Skip to main content

Friends and Co-workers

Taking a random Wednesday off from work means Thursday is going to be extra busy, and today was that. I was in meetings for a little over five hours and just barely managed to reply to emails that needed attention and attend to tasks that require daily steps forward.

I have it so good because the people I work with are my friends. We even talked about this today in a meeting about our team culture. We do a solid amount of professional development and core values driven discussions. Officially, I am the manager, so my position has a certain nuance. For example, I know I'm not part of conversations that team members have amongst each other. And that's fine. It's natural. I trust everyone, as I would trust any friend, that they all have the best interests of each other and our organization at heart. They never let me down.

The first meeting of the day was a two hour book study session. My team is passionate about growth, so we choose a book regularly, make a schedule, and meet to share what we are learning so we can be better at what we do. The book we're reading now is A Parents' and Teachers' Guide to Bilingualism by Colin Baker. Today we talked about and learned about how parents can facilitate bilingualism for their children regardless of their situation. Some parents are themselves fluent in more than one language and wonder which language to speak to their kids, while other parents are both monolingual but would like to raise their children to become polyglots. 

Discussing these topics and learning new things with co-workers who also happen to be friends barely feels like work.

An after-lunch meeting ended with a member of my team getting some very good news from upper management. After that I led a meeting with the team to do a one-hour deep dive on what it means for an organization or a team to be open and accepting of outsiders. We reaffirmed our commitment to valuing camaraderie, transparency, and most especially trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we love working with our friends. Friends are people you want to help succeed, people you put your own needs aside for, and people who you look forward to seeing every day so you can serve society together and make a difference. 

I am extremely grateful to be able to work with and manage a team of people who are much more to me than just co-workers. 

Sometime after six p.m. when I'm supposed to be done with work, I heard the usual commotion downstairs and Osamu yelling up to me, "Papa! Din-din!" Eri made us some super delicious miso ramen and we all devoured it.

Comments

  1. Abhijit NaskarDecember 15, 2022 at 5:15 AM

    Culture shapes the language, Language shapes the culture. When you absorb another language, It reshapes your mental atmosphere.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

lookin tired/feelin good

I can't even read the clock right. Eri: "You're going to soccer, right? Aren't you a bit early?" Me: "Yeah! We usually leave at this time and get there right on time. We gotta go! Let's go guys!" Soccer club starts at 10 a.m. The boys know that when the long hand on the clock gets to the 8 (9:40) it's time to go to the bathroom and get our socks and shoes on and head down to the car. The big hand was on 8. The problem that Eri saw was the short hand. It was 8:40, not 9:40. I'm going nuts. Slowly . Rapidly. An hour later, after I slowly enjoyed my coffee and disposed of the last beetle (yes, all four beetles have now gone back to the earth) and cleaned his bug box to make room for new bug acquisitions and the boys chilled out on the sofa watching TV, we set off. While the boys played soccer I headed across the parking lot to grab them some juice boxes for a job well done. This is not standard procedure, but Kenzo made his comeback today after ...
1 comment
Read more

Experiences I Will Never Know About

Eri and I were checking out one of Kenzo's school notebooks tonight. This page has so much going on, and I love all of it. It made me realize something that I can easily forget - he's a person. He has a life separate from mine, lives each day having experiences that I will never know about, and has thoughts and ideas that I can't nor should get in the way of. "Thank you for doing everything," she said. Eri walked with me this morning as I went around the neighborhood and delivered planter box maintenance information and schedules to various folks.  We stopped at the first house and I rang the doorbell and handed the old lady the three-page information sheet I had made and copied and we exchanged greetings and then I realized this is going to take forever if I ring every single person’s doorbell and chit-chat with them. I’ve got 20+ more of these to hand out.  So we started just sticking them in people's mailboxes and made better time. Most folks aren’t home an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Certain Luxuries

I work from home. My office is in Osamu's future bedroom, though he doesn't know it yet. At some point a few years down the line he will probably start to yearn for his own space. For the time being he and Kenzo share the room next door and sleep in a bunk bed and have a grand time playing, roughhousing, and quarreling. As brothers are prone to do. I started the day with a two-hour meeting with an esteemed co-worker who is based in a city far away. He manages a team associated with mine, and I value our developing relationship. We're both in management positions where people depend on us, and for my part as a relatively new manager I respect and try as often as possible to seek out his advice and perspectives.  We're very different, though. We dance around the topic, but it's pretty clear that one of our differences is that I embrace ambiguity and he does not. I think that it's okay if meetings don't end with a clear solution, as long as the relationship be...
Post a Comment
Read more