Category Archives: Business

Facing our Fears

Putting Myself Out There

I recently stood for an election. For what is not important. Anyone who knows me knows how completely against my nature this was. Why I agreed I am still not quite sure. Yet, during the process and its aftermath, I was reminded that things often have a funny way of working out.

Before going further I need to come clean and admit that I lost. I have no idea by how much or for that matter how close I came to winning. Yet, it was in losing that I was forced to face my fears about the process and reflect about why it was a good idea to put myself forward despite knowing this loss was a real possibility.

An Inverted Perspective

By some quirky fate of the calendar, the same day I learned that I had lost I attended an intense yoga inversion workshop. At the time I was simply looking forward to losing myself in my practice; I had no idea how cathartic the workshop would prove to be.

Let me be frank. I am pretty good at yoga but I am terrified of headstands. Staying inverted without the support of the wall has been a personal challenge for me for a long time. I have the strength, I have the form but I lack the confidence.

Spending a concentrated period of time working on staying up in a headstand helped me understand the competing pressures at work. On the one hand, there is a lot of ego involved. Why is it so important to me that I master the pose? On the other, is vulnerability. Am I really capable of staying up?

Competing Pressures

During the workshop I was struck by the realization that these same competing pressures (ego and vulnerability) were also at the heart of my losing the election. By agreeing to stand, my ego wanted a win; knowing it was a long shot made me vulnerable. I wonder if part of what pushed me to stand was a realization that I needed to face my fear of losing. I needed to stare down my vulnerability and move past it. Funny how a bruised ego can make one feel less, not more, vulnerable….

Contemplating my personal struggle between ego and vulnerability led me to watch Brene Brown’s TED talk on vulnerability. I had been “meaning” to watch this for ages. I just never got around to it. Listening to Ms. Brown talk about her own vulnerability issues struck a chord with me. It seems that by leaning into our vulnerability and putting ego aside we become more at peace and centered.

Into the Boardroom

This is a struggle that most leadership teams wrestle with. Leaders have egos. Big egos. Undertaking an organizational assessment of any kind involves putting your ego aside and opening yourself up to vulnerability.

Anytime an individual or team engages a consultant to investigate a problem there is inevitably a degree of fear involved. What will the process uncover? Do I really want to know? Do I need to know? Agreeing to learn what is actually going on forces a leader to become vulnerable while laying some ego aside.

The beauty of this process, however, is that despite being hard and uncomfortable, it can also yield surprisingly beneficial results. If knowledge is power, then being willing to open yourself up to what is actually going on may be one of the most effective ways to move forward. It may not yield the results you want or expect, but it just may lead you down a different, ultimately better, path.

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Synergy All Around

Spreadsheet Nerd

spreadsheet tower

I am a spreadsheet kind of girl! I have yet to meet a spreadsheet I didn’t want to figure out or tweak. You might even call me a spreadsheet nerd.

Those of us who like to live in the tidy world of numbers, however, can sometimes lose sight of the bigger picture. Keeping our pages “pretty” and our formulas “pure” can seem more important than factoring in shades of grey.

Let’s not Stack the Deck

While I like to think you need at least one person like me on every project, the benefits of not always stacking the team in our favor became clear to me (once again) while working on the groupings for my neighborhood’s progressive dinner.

Let me explain: after we thought we had finished putting the groups together we realized that we had forgotten to place one couple. As a somewhat hyper number-type my inclination was to fix our problem right away. How would I sleep knowing there were loose ends lying about?

Saner minds prevailed. The most laid-back members of our little team said not to worry, there would be movement among participants and things would surely work themselves out. YIKES.

Sure enough there was some movement within groups: a few late-comers and a few who dropped out. However, about a week before going live we did feel the need for one last push. Eventually those loose ends started to niggle at others…..And I am the first to admit that waiting to pull things together was a wise decision.

The synergies within our committee mirror what we were trying to accomplish within dinner groupings. We strove to mix young and old, new and long-time residents and, perhaps most importantly introduce people to each other. After all, if you want to have dinner with your friends have a dinner party.

Synergy at Work

These synergies pop up daily in all aspects of life. I was recently speaking with a very accomplished older lady about some of her volunteer work. Having worked with me, she knows that I often deal in spreadsheets. She shared a story about joining a board full of “number people”. At first she was terribly intimidated. However, she soon realized that she brought a depth of understanding of the population the board was meant to serve that the best spreadsheet could never capture.

Ultimately this comes back to the conventional wisdom that most of the time a group makes a better decision than do the individuals that comprise the group. I would hazard a guess that the more diverse the skill sets and perspectives of the members of the group the better their ultimate outcome.

As uncomfortable as it may be surround yourself with people who think and operate differently than you do, the reality is that how we play off and leverage our differences is what helps us achieve the most synergistic results. So next time one of us spreadsheet nerds is driving you crazy: listen, push back and work together.

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No More Resolutions!

Happy New Year everyone! Did you make a new year’s resolution? If you did, have you broken it already? If not, is there any chance you’ll keep it?

I hate to sound cynical but I loath the concept of new year’s resolutions. Yes, the new year is a great time to take stock of things and make plans for the future, but I think too much heft is put into making lofty goals that one is unlikely to reach.

Commitment not Resolution

Instead, I prefer to see the new year as an opportunity to commit to improvement. It is a chance to tweak things that could work better and to clean out clutter, both mental and material. Personally, I am more inclined to “clean” when I’m house bound in the winter than during the traditional “spring cleaning” season.

What does a new year’s commitment look like? It is much less impressive than a sweeping resolution, but much more attainable. I have a friend who is planning to have a “dry” January. She is doing this for herself, believing it will make her feel better. There is no fanfare around this goal, and no unrealistic social events or travel plans that will make it more challenging. Chances are she will see it through.

On my end, I am undertaking the yoga challenge. This involves practicing yoga 50 out of the next 90 days. To meet the challenge I need to take 3.8 yoga classes per week. Since I can easily do three, the challenge is adding the fourth class 10 out of the upcoming 12 weeks.

I tried the challenge last year, and did not make it. I hate to say I failed, for I developed a greater commitment to yoga, became considerably stronger and made yoga a core component of my exercise routine.

Had I made a BOLD resolution to master yoga I don’t believe I would have been as successful as I was. I would likely have moved my practice forward but rather than feel empowered by making such great strides I might well have ended up disheartened.

And Why does this Matter?

There are many parallels to the ambitious resolutions people make and the lofty goals set out in organizational strategic plans. Let’s be frank, a bold, ambitious vision is more impressive than a focused commitment to move forward and improve a specific practice. The vision grabs attention but far too often it is too grand to realize within existing constraints. That is not to say it is impossible to reach it, just improbable.

Wake County School Board just published its draft five year strategic plan. The document contains a lot of feel good rhetoric about changing the way students learn. It also sets an ambitious goal to improve its graduation rate to 95%.

Sounds great. Who would disagree with making high school graduation rates a key priority? No one. Trouble is that last year’s graduation rate was 81%. Is the district really equipped to move this metric 13 points in the next five years? Are there other priorities that need to be highlighted and fixed before announcing this goal?

I think consultants have a responsibility to move organizations away from these grand “resolutions” and move them towards more narrow, but more feasible “commitments”. A consultant is usually engaged to guide the strategic planning process and so has an opportunity to help focus a group towards the reasonable, not the impressive. The result may not grab headlines, but if it makes a difference then what more do you actually want?

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