A great manager is also a great leader, one who makes employees feel valued while motivating them to perform their best. Savvy managers understand the importance of comfort and flexibility in work hours. In 2020, as the COVID pandemic forced professionals to adapt to working from home, Megan Witherspoon emerged as an exemplary leader, showing deep care for her team. In a heartwarming LinkedIn post, she shared a list of things she "cared" and "did not care" about regarding her employees.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Olly
Witherspoon, the Vice President of Communications at Altria and a mother of two, began her post by stating she “doesn’t care” if employees go offline for an hour or two for a doctor’s appointment, but she “does care” if their child is sick. She “does care” if someone needs to care for an ailing mom, but she “doesn’t care” if they make up the time by working during meals or while administering medications.
“I DO care that a bus driver shortage means you don’t have reliable transportation for your son. I DO NOT care if you need to get back to me in an hour after picking him up from school,” she listed. She “does care” if an employee’s dog is puking all over their rug, but she “doesn’t care” if they need to jump off their call to rush him outside.
Adding to the list, she wrote, “I DO care that you desperately need to get out of your house because you’ve been cooped up far too long. I DO NOT care if you’d like to work from the office for a few days, or from Florida for a week,” plus, “I DO care that you haven’t taken your vacation time, because I know you need a break. I DO NOT care if that means asking for help so you can disconnect without missing a deadline.”
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Anastasia Shuraeva
She wrapped up the post with a heartfelt message for her employees, which signified that she actually “cared” for her employees. “I DO care about YOU and the things you care about. I DO care that you deliver quality work and perform at your best. I DO NOT care when, where, or how you get your work done.” The post attracted the attention of more than 104,000 people, becoming viral with over 2200 comments and nearly 8000 reposts.
Image Source: LinkedIn | Aimee Quinn
Image Source: LinkedIn | Stacy Knight
Image Source: LinkedIn | Kathleen Miller Thiess
"I never expected my post to get this much attention—I've had a huge outpouring of support, both from inside my company and on LinkedIn. It's reaffirmed that this matters so much to so many people,” the 42-year-old told Newsweek, adding that the pandemic was a great motivator that prompted her to change. "The pandemic was a huge catalyst for change. Suddenly entire companies went fully remote overnight, and many are still working remotely 18 months later. We've now shown that it's possible to embrace flexibility and still be effective and that it holds benefits to both employer and employee.”
Speaking to Bored Panda, she said that “caring is critical.” For a long time before the pandemic, it was believed that the personal and professional lives were meant to be separate. But soon the trend whittled away into black-and-white conversations. In such a scenario, Witherspoon wanted to bring a shift in her workplace. “Now the personal and the professional are intertwined, and we’ve all felt the benefits of caring for our colleagues, we no longer need to divide ourselves in half when we log into our computers each day,” she pronounced. Witherspoon believes that the work-from-home model is a “win-win” situation for both businesses and their employees.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.