I have been absent for some time from this blog, in large part because I have been consumed for the past several months with holding space for people going through big changes in their lives.
This has not been easy. Holding space for change never is.
What has been confusing and confounding to me in this process is WHY I've struggled so much with what I'm doing. Helping people who are in the midst of a change is the core of my work. I've been doing it for years. Why has it suddenly become harder somehow?
This morning I ran across a fantastic article by Heather Plett on holding liminal space. She perfectly describes why things are shifting for me now and it helped several things click into place.
Most of what I do is connected to helping people navigate changes in career and work. In the "professional" realm, we are very task-focused. What actions do I need to take? What is on my "to-do" list? How do I make and implement the right plan?
So we approach professional transitions from a place of wanting to know what we should DO and tend to constantly search for the RIGHT ACTION to take us toward our goals. We may pay some lip service to the emotions that go with these transitions, but we don't tend to spend a lot of time on the emotional aspect because to be "professional" is to have control of our emotions, especially any emotions that threaten to become "messy."
In the work I'm doing with long-term unemployed individuals (unemployed for more than 6 months), this plays out as an obsessive focus on revising the resume, creating a great LinkedIn profile, finding the hiring manager, etc.
In the work I'm doing with startup entrepreneurs (many of whom are also long-term unemployed), they are consumed with creating a website, marketing to customers, getting that first deal in the door.
There is a place for action, no doubt, and I spend a lot of time helping people figure out the right actions to take. There are ways to conduct a job search that are more or less likely to result in success and I can share those. There are ways to start up a business that are more or less effective and I can also share information about that.
But this is where I've been experiencing the challenge.
I'm sharing the information, showing people the "right ways" to do things, but many people are still stuck.
I've encountered this before, of course, and I've certainly worked with people's emotions about change. But the sheer volume of people I'm encountering who struggle with being stuck has forced me to really dig more deeply into what's going on.
What I'm realizing is that there's change and then there's CHANGE. And what qualifies as "change" (with a lower-case "c") and what qualifies as CHANGE really has to do with whether or not this is puts someone in a "liminal" space.
As Heather describes it in her post:
Liminal originates from the Latin word “limen” which means “a threshold”. In anthropology, liminality is “the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete. During a ritual’s liminal stage, participants ‘stand at the threshold’ between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which the ritual establishes.” (from Wikipedia)
A liminal space, then, is a period in which something (social hierarchy, culture, belief, tradition, identity, etc.) has been dissolved and a new thing has not yet emerged to take its place. It’s that period of uncertainty, ambiguity, restlessness, fear, discomfort, and anguish. It’s the space between, when a trapeze artist let’s go of one swing and doesn’t yet know whether she’ll be able to reach the other swing. There is nothing shallow about liminal space.
In the article Grieving as Sacred Space, Richard Rohr describes liminal space as “…a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but where the biblical God is always leading them. It is when you have left the “tried and true” but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are finally out of the way. It is when you are in between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. It is no fun.”
The people who struggle the most to implement their plans are dealing with a liminal CHANGE. They are moving in some very deep ways into the unknown (often against their will) and they don't yet know where they are going to land.
But because this change is happening in a professional context, there is less recognition of the nature of this change and fewer resources to help address it. We understand on some level that the death of a loved one or a divorce or even getting married are liminal events and we make some space for emotions in the personal realm. But in the professional realm, I find that we have less awareness of and compassion for liminal experiences.
Here's why. Liminal transitions are deep and gut-wrenching. They push our personal buttons and often bring out our most feared emotions. They bring us face to face with our own raw vulnerability, self-doubt, fear, shame and rage. We are also confronted with our own dreams for ourselves and whether or not we have the willingness to make hard choices.
Liminal changes make us seriously question who we are and what we value. They challenge our marriages, our friendships, our role in our families and even our role in our communities and the culture at large.
How do you go through this kind of transition and remain "professional"? You don't. You can't.
Liminal transitions are by there very nature messy and emotional, so pretending that this change is simply about having the right resume or creating a good business plan is ludicrous and damaging. It leaves people isolated and alone and believing that there's something wrong with THEM because they can't just move forward.
Liminal transitions are about a changing sense of self and anytime we must change our identities in deep ways, we are bound to resist and to struggle. We will always have messy emotions. It is the nature of the beast.
So now I find myself intensely engaged with looking for ways to acknowledge these liminal changes in a work setting and for ways to support people in a deeper way as they travel through this space. I feel that we're doing tremendous damage to people when we fail to address the fact that liminal transitions are qualitatively different from other kinds of change and our insistence on keeping work-related changes "professional," is a big problem.
I'm playing with some different ideas for working with these issues that I'll be sharing in the coming weeks, but also would love your input and thoughts on this topic.
Last Friday's Work-out-Loud Roundup got away from me, but I'm back in the saddle again this week to share what I've been learning . . .
I'm running a 9-month Leadership Academy for a local Chamber of Commerce and yesterday's topic was continuous learning and learning from failures and mistakes.
Inspired by some reading I'd been doing on the idea of a failure resume, including this article and this example, I had participants develop their own failure resumes, writing up what they perceived to be their failures in both their professional and their personal lives and what they learned as a result of their "failures."
Then they paired up to talk about the experience of writing the failure resume and what they learned from themselves in the process.
In our debrief on the experience, a few insights emerged:
Although a few people in the group found it to be a "depressing" exercise, most said that it was cathartic and that it gave them a different perspective on what they'd previously perceived as failures. They also identified some key areas for growth for themselves as a result of going through the process.
If you do this for yourself, I highly encourage you to do it with at least one other person so you can discuss your resumes after the exercise. My group agreed that it was the combination of reflecting on failures and then sharing them with each other that made this so valuable.
On Tuesday, I had the honor of being part of a Roundtable discussion with the US Secretary of Labor, Tom Perez, convened by the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.
The Roundtable was part of the Heldrich Center's New Start Career Network, where I'm working as a volunteer career coach and as the "coach of coaches," supporting the other volunteers. This is a project to support workers over age 45 who have been unemployed for 6 months or more.
We had several job seekers at the Roundtable who shared their experiences of being out of work, teetering on the edge of homelessness, draining their retirement and other savings, and dealing with the loss of identity and self esteem that is a huge part of being unemployed in America.
They used words like "devastating" and "hopeless" to describe their experiences and I was struck once again by the recognition that job loss and being unemployed are forms of trauma that people are having to deal with on a regular basis.
One thing I mentioned in my comments to the Secretary was that we are quick to overwhelm people with advice on what to do to find a new job, but we are NOT generally acknowledging the extent to which people have been traumatized--by their job loss, the period of unemployment that follows and, in many cases, the experience of being in a toxic work environment that often precedes job loss.
Here's a definition of trauma that I've found useful:
By that definition, job loss and unemployment are forms of trauma. Yet most of us are not recognizing this.
Compounding the issue for many people is that they may have experienced other forms of trauma throughout their lives, so that losing their jobs and then being unemployed for a long period of time becomes yet one more trauma they are ill-equipped to deal with.
Then add in the fact that many people are dealing with multiple lay-offs--one participant in the Roundtable has been laid off 7 times in 15 years! Each time, this is a fresh trauma that is added on, often with devastating emotional, cognitive, social and physical impacts.
What I'm finding in my work with people who have lost their jobs is that when we fail to address unemployment as the trauma it is for people, the job search tends to drag on even more because there are unresolved feelings of shame, grief and anger that tend to sabotage the job seeker's best efforts and intentions.
My online course on Recovering from Unemployment has been one of my attempts to address this issue, but the conversation on Tuesday has me thinking about this topic again and what needs to be done to provide people with opportunities to process the emotions around being unemployed.
A big part of this will be restoring a sense of community and belonging. As Brene Brown has pointed out, feelings of shame cause us to isolate ourselves and to feel unworthy of connection, so when we we feel ashamed, we often withdraw. This isolation further feeds our shame and it can create a serious downward spiral.
I'm also drawn to explore some strategies from the art therapy world--how can we use the visual arts, theatre, poetry, writing, etc. to help people make sense of their experiences so they can move on?
One of my favorite writer/thinkers, Umair Haque published a fantastic post on Friday about what he calls "Mega Problem Denial Syndrome" or MPDS:
Let me introduce you to the biggest little problem in leadership: Mega-Problem Denial Syndrome (MPDS). As often in life, it’s the little problems that turn out to be trickier and more troubling than the big ones—like postponing having that troublesome lump scanned because you’re too busy/scared/lazy. Certain challenges may seem distant and therefore small today, yet the pervasive hesitance to even acknowledge them is standing squarely in the way of leadership.
This post is important for two reasons. First, he puts his finger on how MPDS is at work when we're talking about the futures of Millenials and (to some extent) Gen-Exers:
Millennials are the first generation in history—not just American history, but that of the modern advanced world—that will experience lower living standardsthan their parents. They won’t enjoy retirements, savings, pensions, careers, steady raises, security, stability, assets, homeownership (and maybe even working democracies, societies, a planet) on a par with those that their parents’ generation enjoyed.
Think I'm overstating the case? Congrats! You just fell prey to Mega-Problem Denial Syndrome. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the economic damage done by the Great Recession was on the order of a historic war, catastrophe, or disaster. That damage is like a disabling illness, not a cold: It doesn’t "go away," it leaves societies on lower trajectories of human potential. And it's the young who are going to suffer that loss the most. They're already on lower career trajectories and will earn and save lessfor life.
Anyone crushed by debt yet forced to work increasingly insane hours for comparatively worse wages (often in jobs and industries that contribute to the inequality whose consequences they suffer) is not free in any meaningful sense of the word.
But you’ll hear precious few business leaders discussing that, let alone doing anything about it. Instead, the prevailing narrative is that the economy’s recovering, and everything’s going to be just fine and dandy, thank you very much. That’s not leadership; that’s an alternate reality built on delusional wish fulfillment.
From a career perspective, Millenials and Gen-Exers are living in a world that is not currently optimized for their success. I think it's important to recognize this and start talking about what we need to do to make changes.
The second reason this post is important is because MPDS is at work in virtually field of human endeavor. Every organization, every industry, every occupation has those "small problems" that, when ignored or not recognized, will add up to something huge later on.
Our greatest opportunities may lie in our ability to call out and acknowledge these issues--can we recognize these "small problems" and can we see how they may have huge positive or negative impacts in the future? Are we able to describe these issues in a way that allows others to recognize them and so that we might actually harness the will to make changes?
To the extent that we have opportunities, they may lie in our ability to recognize and acknowledge those issues that everyone else is denying even exist.
My friend and colleague Melissa Rowe of Capture Greatness keeps a list she calls her "Oh sh*t, I DID that!" list where she captures all of her accomplishments for the year.
Melissa does this as an annual exercise, but as another friend, Rebecca Fabiano pointed out earlier this week, spending some time at the end of each month thinking about this question can be a great strategy for giving you more immediate feedback on whether or not you're achieving your goals.
It's also an excellent way to feel a sense of progress, which can sometimes be sorely lacking when we get buried in our list of "To Do's" each day.
When I look back over my January list of accomplishments, here are a few:
I also managed to stick with my plans to end my work days by reflecting on what happened that day and new questions or insights that emerged for me, which was an accomplishment in being disciplined, let me tell you!
Putting the list together was pretty easy--I looked back over my calendar and my daily journal reflections to pull it together.
My plan is to add this to my Yearbook journal for the month of January so it will be there for my year-end reflections--or when I need to remind myself that I do actually accomplish some things.
Every Friday, I'm posting about things I'm learning and sharing the resources and information I found most valuable during the week.
I'm currently reading Appreciative Leadership: Focus on What Works to Drive Winning Performance and Build a Thriving Organization and finding it to be a wealth of wonderful ideas for bringing appreciative inquiry into my daily practice.
In setting my development goals for February, I've added these two ideas from the book to my list:
My colleague and co-conspirator in the Leadership Lab, Rebecca Fabiano, had 6 hours to kill on a train during the recent blizzard that blasted the East Coast. She spent part of that time pulling together this newsletter where she listed all of the listservs and newsletters she subscribes to in order to stay relevant in her field. What a fantastic resource for the people she's working with! Imagine if you and other colleagues did something similar. . .
Rebecca's newsletter reminded me of this article from Aja Frost that I'd seen a few months ago on the career benefits of starting a weekly personal career newsletter. Aja recommends using TinyLetter (a Mailchimp product) that is a free and lightweight way to share what you're working on, your ideas, thoughts, etc.
How could you jumpstart your career aspirations if you started a newsletter like this?
As part of my goal in January to do more "Working out Loud," I'm experimenting with doing a Friday Roundup, sharing a few thoughts, links, etc. that have emerged from my work during the week that I think could be useful to you too. This week I had several holy sh*t moments related to how work is changing that I wanted to share. . .
OK, I'm behind on my reading. Martin Ford's The Rise of the Robots was published back in May 2015 and it's been on my "to read" list for awhile, but I hadn't gotten around to it until I was on Amtrak Monday morning, headed to a Policy Forum where I was leading a breakout on "New Ways of Working."
All I can say is "Holy Sh*t."
I've been talking for awhile about how technology is impacting work (Part One, Part Two and Part Three) and that we all need to be looking at how AI and robotics (not to mention nanotechnology and the Internet of Things) are going to change or even eliminate our jobs. But Ford lays things out so cogently, so persuasively--and the picture isn't pretty, even for people who have thought their jobs were safe.
He writes, for example, about Narrative Sciences Quill application, which can analyze staggering amounts of data, identify patterns, relationships, themes, etc. and then write a report that is indistinguishable from that written by a human!!
Or there's WorkFusion, software that can analyze projects and determine which tasks can be immediately automated, which can be crowd-sourced to sites like Elance, which need to be done by in-house professionals. It can then automatically post freelance job openings to Elance or Craigslist and manage recruitment of freelancers and assigning of tasks to the freelancers. This is without human intervention!
WorkFusion is constantly monitoring the productivity and work of the freelancers, learning new ways that the work might then be automated further. Even as these freelancers are doing the work, they are also training the software that will eventually lead to their replacement!
This is happening RIGHT NOW, people--not 20 years in the future. And these are just a few examples that Ford lays out in his book.
Clearly this is going to create some big changes for so many jobs!
My next "holy sh*t" moment was this article from Wired Magazine on how the Deep Mind system had beaten a top human player at the game of Go, which is exponentially more complex to play than chess. This is an example of the "deep learning" that Ford talks about in his book that is leading to major breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence.
The technical stuff is interesting to me, but maybe not to you. What is important to understand here is that this is another big breakthrough in terms of machines learning how to think like humans. And, again, that has big implications for many careers.
My last holy sh*t moment came when a friend forwarded this report to me. Here are some highlights:
One of the ongoing conversations I have with people--both unemployed and currently employed--is about that desire to find the next great full-time "permanent" job. It's clear that this is not the direction in which businesses are moving. Increasingly, they are looking for "on-demand" professionals who will increase flexibility and lower their labor costs.
Between sophisticated software, robotics and the "on-demand" workforce, companies can make record profits with far fewer employees. This is why we're looking at the death of jobs and the reality that America has hit "peak jobs" .
None of this is new--it's a process that's been happening for awhile. It's just that these three things hit me in the same week, providing yet another powerful reminder that we need to be thinking differently about the role of work in our society where we believe that every able-bodied adult should have a job. What happens when there are fewer and fewer jobs available, especially jobs that pay a living wage?
One of the videos we're using for the Leadership Lab is this TedTalk from Roselinde Torres on what it takes to be a great leader.
In it, she identifies 3 questions that 21st century leaders should be asking themselves that I think apply to all of us who want to take charge of our careers.
Torres says:
Great leaders are not heads down, they see around corners, shaping the future not just reacting to it.
She suggests that we need to always be asking ourselves these questions:
These questions are particularly important to our work world. So much is changing so quickly that if we are not acting in more future-oriented ways, we are likely to be left behind. It's critical that we develop our capacity to "see around corners" if we want to continue to grow in our careers.
Here, we need to be asking ourselves about our capacity to develop relationships with people who are very different than we are. We have a strong tendency to associate with people just like us, but our best work and life happens when we are able to have diverse connections and are able to nurture relationships with people who see things differently than we do.
What a fantastic question!
Part of what can make us less resilient, less able to adapt to changing conditions is our inability to let go of what has made us successful in the past. This question invites us to be aware of how past practices that worked well in one environment may not be helping us in a new situation. Too often we become wedded to what has always worked and it becomes impossible for us to move forward because we cling to habits that no longer serve us.
I invite you reflect on these 3 questions as they relate to your career and life--what emerges for you in the process?
As part of my goal in January to do more "Working out Loud," I'm experimenting with doing a Friday Roundup, sharing a few thoughts, links, etc. that have emerged from my work during the week that I think could be useful to you too.
Earlier this week, I ran across this article from Thomas Koulopoulous on a 30-Day plan for disrupting yourself. It outlines a simple and fun process for doing something different every day to get yourself in the habit of moving yourself out of some of your ingrained habits and patterns.
In this process, you are experimenting with both inconsequential habits (like using your non-dominant hand to brush your teeth) and meaningful behaviors (like reading a career-related book for 20 minutes one morning).
Doing these activities is going to be on my February goal list. I also think it would be a great exercise to do with a team or mastermind group. For the meaningful behaviors, you could work together as a team to identify some different things to experiment with or you could each work on your own to come up with some activities you want to push yourself to try. Each week, you could then talk with your colleagues about how it's going and what shifts you might be noticing.
Although I'm a big believer in establishing some good habits that eliminate a lot of daily decisions to free up brain space for creativity, I also think that disruption as a habit makes a lot of sense, so it's something I want to experiment with doing.
One of my ongoing projects is a Business Leadership Academy I run for a local Chamber of Commerce. Our sessions are scheduled from 9-3 and I try to have a mix of activities going on to keep people's energy levels up.
In yesterday's session, around 2 p.m., the energy in the room shifted. About half the group started shutting down and you could feel things just get heavier. A few people tried to help me keep things moving, but we just had too many others who were disengaged.
I made a decision awhile ago that when I'm facilitating things, I'm not going to keep going because "we have material to cover." It's a waste of time for everyone. So I cut our session short yesterday and sent everyone on their way.
One of the participants came up to me afterward to thank me. He said "I really appreciate that you ended things rather than insisting on keeping us here. I've been in too many meetings and training sessions where people just insist on continuing and it's the most painful thing about working sometimes."
I take this kind of monitoring of energy and knowing when to stop for granted--it's become something I'm always scanning for in group work. The conversation made me realize, though, that not everyone does this.
Knowing when to stop something is a skill. How do you do with knowing when it's time to end something?
I've been working with NYCETC to put together their annual Policy Forum, designing the breakout sessions, putting together a lunchtime discussion based on appreciative inquiry and planning for how they will document learning throughout the conference. I ran across this great chart that I wanted to share:
I also wanted to share the Appreciative Questions we'll be using during lunch at the Forum. They focus on:
Our plan is to have these questions at all of the tables and we'll be inviting people to discuss one or more of these with their group as a different way to engage with each other as they are eating. I'll let you know how this goes in next Friday's Roundup.
Over the past few weeks, some workplace trends have been showing up in my feeds that I think should be of particular concern to women.
PBS Newshour reports that age discrimination for women at work is now starting as early as 35. The older you get, the fewer callbacks you get.
Employers report that their concerns about "older" workers range from "an inability to deal with change," to "less active," "less technologically savvy," and "more likely to be absent from work." These are the concerns they've cited for years when talking about the 50+ crowd, but for women, it's now trickling down even younger.
The Kansas City Fed reports that women over 50 have been the hardest hit by long-term unemployment, which is defined as being out of work 27 weeks or more.
The World Economic Forum released a report, The Future of Jobs with a section on The Industry Gender Gap. With current trends, we are on track to lose 7.1 million jobs--largely in white collar administrative types of positions, more often held by women--and to gain 2 million jobs in computer, engineering and mathematical fields---a net loss of 5 million jobs.
In absolute terms, men will lose 3 jobs for every job gained. But women will lose FIVE jobs for every job gained. The loss of 5 million jobs is bad for everyone, but it's worse for women.
Traditionally male-dominated fields are taking on new-found importance in the new economy and unless there are big changes in women entering these fields, hiring trends, and employer work environments, women are likely to miss out on the major shifts coming to the economy.
These trends don't paint a rosy picture for women at work. I'm particularly disturbed by how age discrimination is dovetailing with gender, especially if this discrimination is starting even earlier. Women already face a rough road in terms of wage parity, access to opportunities and career advancement. When you add in age discrimination as a factor, that's a double whammy.
As part of my goal in January to do more "Working out Loud," I'm experimenting with doing a Friday Roundup, sharing a few thoughts, links, etc. that have emerged from my work during the week that I think could be useful to you too.
After I wrote my post a few weeks ago on using a Yearbook Journal to set goals and track progress, my colleague Rebecca Fabiano and I spent some time creating our own yearbooks. We facilitate a monthly meeting for youth development professionals called the Sandbox and decided that this would be a great topic for our January meeting.
(Note--here are follow-up links and resources from the session you might be interested in related to planning, etc. )
As part of the session, we had people sit in small groups to discuss these questions:
My group was only able to get to a couple of these in the 20 minutes we allotted, but in that short time, each of us walked away with a new idea we wanted to try.
For example, one of the questions we discussed was "Who else is involved in your planning/goal-setting and who do you want to involve?"
This led one person to share that she was using Cozi.com to coordinate family to-do lists and to get her kids to share and reflect on some of the highlight of the year.
Another woman in my group said that she has set up a jar in her kitchen where she and her family were writing down great things that happened to them during the week and then putting those in the jar for them to look at and remember their year. We talked about how this idea might also be used within their department and with some of the teens they are working with.
What struck me was how taking a few minutes to talk about some of our personal practices was so inspiring and engaging for all of us. We each felt like we'd walked away with some actionable ideas and were excited about the different possibilities that came up.
One of my current projects is working with the New Start Career Network, a Heldrich Center/Rutgers University initiative to help people 45+ who are unemployed for 6 months or more. I'm acting both as a volunteer career/job search coach and as a coach for the other volunteer coaches.
One of the things that happens a lot when we're coaching people in a job search is a big focus on informational stuff--how to write a resume, how to create a great LinkedIn profile, how to answer specific interview questions, etc.
But the thing is, while this can be helpful, often the real hurdle that people are dealing with is their own self-confidence, which has taken a beating from the rejection that is so much a part of job search for anyone who is unemployed, but especially for people who have been out of work for awhile.
I've also found that people who have been trapped in dysfunctional, toxic workplaces have similar issues. They are so beaten down. Their inability to make a move isn't because they lack information. It's because they they have lost touch with the strong, competent person they once were.
This week I experimented with posting 3 appreciative interview questions on the blog, hoping to invite some conversation. I got a number of "re-tweets" and "likes" via social media, but no uptake on the discussion.
When I posted the questions, I guessed that this would be the case, but I still had hopes for a different outcome. I suspect that the questions might have felt too long and involved, that people might have bookmarked them, thinking they might come back to them, and then moved on to the next thing.
Or maybe we are just so used to looking for the negative in our lives, we're not even sure what to do when we're asked to think about the best of our experiences.
No answers here. Just more questions.
This one is in my Yearbook and we'll be using it in the Leadership Lab.
Godin wisdom: "Ten questions for work that matter" | #careers #leadership | https://t.co/QveiXklDC7
— Scott Woodard (@ScottAWoodard) January 11, 2016
I keep talking about the impact of technology on jobs. . .
3 tech innovations changing the workforce - driverless 18-wheelers, articles by robojournalists, bricklaying robots pic.twitter.com/6DE30q2Bnt
— pammoran (@pammoran) January 15, 2016
The Best Leaders are Constant Learners by Kenneth Mikkelsen and Harold Jarche
Reinvention and relevance in the 21st century instead draw on our ability to adjust our way of thinking, learning, doing and being. Leaders must get comfortable with living in a state of continually becoming, a perpetual beta mode. Leaders that stay on top of society’s changes do so by being receptive and able to learn. In a time where the half-life of any skill is about five years, leaders bear a responsibility to renew their perspective in order to secure the relevance of their organizations.
So these are a few things from my week.
This week I'm posting positive questions from the Encyclopedia of Positive Questions by Dianna Whitney and I'm inviting you to respond to those questions via comments so we can gather positive stories of our career growth and leadership.
When work is in service to a larger purpose, it is life-giving and compelling. People want to contribute. They get great satisfaction from knowing that their work and their organization are positive forces in the world.
As we've been doing with the previous questions, drop me a line in comments to share your answer. Or talk with a colleague or friend and then share what happened in that conversation. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Join Rebecca Fabiano and I tonight at 7 p.m. (EST) on Blab when we'll be talking Leadership 2016 Resolutions. How do you want to grow as a leader this year? What are your goals and how do you plan to get there? What are your favorite resources for leadership growth? It will be a fun, interesting conversation--we hope you can be there!
This week I'm posting positive questions from the Encyclopedia of Positive Questions by Dianna Whitney and I'm inviting you to respond to those questions via comments so we can gather positive stories of our career growth and leadership.
In a changing world, competitive advantages goes to those organizations and individuals that can change, grow or learn fasters than others. When at their best, organizations embrace continuous learning and become learning organizations in which people continuously challenges themselves to move out of their comfort zone, think in new ways and acquire new knowledge and experiment with different ways of working.
Continuous learning creates an exciting work environment, full of creative possibilities for the organization and its members. It stimulates people to go beyond the usual to discover and create better, more financially and socially effective ways of doing things.
If this question seems like too much, respond to just one aspect of it in comments. Let's get out of discussions of deficits and learn from what's positive and strong in our lives.
Join Rebecca Fabiano and I tomorrow, January 14, at 7 p.m. (EST) on Blab when we'll be talking Leadership 2016 Resolutions. How do you want to grow as a leader this year? What are your goals and how do you plan to get there? What are your favorite resources for leadership growth? It will be a fun, interesting conversation--we hope you can be there!
In our work and careers (and in life, for that matter), we tend to focus on what David Cooperrider calls "Deficit Discussions." We ask questions about what's not working or what's wrong and generally treat everything as a problem to be solved.
For sure this is how I see so many of us approach our career planning. We tend to think about it most when we feel dissatisfied or when external forces like a lay-off force us to consider what we might do next.
This week, I want to invite you to join me in exploring the best in your career--what gives you life and energy? What do you want MORE of?
For the next few days, I'm going to post a positive question from the Encyclopedia of Positive Questions by Dianna Whitney and I'm going to invite you to respond to that question via comments so that we can gather stories of positive career experiences and learn together about what gives life to our work.
I also want to suggest that this would be a fantastic way to connect with friends or colleagues--taking 30 minutes or so to interview each other, using these questions.
So here's the first question.
In today's rapidly changing environments, an organization's success depends on the learning capacity of its members. In successful organizations career development is a responsibility shared between the organization and its employees. Career coaching, training and opportunities for advancement demonstrate the organization's value for career development. When people are committed to career development, they are in a mode of continuous learning about their job and about themselves. They focus on their unique gifts and talents and their contribution to the organization. As people develop, they have more to offer their team and the organization. Everyone benefits from learning.
If responding to all 3 parts of this question feels like too much, pick just one aspect and respond to that. Or talk with someone else about it and then let me know how the conversations went via comments. I'm looking forward to hearing from you!
Join Rebecca Fabiano and I this Thursday, January 14, at 7 p.m. (EST) on Blab when we'll be talking Leadership 2016 Resolutions. How do you want to grow as a leader this year? What are your goals and how do you plan to get there? What are your favorite resources for leadership growth? It will be a fun, interesting conversation--we hope you can be there!
As part of my goal in January to do more "Working out Loud," I'm experimenting with doing a Friday Roundup, sharing a few thoughts, links, etc. that have emerged from my work during the week that I think could be useful to you too. So here goes:
I started work this week with a new client, FNC Philly. Over the next year, we'll be working together to help them build from their positive core and strengthen their partnerships and relationships within the community.
One thing they are doing that I LOVE is using Appreciative Inquiry as the basis for their performance evaluations. This means lots of open questions, like:
Imagine how your work life would change if these were the kinds of questions you were discussing in a "performance review"?
You may not be lucky enough to work at an organization that asks these kinds of questions, but you can certainly use them yourself as part of your own career/leadership planning process.
As Rebecca Fabiano and I get ready to launch the Leadership Lab on January 30 (Only 4 slots left at this point, so sign up if you want to join us!), we wanted to host some online conversations on how people are setting their leadership goals for 2016 and what resources they're using, connections they're making, etc.
We had our first session on Tuesday and got into some really interesting discussions about owning your identity as a leader (many of us don't) and the role that serendipity can play in your leadership growth. We also gathered some of our favorite reads and resources--you can find them here.
We'll be hosting another session through Blab on January 14 at 7 p.m EST so if you want to join us, you can subscribe to the broadcast here or just go to that link next Thursday at 7 p.m.
Six Million Missing Jobs--The Georgetown Center for Education and Workforce has published a report indicating that since the Recession, we still have a deficit of 6 million jobs. It's the worst for people with a HS diploma or less, but even college grads still have big problems.
And nearly 1/3 of workers are temporary, contract or freelance--another reason I'm always pushing the multiple income stream approach to your career.
The Company You Work for Is Not Your Friend--I LOVED this LifeHacker article. Don't get me wrong. There are great, wonderful people in every organization. But when push comes to shove, most organizations are going to be focused on their survival and success as an organization, NOT on your life and career.
Sometimes I think we need reminders about this because I see SO many people who sacrifice and work their tails off for their companies, only to find that in doing this, they've forgotten themselves. Then when the hammer drops and they're laid off or troubles start up, not only do they have to deal with the associated practical problems, there's this huge sense of betrayal--like how could they DO this to me?
This article is a good reminder to have more balance.
As Rebecca Fabiano and I continue to work on launching the Leadership Lab, I've been doing a lot of thinking about how I have some bad habits that get in the way of how I lead in my life and work. One of these is how I plan and organize things.
As I reflected on 2015 over the holiday break, it became clear to me that I've fallen into the trap of being too reactive about things. Most months, I was focused on just getting through all the tasks on my "To Do" list, many of which were probably not even things I needed to do. I've been caught up in doing things right, rather than in making sure that I'm really doing the right things.
There are a lot of problems with this approach--the biggest one being that I always feel frazzled and all over the place, which means I'm not really doing my best work. I also find that other people's priorities tend to dominate when I'm in this reactive mode. And I'm less reflective and focused on learning. None of these are good for me personally or professionally.
I know I'm not alone in this--it's how many of us approach our work--so I thought it might be helpful if I shared some of the thought process and approach I'm trying out as I move into January 2016.
Although I love using digital strategies for a lot of my work, when it comes to planning and reflecting, I still love pen and paper.
I've experimented with using composition books and sketch books for capturing ideas, notes, plans, etc. but the biggest problem I have with this strategy is that things aren't very well organized. Notes related to a particular project or idea session can be scattered throughout my books and using post-its to mark different sections quickly gets out of hand.
I decided to experiment this year with using the Staples Arc series of notebooks because I like how easily I can add, remove and re-arrange pages.
I can also add in calendar pages, task lists, pocket dividers, and zippered pockets. I invested in the hole punch as well so that I can add just about anything I want to my book, including note cards, drawings, unlined paper (which I love), customized covers and sections, etc.
My verbal explanation may not give you the best picture of why I chose this particular notebook. This video is part of what convinced me to try it out:
I invested in one notebook for the Yearbook I want to maintain for 2016 and then I got the All-in-One Notebook as my daily planner.
This year I'm trying out the plastic covers. If I like the system, I may invest in the leather bound versions next year.
This is how I set up the planner:
This is most definitely a work in progress. It's possible that as I continue to use the planner, I'll see that I need new sections and that other sections aren't working as well for me. But for now, this is where I'm starting.
I used the 2-page January Planning Spread to set my goals for this month. I have been experimenting with doing more 30-day plans and overall I think the process works better in helping me maintain both a short-term focus on getting things done, but then also looking for bigger themes and experimenting with new ideas.
This is how it looks:
I started out by listing the major projects I have going on right now in the left column. I color-coded some of them with flags so I can easily find those sections in my notebook.
Then I moved into setting some loose goals for myself. Right now, I'm not doing "SMART" goals (that may come). I'm more interested in looking at where I want to put my time and energy, so that's how I approached it.
One thing I noticed in looking at my month ahead is that I'm starting work with several new clients and/or beginning new projects for some current clients. The theme of "Beginnings" really stood out for me, so one of my goals is to really focus on "how to begin well." I made some notes on how I wanted to do that and some of the things I wanted to refer to.
I'm also continuing my commitment to doing more "working out loud," so that's on the list too. (This blog post is going to help me meet that goal!)
And I set a couple of goals around beginning and ending my days well. These are habits I need to cultivate to build my organizational/planning muscles, which have gotten a little weak in the past several months. In particular, I need to find ways to keep up with learning and expanding my skills and with staying focused on doing the right things. I'm experimenting with how I can see improvements when I'm more mindful of how I start and end my days.
In setting up the calendar section of my planner, I intend to use the weekly sections to reflect on each day as part of my commitment to ending my days well. This is where I want to write about what I've learned, questions, going on, small wins, etc.
I'm planning to use the Task List inserts to identify my big "To Do's"--the major priorities for that particular week.
Daily "To Do's" will be created on individual note-cards that I can hole punch and include in my planner.
I will continue to use my beloved Google calendar to keep track of all my appointments--I see this calendar as a way for me to be more "big picture" focused and as a place to capture reflections.
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If you're in the Philadelphia area and looking to grow your leadership skills in 2016, check out the Leadership Lab that I'm launching at the end of January with Rebecca Fabiano.
And join us tomorrow, January 5th or on January 14th online where we'll be talking about Leadership resolutions, goals and resources for 2016. More info and the signup are here.