Monthly Manager Meeting-January 2026 - Jan 29, 2026

meeting

Loudoun County Board Committees and Advisory Boards 1h 31m 1 speaker 6 agenda items transcribed 6 days ago official recording ↗

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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

Why does the speaker compare workplace stress to unstringing a medieval bow?

Unknown 0:00

All right, good morning, everybody. Let's go ahead. We got a big agenda today, so we're going to go ahead and get started right on time. I know that's usually not my welcome. It sounds like we've got perhaps a little bit of precipitation coming up that we'll have to talk about here a little bit later in the meeting. But before we get going, I wanted to start with connection before content. So as you all know, I like to hunt and fish, and I spend a great deal of time outdoors, but when I'm not indoors, I spend a great deal of time reading about the outdoors. And I came across an article the other day about this piece of equipment, and I just want to share something with you associated with this for the connection people content.

Unknown 0:50

It's called Unstring the Bow. That at the end of the 13th century, when the Norman English bowmen began to pioneer the new powerful new military technology of the longbow. One of the things that they discovered that the very best precaution that a bowman could take for his weapon was to simply unstring the bow and do that when it was not in use. In other words, the most important thing was to make sure that they released the tension Another way to say it would be relax the pressure when not in use. Relieving the strain allowed the bow to last longer, to snap back faster, to set arrows more, to flight both further and more accurate. A bow that was never unstrung would quickly lose its effectiveness. In other words, a bow that never relaxed ultimately became useless.

Unknown 1:56

And it got me thinking about us and how we sometimes are. I know myself, I'm as guilty as anybody about not taking the time to relax. And so with this being our first meeting of the year, I wanted to share that with you and reiterate the importance that each one of us needs to make sure that we are unstringing our own personal bows when we leave work. Try as hard as you can not to take it home. Take that time to relax. Take that time to make sure that the pressures that come from working in Loudoun County are dealt with appropriately and in a healthy way so that you can be effective and last while you are here. There's something to think about. All right, a couple of announcements. I know this wasn't on the agenda, but I do need to mention two things to you.

Unknown 2:56

There is some switch outs of our cell phones and I'm going to ask Ryan to just give a 60 second advertisement about that. I'm going to hand the mic over to Ryan. Thank you. So if you've received an email from me within the past couple weeks, if you can make sure that you're reading those emails and and So we have two different scenarios. We have phones that need to be migrated and we have phones that need to be upgraded. And so DIT has set dates, February 9th through the 13th. A bunch of folks have already taken advantage of those appointments, which is great, but we still have some outstanding. And then the phones that need to be migrated We sent out some emails about that. You can self-serve or you can schedule with us to get those devices migrated.

Unknown 4:01

So we just need to make sure that we're staying on track because March 31st is kind of the deadline that we're working towards for that. Thank you. Thank you, Ryan. The other thing I wanted to mention before we get into the agenda is I got an email last night from county administration and it dealt with a reminder about Administrative Policy MRC-1. Now, I know you all know exactly what that policy is, so I will go into that. Actually, it deals with the recording of meetings, okay? And what has been happening across the county is, particularly after COVID, everybody has defaulted to recording all of the meetings that have been there. and that is counter to county policy, all right? There is certain meetings that we have to record, public meetings, things like that.

Unknown 5:01

As an example, this would not be defined as a public meeting, okay? But we do record this meeting, and that's acceptable because we then allow other staff members who were not able to attend to do that. But what we're talking about is internal staff meetings