Category: growth

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The Manual Of Me

 

Following an interesting question about CVs on the Leapers Community, created by Matthew Knight in response to his own decision to move on from his current role at Carat, I got to thinking about resumés.

Do follow Matthew’s journey via Rethinking Work, on Medium, it’s very interesting and may give you the confidence to make that ‘leap’. 

More often than not, your CV and LinkedIn profile are looking backwards, not forwards. They give a snapshot of what you’ve achieved, the skills you have that were relevant for your past role. If the CV is about the journey, shouldn’t we have a tool that is more about where we’re heading?

This got me to thinking about my own recent decision to ‘retire’ from what I’d done before so that I could move into new areas, use my varied skills in new ways and continue learning. My own LinkedIn profile considers the old me, but not the new.

Time for me to create a Manual of Me.

How I add value

  1. Solving problems. The more complex the better.
  2. Working with teams of people to solve challenges. People from all walks of life. People from different backgrounds. People with varying degrees of knowledge of what might need to be done.
  3. Working alone. Deep thinking. Presenting a set of starting points that others can build upon.
  4. Workshops. Creating and facilitating them. Getting people together. Playing around with ideas. Taking someone’s thoughts and sculpting something from it, as a group.
  5. Using the outside world within activities. Moving gets the blood flowing, provides observations and inspirations. It stops ‘stuckness’. Fresh air is the lifeblood of great ideas.

Barriers to consider

  1. Lack of constraints. Freedom is great, but it leads to incorrect paths and a move away from certainty.
  2. Sitting around bemoaning the problems rather than getting up and doing something about them. More doing than talk is better.
  3. Offices and their conference rooms. Sitting at computers because that’s what makes people look busy.
  4. Those who say serious is the only way to be professional. Being playful unlocks
  5. Knowing all the answers before we set out. Where’s the fun in knowing? The fun is both in the discovery and in the journey towards that discovery (and all the paths that prove fruitless, for they bear fruit in ways that are truly immeasurable against the final outcomes).

Requirements

  1. Open-minded people. The questioners. Those who ask why. People willing to try something because it might just unlock something in collective thinking.
  2. Play. Having fun is possible while doing work. It allows for activities which, on the surface, appear unrelated to the task. Yet, they remove obstacles to thinking clearly and enable progress. And people smile, laugh and connect.
  3. A space in which to work. This can be an office, a park, being provided a different desk inside an organisation each day, an hour of people’s time. As long as there is coffee to start the day.
  4. The willingness to work hard. This doesn’t mean stay up all night, or skipping lunch. This means putting in effort and being present when necessary, always.
  5. Uncertainty. Those who want to learn how to use it as a powerful force. And be happy getting things wrong in order to do so.

Cost
I don’t like to think of it as a cost. I believe the value created far outweighs that – not only financially, but also through motivation of staff, progress on challenges and a shift in organisational mindset.

However, on your balance sheet it will be marked as a day of everyone’s time answering the brief. It can’t be ignored; however, it should be viewed against what you’re gaining. My aim is that value should always exceed cost.

Outcomes
These are dependent upon the brief. Previously, for those I’ve partner with, I’ve delivered the following:

  1. Frameworks and tools that your teams can use again and again
  2. A report with clear recommendations
  3. Ongoing support, coaching and training – of individual staff, departments, or organisations
  4. Clearly defined strategies, goals and narratives for moving forward.
  5. An outsider’s perspective: objective, unencumbered by internal process and politics, yet willing to get my hand dirty to make things happen.

And as I’ve found myself drawing more and more, I’ve prepared a visual version for those who prefer pictures to words.

Posted on

Modulating Self

I’ve been having coaching sessions.
Principally, these have been to get me out of my comfort zone and into a freer, more experimental self.
I’ve found them invaluable in understanding what’s blocking me from doing things, and the traits within myself that I’m using to define me.

That I’m using.

That’s a key point. It’s about me.

I’ve realised I behave a certain way, that I’m conforming to how I think people believe I should act. I’ve not been my authentic self all the time, and certainly not when I need to be.

I’ve been keeping things hidden, or showing the wrong side of me. I’ve been trying to please people and not putting myself first.

This has had an effect of me trying to make people happy in areas that I have no control over. And in trying to exert control, I’ve made myself unhappy, completed work that’s out of scope and yet still been left feeling I’ve failed somehow.

Now, I can’t really change the core person I am. I’ll always be overly talkative when I’m nervous, prone to occasional swearing. I’ll always want to do more than is expected (because I enjoy what I do); however, taking on someone else’s anger, or fear, does me no good.

I explained to my coach that I felt like I need to consider interactions within my work as if I had a graphic equaliser. That way I could modulate my responses, my actions and, therefore, how I felt about outcomes or decisions that needed to be made.

Beyond that initial chat, I’d banked the idea and then completely failed to follow up. So, as a good coach, it came up again this week during an exercise and she asked me what had happened to that idea. And so I’ve revisited it, in depth.

I could draw a whole host of these equalisers, each one with different labels. In fact, I’m doing this as an exercise from now on. Where I feel it’s necessary, I’m using this as a framework for reviewing meetings, workshop sessions, mentoring, etc.

The one at the top is how I think I act with people. I think a lot, constantly. About what they’re saying, how I might react. Sometimes I think my brain feels two steps ahead and yet I know that the assumption bar is creeping up. I don’t feel I listen enough – as the saying bar is up high. And yet, I like to think there is clarity within the conversation – that what I’m saying in reply, or framed within questions, is insightful and relevant; it’s clear and can be understood.

I’d prefer to have an equaliser that is more like the one below. And so I am working on making that the standard for my interactions at work.

I know I’m going to be guilty of viewing all these through my own biased lens. That can’t be helped or changed. Yet, as a self-reflection tool, I’m finding it really useful. To really consider what those labels should be. To decide if I need to modulate how I’m thinking, acting, speaking, behaving. Or just be okay with how I approached things.