Last week I wrote about my trip to the hospital, but there was a part I left out that ultimately resulted in me passing out, and getting lots of ‘fun’ stuff stuck into me. To recap briefly I went into the emergency room because I had an epic bloody nose that would not stop bleeding. After spending hours at home trying to stop it, I realized it was time to seek help. When I went into the emergency room, they escorted me to a little room within the ER. They put a clamp on my nose and said that I needed to wait a while until it slowed down.
The clip that they put on my nose was not doing much; it just made the blood go down my throat instead of out my nose, (not fun going either direction)… After quite a while, at least an hour, a nurse came in with a needle and 4 empty vials. One of my eyebrows raised, I looked at my wife, and then at the nurse and said, “You’re joking right?”
By this time I had been bleeding for about 3.5 hours, and this was a not a slow little drip, this was a Texas rainstorm coming out my nose. So I was seriously worried about them taking even more blood, but they are the experts, so I conceded. They led, I followed. As she got to the last vial, the blood was barely dripping into it. I assume due to my blood pressure being so low, since I had lost so much already. About 10 minutes after they finished, I told my wife, “I’m dizzy, I think I’m going to pass out.” Moments later, I was out, she screamed and lots of alarms starting going off.
As I was lying there later, I thought about how stupid this was that I was in a bed for a dumb nose bleed. I thought about them extracting more blood when it was obvious, to me at least, that it was not going to lead to good a good outcome. Four days later, I had another epic nose bleed, but this time we went to an ENT. They cauterized the blood vessels in my nose and I was out of there in under 30 minutes.
As I consider this experience, my mind travels to employers I have worked for in the past, that similarly, sucked out every last ounce of my “blood,” i.e. my motivation, my energy, my desire. I once worked for an employer in which about 1/3rd of the staff had filed for divorce during their tenure, and it was rumored there was one suicide in the early days of the company. There was lying and manipulation galore from the CEO. Not a great atmosphere!
I specialize in creating a culture of execution, but creating that culture has nothing to do with being a hard-nosed task master that sucks the life out of your employees.
Employees are people, and they will work a lot harder for you if they respect you and have an inspiring purpose and an inspiring leader. Click to Tweet This.
So today, no lists, no wild headlines, no step-by-step plan to follow, just a challenge …don’t be a blood sucker.
I’d love to know your thoughts, please continue the conversation below.
I recently had an interesting dream. In the dream I was on top of a very large hill overlooking a lake. A man was chasing me and we were struggling over a small parachute, the kind used in kite-surfing, sometimes called parachute-surfing. I managed to gain control of the parachute and deploy it, just in time to get away from him. Being that it was a small parachute, it would take me up in the air and then drop me back down in short bursts. I was often being dragged on the ground until I cold get back on my feet.
When we think about pioneers one can think about a lot of different people throughout history. More notably are the actual pioneers who crossed the plains and mountains of the western United States in the 1800’s in search of freedom and opportunity in the West. Their stories of perseverance are inspirational and help us to put our own struggles into perspective.
,” that could hurt an organization. You know, some guy with a big following might write an article about it or something… 🙂
That’s right, DESTROY! It can kill moral, stifle innovation, increase gossip, diminish customer service, and reduce profits. An emotional attachment is a desire for something or someone, and the inability to release or do without that thing or person. We tend to think about this when it comes to relationships, but have you ever thought about whether you are emotionally attached to say ….a line item on your P&L?
Writing this article makes me feel hugely and morbidly inadequate. This is a story of a leader that dealt with horrible odds of success, starvation, internal quarreling, physical and mental weakness of massive proportions, and the possibility of death for him and his team …every day for months and months. You may have guessed what this story is about, but I suspect, like I, that you had never really considered the leadership lessons from this amazing epic adventure. I have been involved in turn-around situations, but this is the ultimate turn-around. (If you are a skimmer, read the last paragraph).
by Dennis N. T. Perkins.
One might think that with all the topics I write about that I would be an arrogant know-it-all type. This is really, really far from the truth. In fact, the more I learn in life the more I realize that I know very little. This year as I was preparing for 2012 and making my 
I have been wanting to write this post for a while. I have said it many times in passing to individuals and in my writings, but I have never dedicated an article to it. Very few things boil my blood more than seeing business owners, or employees for that matter; that refuse to pick-up a book, read a blog post, or take a class to grow and learn how to be better. Better leaders, better followers, better innovators, better problem solvers, better marketers, better at anything and everything.
Over the years I have belonged to various associations and groups. I been also been in many peer groups, hired consultants and coaches, used multitudes of products and vendors, and even worked for some crummy employers. The years of this have recently caused me much pondering. I keep wondering why a person would stay with certain employers, or industry associations, even vendors …to their own detriment?
