Greg Priest
Management Services Committee Member
Priest Electric
Caldwell, Idaho 

We’ve all heard the following coined by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “The only constant in life is change.” As of late, the changes seem to be coming more rapidly and compounding on top of an already dynamic business environment. That well-known phrase can be interpreted positively or negatively. Managing through this polarizing political climate doesn’t mean that you must choose sides, but we do have to motor on. I have found three tips that help me in my business life.

1. Reconcile thinking errors: This is a broad subject, but my personal favorite is: “horribilizing.” This is when you take a situation or what someone says and think of the worst outcome. It often means you use words like: always and never. For example, “Susan is ALWAYS late; she can NEVER be on time.” When the truth is she has a shared carpool for her kids and the neighborhood. She drives to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays and sometimes the drop-off line causes her to be late on those days. The sky is not always falling.
2. Don’t indulge procrastination: It’s always fine to pause and think things through or come up with a plan of attack. However, it’s rare that we don’t know what to do in our daily business actions. We know what to do, we just don’t want to do it. For example, I personally hate auditing/reconciling time on jobs. But if you don’t know where the time was spent, you can’t make a good decision on improving that time. So, I learned a lesson from my kids through the task of finishing homework. We would count to three and just do it. Don’t let tasks sit for too long and stack-up; count to three and go at it.
3. Beware of toxic positivity: This refers to those nice people who say things like: “It’s all good.” or “Only good vibes here.” Change is hard. It’s also good to acknowledge that difficulty and that we can do difficult things. Dive into the details, read the fine print and be brave by asking why. Then we can react with integrity and solve problems at work with plans of action.

So, when you’re getting frustrated with today’s business pace of staying agile, supply chain shifts, reducing disruption, data-driven planning or any myriad of staffing challenges, I revisit these three tips.

Categories: Technical topics, Miscellaneous

Tags: Management

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