For 2012, we are planning a special series with a theme: Generations at Work

• What do you need to know to prosper in your work life during your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and into your 60s and beyond?

• And how can we work well across all those age groups to build successful organizations – and to make the most of our resources?  In today’s challenging financial times, that’s more important than ever.

We’ll talk about everything from first jobs and Facebook to final chapters in the workforce.

And we’ll look at the chemistry of today’s organizations – for example, what happens when the generations of “Father Knows Best” and “The Simpsons” collaborate.

Consider this an interactive adventure: Please share your reactions and experiences.   Whatever your age, tell us how you see your generation at work – and your advice for forging strong teams of all ages – kw@wunderlin.com.

Beginning with the 20-somethings

A funny thing has happened over the past several years.

I found myself in a new kind of consulting job. My kids and their classmates, my nieces and my nephews, the children of my friends … they were all asking the same questions:  How to find a job? How to network?  How to handle the new universe of life at work?

As my son graduated from college last spring, the parents of his group of friends gathered for a brunch and gave them our best advice.  Here are some of my favorites:

• Make friends with HR.

• When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

• Keep a clean change of clothes at work.

• Read Moby Dick in yours 30s, Middlemarch in your 40s and The Confessions of St. Augustine in our 50s.

• The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow…do good anyway.

So what can we tell them?  What do they need to know in their first work adventures? And what advice can we offer to the folks who work with them?

Whether you call them Generation Y or Millennials, 20-somethings bring a new set of values and experiences to the world of work.

Let us introduce you

If you read books like “Millennials in the Workplace” by Neil Howe and Reena Nadler or a recent report on millennials from the Pew Research Center, you will hear 20-somethings described this way:

• Confident Remember they are the children of baby-boom parents who’ve told them they were great since toddlerhood.
• Team-oriented. From school team projects to scheduled sports and social lives, 20-somethings have grown up multi-tasking and working with others.
• Tech-savvy. Life before computers seems prehistoric. They have mastered new technologies at every turn and are fearless about new ones.
• Socially connected. They can’t remember life before email, Facebook and texting – and have global social communities that no previous generation could have imagined.  They are comparing notes about work around a virtual water cooler.
• Racially and ethnically diverse. More travel, study and jobs abroad, Skype, those social networks, friends and families with connections across the globe – all this has made them comfortable in diverse environments.
• OK with uncertainty.  From the terrorism of 9-11 to the economic downturn, they have grown up in unstable times. Young people their age have gone to war. They have seen friends and parents laid off.  They know they have a better chance of seeing a UFO than a pension check.

Finding a first job

At the same time, uncertainty about finding a first job —well, that is not something they are OK with.  They want jobs – preferably meaningful jobs – in the worst job market in decades.

So when 20-somethings ask for my job-hunt advice, I talk about:

Focus. Some young people know they want to be a CPA just like Mom or an architect just like Dad. But most don’t have a clear picture of how they can fit their skills and interests into the jobs out there. When young people ask me for advice, we use the Myers-Briggs type indicator and Strong Interest Inventory to get more clarity.

Networking. This is old advice — but with new weight today as job applications move online and hundreds of resumes pour into HR inboxes. How can yours stand out? Who do you know at that company? Who do you know who is friends with someone there? Whose parents have a connection? Is there someone at church or the gym?  I urge young people to join organizations and set up interviews — to ask for information.   How did you choose this line of work?  What sorts of people does the organization work for?  What kinds of work experiences do you consider most valuable?  Is there anyone else you suggest I talk to?  A young woman I know used a spreadsheet to track contacts made, jobs applied for, when to check back.  She reached out fearlessly to any older adult to whom she was referred. It worked: Having a conversation with someone in a coffee shop, she was overheard and approached about a possibility that turned into a dream job!

And keep networking: Few young people I know are in their dream jobs. So staying connected to colleagues, mentors and friends is essential.  In her book “Brazen Careerist: the New Rules for Success,” Penelope Trunk has a chapter title that says it all: “Hunting for a job is not a task – it’s a lifestyle.”

For more advice on the job hunt, check out these tips from a recent New York Times column: “Ten things job applicants should know” by an entrepreneur who owns five businesses in Chicago.

One of its best suggestions: Stay in touch even if you don’t get a job, especially if you are a finalist. “There is a good chance that the new hire won’t work out or that another position will open up.”

So you have a job…

If they have a job at all in this challenging economy, the 20-somethings I know are thrilled.

Even if it’s not their ideal job, they are intent on making the most of it.

If they are highly educated and employed in transitional jobs – nannies, bike shops, farm hands, restaurant work – they are still grateful.

If they have made a beeline to grad school, even big degrees that take a long time – like Ph.D.s – they are probably working part-time as they earn new credentials and hope for better times.

What have they learned on the job? What advice do 20-somethings in the work force have for fellow 20-somethings just getting started?

• Ask questions. As the vice president of local architecture firm likes to say to young colleagues, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Most supervisors appreciate the opportunity to keep you on track. Penelope Trunk says: “Be a sponge.”

• Just say yes. Whether it’s a new project, extra training, a volunteer initiative at your office, raise your hand for the experience and to advertise your commitment. “No job is too small or insignificant for you to complete,” one 20-something friend told me.   “If you do things well and on time, recognition will come for the tasks you complete.”

• Ignore complainers. Another young friend told me he was surprised by older coworkers’ complacency and complaints. “I asked for any responsibilities or opportunities my supervisors would afford to me…and I worked much harder than many in my department. And when new promotions came available, in less than two years, I received one of the spots.”

• Learn from less-than-perfect experiences. “I would argue holding a job — one which forces you to adapt to a management style you don’t like or work you don’t particularly care for — could help sharpen your notion of an ideal career path,” one 25-year-old told me. “I would venture to say you cannot become a well-rounded employee without the experience of working in less-than-ideal circumstances.”

• Share your outside-work accomplishments, too. A 25-year-old who started a popular series of spelling bees in bars found a connection with Louisville’s Idea Festival – and a reputation as a great project manager with a sense of humor.

What is the top advice from their bosses – and older folks in the workforce?

• Cultivate relationships you can learn from – and be inspired by.  It might be a supervisor/mentor but it could also be colleague who works well with a wide variety of people – or seems to wind up assigned to every interesting project.

• Core skills make a difference in everyday work life.  Being a good listener and a clear writer, having a positive attitude and working hard will make you a standout. A recent New York Times magazine article, “The Character Test,” described key traits correlate with success, including grit, zest and curiosity.

• Expand your horizons in terms of what you read: Facebook and Yahoo’s home page are fine. But also check out some resources with authority regularly. The New York Times front page online.  The Wall Street Journal’s front page.  Try buying a new magazine each month, from “Vanity Fair” to “Fast Company.”  And read books with buzz. “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell will help you appreciate the role of luck in life. Thomas Friedman’s “That Used to be Us,” offers his take on America’s changing role in the world. “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, looks at how we make decisions. Daniel Pink’s “Drive” offers a new take on motivation.

The great hockey player Wayne Gretsky once said, “You don’t skate to where the puck is. You skate to where the puck is going to be.”  That’s where you want your thinking to be, too – looking forward.

Working with 20-somethings

The best teams capitalize on the strengths of diverse members – so recognize that their characteristic traits add value.

• Gen Ys bring enthusiasm and special skills to cross-generational teams — and they are comfortable juggling projects. The multi-tasking that stymies some people in workplaces? It’s business-as-usual.

• Capitalize on their technology know-how, both with projects you assign them and “reverse mentoring” that lets them shine helping other less tech-savvy staff members.

• Give clear feedback.  Be specific about goals – short term and longer term.

• Understand that they want to enjoy work – but that won’t keep them from working hard.

One 20-something summed it up well.  “My experience might not be much, but my capacity to learn is great!”

I asked him how he thought his life would change in the next three to five years.

“Dramatically.  I’ll be in a new job in a different city.”  He has no idea where.

My 20s decade was so different: I’m finding the experience of working with young people a great way to pay it forward. Let me challenge you to do the same.

Next up: The Thirties

I’d like to hear from folks in this age group – and people who work with them.   If you are a 30-something, what has defined your work life so far? What have you learned? What are you headed? Do you face special challenges at work – or balancing work with the rest of your life? Email me at kw@wunderlin.com.

Recently, we searched through the archives and selected our top 10 posts. They cover a broad range of topics—from how to be a great non-profit board member to defining a vision for your company’s future.

Hope you enjoy reading them, learn from them, and forward them on to others who might find them insightful.

All the Best,

Karen’s Top Ten

1. Tips for Leading Efficient, Effective, and Enjoyable Meetings
2. Emotional Intelligence: A Different Way of Being Smart
3. How to Use (and How to Choose) an Executive Coach
4. Get Better Results from Difficult Conversations
5. Making a Truly Excellent Hire
6. Defining a Vision for the Future
7. Who are You? Defining Your Purpose and Values
8. How to Be an Outstanding Non-Profit Board Member: 10 Tips
9. “George, can you step into my office for a minute?”: Delivering Effective Feedback
10. Be Creative: Success Flows Directly From Innovation!

Here’s a brief look at each of these favorites.

Tips for Leading Efficient, Effective, and Enjoyable Meetings

What if all our meetings could be decisive, productive, and no longer than necessary? Our 10 tips enable you to lead meetings that are to die for…not to die at.

Here’s how:

1. Determine if the meeting is really necessary.
2. Create and use a detailed agenda.
3. Ensure proper room arrangements are made.
4. Always have a facilitator, timekeeper, and scribe.
5. Set clear guidelines.
6. Manage participation.
7. Make periodic process checks.
8. Take and distribute action minutes.
9. Plan next steps.
10. Begin and end on time.

Emotional Intelligence: A Different Way of Being Smart

In this post about Emotional Intelligence we summarized Daniel Goleman’s seminal book, which now, from a quick check of Amazon, seems to have spawned a cottage industry of similar books and seminars.

Successful leaders need these emotional competencies:

• Self-awareness
• Self-management
• Empathy, and
• Social skill.

This popular blog discusses leadership styles in light of the EQ concept, and provides a wealth of specifics on learning emotional competencies, and using them to create leadership styles that yield positive results.

How to Use (and How to Choose) an Executive Coach

Executive coaching has become a preferred approach to executive development– it focuses specifically on your individual leadership development needs, and can be directly applied to your current work.
Our  2007 newsletter “How to Use (and How to Choose) an Executive Coach” shows how to successfully employ executive coaching.

Get Better Results from Difficult Conversations

There’s nothing easy about difficult conversations. Whether the talk is about performance issues—Her work is just not where it needs to be—or behavioral issues—He was late again today—many of us avoid having to deal with conversations that we know will be unpleasant. Inside every difficult conversation are three separate conversations:

• The talk about what happened
• The conversation about feelings
• The discussion about what this information says about each person’s identity

Re-read “Get Better Results from Difficult Conversations” to get yourself started on more productive difficult conversations.

Making a Truly Excellent Hire

Whether we are expanding our businesses or just replacing employees lost through attrition, the need to “get the right people on the bus” never goes away. “Making a Truly Excellent Hire” focuses on five best practices:

• Learn from those who leave.
• Know what you want in a new hire.
• Base your hiring decisions on more than your gut.
• Hire for smarts.
• Don’t expect your new hires to sink or swim—orient them.

Defining a Vision for the Future

“If you don’t know where you are going, you might end up someplace else.” So we began our newsletter, “Defining a Vision for the Future.” Today, the need to define a clearly envisioned future is essential, and the vision processes are as important as the outcomes.

Who are You? Defining Your Purpose and Values

Start with this: What is your organization’s fundamental reason for being? Our newsletter on Defining Your Purpose and Values,” explores this essential element of a sustainable organization. Check out the model we recommend for defining your mission and values.

How to Be an Outstanding Non-Profit Board Member: 10 Tips

One of the most gratifying aspects of giving back to our communities is service on non-profit boards. In a 2006 blog, we provide 10 tips for making ourselves outstanding non-profit board members.

1. Get to know the organization.
2. Be an advocate for it.
3. Recognize that serving is volunteer, but not optional.
4. Make commitments you can keep.
5. Know your job and stick to it.
6. Find ways to translate what you know to benefit the non-profit.
7. Expand your skills.
8. Recognize that fundraising is a reality and a responsibility.
9. Don’t spread yourself too thin.
10. Rotate off.

Your favorite non-profit will thank you!

“George, can you step into my office for a minute?”: Delivering Effective Feedback

Giving candid and timely feedback may be one of the most neglected of all business skills. We all know we need feedback. So why don’t we give it?

1. We don’t know how.
2. We wait too long.
3. We don’t want to be hurtful.
4. We lose focus on why feedback is important.
5. We are fearful.
6. We are not measured on it.

For more information, see the full 2008 blog. 

Be Creative: Success Flows Directly From Innovation!

In our newsletter on creativity, we took a look at the creative process of Twyla Tharp, one of America’s foremost choreographers. In her book on developing creativity, Tharp comments: “It takes skill to bring something you’ve imagined into the world! No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that’s both painstaking and rewarding. It takes time.”

We hope you will enjoy TWC’s Top Ten and feel free to pass them along, post on Facebook or Twitter—and let us know how the Wunderlin Company can help you.

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A number of The Wunderlin Company workshops address these newsletter topics in more detail—Facilitating for Results and Advanced Models for Facilitation, Coaching as a Leadership Skill,  Effective Meetings, Myers-Briggs and Difficult Conversations.  For a full schedule or registration information, check out the workshop page on our website.

When my children were young, I did a fair amount of parenting with my eyeballs, reading books of all descriptions.  One of the books that really impacted my approach was The Optimistic Child by Martin Seligman.

So, while at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, I made sure to attend his session.  And, Seligman is two-for-two in my book—the session was truly helpful.  He shared the session with Matthieu Ricard, who among other roles, is the Dali Lama’s French interpreter.

In this newsletter are my notes on their recommendations for improving your day-to-day authentic well-being by employing simple daily practices. I hope they are as meaningful for you as they have been for me!

A New Theory of Well-Being

Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology, is the Zellerback Family Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and serves as director of the university’s Positive Psychology Center.

This bestselling author has devoted his career to examining the opposite of what most psychologists study: not what can go wrong, but rather, what can go right—positive emotions, character traits, and institutions. He believes that many people feel they are powerless to change situations that are, in fact, changeable.

Freud and Schopenhauer posited that our highest aspiration is not to suffer, to have as little misery as possible.  Psychology, then, was dedicated to minimizing suffering. Seligman believes that stance is morally, politically, and psychologically flawed.  And he has developed the empirical evidence to support his claim that if we emphasize and develop the positive, we can have fuller, richer, lives.

Got PERMA?

With a foundation of belief in the value of the positive, Seligman notes that it is not enough just to talk about positive emotion; authentic well-being has several dimensions, which he terms PERMA—

• Positive emotion,
• Engagement,
• good  Relationships,
• Meaning and purpose, and
• Achievement or accomplishment.

With intentional effort, we can increase our PERMA—and this isn’t just touchy-feely, feel-good mush.  The practices are evidence-based and have survived random assignment placebo-controlled testing.

In the preface to his latest book, Flourish, Seligman says “I am a research scientist, and a conservative one at that.  The appeal of what I write comes from the fact that it is grounded in careful science:  statistical representative samples.  In contrast to pop psychology and the bulk of self-improvement, my writings are believable because of the underlying science.”

And that’s why his suggested practices are credible to me, and, I hope, to you as well.

Seligman has more than 12 practices that have passed his rigid level of scrutiny, and he shared four of them with us:

1. The What Went Well Exercise (improves Positive Emotion): Our natural focus is on the negative events in life; and there is certainly benefit in learning from the bad experiences. But focusing on the negative increases anxiety.  This exercise strengthens your ability to discern and hold tight to what is going well. For a week, before sleep, write down 3 things that went well and why.  Actually writing or typing it is important.  Next to each put a place to answer: “Why did this happen?”  Do it for a week even if it feels awkward.  Seligman noted that in psychotherapy, we are always doing skill building that is “like fighting against the mountain.” Sooner or later, you will wear down and give up. The PERMA practices, on the other hand, are self maintaining– even addictive—try them, and you will sleep better and feel better!

2. The Signature Strengths Exercise (improves Engagement): Doing this practice requires knowing your signature strengths.  You can complete the assessment that will give you that information at this link. You want the Via Survey of Character Strengths.  When I took the test today, it took about 30 minutes.

Now think of something you do every day that you don’t particularly like to do, then do that thing you don’t like to do, using a signature strength. Here’s an example—one of Seligman’s graduate students had a job bagging groceries which she did not like. One of her signature strengths was social intelligence.  She did this exercise when she bagged–connecting with each customer with the goal of making an interaction with her their best moment of the day!

3. The Gratitude Visit (improves good Relationships) Close your eyes and think of someone who years ago did or said something that improved your life.  (This needs to be someone who is still alive.)  Now, write a 300-word testimonial–what she did, how it affected you at the time, and how it affects you today. Then call and make the visit, but don’t say why.  When you visit, read them the letter.  Seligman noted that in their tests, people who did gratitude visits were less depressed and had better well-being one month later. Seligman noted that gratitude is very closely correlated with happiness.

4. Active Constructive Responding (improves Relationships) Seligman noted that marriage counseling is the worst kind of therapy because it is just teaching people to fight better! Dr. Shelly Gable of UC Santa Barbara looked instead at how married couples celebrated together, and learned that how they celebrate is more predictive of good relationships than how they fight.  So, how we help others celebrate can be a powerful means for improving relationships.

When someone tells us of a good thing that has happened to them, we can respond in an  active or passive, and a constructive or destructive fashion.  When your spouse comes home and tells you he or she was promoted, an active/ destructive response is “Do you know what tax bracket that will put us in?  Passive/ destructive is “What’s for dinner?”

An active constructive response has the greatest positive impact, and it has a constructive script.—“What great news! Let’s relive that moment– where were you? What did he say? How did you react?  We should go celebrate!”

So the practice is, for a week, listen carefully each time someone shares good news.  Go out of your way to respond in an active constructive way.  The key is to help the person relive the positive event or emotion. Seligman noted that this is another self-maintaining practice, but it is not one that comes naturally to most of us.  Intentional practice will help you become better at this practice with double benefit — “people like you better, they spend more time with you, and they share more of the intimate details of their lives.  You feel better about yourself, and all this strengthens the skill of active, constructive responding.”

To learn more about Seligman’s latest research, check out his website. It is full of free assessments, articles, and information.

Money Can’t Buy Happiness…Unless It is Spent on Another

Matthieu Ricard’s comments come from his experiences of forty years as a Buddhist monk. But Ricard is not one-dimensional: he is also an artist, a photographer, and an author. Most of the proceeds of his work go to humanitarian causes.

Ricard notes that, when we wake up, we don’t think, “I would like to suffer all day.”  We generally think that something better is coming down the road. For him, despair is not seeing any improvement coming in the future. The desire of all conscious beings is to get rid of sorrow and achieve some happiness.

Yet Ricard believes that there are things that look like well-being, but need to be distinguished: well-being as a way of being, as distinct from a pleasurable experience.  Happiness that comes from outside can provide pleasure, but true well-being comes from inside.  So we are not talking about the thrill of buying a new car or a new designer handbag, but rather altruistic love, inner peace, and inner strength that creates a deep reservoir of well-being.  This kind of happiness suffuses all states–You can experience sadness and still have genuine well-being as a way of being.

Some people try to build a bubble of self centeredness, thinking “I will focus on my own happiness.”  Selfish happiness doesn’t work because failure and successes get magnified — You feel miserable and are miserable with others.  This approach is dysfunctional because it is at odds with reality—genuine happiness comes through and with others.

The meditative state that brings the most positive result is compassion.  It functions because it is in harmony with reality.  It recognizes the fundamental motivation of all to avoid suffering and seek happiness. Genuine happiness is not a reward for good behavior; it is a result of living a compassionate life.  We have a biological urge to care, and we can extend that through training.

But How?

We know that high levels of skill require persistence and practice.  We can’t get kindness and compassion without that kind of practice.

Ricard suggested the following exercise to build compassion and therefore authentic well-being: Sometimes we have magic moments – focus in on what made them special.  Tune into the feelings you experienced in that moment — harmony, no inner conflicts…. Then, cultivate those feelings. As a starting point for practice, recall a genuine moment of unconditional love, like you have for a child.  Matthieu said, “That feeling has a different fragrance. Identify those qualities, then don’t let it go. Hang on to it–bring it to mind, keep it there. If it goes, bring it back, in a clear, stable, and vivid way. Maintain it. If you do regularly it will become part of yourself.

Ricard noted that short reflective sessions performed frequently were much  more effective than an occasional long effort.  Do this practice every day– don’t expect swift results, but genuine gradual change.

So, there you are–some quick notes from the Aspen Ideas Festival, that I hope will prove genuinely helpful to you.  If you are interested in reading more, below are lists of Seligman’s and Ricard’s books:

Martin Seligman’s major books:

Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

Practicing Positive Psychology Coaching: Assessment, Activities and Strategies for Success

The Optimistic Child: A Proven Program to Safeguard Children Against Depression and BuildLifelong Resilience

Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control by Christopher Peterson, Steven F. Maier and Martin E. P. Seligman

Matthieu Ricard’s major books:

Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill by Matthieu Ricard and Daniel Goleman

Why Meditate: Working with Thoughts and Emotions

The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life by Jean-Francois Revel, Matthieu Ricard, John Canti and Jack Miles

The Great Medicine That Conquers Clinging to the Notion of Reality: Steps in Meditation on the Enlightened Mind by Shechen Rabjam and Matthieu Ricard

It is from this need that we developed this newsletter – our observations on what it takes to be really successful in driving change in your organization.

Change is a Process

A study of change projects concluded that 100% of successful change initiatives had good technical solutions. Not surprising. But it also found that 98% of unsuccessful change initiatives had good technical solutions!  So successful change is not about whether we have a good idea for change, but rather: Can we get the people who work here to support this good idea?

Because it is about influencing people as well as changing procedures, change is not a one-time event. When we work with clients, we focus on leading change as a four-step process:

• Initiate change by  grounding it in a solid purpose and a shared need.
• Mobilize commitment by engaging people in shaping the outcomes and understanding what the change will do for them.
• Transition to the new systems and processes in a transitioning period, and
• Make change last by monitoring results and having the change become a way of doing business.

Change Acceleration works in tandem with project management to assure that your change is delivered on time, on budget, and with support in the organization!

A savvy change leader* understands the complex interplay of these four elements, and realizes that the success of any change depends on the support of those affected.
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*Note: If you – or someone in your organization – would like to master the change leadership part of influencing people to accept change, The Wunderlin Company is offering its most popular workshop: Facilitating for Results on December 14-16. For more information or to register, click here.
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Switch!

A new book by brothers Chip and Dan Heath provides a compelling metaphor for creating effective change. In Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, the Heaths argue that implementing change is like getting a rider to control an elephant along a path. Lots of things have to go right to get the elephant where you want it to go!

Imagine you want to make a change. Every person – or team – has an emotional side, “the Elephant,” and a rational side, “the Rider.” To accomplish change, you have to reach both. And, of course, you have to clear the way for them to advance.  Using example after example, the Heaths focus on ways to “direct the rider, motivate the elephant, and shape the path.”

For example, two researchers in West Virginia wanted to try to find ways to persuade people to eat a healthier diet. Milk was identified as a pivotal part of the problem. Almost everyone drinks it, and whole milk is the single largest source of saturated fat in Americans’ diets. If people who drank whole milk switched to 1% or skim milk, they would reach the recommended levels of saturated fat in their diets.

First they appealed to the elephant – emotions – by showing grocery shoppers a tube of fat equivalent to the fat in a half gallon of milk and by explaining that one glass of whole milk contained saturated fat equal to 5 slices of bacon! Everyone’s reaction, of course, was that the fat was gross. Having monitored milk sales before the reduced-fat milk campaign began, the researchers knew that the market share of low-fat milk in the area was only 18%; during the campaign it rose to 41%, then leveled out at 35%.

The experiment covered all three bases: It clearly and simply directed the Rider to buy 1% or skim milk, it motivated the Elephant with images of tubes of fat, and it made the path easier by allowing people to make one simple change that started them along the road to better life-long health.

Direct the Rider

A few years ago The Wunderlin Company worked with a major airline, identifying 40 changes that needed to be made in the reservations division in the post 9/11 environment. As Laura Butcher, a Wunderlin Company associate, explains the challenge:

“Making 40 changes in one year – with many having impacts on the skills, compensation, and efficiency metrics – required substantial planning. We worked with a cross-functional team to put together plans to integrate the most significant initiatives first so that the airline minimized disruptions, overcame resistance, and realized efficiency and cost savings more quickly.

We helped the team complete a gap analysis for each of the initiatives to describe the current and future states, and we helped them identify the specific gaps that needed to be addressed.

We also guided the team in completing analysis of the stakeholders – what their needs, concerns and influencers were on each of the change projects. In dealing with these issues, we helped to construct adoption strategies, communication plans and action task lists to ensure that the initiatives and teams remained on message, integrated and aligned in purpose. Finally, we facilitated the group in identifying risks to successful execution and action plans to mitigate them.”

Clearly, managing change is not all about the change itself; in fact, most of our work deals with the more emotional, less rational side of the ‘change ride’: motivating the elephant!

Motivate the Elephant

A couple of years ago in a newsletter written at the depth of the recession, I discussed Ram Charan’s “Six Essential Leadership Traits for Hard Times.” The same skills needed to weather the changes brought about by a downturn are valuable in leading a company into better times. But as a change leader, you might also want to evaluate your team’s skills in dealing with the emotional aspects of change:

• How are my team’s influencing skills?
• What about their communication skills?
• Can they address the right questions? Like…
  • Where are we meeting resistance?
  • What do our employees need to effect this change?
  • How can we influence them to support the change?
  • What is the next milestone?

Failure to bring the organization along with you can ensure individual and collective resistance, along with reactions to the change ranging from apathy to downright sabotage, so inspiring a buy-in is absolutely essential.  So how do you handle the inevitable resistance?

In recent months, we have been working with a global company whose senior team wants to achieve some dramatic culture change  AND give leadership development opportunities to a number of “next generation” leaders. The executive team elected to launched a number of change initiatives, simultaneously! Senior team leaders had spent a good amount of time hand-picking the team members for each initiative, and providing resources for their work, but issues and resistance still arose.

For example, teams  feared disagreeing with senior management.  The first time such an issue came up,  the team took the risk, presented their case, and let management decide whether to accept what ended up being a very modest change (and they did!). Another team made a recommendation that actually wasvery significant – involving a change in the company’s logo and tagline – and after robust conversations, senior management supported them. All these issues were more about the elephant than the rider.  As senior leaders proved they were serious about letting the teams do their work, commitment has increased.

The early experiences with change management helped senior management and the change acceleration teams understand how to really “bake in” a culture difference across the globe. TWC’s “Equation for Success” had turned into the company’s mantra for change: the Quality of a solution times its Acceptance in the organization determines the Success of your result.

Sometimes, getting that all-important buy-in from your employees is as simple as maintaining your sense of humor–

A Fortune 500 company was changing its time sheets from paper to electronic. This was a major change, involving staff reduction, job assignment changes, and major alterations in methodology. The head of payroll  knew the change was going to have an emotional impact on over 15,000 employees.  So those most involved were invited to a funeral for the paper time sheet! Eulogies extolling the virtues of the old system acknowledged the pain of its passing. When the new system came online, birth announcements were sent out. The transition was much smoother because the stress brought about by change was anticipated and addressed with respect and humor.

Shape the Path

Once changes are formulated, and individuals and departments have bought into the changes, leaders have to shape the path to make the changes last.

The Switch authors suggest that you tweak the environment to make right behaviors a little bit easier and the wrong behaviors a little bit harder. Think about Amazon’s 1-click ordering. With one-tenth the effort of dialing a phone number, you can buy a new book or DVD. Talk about instant gratification. Amazon’s site designers have simply made a desired behavior – you spending money on their site – a little bit easier.

Here’s how Wunderlin Company associate Carol Schifman explains our approach to helping leaders shape the path for change: “Change is never easy, but the process and likelihood of success improves measurably when leaders understand how to initiate change, mobilize commitment for it, make the transition, and make the change last. We help get them to this level of understanding.”

Final words of advice from Switch authors Chip and Dan Heath: “For things to change, somebody somewhere has to start acting differently. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s your team. Picture the person (or people). Each has an emotional Elephant side and a rational Rider side. You’ve got to reach both. And you’ve also got to clear the way for them to succeed.”

Direct the Rider • Motivate the Elephant • Shape the Path

_____________________________________________________

Some Great Reads on Change

Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. Chip and Dan Heath. Broadway Books, 2010.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. Penguin Books, 2008, 2009.

Harvard Business Review on Change. A Harvard Business Review Paperback. 1998.

Change the Way You Lead Change: Leadership Strategies That Really Work. David M. Herold and Donald B. Fedor. Stanford Business Books, 2008.

Radical Change, the Quiet Way.Debra E. Meyerson. Harvard Business Review. October 2001.

Leading Change: An Action Plan from the World’s Foremost Expert on Business Leadership, John P. Kotter. Harvard Business School Press.

When I went to college in 1974, most women I knew still expected to marry shortly after graduation.  Many of my friends majored in nursing and teaching, the most common and “available” careers for women.  When I graduated from business school, instead of luggage and a brief case, I got a sewing machine and a vacuum cleaner! But while in school, our world began to change.  Friends switched their majors to business, or began planning to go to law school or med school.  And, most of us didn’t get married right out of school!

Then in the late seventies, we began our careers… and have ended up as CEO’s, CIO’s, GM’s, senior partners, business owners, public sector leaders, elected officials, and presidents… and that’s just my friends! We have worked in a time when social mores and expectations were shifting at an accelerating pace.

A couple of months ago, some of us were reminiscing about those days… and the idea for a newsletter emerged.  I hope you enjoy reading about and gain some in learning from our stories.

Lessons Learned:  Beyond the Glass Ceiling
Women who entered the work force in the 1960s and ‘70s – and even managed to break through the glass ceiling – may not know whether to laugh or cry at AMC’s Mad Men, set in an ad agency around 1960. If they laugh, it might be because of the truth they see in the depiction of women in the workplace. If they cry, it might be because of the truth they see …well, you get the picture.

You don’t have to turn to television for stories of behavior in the workplace of the past that would be unimaginable by today’s standards. You just need to ask the women who were there! That’s just what we did for this edition of Changing Times. Compiled here are the stories of women’s early days of their careers.  They relate, with a humorous twist, some of the challenges they faced. Then, we share gems of advice for finding success as a woman in the world of work today. And, it’s not too hard to see that many of these lessons apply to both women and men.

Looking Back
In the mid-80s I was on a team at GE that spent significant time in Japan and Korea.  My first trip there, I asked one of our Asian hosts to point me in the direction of a rest room.  Following his directions, I unknowingly walked in on all my male teammates!

As the project progressed, we developed strong bonds with our Asian counterparts. On my final visit to Japan as part of the team, we held a dinner, followed by a visit to our Japanese host’s club.  After several rounds of scotch, this fellow with whom I had spent so much time finally opened up about the question that had clearly been on his mind all along—“ Why does your husband allow you to do this?!”

I was not alone: A former manager of a firm specializing in corporate design and relocation tells the story of a phone call she thought was a mere formality to closing a deal to design a series of child-care centers. Working from home the day of the call, she failed to notice the family parrot mimicking voices in the background, but the would-be client abruptly ended the call, telling her he would not consider doing business with a woman who left a child crying in the background during the whole call.  Her explanation that the sounds were a parrot, and that her youngest “child” was a college student, did nothing to counter his position that in the South, families were revered, and he would not trust the design of his facilities to such an unfeeling “professional” woman.

One of the ways most women have succeeded is by looking for the humor in situations.  A former auditor mused that one controller asked her directly why a “gal like you is in a job like this and not home having babies.” The same man had the documents needed for the audit stored in boxes in the men’s room.  Of course, she ventured in anyway, reviewing the documents and stepping out any time someone came in to use the facility.  (That controller, by the way, ended up being convicted of embezzlement, giving her one more reason to trust her instincts.)

Other stories aren’t really tinged with humor, but rather make you cringe. A long-time IT and HR executive recalled that she was promoted to management when she was 8 ½ months pregnant, but was told that her boss’s boss at the New York headquarters of the company wanted to hold off on her raise until she returned from maternity leave – they didn’t really believe she would come back! Fortunately, her boss stood firm, saying she had earned the promotion and the pay that accompanied it.

When Everything Changed
Gail Collins’ 2009 book When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, tells the story of our move from a society in 1960 where most young women grew up never seeing a woman doctor, lawyer, or engineer, and where most had to have their husband’s permission to get a credit card, through the 2008 Presidential campaign of Hilary Clinton.  The book is full of astonishing facts and stories of the early years:

• A young woman was thrown out of court in 1960 by a judge because she was wearing pants.
• A medical school dean in 1961 candidly said of women, “We don’t want them here.”
• A NASA spokesman announced that “talk of an American space woman makes me sick to my stomach.”
• The Boston Marathon was men only, because it was “unhealthy for women to run long distances.”

A report on women in management by Harvard Business Review in the 1960s noted that there were so few women in higher echelons that “there is scarcely anything to study.”

Yenise Alonso and Vickie Brint, in their essay “Women in the Workplace,” note that social and economic changes enabled more women to attend college in the 60s, thereby increasing their job opportunities. According to Nancy Gibbs, Time magazine’s editor-at-large and author of Time’s 2009 special report, “The State of the American Woman,” the birth control pill, the civil rights movement, and a changing economy enabled women to start their families later and made us less tolerant of discrimination in any form, opening doors for women to go to work.

By 1998, the number of women entering the workforce had risen to 3 out of every 5 women, compared to 1 in 3 in 1950. By 2006, women represented 46% of those working, and in 2010, for the first time, women were generally reported to be at least 50% of the workforce.

How Far We’ve Come
Today, women have come so far that it seems acceptable to take a light-hearted look at gender issues. NBC News legal analyst Dan Abrams has written a compelling little book entitled Man Down: Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt That Women Are Better Cops, Drivers, Gamblers, Spies, World Leaders, Beer Tasters, Hedge Fund Managers, and Just About Everything Else.

Using empirical evidence and a good dose of humor, Abrams makes the serious case that polls and scientific studies have demonstrated that women have better memories, vote in higher percentages, are better at using social media, are less corrupt in politics, are better at navigating a tough economy, and are even better beer tasters!

One of Abrams’ most interesting and well-documented chapters concerns the effectiveness of women police officers, who, he notes, “didn’t even have a Police Officer Barbie to look up to until 1993.” When crime and police corruption were rocking Lima, Peru, and Volgograd, Russia, in the early 2000s, the countries came up with the same solution: hire women officers instead. A study in Los Angeles backed up their good results: Women were more trusted, played by the rules, and had less tolerance for bad behavior on the streets and among their peers.

Abrams reports that a New York Times study determined that women make more money in the stock market than men. The same newspaper reported that some Ivy League schools have been accused of stacking the deck in favor of boys to try to “balance out” higher achievement by women students.  As Abrams notes: “Wow. Accusations of affirmative action policies—for men. That kind of says it all.”

Fifty years after a wholesale move of women into the work force, many people believe that all issues of gender equity are behind us. In truth, women are still chiseling away at the glass ceiling.  As one friend put it, the cracks are bigger, but the ceiling is still there.

Issues that Remain
Progress to the very top has remained slow.  While women now earn 60% of all master’s degrees and 50% of all doctoral degrees, in 2006 only 10 Fortune 500 companies were run by women.

Pay equity also remains an issue. In 2005, women earned only 77 cents for every dollar men earned. In 2009, according to the US Department of Labor statistics, that figure ranged from 80 cents through 93 cents, depending on the ages of the women. (Young women ages 16 to 24 achieved the higher level.) Pay inequality in part stems from the occupations most prevalent among women.  The number one job category for women in 2009 was secretaries and administrative assistants, and the numbers two and three – registered nurses and teachers.  So there hasn’t been as much change as one would like to believe.

Competing priorities at work and home remain an issue for women, but a consensus is developing that what women want and need in the workforce can be beneficial to men and to employers, as well.

With women’s participation in the world of work largely a foregone conclusion, some old issues have died out, but new ones have arisen. A recent New York Times article focused on a new set of issues facing academic women.  Those in scientific fields, still a minority, spend an inordinate amount of time, for example, sitting on committees, where they feel like the “token woman.”  In addition, author Kate Zernike notes that women feel they—and not the men on the faculty—are too frequently invited to participate in work-life balance panels, where they are expected to discuss family issues, like how much sleep they get, or what they feed their children for breakfast.

Keys to Success
Distilled down, here are some of our lessons learned—

• Focus on what you do well.  Your individuality is your best asset.
• Listen for hints and take advice.
• Trust your instincts. They are a major part of who you are.
• Act confident until you are.
• Always make friends with the HR people.
• Be able to understand and articulate how your initiatives align with the vision of the organization.
• Document and share your accomplishments and those of the people you lead.

Lessons Learned
So where do we go from here? How can we be sure the path from here continues to improve openness and opportunity?

One thing is certain: everyone benefits when the talents of women and men alike are fully utilized, and when employees are able to work with their employers on finding a balance that is beneficial to everyone. Policies that are women-friendly are also men-friendly and business-friendly.

The Last Laugh
Of all of the advice my friends had to offer to young women and to those who mentor them, perhaps the best was to be yourself – your individuality is your strongest asset. We’ll close with one last true story from a colleague:

“It was the early 1980s, and we were all wearing the ‘dress for success’ uniform – suit with oxford shirt and floppy bow tie. I had a friend at work who wore the uniform every day, and I mean EVERY DAY. She was very attractive, but also very shy. She said she couldn’t just start wearing something different, because everyone would notice. This continued until she got a job at another company. When she got her acceptance letter, I bought her a celebration present – a red knit dress with matching jacket that looked GREAT. She wore the new dress the first day on the job, and phased out the uniform. She’s now a senior executive at a Fortune 200 Company. While the killer red dress wasn’t the reason for her success, it sure helped her self-confidence!”

You, go, girl.

Asking for a raise. Reassigning responsibilities. Giving critical feedback to an underperforming employee. Saying “no” to a request. All difficult conversations. What are the hard conversations you need to have,  but don’t,  or don’t do well enough?

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most is a book that rarely is more than an arm’s reach away. My copy is tattered, highlighted and post-it tabbed with years of use. The tools and techniques this book offers are ones I have found invaluable.

(In fact, we wrote a newsletter on the subject several years ago.)

In response to client interest, we have developed a one-day workshop that will aid you in having your toughest conversations with less stress and more success. The course deconstructs difficult conversations into manageable portions and provides practical and actionable tools to take back into the workplace or the homeplace.

We’ll start the day with examining the three conversations that are part of a difficult conversation: the “What Happened” conversation, the “Feelings” conversation, and the “What does this say about my identity” conversation. Then we’ll move forward to mapping the contribution system (wherever we are, we all contributed both good and bad), separating intention from results (“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings.”), and how to shift the conversation from being about who is right, to a learning conversation about how to go forward from here.

An inaugural public workshop is being offered on Friday, November 12. Cost is $850 and includes all materials, course instruction, and lunch. Enrollment is limited.

Dedicated on-site workshops are also available and can be customized in length and topics to address the specific needs of your organization. For more information, please email us at: kw@wunderlin.com or give us a call at 502.895.3689.

And there’s another new workshop on the horizon…

Myers-Briggs Step II® Workshop Now Being Offered

Working in almost any organization today, chances are you have taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®. You know that you are a INFP (Introversion, iNtuition, Feeling, Perception) or an ESTJ (Extraversion, Sensing, Thinking, Judgment) or one of the 14 other combinations of psychological type. The Wunderlin Company uses the MBTI® to help individuals, teams and entire organizations improve the way they communicate, learn and work. The basic MBTI® is designed help identify your natural patterns for accessing information, making decisions and relating to people.

But did you know that there is a second part (MBTI – Step 2) that helps people better understanding their unique expression of a particular personality type? The MBTI Step 2 takes each of the 8 scales from Step 1 and breaks them down into 5 sub-scales known as facets. This gives us not 4 ways in which we differ but 40!

The Wunderlin Company is pleased to announce a half-day workshop that focuses on providing a much more thorough analysis of the Step 2 data and its applications in terms of personal development, teams, organizations, conflict, coaching, emotional intelligence and communication.

This new workshop is being offered for the first time on Monday, August 23 from 8:00 – noon and again on Monday, October 18 and Monday, December 13. The cost of the workshop is $249 and includes the Step II diagnostic test, and course instruction.

For more information, please email us at: kw@wunderlin.com or give us a call at 502.895.3689.

Fall Lineup Announced for Wunderlin Company Workshops
In addition to the two new workshops, we offer a whole series of workshops that mirror the services offered by The Wunderlin Company. Click on the one that will most help you polish your skills and get all the details.

Facilitating for Results
This introductory workshop provides leaders and managers with three days of experiential practice in both the skills of facilitators—asking effective questions, observing groups and making interventions—and the tools of facilitators—brainstorming, multivoting, gap analysis and others. The final day simulates a WorkOut style problem solving process.

Advanced Models for Facilitation
For the facilitator with some level of experience, our Advanced Models workshop enhances capability by working through Roger Schwartz’ Skilled Facilitator models, and introduces more sophisticated group processes such as Appreciative inquiry and Open Spaces and working on more complex team interventions. Advanced Models also customizes to the specific needs and requests of workshop participants with plenty of time for problem solving, Q&A and practice sharing with our very experienced and skilled faculty.

Coaching as a Leadership Skill

Often at the end of a coaching process, our clients will see the value in cascading the approaches of the one-on-one coaching process to a broader population of leaders. Coaching as Leadership Skill provides over two days the practice required to significantly improve manager’s effectiveness in communicating with and developing their associates.

Customized Leadership Development
We have also customized this workshop for several clients to specifically support their leadership development needs.

Effective Meetings
We all spend so much time in meetings… and almost universally find the majority of meetings to be a poor use of time. This half day workshop provides nine practical and immediately applicable practices for improving meeting effectiveness.

Discover Your Strengths and Put Them to Work
Building on Marcus Buckingham’s book Now Discover Your Strengths, this team building workshop enables teams to look at their collective and individual strengths and reorient both their work allocation and leadership development.

We offer these workshops both in-house and by subscription. For more information, please email us at: kw@wunderlin.com or give us a call at 502.895.3689.

If you subscribe to the “what’s new” approach to organizational change, Work-Out might seem like yesterday’s news.  But, recent experiences reinforced Work-Out’s continued relevance. In some ways, arrival of tough times for all organizations has made Work-Out – and concepts like it – more contemporary than ever.

The Wunderlin Company’s approach to cultural change is rooted in our collective experiences with GE’s Work-Out process. Work-Out places the work to be done (or the problem to be solved) in the middle of an organization and surrounds it with the people who know it best. This unlocks new resources for problem solving.

From the beginning, Work-Out was a source of major transformation at GE.  In the mid 80’s GE was still a stodgy, monolithic enterprise, weighed down by bureaucracy and bureaucrats.  The earliest Work-Out wins were in the moments that we observed the combination of problem-solving teams asking, “Why do we do things this way?  What if we could try…” and leadership teams saying, “I’m listening….and I’ll support you to make that change.”  It’s a transformational combination!  And, more than 20 years later, it’s exactly the same in organizations who are just beginning Work-Out.

While the process is directed from the top of the organization, it is implemented with broad participation from employees throughout the organization. Work-Out develops broad coalitions across the organization. Employees start to care deeply about success because they are connected to the organization and can make change happen. The Work-Out process also provides a vehicle for organizations to optimize speed, cost and quality – without compromising any of these measures, and results in new levels of success.

Proof it works

Last year, we helped a financial services organization introduce Work-Out and facilitated a number of their early problem-solving sessions.  A highlight for Laura occurred when true “breakthrough thinking” occurred, resulting in a 90% cycle time reduction.  By making a few simple changes to their standard business contracts, the contract negotiation process was shortened and the legal department was no longer consumed by iterative “red lining” of agreements.  It was proof that Work-Out really works – even in a legal department!

Early on in Karen’s consulting career, The Wunderlin Company was engaged to instill the Work-Out process throughout Louisville city government. From the city garages, to garbage pickup to purchasing processes, we worked with government employees to tackle difficult problems and the results were nothing short of remarkable – in terms of time and money saved, citizen services improved, and overall morale boosted. In fact, the program was so successful that the Louisville government was awarded a Ford Foundation Innovations in Government Award to teach other cities how to implement the process.

Carol worked recently with a utility distribution business that was able to save $1.8 million by buying pre-fabricated parts and expects to save nearly $20 million by rolling out the program system wide – all thanks to the Work-Out process. That same company was also able to make similar improvements to its collections, prepayments and safety programs.

Another example of success was a Safety Work-Out that was instrumental in turning around a difficult ongoing trend for the company, achieving a 25% reduction in preventable motor vehicle accidents and OSHA recordables within one year. The company also revamped the entire Accident Prevention Manual in just five days with 35 union and 15 management employees.

Why it works

Work-Out gets the whole system in the room. How many times have you or an associate been frustrated by a work process that you know can work better… but how to make “those people over there” – whether it’s production or people in the field or finance – cooperate?  An essential tenet of Work-Out is to get the whole system in the room.

Work-Out significantly shortens decision times. A typical task force meets for two hours every week or so for a couple months, presents to leadership, and then waits days, weeks or months to hear the final decisions.  With Work-Out, teams work with a facilitator for 2-4 days, and then leadership joins the group.  The teams make their recommendations for improvement and leadership makes the decision on the spot. In 20 plus years of leading Work-Outs, we have yet to see a Work-Out session that received less than 80 percent “Yes’s” to the recommendations – and that isn’t because senior leaders become easy marks in public forums; it is because if you ask the people who do the work how to do it better, they know and they come up with highly workable solutions.

Work-Out is much better than training. Frequently leaders talk to us about how to get employees to change their behavior.  What we have seen is the “double benefit” of Work-Out experiences – in addition to identifying and implementing recommendations to improve business results, associates learn new ways to do their work.  A participant in a Work-Out about fleet maintenance told us a year after his Work-Out experience “If I came in tomorrow and we went back to the old way of working, I would quit.”  Now that’s sustained organizational change!

People support what they help create. In Work-Out, participants own their approved solutions. Instead of “selling” their good ideas to the rest of the organization, the organization gets involved in selecting the best approaches to improvement, making implementation go more smoothly and faster.

The Work-Out process is elegant in its simplicity – yet deceptively powerful on so many levels

• You can get traction quickly working on important problems or opportunities.
• You can increase associate involvement and ownership in generating solutions. The people closest to the work are called upon to create and own the solutions; thereby creating support and buy in.
• You can breakdown real (or imaginary) organization boundaries – between manufacturing and engineering, sales and marketing, field and headquarters –because you start to look at the process end-to-end and with a customer-focused perspective. Participants gain valuable perspectives on their jobs and learn about other processes within the company. Leaders can demonstrate a way of leading that engages people in a more transparent and interactive way and gives associates, those closest to the work, the power of being involved in decision-making.

Here’s how it works.

1. Leadership identifies a critical organization issue or problem.

2. A small group of people from several functional areas comes together for uninterrupted work time with the pressure of a deadline as a catalyst and the assistance of skilled facilitators to support their work.

3. The group works to develop and present recommendations it can implement.

4. Leadership hears their recommendations and gives a “Yes,” “No,” (and here is why) or “Further Study” and then empowers teams to implement approved recommendations.

5. The teams implement accepted recommendations.

6. The teams come back together at a predetermined time (usually 90-120 days later) to report their progress.

At its core, Work-Out is a means for driving cultural change. In the short term, you can increase efficiency, improve work processes, eliminate nonessential work, involve your people in the process and increase communication. Long term, it empowers your people, sustains productivity improvements, and, perhaps most importantly, creates true partnerships.

What has to happen?

Senior leadership has to support the Work-Out. Participants’ most common fear: “Senior management will never really let us do this.”

Planning is critical. A small group of folks has to spend a couple weeks crafting the question to be answered, recruiting the right people to participate and gathering relevant background information.

Skilled facilitators are needed. Teams need a facilitator who knows Work-Out, and is highly skilled in bringing cross-functional teams to a high-performance state. The facilitator ensures the Work-Out teams’ efforts are focused and efficient, completing specific Action Plans to be accomplished within 90 days. The group must feel free to disagree, discuss, explore and problem solve in a short, intense period.

Try Work-Out

If you want to quickly see results, try Work-Out. If you want to improve dialogue, remove barriers between functions and bust bureaucracy, try Work-Out. If your work group has been wrestling with an issue for some time or is struggling to improve its performance, try WorkOut.

In 2010 being able to move quickly to take advantage of emerging opportunities and to streamline processes differentiates recovery from continued struggles.  When considering your department or organization’s recovery strategy, consider working in Work-Out—it really works!

These are practices to follow wherever you fall on the employment spectrum – from ecstatically happy, to profoundly unemployed.

• Have a career roadmap
• Prepare your elevator speech
• Keep your resume current… and update it annually
• Foster a network outside your current workplace
• Have an internet presence

Have a career roadmap

“If you don’t know where you are going any path will do…” – Cheshire Cat to Alice in Alice in Wonderland

Many of my colleagues remember that in the earliest days of The Wunderlin Company we used Lewis Carroll’s writings in our work—his writings are so relevant to organizational and personal change, and enabled a nice play on my last name!  This particular quote is one that has always been a personal guiding principle.

Every person needs a lifetime career plan.  It doesn’t have to be detailed; you can simply plan by decade.  We know that careers roughly follow the decades of life—in our twenties, we experiment, build foundations, and find the work we are meant to do.  In our thirties we achieve, progress and continue to learn.  In our forties we consolidate our successes, solidify our skills.  In our fifties, we leverage our significant skills and life experiences, in our sixties we consider and transition to our next careers.

Wherever you are now, pay attention to the high-level matters: What have you learned?  What do you still need to learn? To what extent do you have an entrepreneurial itch you need to scratch? What are your feelings about the public and private sector?  What are the significant experiences you want—international work?  A stint in marketing?  A sabbatical to write a book?  To teach at some point?  Take time to discern what is important to you: Predictability? rewards tied directly to your work? Financial security?  Making a difference? Control of your work? Prestige?

From here, you can set out your overall roadmap for your career.  It is not about getting it right – we can’t predict the future.  It is about identifying what you desire.  Then as life unfolds, you will be better prepared to differentiate true opportunities from distractions.

Here are a couple of my favorite tools to assist clients in defining a career plan:
Personal Compass
If You Don’t Know Where You are Going, You’ll Probably End Up Somewhere Else

Prepare your elevator speech

Every week we meet new people, open new doors, and make new connections. When someone asks what you do, you have very little (less than 10 seconds) time to answer. You must introduce yourself and your capabilities in a succinct and compelling fashion.  Having an elevator speech is not a new concept; and it’s like getting enough exercise.  We all know we should do it, and can find many reasons we don’t!

An effective elevator speech is simple, memorable, concise, and it describes you very, very well.  Even if you are not in sales, and not looking for a job, as we walk through life we are making impressions.  It helps to leave a clear and positive one.

In drafting your elevator speech, think about: What are your unique combinations of skills and attributes?  What is the best reason for someone to remember you in a work setting?

You can find numerous elevator speech tools on the internet by googling the term.  I found one article that seems particularly helpful: The Elevator Speech is the Swiss Army Knife of Job Search Tools.

Keep a current resume…and update it annually

We never know when an unexpected opportunity is going to come our way…or when we are unexpectedly going to be in the job market.  In the past 12 months, I have had coffee with numerous folks who were looking for their next position.  Those who had a resume handy were several months ahead of those who had to start their job search by reflecting on their careers, remembering key accomplishments, then drafting and redrafting a resume.  The ones who had a current resume were ready to get started with networking.  Largely, they were also reemployed more quickly.

I recommend that once  a year you think back over the last year.  Write down your major accomplishments, note the professional development you did, update your objective, and shorten earlier sections to keep the resume to one page. I undertake this exercise every year between Christmas and New Year’s. It has been an enormously helpful exercise.

Foster a network outside of your workplace

If you should unfortunately find yourself looking for a job, that is not the best time to create a network.  What you need in a time like that is a robust network of people who already know you and with whom you have a relationship.  So even if you believe you will sail into a gentle retirement at age 80 and never need to look for work anywhere else, just in case, pay attention to who you know outside your current workplace. Find ways to stay connected with people you will be glad to know if/when you are seeking your next opportunity.  The parents from Little League, the guy you coached basketball with or who go to your church are certainly connections; but in a career context, may not be the highest value.

To what organizations do you belong?  Are you on a non-profit board?  Do you maintain contact with college and/or graduate school friends?  Remember, if Sheree hasn’t heard from you in 18 years and that first contact is an ask for an introduction, you may not get the full benefit of what she can do to help you.

Try to set an informal goal (say once a month) of being in a professional setting that enlarges your network. You will also find that many of these contacts can enrich your current worklife.

When you do meet a new person, be intentional about capturing their information in your Outlook address file or your address book.  Make a note about where you met them, and some impressions of that person.  If you contact them in two years and remember how much that person likes to fly fish or that they have an electrical engineering background, the connection will be stronger.

Have an Internet presence

Finally, if there is a chance you will be moving to another position in the next 24 months, you need to be on LinkedIn—with a strong informative profile, and with careful attention paid to the key words you use.  If you have a technical background and are a skilled salesperson, be sure your resume includes the words and phrases that will bring your profile forward.

Then make any connections you can to your old workplaces, colleges, and groups. There are a growing number of ways you can use a LinkedIn profile.  For example, my daughter is just starting a career in the theatre, so for her birthday this summer, I went to moo.com to get her some business cards.  It offers an option to include a link to her Linkedin profile!

The younger you are the more likely Facebook is an important part of your social network.  Twenty years from now, when today’s twenties are running organizations, Facebook’s true place will be clearly understood.  For now, most of the folks who are hiring don’t consider Facebook essential… many are slightly distrustful.  In addition, they sure aren’t fond of finding a favored candidate tagged in numerous drunken poses!  If you are looking for a position, and you must be on Facebook, make your Facebook page appropriate.  You will be checked out online; be cognizant!  Remove tags you wouldn’t want an employer to see, pay attention to the comments you make on yours and others walls.

Let me know what else you do to maintain your career bearings.

Have you ever wondered…

• Should you “friend” your boss on facebook? What about your boss’s boss?
• Who calls back when a cell call is “dropped”?
• Which ringtone should you select? And what does it say about you?
• Can you post a photo on your facebook page that was taken 10 years and 20 pounds ago?

On my bookshelf is a 1975 edition of “The New Emily Post’s Etiquette” and I actually pull it down and refer to it once or twice a year. In her introduction, Ms. Post tells us that manners are just as important to us now as they were to previous generations. She rightly claims, “manners evolve of their own accord, influenced by current lifestyle.” While Ms. Post died in 1960, she would be bemused by the manners dilemmas people encounter in 2009.

So, because Ms. Post is not around to arbitrate these questions, Wired Magazine has stepped up to the plate with extensive and highly entertaining answers to your most pressing new-age etiquette questions. Entitled: How to Behave: New Rules for Highly Evolved Humans, I read this article while on vacation last month and believe you will be entertained and pick up a couple useful pointers!

– Warren Buffet, 2008 Letter to Shareholders

Sounds awfully gloomy, doesn’t it? Reminds me of the ballad which begs hard times to “come no more” and made fresh by Bob Dylan as he strums and laments: “Tis the song, the sigh of the weary.” (Click here for video of Dylan’s rendition). As I talk with business owners and organization leaders I almost expect them to break out into the chorus: “Hard times, hard times come again no more.” What is one to do?

Last week I took two actions to help me survive these tough economic times. Both felt like positive steps forward. First, I made a conscious decision to limit the amount of news I listen to. Avoiding reality, you say? Shying away from the truth, you wonder? I prefer to think I am preserving the sense of balance that shrill pronouncements of defeat and ruin drown out. Yes, I still listen selectively to NPR, watch the national news and read the New York Times (albeit, I pick up the Style section before tackling the World in Review). But I’ve quit listening to the “talking heads” predicting gloom and doom at every turn. I don’t need that. Thank you.

The second thing I did was read two publications that helped me frame my thoughts about the economy: Warren Buffet’s 2008 Letter to Shareholders (22 single spaced pages) and renown business writer Ram Charan’s Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty (138 pages). I highly recommend both publications, but since I realize that many of my colleagues and clients are too busy to read even these useful publications, this post highlights two quotes from Buffet’s letter and a summary of Charan’s points with some added examples.  For leaders in the not-for-profit and public sector, I have also attempted to “translate” Charan’s guidance into your frame of reference.

Charan begins his book by noting, “Whether you lead a small group of people or a whole business unit or company, these next few weeks, months, and years will test you.”

In responding to that test, he advises that you transfer your attention to cash.  “Your focus must shift from the income statement to the balance sheet.  Protecting cash flow is the more important challenge.”  You know the three sources of cash in your organization—earned funds (or donated funds in the not-for-profit world); working capital invested in inventories and accounts receivable, and proceeds from the sale of assets.  Make maximizing the cash flow from these three streams your relentless focus.

Another important change is shifting your focus from growth to gaining cash efficient market share. What Charan is referring to is that growth your organization can attain without excessive outlays of your precious store of cash. And, shrinking to providing only those products and services that provide cash will be a mandate. “Eliminate the rest,” he implores – that means shrinking will present opportunities to simplify your processes and reduce the layers of management.  In the end you will have fewer customers, fewer products, fewer facilities, fewer people, fewer suppliers –and a stronger [organization].”

In this new environment leaders need to dive into the details of operating their organizations in unprecedented ways.  Charan calls this “hands on, heads in”.  In adopting this leadership stance, we will all adopt a more intense approach to managing our companies.  We will communicate more with sales or development people, field people, our customers, and our employees who will need an ongoing balance of information from you about both the challenges of the current reality, and your optimism that your organization will come out in 2010 or 2011 healthy and strong.  The cycle for measurement and rewards will compress. Charan advises, “You have to increase your frequency of control, setting targets on a quarterly, monthly or even weekly basis.  Aggressive actions and decisions build optimism and confidence—your own and others’.”

The Six Essential Leadership Traits for Hard Times
Charan argues that the new economic reality changes the attributes leaders must have for success.  Think about your work, your decisions and your leadership since September.  Which of the following are your strengths?  Which do you need to intentionally add to your repertoire?

Honesty and credibility. Do the folks in your organization absolutely trust you to tell them the truth, even when it is a difficult truth?

The ability to inspire. How skilled are you in finding the compelling strands in your organization’s or department’s future and knitting them into a story behind which your folks can align?

Real-time connection with reality. To what extent are you getting real-time information from your customers, clients or donors?  Basing decisions from even January’s information could be very misleading

Realism tempered with optimism. How balanced are you in your communication and decision-making?  Have you unwittingly become the prophet of an apocalyptic future?  Or are you clinging too hard to the belief that this will all go away in 90 days?  How skilled are you at finding that balance?

Managing with intensity. What is your personal energy level these days?  To what extent are you modeling “Hands on, Heads In?”

Boldness in building for the future. What investments are you making with limited resources to ensure your organization’s or department’s strength when the recovery does kick in? Again from Buffet’s most recent Letter to Shareholders:

“Amid this bad news, however, never forget that our country has faced far worse travails in the past. In the 20th Century alone, we dealt with two great wars (one of which we initially appeared to be losing); a dozen or so panics and recessions; virulent inflation that led to a 211⁄2% prime rate in 1980; and the Great Depression of the 1930s, when unemployment ranged between 15% and 25% for many years. America has had no shortage of challenges. Without fail, however, we’ve overcome them. In the face of those obstacles – and many others – the real standard of living for Americans improved nearly seven-fold during the 1900s, while the Dow Jones Industrials rose from 66 to 11,497. Compare the record of this period with the dozens of centuries during which humans secured only tiny gains, if any, in how they lived. Though the path has not been smooth, our economic system has worked extraordinarily well over time. It has unleashed human potential as no other system has, and it will continue to do so. America’s best days lie ahead.”

The balance of Charan’s Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty is organized around the actions, skills and decisions required for the major functions in most organizations, many of which build on the concepts already outlined.

Despite my swearing off (or maybe weaning off) of gloomy news programs, I did catch a recent NPR report (click here to listen) on the Arizona Diamondbacks which illustrated the success organizations can achieve in implementing Charan’s approaches (although as far as I know, Charan and the Diamondbacks are not in contact!) The Diamondbacks have lowered their cash breakeven by implementing a player acquisition strategy that keeps them significantly under the salary cap.  They forgo marquis players with back-loaded ten-year contracts in the hundreds of millions in favor of talented but lesser known players. They are adjusting their products and services to suit the times—you can now bring your own food to the baseball park, or for $25 you can sit on the suite level and enjoy their All You Can Eat Buffet.   Their General Manager, Derrick Hall notes their philosophy is “One Fan at a Time”.  By maintaining this highly personalized approach to customer satisfaction, their season ticket sales remain strong.  Hall noted that they are working with their season ticket holders to define packages for next season that fit their reduced circumstances—such as partial or split season tickets—and keep them coming to the ball park.

I hope this post has inspired at least one or two new approaches or tweaks to your leadership that will make you more effective, and more confident, and your organization more successful during these most difficult days. I’d love to hear from you about what is working for you and what you are doing to survive. Please post your comments as a REPLY in the box below.

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We are currently revamping The Wunderlin Company website and blog to make the format and content more engaging for our readers. We will let you know when it is up and running and available for your perusal. In the meantime, you can still visit us at www.wunderlin.com. or contact Karen at kw@wunderlin.com.