Elevating Support

My kids have been begging me to get a hay elevator for years. “But we’ll become a laughingstock,” I’d reply. I agreed that lifting and stacking 800 heavy bales high in a hot barn was miserable work, but none of our farmer/rancher neighbors were using elevators. I was afraid they would make fun of us as the “wimpy New Yorkers.”

I finally realized I was thinking only of my pride and not what my team needed, so I broke down and got one. What a game-changer! Here is a short video of my 77-year-old dad, three grandkids, and I stacking 100 bales with this back-saving technology. As my 11-year-old son said, “We are finally working smarter, not harder.”

I just read a great little book on the art and science of 1:1 meetings called “Glad We Met.”  These are the most common meetings we attend but are often terribly underleveraged, varying between unstructured “chew-the-fat” sessions to “leader-dominated task report-out” sessions. The author encourages leaders to ask a simple question in every 1:1 meeting: “What can I do to better set you up for success?” This shifts the meeting's primary purpose from what the leader wants to what the employee needs. 

I am happy to report I have “elevated” my level of support for my hay crew this summer, trash-talking neighbors be damned.