Guest Blog: Ash Lilliott, Group Procurement Manager Nash Squared - we all grow better together
we all grow better together
For those that don’t know me or haven’t met me yet, hello, Dia duit, Hallo, Bonjour, cześć, namaste, Hej, Hei, Kon’nichiwa, xin chào, Ni Hao, nǐ hǎo! I had the pleasure of being able to join the Nash Squared family this October in the newly created position of Group Procurement Manager.
I’ll be honest, the pressure to write a blog post felt great but why am I sharing that with you? I’ve been pondering a lot recently, perhaps because my commute like most is a vat of time to think, process and explain things to ourselves, among other things. Recently though, I have focused a lot on perspectives.
As I have only just joined Nash Squared, everything is new to me - the people, the culture, the systems. Already I feel at home, and thank you to everyone who has given me such a warm welcome! But this ‘newness’ also does give me a useful view on who we are and what we do. And in this blog I wanted to share those thoughts.
Perspective is the way you see something.
It’s very easy as humans to have a single minded view on something and to not be open to other views, regardless of what information is available to us or other influencing factors, we can be stubborn and selfish.
Take a moment to think how the pandemic shifted your views overnight on aspects of life we perhaps thought wouldn’t change much in our working lifetimes, but it has.
• We have been empowered and given opportunity.
• We are living and working in a new world.
• We value time more in and out of work.
• We have time to cook better and more healthier meals, feeling better and energetic as a consequence.
The list goes on but it’s fair to say, we’ve all become used to the new ways of life and therefore new perspective, but is there a cost associated to perspective? I’ll give you an example of how perspective might have a cost and how we should remain openminded and remember to try to view things from another perspective, for our ultimate benefit.
Think about the time pre-pandemic when we saw and met stakeholders, colleagues and had conversations. Sometimes those conversations were planned (meetings), sometimes not (watercooler), but each time we probably gave something or took something away with us, adding value to the day. You might’ve happened to be in the office surrounded by people who are more senior or junior, more experienced or less experienced, it doesn’t matter. But subconsciously you probably listened in? I bet you did, we’re a nosy bunch and you probably learnt from that however small it might have been.
Now to the present day where you’re at home, surrounded by yourself and only yourself and work tasks that don’t encourage you to learn or explore nor the opportunity to enhance your soft skills or just be present for whatever potential opportunity there may be. What is the cost of that? All because we possibly got too comfortable working from home, set with a perspective that it is better for us, because we wanted to do X before work, at lunch or after. But by not getting this balance right (whatever that might look like) this could come at the cost of development, progression, innovation & opportunity. We should do our best to avoid those ruts, the effective opposite of pre-pandemic life because we all grow better together.
I’d like to wrap up by thanking everyone for an extremely warm welcome and as it’s December, Seasons Greetings to everyone who is celebrating this month!
Ash