The Productive Pessimist

This morning, LinkedIn was being very Monday, very LinkedIn, not very demure, not very mindful. A woman, whose profile suggested she works in recruitment, responded, quite aggressively, to a disabled man asking why companies were still  engaging in discrimination against disabled individuals with: "Because disability is a liability, it costs money, and businesses can't expect to run up their costs to an infinite degree whilst tiptoeing around every single need people could ever possibly have." This isn't an isolated thought.  It's not often said out loud in the UK - but it always has been elsewhere in the world, and it very much is being shouted from the rooftops of the USA. And it's not just recruiters and executive leadership; it's ordinary people, meaning that, even with the most inclusive, welcoming, accommodating leadership, disabled people will still be encountering hostile environments courtesy of the able-bodied people they have to work with  on th...

  As leaders, we are often expected to have all the answers. If we don't, we risk dark mutterings about being "overpaid", about being "the reason people actually doing the work are struggling", or "the reason nothing ever gets done around here." Across sectors, people hate  leaders.  The NHS and UK social care, currently at the centre of political focus for reform, is littered with very public derision of "money being wasted on pointless leadership roles, rather than frontline services."  I've worked in a healthcare transformation leadership role, and...I'd be very wary of doing so again, purely because of  the attitudes from clinical staff, including their own operational leads. I was actually well-liked by these colleagues as a person, but even that regard couldn't get past the disdain my team, and what they represented, were held in. People don't like change, and they really  don't like change leaders. The reason why ch...

  It can be easy to dismiss the memes that centre "we could be hibernating right now, but nooooo, we had to invent CAPITALISM and CUPS!" as "just more Gen Z whining", and further evidence that "people are lazy and just don't want to work", and sure, some people actually don't  want to have any  kind of job. That's a thing - people are allowed to feel resentful about the idea that they are obliged  to do something they find to be either very intrusive, or actually harmful to their wellbeing. A lot of people will just be posting those memes as 'engagement-scrapes'; complaining about work we don't really  have too much issue with is part of human nature, and probably has been since we first started engaging in planned, focused, longer-term-thinking activity, rather than merely surviving day by day.  People like to bond through sharing low-key frustrations, so these memes will generate a lot of comments, shares, and likes - all of which...

  This morning, I should have been hosting a networking event alongside my business partner.  Unfortunately, I woke up with a particularly bad cold - far more than just sniffles and feeling under the weather - which didn't improve as the morning went on.  I asked myself what I would do if I had a "regular" job; the answer was "I would identify that I was well enough to work from home, but not well enough to go into a physical location." So, that's what I'm doing today, while my partner handles the networking event.  "But if someone's well enough to work from home, they're well enough to come in to work!" I'm not dying, and my vision is only minimally playing up (I have multiple active sight-loss conditions; it takes actual work for me to be able to benefit from the little useful vision I have left; that is compromised when I'm ill), but I am probably contagious, and have no way of knowing how what for me is a bad chest cold woul...