Dear diary…
Dear diary,
Today I am grateful for having a keen eye for the tiny details. I see what others don’t see. It helps me to make sure that what we do at work is perfect. It allows me to correct what is incorrect before the work is shared with our customers. I wouldn’t want a customer to doubt our company because of these tiny mistakes.
Today, for example, Maurice delivered his report on sales from social media marketing. He’s been working on it for quite a while now. This must be the 20th version I have seen on my desk. Still, there were some hard to miss errors in the graphs and conclusion. I don’t know why he doesn’t follow my lead. It seems that he doesn’t listen to me. Perhaps I should send him an email pointing out all the corrections I found. Or I may have to send him back to the sales team and let him do what he’s good at: selling to our existing customers. I bet he loves reconnecting with their representatives. He’s always had a great bond with them. I’ll have Josie talk to him first thing in the morning.
Ever since we landed customers that target a younger audience we have been keeping an eye on what’s happening in the world of social media. Initially, Gwen had been our go-to employee when it comes to platforms like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. She had explored what social media could mean for our clients in terms of sales. She experimented a bit, sharing posts about our own company. I am glad that straight from the beginning the leadership team was involved and overseeing the work that she put out there. We were all very enthusiastic about this change in our business and had all these wild ideas of what it could mean to us. The pictures Gwen posted about our company were very nice. A friend of hers is photographer and we could get a discount on the pictures. The text she wrote herself. Unfortunately, most of them just didn’t have that edge we were looking for as a company and I had to re-write a lot of them. For every post I gave her tips on how to improve them. Nothing much but we can’t just share items that aren’t well thought through. At some point she didn’t seem to enjoy working with social media anymore and asked for a transfer. That’s when Maurice took over.
Then, later today, during the strategy meeting with our team leaders, Frank hosted a presentation on the new core values he had been working on with the other team leaders. It is not that sales were dropping but we weren’t increasing big either. I devised an action plan and got the leadership team to agree on it. Part of it were brand new core values to inspire our employees doing their utter best to reach the company’s KPIs. Frank had been leading the effort and met with a consultancy firm to come up with the best core values for our company. The result was great and I am amazed by his work. Never before had we described the work we do here in such a way. After having swapped one of the values, everybody signed off on it. I simply can’t run a company that doesn’t value excellence. I think Frank can agree with me on that. I can’t wait to see what this will do for our KPIs.
Three things that made me happy today:
It felt great to feel the sun shine again.
The cd that’s stuck in the car for ages suddenly started playing again.
Josie brought me a cup of coffee. It didn’t have enough sugar in it but was delicious anyway. “Next time I’ll get it right” she said.
First thing in the morning:
Drop kids off at school
Have Josie plan a meeting for an off-site strategy meeting
Cancel leadership coaching
This is the letter I wrote for the altMBA, prompt #4: put yourself in the shoes of a person who opposes something you believe in. I believe in self-management, in making mistakes, in healthy leadership, and in being the person you are at work as you are at home. I’ll probably write more about KPIs and core values later on.