In praise of good colleagues

In previous blog posts, I have written about how important elements like good leadership, good corporate culture and corporate values ​​are as means to retain people in a workplace - but when discussing with Janice Kobelsky in continuation of my post about the tower that did not lean, it dawned on me that to my experience, one factor is even more significant. Good colleagues. Well, it does not have to be much more than just a single good colleague.
Now I have never been cast in such a way (or rather, my eyesight is not sufficiently good) allow me to spend time on any kind of military service, so I can not comment on the relationships that are formed among brothers in arms - but on a slightly less serious level, among people who remain my very close friends, I count a handful of excellent people who are all former colleagues of a quite exceptional nature.
They are the kind of people that I have always been able to get along with, without any of us having any kind of hidden agendas; where we have never been in doubt that no matter how dire straits we would end up in, we could trust that we would always have each other's back - this even went so far that when some of these people became former colleagues, they told me about their considerations long before they left their position.
Such people are rare. But there is no doubt that when you meet them you should stick to them. Also long after you are no longer colleagues - because they are not only unusually good colleagues; they also have the potential to form unusually good, lifelong friendships.
(Translated from Til den gode kollegas pris, originally published February 14th, 2018)

On the topic of kids and comfort zones

It was while reading a tweet by Janice Kobelsky regarding comfort zones that something all of a sudden dawned on me.

A big part of the role, I have been playing as a parent during later years has basically been the role of what we could call a "comfort zone manager". From the moment, your first child is born, you will constantly have to work with comfort zones.
First of all, in the moment the kid is born, you take a giant leap out of your own comfort zone - a leap, for which you have only nine meager months to mentally prepare for. But from that point in time, work starts on challenging the comfort zone of the child - to give the child the possibilities to move to the very edge of its competences, but never further than where you have an almost certain assumption that the child will be able to handle the situations. At the same time, you also constantly work on your own comfort zone - because there are limits to what you dare expose the poor kid towards. In the beginning, it is actually just as much a question of holding back a kid who is convinced that it is able to do anything - later on, it also turns into a question of persuading or convincing the kid or the young adult to understand that there will be no problems handling the situations that you try to help it handle.
But it all has one thing in common: if you are too happy staying in your own comfort zone, then you will try to stay clear of any borders of the things that you dare expose your kid to. And then you will eventually turn into a helicopter parent, overly shielding the child in order to challenge your own comfort zone. But if you are of the opinion that comfort zones are there to be challenged in order to be extended - then it is time to leave the aircraft and challenge your kids to take responsibility for more and more of the things they do in their daily lives.
(Translated from Noget om børn og komfortzoner, originally published February 8th, 2018)