I was reminded of this year is that when it comes to our relationships with other human beings, whether they are close relationships or not, there are a few constants.

  1. Everyone is having an experience of life that is different than yours. They may be in trauma. They may be struggling. They may be having a crisis of confidence. They are dealing with things you likely can’t understand if you haven’t experienced them yourself.
  2. Judging others never helps. What you might have done or decided in a similar situation is irrelevant because you cannot understand another person’s reality.
  3. By seeking to understand what others are experiencing, you can grow. When we acknowledge that we can’t fully understand the experience of others, that should lead to curiosity and a desire to learn. In some small way, I’ve learned something about loss and addiction and relationships this year through conversations with my loved ones as I try to understand their experiences. This is an area where there is always room for growth, and I will continue to try to do better.
  4. When in doubt, provide as much love and support as you can. No matter how much I want to solve someone else’s problem or take away their pain, I cannot. And when I try, it often backfires. The best thing I can do for others is to love and support them without judgment, knowing that they may be struggling against something that feels insurmountable. Being there to say, “You’ve got this,” and showing up even when they don’t is what matters.

These are some powerful life lessons for me. While I wish I could have been reminded of these lessons in a way that caused less turmoil for the people in my life, I am grateful for the opportunities to learn.

Work Relationships Matter Too

If we want to have better relationships in 2020, these lessons are a great way to make that happen. And this isn’t just for life outside of work. When we remember that work is a relationship for each employee, these four things take on specific meaning for leaders and managers (and coworkers).

Assumptions and judgment are two of the biggest obstacles to forming great relationships. As a manager, there is so much you don’t know and can’t understand about the people entrusted to your leadership. Instead of making assumptions about people and assuming we have them figured out, adopt a mindset of curiosity, seeking to gain a deeper understanding of your people. You will learn and grow as you become a better manager.

And #4 above is just as true for managers as it is for friends, spouses, or family members; when in doubt, offer love and support. Your people already have plenty of judgment to deal with everywhere else in their lives.

There are fewer more powerful words than this:

“You’ve got this. And I’m here to help.”

 

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Getting Smart About Employee Experience
Getting Smart About Employee Experience (Resources)
 Getting Smart About Employee Experience (Resources) 1024 512 Jason Lauritsen
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Employee experience isn’t a trend or a fad or a buzzword. It is, and will continue to be, a shift in how we do the work of unlocking human potential at work. If you haven’t already embraced this shift, now is the time. The best place to start is to get educated about experience, what it means, and why it matters.

Today’s post is about pointing you towards one great resource for doing just that.

Over the past several years serving as an advisor to the North American Employee Engagement Awards, I’ve had the opportunity to get to know Aimee Lucas and her work at the Temkin Group (now the Qualtrics XM Institute).  Each year, she presents some great insights and research findings at the event showing the strong linkages between employee engagement and customer satisfaction.

Aimee and her group have been at the forefront of the conversation about both customer and employee experience. At this year’s event, she shared a model they call “The Human Experience Cycle” that is a helpful way of understanding how experience works. The thing I love most about this model is that it clearly outlines the role that individual expectations play in how we experience things.

 

 

You can read more about the model here. It applies to both customer and employee experience. And it helps explain how to shape and measure experience.

Beyond this model, the Qualtrics XM Institute website is a treasure trove of resources available for free. At the site, you’ll find research and guidance about both employee and customer experience and, more critically, the relationship between them.  Below are a few I recommend that you check out as you continue your education in this emerging domain.

Insight Report: Employee Engagement Competency & Maturity, 2018 – Download

  • “When we compared companies with above average employee engagement maturity to those with lower maturity, we found that employee engagement leaders have better customer experience, enjoy better financial results, have more coordinated employee engagement efforts, have more widespread support across employee groups, are more likely to act on employee feedback, and face fewer obstacles than their counterparts with less engaged workforces.”
  • “The top obstacle to employee engagement activities continues to be the lack of an employee engagement strategy.”

Insight Report: Propelling Experience Design Across an Organization – Download

  • This is a great resource to understand the work of designing experience. It’s focused on customer experience, but if you replace the word “customer” with “employee” as you read, you’ll begin to see the impact.
  • “This report explores how companies can use Experience Design – which we define as a repeatable, human-centric approach for creating emotionally resonant interactions – to craft consistently excellent interactions and how they can share and spread these capabilities across the entire organization.”

Post: The Inextricable Link Between CX & EX

  • “Although the connection between customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) may seem obvious to many people, it’s important that we periodically test the linkage. So we took a look at the data from our survey that drove the report, State of CX Management, 2018.”

Post: The Engaging Power Of Employee Feedback

  • “In our Q3 2018 Consumer Benchmark Study, we found that 40% of full time U.S. employees strongly agrees with the statement, ‘My company asks for my feedback and acts upon what I say.'”
  • “Eighty-two percent of employees who strongly agree that their company takes action on their feedback are likely to do something good for the company, compared with only 30% of those who do not agree.”
Words of Gratitude (#9) for Linda Jonas
 Words of Gratitude (#9) for Linda Jonas 150 150 Jason Lauritsen
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Note: I’m writing a note of gratitude on the blog each day in November leading up to the Thanksgiving holiday. My hope is that these posts will inspire you to do the same. Write an email, Facebook post, or a text to tell people they have made an impact on you. Gratitude is contagious. 

I met Linda Jonas at a small HR event probably five or six years ago.

When you meet Linda, you immediately feel like her friend. She approaches everyone she meets with a friendly sparkle in her eye and a truly genuine smile.

Once I had a chance to talk with her, I realized that she was as passionate about making work better as I was. She was also wicked smart and clever.  This was someone who I wanted in my network for future collaborations.

Following that first meeting, Linda and I began chatting over video from time to time about what we were each trying to accomplish professionally. It seemed that every time I had a chat with Linda, she was somewhere else on the planet–Sydney, Berlin, San Francisco. And, she had traveled far beyond that in between the chats.

Linda describes herself as a “global nomad.” Each time we met, she has great stories to share about her travels and experience all over the globe. With apologies to Dos Equis, Linda is my real life version of “the most interesting person in the world.”

When we found ourselves in the same place at a conference or event, we’d carve out some time to catch up and talk shop.

Over time, we became friends.

Then, a little over two years ago when I decided it was time to go self-employed for good, Linda was the first one to say “We need your help.”  The company where Linda works, Small Improvements, became my first HR tech client. It was an incredibly important moment for me on this journey.

She had always been a champion of my work and she was the reason that Small Improvements decided to bet on a partnership with me. Over the past two years, we’ve collaborated on two ebooks, a podcast series, video content and a variety of blog posts.

Small Improvements has been a great client to work with because we have so much overlap in our philosophy about work and employee engagement. But also because I get to work with someone who I enjoy and respect so much in Linda.

There are few things I love more than doing meaningful work with a good friend. And few things are more valuable than a good friend.

Linda, thank you for your friendship and for believing in me. You are a good friend. Few people have had shown me the kind of support and belief that you have over the past two years. I’m so grateful for our friendship and for the opportunity to know you. 

Jason Lauritsen