Tag: Career

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Career

What’s Your Story?

Being authentic can be harder than it sounds. Herminia Ibarra recently published The Authenticity Paradox in the Harvard Business Review, which outlined how being authentic can backfire, despite being one of today’s most sought-after leadership qualities. Authenticity shouldn’t be viewed as permission to stay cozy in your comfort zone. Ibarra argues that when we are adjusting to new situations we should give ourselves permission to try on different variations of our own style to find one that works best given the new reality. We can still be authentic in these variations because we are not trying to become something we are not; we’re just tapping into a different set of strengths that may have been dormant or less developed. Ibarra details three steps to help find your “adaptively authentic way of leading,” but the one I find the most interesting is not sticking to your story.

The premise is that our personal narratives may be keeping us from growing and moving forward since they’re rooted in our past rather than telling the story about where we could go – what we’re capable of doing, given the chance. I think about my own career history and the story it tells. For some, my resume may look a little scattered since I’m not clearly one thing in one profession – I’m not an engineer, a teacher or a network specialist. However, I look at my time in banking, associations, retail and consulting and it’s very clear to me that one of the things I am is a customer service specialist. Whether it’s service to external or internal clients, I have always prided myself on being among the best. And that’s part of the narrative I need to make sure I’m telling, but it’s rooted more in what I’ve done than where I want to go. Adjusting my narrative to talk about the ways I can bring out the best in people is what I want to emphasize at this point in my career and that’s something I’ll be thinking about moving forward. What are the stories you’re telling about yourself?

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Career

Different Lenses

Wall Street Journal’s Saturday Essay from December 12th caught my attention. Women at Work: A Guide for Men may seem like it’s a few decades too late, but I found it interesting on the heels of few different conversations that have found their way into my life at the moment. For a current client project, we’re focusing on engaging half of the staff, plus one. While obviously we’d like to engage more than that, the thinking is that if we’ve got a majority (even the minimal majority of 50% plus 1) of the staff on board, change will be inevitable. Not wholly unrelated is the UN Women’s campaign HeforShe, a solidarity movement for gender equality, based on the idea that gender equality shouldn’t be a women’s issue led only by women. We’ll need the majority of the world to make real change, and that includes men.

When looking at change, be it behavior in an organization or discrimination of any kind, it makes sense that the change will be more successful with more people involved. We spend a lot of time focusing on women mentoring women, and let me be clear – I think there is tremendous value in that. That doesn’t mean, however, that men can’t also play a role in helping women up the career ladder. Managers and those at the top of the ladder are responsible for helping to cultivate the next generation of leaders, regardless of gender. I think to pretend we all approach things the same, however, is naïve and anything we can do to understand the lens of others is time well-spent – gender, generational, socio-economic, cultural, and so on. Whose shoes can you walk in for a bit to adjust your own lens?

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On the Job

Knowing Your Customer

I was having a conversation with a new member of a senior team who has been with her organization just a couple months now. We were talking about several initiatives designed to make the organization more efficient. Many of them were not large, expensive changes, but rather, small improvements designed to make daily work faster and easier. One of the things we were talking about was the organizational phone list. A seemingly simple enough tool designed to help you reach one of the hundreds of employee who worked there. The issue, however, was that the phone list was organized by department and title.

A phone list organized by department is great if you know you need to contact someone in accounting about your new paycheck and may not know who, but less helpful if you’ve been pointed in the direction of Catherine Wemette, but don’t know her department. It’s also incredibly challenging as you’re getting to know these several hundred new people and you can’t remember Catherine’s last name after you were told you should talk with her.

Surely the goal of the phone list was to be helpful, but the customer had been lost in the development of the product. Sure, as someone who has been with the organization for a while, a departmental phone list probably makes perfect sense. However, taking the process one step further and thinking through all the possible customers would have perhaps resulted in the same list organized three different ways – department, first name or last name – or a dynamic directory that was searchable in a number of ways.

This is just one example of the need to put ourselves in our customer’s shoes to deliver what they really need. And if we don’t know, it’s okay to ask. What could you be doing just a bit differently to provide your customers with what they need, maybe even before they know they need it?

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On the Job

Survival Skills – Facilitation-style

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of co-teaching a course at the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), which is an old stomping ground of mine. It was great to be back and teamed up Libby Bingham to present “Facilitation Essentials: Effectively Managing Conversations.” We had an exceptional group of folks, and they were great about staying with us as we moved between information sharing, exercises and small group discussions. I thoroughly enjoyed our time together and learned as much from them as I hope they learned from us.

We talked about the skills needed to be a strong facilitator, and one of my favorites is often overlooked. It’s common to talk about active listening, the ability to draw people into a conversation, and how to manage conflict in a group. While all these skills are critical, there is one that can help with any situation: the ability to improvise. For anyone who has ever been at the front of the room in any sort of capacity, you know the only thing you can count on is the unexpected. Despite all our preparations and best intentions, there is always something that catches us off guard — technology woes, a rowdy audience member or an extensive question in 7 parts. Improvisation is something created without preparation, typically a piece of music, drama, etc. I would absolutely argue that facilitation done well is an art form all its own, and there will always be opportunities to create an experience, a lesson or a memory without preparation. So the next time you’re presented with the unexpected, you can view it as a pain or take advantage of the opportunity to practice your improv skills. You never know when or how those moments will present themselves, and the more comfortable you are simply going with the flow, the better the chances are that your improv will leave them laughing and wanting more.