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Why You Should Take a Vacation

16/7/2019

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A version of this article was first published as my July 2019 monthly column on Troy Media.

I just returned from a 2-week road trip in Newfoundland with my sister, a trip I highly recommend.  Being away, really off the grid, gave me time to reflect on all the reasons it is important to take annual leave.  That is how vacation used to happen - annual leave where you left the office, packed up the kids and the station wagon and were absent for several weeks at a time.  Now we squeeze in a long weekend between due dates and business trips and rack up un-used vacation days.  It has gotten so bad, most employers have done away with vacation carry-over.  Somewhere along the way, we gave up our right to put down our tools and rest.  
I will admit at the outset that I am a vacation-taker.  It goes back to my childhood.  My dad was a teacher, so come summer we had the opportunity to take off for weeks at a time.  I got into the habit.  I even remember a shocking time in the mid-00s when I spent 3 weeks touring Australia with my Blackberry locked in the hotel safe in Sydney.  While that may be a bit extreme, I do think breaking away from work in a meaningful way, for a significant period of time, is critical to our health and well-being as humans, and as workers.  There are at least 7 good reasons to take your annual leave.

  1. Because you are probably a lot more tired and stressed out than you realize.  I met with someone this past week who just returned from 10 days away, his first vacation since starting a new job over a year ago.  His colleagues had noticed he was becoming more and more irritable, which is uncharacteristic for him.  He admitted he should have done it sooner, that it wasn’t until he stepped away he realized just how tense he was.  Now that he’s back, his tolerance and optimism have returned.  
  2. Get outside your comfort zone.  Vacations are a really good way to experience discomfort for a short amount of time.  You can try something you’ve never done, go somewhere you’ve never been, spend time talking to people you don’t regularly encounter.  There are not many other opportunities in life to be someone else for a couple of weeks, and fewer opportunities to learn more about our world and its people.  I guarantee it will give you new and unexpected insights into some of the issues you are wrangling with back at the office.
  3. Remind yourself everyone is frustrating from time to time, not just the people you work with.  A couple of weeks away with those you love most will remind you living with and accommodating other people is challenging.  It isn’t just your colleagues who are irrational and annoying and try to make your life miserable. 
  4. Give others a break from you.  Let’s face it, it is possible you are also annoying at work from time to time.  Going away gives other people, direct reporting teams in particular, an opportunity to get a break from you.  I have heard some people say their boss going away is a gift they cherish.
  5. Remind yourself you are not indispensable.  Believe it or not, the world does continue to turn in your absence.  I know you understand this theoretically, but it is good to experience it in practical terms now and then.  The reality is, you are probably more committed to your work situation than it is committed to you.  It is good to remember this from time to time. 
  6. Give others development opportunities.  For many of us, when we go away, someone needs to stand in for us.  This is an opportunity for others to practice higher-level decision-making or authority, or test out different skills.  You taking a couple of weeks away can be an excellent learning opportunity for someone else.  
  7. Build your resilience.  Holidays have a way of confronting us with unexpected problems we don’t immediately know how to solve.  Friends of mine had their passports stolen on their last day in Prague.  Talk about an opportunity to demonstrate problem-solving and resilience.  Not that I would wish that on anyone, but you get the drift.

We have created a world that is constantly ‘on’ and we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to be constantly ‘on’.  For the betterment of ourselves, and others, sometimes we just need to give it a rest.

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The Power of Self-Regulation: How Managing Your Impulses Will Make You More Successful

22/5/2019

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AA version of this article was first published in my monthly column for Troy Media.

This weekend I was admiring a burst of tulips in the back garden.  I commented on how striking they were.  My husband commented on how they were ill-placed.  Irritated by his lack of appreciation for the riot of colour, I grabbed a pair of scissors, snipped them off and announced he would no longer need to be annoyed by their poor placement.  At that moment, I completely lost my ability to self-regulate.  Self-regulators do not stomp into the garden and clip tulips just because someone suggests they are planted in a poor location.  

​It is difficult, at this moment in time, to argue that the ability to self-regulate is one of the most important success factors in work and in life.  There are examples of leaders around us who are impulsive and imprudent.  But I think they stand out because they are the exception rather than the rule.  In most instances, the ability to demonstrate consistent and mature control over emotions and impulses will help us succeed.

What is self-regulation and why is it so important?
Self-regulation allows us to set aside our immediate emotional reactions and choose how we want to respond to situations.  It directs us to be nice when we could be surly, to restrain ourselves when we could let loose, to pause before we do something stupid.  It helps us sit back when we might be tempted to dominate, choose our words carefully when conflict is in the air, and show patience when we are tested.  At its essence, self-regulation helps us present our best selves during our potentially worst moments.  The ability to be selective in our response can mean the difference between building bridges and burning bridges.  

Self-awareness is at the heart of self control.  
Without being aware of ourselves, what we are thinking and how we are reacting, it is impossible to choose or change how we respond to people or events.  This idea goes back a long way in human history.  To quote Plato, “The first and most important victory is over ourselves.”  One of the unique features of human consciousness is our ability to observe ourselves in thought and in action.  Philosophies like Stoicism and Buddhism incorporate this act of self-observation (and self control) as a key principle and practice.  It is also at the core of mindfulness meditation, which has taken western culture and workplaces by storm.    

Objectivity helps us over-ride our impulses.  Humans have very big brains, but also very sensitive emotional wiring.  We develop ‘hot buttons’ - beliefs, associations and attachments to things that bypass our brains and trigger our emotional impulses.  ‘Cognitive distancing’ is the process of stepping back and shifting into self-observation.  From this neutral place we can observe what we are thinking, how our brain is processing, and reflect on our emotional reactions.  When someone says ‘you need to be more objective and not take this so personally’, this is what they are suggesting we do.  When we don’t take advantage of our ability to step back, our emotional triggers can ignite and we end up saying or doing something we regret. 

We have the power to choose how we respond.  Psychotherapist Viktor E. Frankl said it powerfully: “Between stimulus and response there is a space.  In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”  We have all had the experience of reacting to something without thinking, and then regretting it.  Like me, you have probably apologized once or twice for something you said or did in the heat of the action.  If we operate from a place of awareness, we are in a position to take advantage of the space between stimulus and response, and choose how we want to react.  We have the luxury of considering options, and their implications.  We can take thoughtful, positive actions and avoid the career- or relationship-limiting ones.  

Self-regulation puts us firmly in the driver’s seat of our own life.  It isn’t easy.  It takes practice.  We aren’t always going to get it right.  But we can get better at it.

For those interested in building up self-regulation, there are a number of best-selling resources including Michael Singer’s The Untethered Soul, the works of author and Stoic Ryan Holiday, and Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now.  To learn more about mindfulness practices, the website relaxlikeaboss offers a very user-friendly guide.


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Are You Listening to the Wrong People?   How to Reduce the Chances of Making a Decision You Will Regret

21/4/2019

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A version of this article was posted in my April column at Troy Media.

Last month my column was inspired by the political maelstrom created by the SNC-Lavalin affair.   A month has passed, the storm continues to swirl.  I am inspired, once again, to draw on this situation as a leadership learning opportunity.  There have been no shortage of ‘what were they thinking?’ moments, causing us to wonder about the quality of the decisions being made. 

We all face difficult situations.  The question is, how do we do an appropriate level of due diligence before making a high-impact decision?  The more complex and nuanced the issue, the less likely there are clear-cut right and wrong answers.  We can never guarantee we will always make the ‘right’ decision.  We can, however, increase the likelihood of making good decisions through robust due diligence, and then anticipating and preparing for the consequences of our decisions.

There are some typical decision-making traps we can all fall into, and ways to avoid them.
Failing to recognize, early on, the importance, scope, or complexity of an issue.  We are all moving quickly and juggling a lot of balls.  Sometimes it feels like we are on auto-pilot, moving from one crisis to the next.  When we don’t slow down and intentionally engage our brains, we run the risk of overlooking something really important.  This is exacerbated when we have a job where everything we are dealing with is big and complex, or when we are confronting something for the first time and don’t have lessons of experience to draw from.  Strategies for avoiding this trap include:
  • Schedule regular ‘thinking time’ dedicated to reviewing key issues and challenges you are facing.  Big decisions should not be made on the fly nor consultations squeezed into the crevices between meetings.
  • Flag issues you have never dealt with before.  If you have no prior experience with something, it is particularly important to slow down and gain a full understanding of the complexity.
​
Limiting decision-making inputs.  While we all agree there is “strength in diversity”, most of us are not very good at actioning it.  We tend to fall back on a small group of advisors and confidantes, even when we can anticipate the advice we are likely to get.  When the stakes are high, it can be emotionally reassuring to hear familiar perspectives from those we trust.  However, we can fool ourselves into believing that hearing different perspectives is the same as hearing diverse perspectives.  To maximize diversity of inputs and cast new light on an issue:  
  • Seek out the advice and perspective of people whose opinion you don’t know or have never consulted.  
  • Seek out the advice of people who regularly disagree with you.  

Forgetting to plan for the consequences.  Too often we focus on making the best possible decision under the circumstances, and then move on.  The reality is, every critical decision has consequences we will have to deal with.  When we don’t stop to think about what dominos could fall, we are unprepared to respond to them.  There are times when how we respond to events is even more significant than the decision itself.  In his book Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most, author Steven Johnson talks about using a pre-mortem before making a critical decision.  This is a strategy for imagining and anticipating the full range of potential consequences that could occur so we can plan for them, or even use those insights to reconsider our decision.
Doing a poor job of delegating decision-making.  As leaders, we have to delegate responsibility for decision-making to others.  Leaders can struggle with which decisions they should be making, and which they should be farming out.  Some leaders exercise too much control and want to make every decision, even when they lack important insight or expertise (the micromanagers).  Others exercise too little oversight, leaving others to flap in the wind and make critical calls on their behalf (the absentee landlords).  Both situations can lead to problems in high-stakes situations.  As a leader, it is important you get clear on where you need to be operating. 

We are all confronted with difficult and complicated decisions, the consequences of which can have long-lasting impacts.  How we approach them can make all the difference.
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What To Do When You Have a Values Clash With Your Boss

15/3/2019

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A version of this article was published in my March column on Troy Media.

There are so many leadership lessons lurking in the events that have plagued the Canadian political landscape over the past few weeks it is hard to know where to start. Leadership lessons that emerge from crises are easy pickings; they are so obvious and it is so easy to be self-righteous.  A much tougher question is, what on earth do you do when you are on the other side of the equation - when you have a values clash with your boss? 

I have most certainly been in situations where I was expected to do something or go along with something or support something I felt compromised my own values and beliefs.  It is a horrible, uncomfortable place to be.  I suspect many of us have been in that situation in our professional lives.  Typical advice reeks of platitudes: ‘stand up for what you believe in!’.  There are times when that is easier - what is being asked of you clearly violates the law, company policy or principles, or ethical codes.  But not everything is so black and white.  And it is not always so easy.  I think that is why we are quick to recognize and applaud someone who has the courage to stand up for what they believe in, regardless of the consequences.   

Here is my best advice for approaching, and resolving, this sticky situation.

  1. Pause and acknowledge people hold different values and it doesn’t necessarily make them bad people.  It is really important to differentiate between what is a law, rule, ethical principle and organization value, and what is a personal value.  Personal values are often hot-button issues for us, and I frequently see values clashes as an underlying reason for interpersonal conflict at work.  The reality is, people can hold different values.  As an example, for a friend of mine, family always takes priority.  When asked to do something that will result in breaking a commitment she has made to one of her kids, she will always say no.  Her husband, on the other hand, is more likely to re-organize his family commitments to respond to other requests when he sees them as equally important.  They have different values.  Happily, they accept that about each other.    
  2. Express what is making you uncomfortable in a values-neutral way.  There is a difference between saying “I believe what we are doing is wrong and I refuse to participate” and “I accept this is the decision that was made, however, I personally don’t feel comfortable following through with it.  Can we discuss how to handle this?”  The first response is obviously going to get someone’s back up and put you in an adversarial situation.  The second communicates angst and solicits support.  The authoritarian, ‘you do this or else’,  leadership style is thankfully pretty rare these days.  Most managers, when confronted by a team member who is in distress, will want to try and help.  As a first step, you have to communicate, and communicate in a way that makes others willing to understand your dilemma. 
  3. Avoid zero-sum games and look for alternative solutions.  In the same way you shouldn’t expect your boss to present you with an ultimatum, you should also avoid presenting your own ultimatums over values-based issues.  There are often alternative solutions to resolving values clashes - perhaps someone else completes a task or takes on a responsibility.  This recently happened to Jan, who was told to terminate someone after they made a costly mistake.  Jan strongly believed the company was not being fair, and the right thing to do was to give the person a second chance.  When he discussed with his boss how difficult it was going to be for him to follow through on something that was, for him, a real values disagreement, she was actually very sympathetic.  She knew Jan could fire someone - that was not the issue.  Instead of just saying ‘too bad, that’s your job,’ she actually offered to be the one to deliver the bad news to Jan's team member.  The situation was resolved, Jan was relieved, and his boss had the opportunity to display leadership and compassion.  
The reality is, the more diverse and inclusive our workplaces are, the more likely it is we will bump into disagreements along values lines. Recognizing them, acknowledging them and addressing them openly and respectfully will help us create healthy teams and organizations where we all feel welcome.
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Are You Taking Enough Pride in Your Work?

20/2/2019

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A version of this article was first published in my monthly column for Troy Media 
I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon is a brilliant article by Austin Murphy in the December 2018 issue of The Atlantic.  Mr. Murphy articulates his personal career journey as a result of being in an industry disrupted by technology.  What really resonated for me about his story was his transformation from shame to pride.  Somehow, he found his way to seeing his new job as rigorous, challenging, fun, and something he strives to excel at.  He discovered he can be - and has the right to be - proud of the job he does, whatever that job is.  

After reading Mr. Murphy’s article, I found myself paying more attention to people doing their jobs.  I noticed Jack, the cashier in Winners, whose attentiveness elicited a spontaneous “you should be in customer service” comment from a customer.  He paused and beamed up at her, “thank you.  I think customer service is my thing.”  He clearly takes pride in what he does, and it shows.  I contrast this with the bored, lackadaisical barista at my local coffee shop.  While she is voluntarily employed in a service job, she clearly feels no pride in what she does and it also shows.

Is it important to feel pride in what you do?

According to researcher and author of Pride: The Secret of Success, Dr. Jessica Tracy, it is.  Pride is a primary, universal human emotion and closely linked to self-esteem.  As human beings, we are programmed to feel and express pride.  I heard Dr. Tracy speak recently, and her ideas caused me to wonder, do we spend enough time thinking about how to maximize our opportunities to feel pride?  We are really focused on being happy.  Happy is good.  But what about pride?  How might we transform ourselves and our experience of life if we felt more pride?  Since most of us spend the better part of our days working, it seems to me we ought to think about how we can maximize our opportunities to experience pride in our work.

How to experience more pride at work

One main source of pride is accomplishing or achieving something.  For an athlete, winning a gold medal is a moment of pride.  For a child, learning to tie one’s own shoes is also a moment of pride.  Work provides an endless array of opportunities for achievement, sometimes large and often small.  There are a number of ways to increase opportunities to feel pride:

  1. Understand what motivates you.  We are all motivated by different things.  If you understand what you really care about, you can focus on doing work that provides you with more opportunities for fulfillment, and pride.  Personally, I love a challenge.  I see navigating through a tricky situation as an accomplishment, and is a moment of pride for me.  My friend Julie, on the other hand, would be the first to admit she is primarily motivated by money.  Nothing makes her happier than getting a big sale and the hefty commission check.  That accomplishment makes her proud.​
  2. Try to do something you are good at.  Doing work that makes the most of your strengths is more likely to result in opportunities for you to feel proud.  As Jack discovered, when you are good at something, people notice.  Even if it doesn’t result in being regularly acknowledged by others, I suspect that inner sense of pride in doing something you are good at is just as important to how you feel about yourself, and your life.   
  3. Commit to doing your very best.  We don’t always get to do jobs that thrill us.  Austin Murphy’s decision to drive for Amazon was about having to pay the bills.  How we show up in the roles we take on, however, is completely up to us.  When you are doing your very best, I think the chances of feeling proud of yourself go way up.  This is the lesson I learned from Sophia, who is an absolute star as a receptionist.  She is so good at what she does, I assumed she was in her dream job.  One day I commented on this to her and she quietly confided it was actually her heart’s desire to be an actor.  “This is what I do to support my family,” she said. “When I decided I needed to play the role of receptionist, I decided to be the very best receptionist.  And I am proud of that.”  ​
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Five Radical Strategies to Excel at Collaboration

30/1/2019

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This article is adapted from my HR column on Troy Media at http://troymedia.com/2019/01/14/radical-strategies-work-collaboration/

The ability to collaborate with others is a ‘must have’ skill to be successful in work.  It doesn’t matter if you are a project manager, a self-employed editor or the Chief Financial Officer, part of your success is probably going to hinge on how well you can work with colleagues.  Our work world is a complex system with lots of inter-related people and parts that need to work together if we are to get things done and deliver on our goals.  Working easily and fluidly with others is simply how things get done in the 21st century.  

​What is collaboration?  Collaboration has become a catch-all phrase to encompass a whole range of activities and behaviours that relate to our ability to interact and work with other people.  Fundamental to collaboration is the ability to establish and maintain constructive, genuine, healthy relationships.  Some questions you might ask yourself to test your collaboration skills include:
  • Do I talk to colleagues on a regular basis, not just when I need something?
  • Do I know who my key stakeholders are for each of my major projects or initiatives?
  • Do I genuinely seek out the input and perspective of knowledgeable people when making plans?
  • Do I think about who will be affected by my actions and decisions, and do I communicate with them in advance?  
  • Do I proactively offer up information or insight that can help other people be successful? 
Why is collaboration so hard?  The reason I know collaboration is hard is because it is on the development plans of many of my clients.  At work, we typically get rewarded for getting things done.  Collaboration can slow this down - getting others’ input, incorporating others’ ideas, communicating regularly all take time.  And then there is our natural egocentric nature, the belief we know best and have the right answers.  Since we already know what to do, why bother asking for advice?  Effective collaboration also means we have to trust other people.  We have to trust they will be honest with us, that they will use our input with integrity, that they won’t take credit for our ideas.  The work environment is competitive by nature - not everyone will get promoted or rewarded.  At times, collaboration seems an awful lot like putting ourselves out there to help other people be successful when what we really want is to ensure we are successful.

Radical ideas for better collaboration.  I recently read the book Real Love, Sharon Salzberg’s guide to applying Buddhist philosophy in order to experience greater love and acceptance of oneself, and others.  It struck me how applicable many of the key principles are to collaboration in the workplace.  To be truly successful at collaborating with others requires more than just switching up a few habits.  I believe it requires a different - radically different - mindset.


  1. Pursue excellence, not perfection.  Striving for perfection ties us up in knots.  It escalates our need for control, which causes us to become ego-centric and insular.  That is bad for collaboration.  Pursuing excellence opens us up to the possibility that someone other than ourselves may have something to contribute, may be better at something than we are, may know more than we do.  To truly achieve excellence requires us to look beyond ourselves and out into our communities.   
  2. Resist judging others.  Our human brains are wired for analysis and judgment.  We make up stories about other people to explain who they are and what we can expect from them.  Sometimes we make judgments about who is worth talking to, who is worth listening to.  The truth is, we never really know where the next good idea will come from, what conversation will spark an idea, who will offer up a critical piece of information.  When we suppress our judgment of others, we can be more open, more curious and more receptive to what others have to offer.   
  3. Be curious.  When you consult with your partners at work, are you really interested in what they have to say?  Do you really understand where they are coming from - their concerns and challenges?  Are you checking your email while they are talking to you on the phone?  Superficial interest doesn’t lead to the insights that can help you do your job better.  Effective collaboration requires relationships, and those take real sympathy and compassion to build.    Curiosity is an important pathway that leads to understanding.
  4. Practice kindness.  Kindness.  Now there’s a word that is rarely used when we talk about work.  Pause and reflect on a time when someone was particularly kind to you.  How did you feel?  How did it make you feel about that person?  Kindness is an act performed without the expectation of reciprocity.  But isn’t collaboration about relationship reciprocity, you ask?  Yes.  And there is a very good chance that kindness begets kindness, creating a virtuous cycle that leads to deeper and more meaningful relationships.  The kind of relationships we envy when we see them.  And, frankly, we could use a lot more kindness in the world, including at work.   
  5. Accept help.  While we are often happy, even eager, to lend a hand when asked, too often we think of asking for help as a sign of our own weakness.  We are afraid it will signal a lack of competence or confidence.  Give and take is an important part of creating the equilibrium required for constructive collaboration.  In the same way we hope our partners will reach out and ask for our advice, opinion and support, we need to do likewise.  Relationships are enhanced when we are able to ask for and accept help.  Collaboration is, after all, a team sport - everyone needs to participate. 
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Thinking about joining a not-for-profit Board?  Ask yourself these 6 questions first.

29/8/2017

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Serving on a not-for-profit Board can be an energizing and fulfilling experience.  You will learn a lot - about yourself, about leadership, about working with others - while giving back to your community and supporting a cause you care about.  But Board work isn’t for everyone.  Here are 6 questions to ask yourself before you commit.

  1. Am I prepared to make a long-term commitment? It takes time to learn about an organization and the more you understand, the better able you are to make a meaningful contribution.  Typically, Boards will expect you to make a 4-6 year commitment in 2-year increments.  Recruiting new Board members is also hard work; we want people who will stay for the long term, not jump in and out on a yearly basis.  While you might feel you have time now, it is good to anticipate whether you will be able to say the same 3 years from now.  If the answer is ‘no’ or ‘I’m not sure’, you might want to wait until you can make a firmer future commitment.
  2. Will I show up?  Regular attendance at Board and Committee meetings, and being part of working groups, is required if the Board is to fulfil its commitments to the organization and its stakeholders.  It is also respectful to your colleagues.  Depending on the organization, Boards meet between 4 and 10 times per year, and each Committee may meet between 2 and 10 times per year.  Because this is a volunteer commitment, it can be tempting to allow it to fall to the bottom of the priority list.  In practical terms, you will be expected to factor your Board commitment into your holiday plans, your work and travel schedule, and your family commitments.  Often, Boards and Committees meet outside of regular office hours and sometimes on weekends.  If you think attending anything less than 80% of meetings will be a stretch, you might want to look for a volunteer opportunity that better aligns with your availability.
  3. Will I follow through?  Being on a Board is more than just showing up for meetings.  There is preparation to do beforehand.  The pre-read package may be a couple of spreadsheets and short reports, or it may be several hundreds of pages. Most not-for-profits do not have a lot of administrative support for the volunteer Board.  This often means someone has to prepare agendas and minutes, schedule meetings, do legwork, transform ideas into tangible products and actions. The Committees will have ‘real work’ to do, from recruiting Directors to evaluating the performance of the Executive Director, negotiating leases to developing a risk register.  The organization, and your Board colleagues, are depending on you to participate actively and do what you say you will do.  If you want to join a Board to contribute good ideas but let others do the heavy lifting, you might want to consider other ways to serve.
  4. Am I prepared to ‘graduate’ to a Board leadership role?  Every Board requires its members to step up and take on leadership roles.  Each Committee requires a Chair. Working groups and task forces often pop up and require someone to take the lead.  It is ideal when Directors join the Board first as members and then graduate into leadership roles as their tenure increases.  This ensures organizational continuity and smooth leadership succession.  If you do not aspire to provide leadership at some point during your time on the Board, at a minimum you should make this clear during the recruitment process. 
  5. Will I donate my money to this cause?  As a Director of a not-for-profit, the organization appreciates you for giving your time, energy, enthusiasm and insight.  But it also expects you to give your money.  Most Boards have a giving expectation spelled out in their Director Roles and Responsibilities, so this should not come as a surprise.  If you really want to focus on giving your time and not your money, there are other meaningful ways you can contribute.
  6. Am I willing to ask others to support this organization?  For many of us, asking others for money is one of the most uncomfortable of human activities.  I think it probably even tops ‘public speaking’.  However, as a Board member you will be expected to be a strong voice and an advocate for the mission and work of the organization.  As a Director, you will be expected to recruit volunteers, new Board members, and open doors to potential funders.  You will probably also be expected to directly ask others for donations or support.  If you aren’t prepared to get your hands dirty in the world of fund raising, not-for-profit Board service may not be right for you.   

​If you answered ‘yes’ to these questions you are well-prepared for the commitment you are making and the organization is really fortunate to have you.  If you didn’t, you might want to pause for the moment.
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5 Steps to Improving Your Life in 2017

3/1/2017

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A version of this article was first published on Troy Media at www.troymedia.com/2016/12/30/improve-life-2017/

I am one of those people who relish the opportunity to reflect on the year and give thought to what I want to be different going forward.  I gave up making actual resolutions years ago; like everyone else, my follow through was short-lived and ended in disappointment.  But I do like to experiment with new habits and practices that might improve my life.  When I find things that work for me, it is amazing how many of them actually stick over time.  My ideas for how to improve my life don’t spontaneously pop into my brain.  Rather, they trickle in through things I read, conversations I have, podcasts I listen to.  In reviewing my 2016 journal and the experiments I’ve tried, below are my top 5 suggestions for how you might improve your life, too.

  1. Breathe.  Western culture is obsessed with the act of thinking.  We are a disembodied culture, one that has lost its connection with the miracle that is our physical being.  Our bodies are machines and our goal is to drive that machine as hard as we can. I believe the reason interest in things like meditation and yoga have surged is because those practices help us turn our attention away from the mind and toward our bodies, and our breath, in a caring and compassionate way.  It is beginning to dawn on us that to really experience the fulness of life, we need to have a healthy connection to our body.  If you want to do one thing to improve your life this year, I would encourage you to focus on your breath.  Maybe this means joining a yoga class.  Maybe it just means pausing a couple of times a day to close your eyes and notice your breathing.  Two meditation resources I would recommend include the App 'HeadSpace' www.headspace.com and the guided meditations of Tara Brach www.tarabrach.com
  2. Experience wonder.  We spend a lot of time and energy looking for inspiration, for something that will fire up our motivation.  I don’t think we spend enough time allowing ourselves to experience the world through our hearts.  Advertisers know the power of wonder.  They know we are a little bit more open and vulnerable at this time of year, so they spoon-feed us heart-wrenching commercials in a bid to earn our trust.  The world will spontaneously combust into wonder if you let it.  It can happen walking in the forest, watching children play, reading poetry.  All it requires is that you be fully engaged and ‘present’.  Experiencing a daily dose of wonder will change your life.  My favorite podcast for finding inspiration is On Being www.onbeing.org.
  3. Be vulnerable.  Speaking of vulnerability, we all need to show more of this.  We live in a culture that worships strength and punishes weakness.  The trouble is, we are only human.   By turning our eyes away from our frailties and failings we cut ourselves off from the fullness of life, from experiencing what it means to be human.  It causes us to be fearful and ashamed of being ourselves.  The most powerful thing you can do as a leader, a parent, a friend is allow others to see your weakness.  For a primer on vulnerability, I recommend the infamous Brene Brown TedTalk www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability
  4. Sit with discomfort.  We hate discomfort.  Our immediate instinct is to run away - physically,  mentally, emotionally.  One of the most powerful insights I have absorbed through my experimentation with stoic and eastern philosophy is how powerful it is to sit patiently through discomfort.  When you allow yourself to feel the full experience of failure or embarrassment or sadness without turning away, you discover you are strong enough to survive.  When you allow yourself to pass through the emotional arc these situations incite, you are better able to extract their lessons.  I’ve also found it reduces the likelihood these experiences will continue to revisit you at 3 o’clock in the morning, 3 years later.  You can read more about this in Seneca's Letters From A Stoic, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now.
  5. Help others.  Checking your text messages isn’t the only way to give your brain a shot of dopamine.  Try engaging in charity - doing something for someone else when there is no possible opportunity for you to get anything in return.  This can be as simple as giving a stranger a heartfelt compliment or as complicated as seeking out that ‘odd ball’ at the office and inviting them to be part of something.  Helping others is one of the best ways to feel good about yourself and better about your life.  And it is the one sure way we each have to make this world a better place, for all of us.  For more on this, see Adam Grant's Give and Take www.adamgrant.net
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Why It’s Time to Invite the Psychologist Into the Boardroom

3/11/2016

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This weekend I am facilitating a board strategy retreat.  “Let me be clear, I don’t do strategic planning,” I stressed when I got the call.  The Chair assured me they were not looking for a strategic planning expert.  Instead, they were looking for someone who is really good at reading and shaping interpersonal dynamics to facilitate an important conversation about growth and help the board align around a decision.  With that proviso in place, I agreed to support them.

This request got me thinking more deeply about where and how psychology collides with governance.  In the same way organizations have embraced and applied behavioural science to support strategic and business goals, it is perhaps time we applied this expertise in the boardroom.  The idea of bringing a business psychologist, or another professional skilled in interpersonal and group dynamics, into a governance context does not originate with me.  Over the past few years I have had a number of people suggest the work I do is badly needed in our boardrooms.  I see at least three key reasons for this.


  1. To leverage diversity, the need to actively and intentionally build effective dynamics in the boardroom has never been greater.  Historically, board rooms were occupied by people who had a lot in common.  Directors often came from the same cultural, educational and professional background.  They understood the implicit rules of the game and spoke each others’ language.  Recruiting peers and associates had a practical purpose - it increased the likelihood that Directors would relate well, the board would gel, and the governance work would get done thoroughly and efficiently.  There is nothing worse than being part of a group where people don’t understand each other, don’t communicate effectively, and are not getting along.  Today, however, with boards becoming increasingly diverse, ‘getting along’ requires more explicit and intentional effort than was needed in the past.  While boards do not have a long history of engaging professionals to assist them with developing their own interpersonal and group dynamics, I think it is time to challenge the status quo.
  2. Board chairs may not be fully equipped to build a dynamic that helps the group govern most effectively.  Leading a team from a position of power and authority is one thing.  Facilitating a board is quite another.  I know from my own experience that being a board Chair is a complex balance of attentive listening, observation, facilitation, influence and control.  It requires a different set of skills and behaviours than most other leadership roles.  There are few ‘training grounds’ to prepare one to be an effective Chair.  In the same way leaders at all levels and experience invest in honing their skills and bring in professionals to help them form and develop high-performing teams, board Chairs should not be shy to engage in development processes within the context of the boardroom.  
  3. The more quickly a board can become high-performing, the greater its ability to fulfill its mandate effectively and add value to the organization.  A board is not a traditional work team, but it is a group of people aligned around a common purpose that needs established processes and operating norms to govern effectively.  Key processes such as how the board communicates, makes decisions, interfaces with the organization, and evaluates its performance all need to be established and honed.  But in addition, an effective board needs to find the right balance of collegiality and challenge; to effectively draw in and on diverse experience to inform issues; to confront and correct dysfunctional behaviour.  The challenges confronting boards include: they meet infrequently, their agendas are often packed, and members may interact little or not at all between meetings.  Add to this mix the need to make prudent decisions around complex, time-bound and high risk issues.  These are not conditions that set the groundwork for easy and effective group dynamics.  A board needs strategies to accelerate and maintain its ability to engage effectively.  Bringing in an expert to support the Chair in this process is worth considering. 

There was a time when boards were secret societies operating behind closed doors.  Those days are long gone.  It is time boards gave serious and strategic consideration to the ways and means at their disposal for accelerating and maximizing their own effectiveness.  All this to say, it may be time for you to invite a psychologist into your boardroom.

A version of this blog was first published on Troy Media.
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Why you should stop outsourcing leadership development

25/9/2016

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A version of this article was first published on Troy Media www.troymedia.com/2016/09/11/stop-outsourcing-leadership-development/
If you ask a successful leader to recall his or her most impactful development experience, chances are it happened while on the job engaged in real work.  This was reinforced on a recent project designed to help organizations transfer and retain the business-critical knowledge of retiring baby boomers (a copy of the report can be downloaded at apgst.ca/projects/pdfs/APGST-KnowledgeTransfer-Report-2016-WEB.pdf).  Interviews with over 40 successful, long-tenured leaders confirmed the best development takes place on the job.  For example, an assignment that stretches one’s personal resources; the opportunity to work side-by-side with a mentor; struggling and succeeding with a challenging project.  While we have long known that most development happens in the workplace, we continue to rely on external, formal training to build leadership capability.  There are 5 key reasons to shift away from traditional leadership training and development and turn your focus toward helping employees develop critical skills and capabilities while they work.

  1. Traditional approaches to development are not producing robust talent pipelines.  In spite of the time and energy we have invested in identifying and developing leaders of the future, waning gaps in the talent pipeline persist in most organizations.  For some reason, we have not been able to sufficiently prepare managers to step in and fill the gaps created when key leaders move on.  Our emphasis on external training and development as key strategies to prepare leaders has not been successful.  In contrast, the evidence suggests the most powerful ways people learn critical capabilities is by actively engaging in real work, most often alongside those who have the knowledge, skills and wisdom they need to develop. 
  2. Traditional approaches to development are not resulting in better business performance.  While organizations have invested heavily in training and development, we have not seen a commensurate uptick in overall business performance.  One reason for this may be that external training is too generic (“Develop Your Leaders, Transform Your Organization”, Harvard Business Press, 2011).  For example, a business school strategy course may provide you with exposure to different strategic planning models and tools but fail to hone your ability to think and operate strategically in your business, in your marketplace, with your teams, confronting your particular challenges.
  3. Traditional approaches to development focus narrowly on the chosen few.  Employee development is often tied to formal succession planning, which limits its scope.  Because external development is expensive, organizations are forced to bet on a chosen few ‘high potentials’.  In reality, all employees are an appreciating asset and benefit from intentional development; their value is enhanced as they grow and mature.  Rather than over-invest in a few possible successors, organizations need to build up the knowledge and expertise of all their employees.  The only way to do this, realistically, is by embedding learning into the organization and into the day-to-day experiences of all.
  4. Traditional approaches to development are designed for learners of the past.  As Baby Boomers transition out of the workplace and Millennials transition in, organizations will need to do learning differently.  While Boomers are comfortable with formal classroom- and text-based learning, young employees expect learning to be hands-on, interactive, and just-in-time (“Bridging the Gaps: How to Transfer Knowledge in Today’s Multigenerational Workplace”, Conference Board of Canada, 2008).  Shunting people off to a campus for a weekend locked up with an instructor, a powerpoint deck and a stack of case studies is so…1999.
  5. Traditional approaches to development fail to engage and leverage your most valuable asset - your internal experts.  An organization’s best training resource isn’t a course list; it is its cadre of seasoned leaders and experts.  Those are the people who have the nuanced understanding of the issues, the war stories to share as cautionary tales, the insightful coaching to provide.  When we fail to design learning that draws on their deep knowledge and expertise it is like installing plumbing and failing to turn on the tap.  While on-the-job learning that engages both internal experts and learners is more complex to design and deliver, it has a much higher chance of delivering results. 
At some point, we are going to have to face the fact that outsourcing leadership development isn’t working and probably isn’t going to suddenly start working.  At the same time, we know on-the-job learning is a far superior way to develop people.  Isn’t it time we put that knowledge into practice?

Sources
This article was inspired by a 10-month project sponsored by APGST that took a deep-dive look at how organizations can transfer and retain critical knowledge as baby boomers exit the workplace in record numbers.  This project reinforced for me that importance of embedded learning as a critical leadership development approach.  A full biography of research that informed my recommendations can be found in the final report, which is a resource guide for HR practitioners and leaders on how to engage in critical knowledge transfer.

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    Rebecca Schalm, Ph.D. 

    Founder & CEO
    Strategic Talent Advisors Inc.

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