Tag: work-life balance

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Leaders, Boost Your Creativity in 2012: Five Suggestions for the New Year

It’s resolution time. I’ve made my list and share five suggestions for yours to boost creativity in 2012.

Times are tough, and every industry is rethinking how it does business. Creativity and the capacity to think deeply and flexibly can pull an organization ahead of the crowd. How can you enhance your capacities and help your organization claim its competitive advantage?  Suggestions to boost your innovation brainpower:

1.  Read more fiction. There are plenty of benefits. Build new neuronal circuits. Deepen your knowledge of the human condition – and learn about yourself as your reflect on your responses. Improve your vocabulary, beef up those communication skills. Expand your cultural intelligence. Leadership is all about influence, communication, relationships, and seeing the simplicity on the other side of complexity. 

No time for major tomes? Try The Art of the Novella Series: short novels by some of literature’s greatest – Melville, James, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Twain, and more. The tiny classics tuck easily into a brief case, purse, or pocket – and their colorful contemporary covers are great conversation starters.

My first was a holiday gift – The Dialogue of the Dogs by Cervantes. Turns out the creator of Don Quixote also wrote the first talking-dog story. Ever wonder what your pet is really thinking, and what Fido can teach you about ethics and fairness?  I loved it: a quick read and deep ideas. I was hooked on the novella.

The Duel by Heinrich von Kleist (a 19th century German author I knew nothing about) was next. Read it, and let me know how your thinking about loyalty, everyday assumptions, and trust have changed.

I’m on The Lifted Veil by George Eliot now — her only work in the first person with eerie similarities to  Eliot’s claiming her public identity as a woman author. Next in line The Lemoine Affair by Proust — and a look at why humans are so easily conned!  Think shades of Bernie Madoff. 

2.  Discover the power and joy of quiet. We live in a world of 24/7 stimulation and news. We text, email, surf, and sit in front of screens (computer and TV) more and more (and Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains paints a dire portrait of the neurological, intellectual, and cultural consequences). Creativity requires quiet – the time and space to think. Find ways to build that into your day. Mindfulness is not a luxury for strong leadership.

3.  Break the work addiction. All work and no play makes for dull, burned-out people – and maybe even dead ones. The Chinese pictograph for “busy” is two characters: “heart” and “killing.” Loving your work isn’t the same as being a slave to it. You’ll work better and smarter when refreshed. Play is productive.

4. Think gray. It’s simple and counter-intuitive: train yourself to not make decisions quickly. You’ll fall into your regular thinking patterns easily: you need to push yourself to think slowly and carefully about what you’re not thinking about. That’s where you’ll navigate through the shades of gray to identify the best course of action. It’s hard to think gray: humans love binary, right-wrong, yes-no, black-white thinking. The concept comes from Steven Sample (the highly successful president emeritus of the University of Southern California) and is developed in his chapter in Business Leadership.

5. Embrace the novice role. Experience the world with new eyes. It’s good for mind and soul. A good way is to try something you’ve never done but have always wanted to or that you know you don’t do well. The process of learning slows life down, encourages mindfulness, and fine-tunes your skills as a reflective practitioner – a definite leadership plus. You might discover a new talent or passion in the process. 

Onward to a creative 2012 for us all! 

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Creating a Truly Great Workplace

Tony Schwartz posted a piece on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network worth the read: The Twelve Attributes of a Truly Great Place to Work.

It’s important, Tony tells us, because more than 100 research studies have found that the most engaged employees are significantly more productive, drive higher customer satisfaction, and outperform the less engaged. The kicker: only 20 per cent of employees around the world say they’re fully engaged at work.

Tony’s meta-advice: employers need to shift their focus from trying to get more out of people to investing more in them. They do that by addressing four core human needs — physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. His twelve suggestions for creating truly great workplaces are offered below.

My two cents: the first six are structural interventions that take special funding, policies, and time to get in place. The last six are things we can implement right now. They make a huge difference and enable people to bring their best to work.

I don’t know about you, but respect, appreciation, autonomy, clarity, meaningful contribution, and capacity to learn and grow go a long way for me. Which on the list speak most powerfully to you?  

  1. 1.  Pay everyone a living wage. We know the gap between CEO compensation and pay to those at the bottom of the organizational heap. No more need be said.
  1. 2.  Give employees a stake in the company’s success. Profit sharing plans, stock options, or bonuses tied to performance let everyone share the fruits of their labor. 
  1. 3.  Design safe, comfortable and appealing work environments with space for privacy, for collaboration, and for community building.
  1. 4.  Provide healthy, high-quality food, at the lowest possible prices – even in the vending machines.
  1. 5.  Create places for rest and renew during the day and encourage breaks. Naps can fuel higher productivity.
  1. 6.  Offer a gym, encourage employees to stay fit, and provide incentives to use the facilities during the work day for renewal.
  1. 7.  Define clear expectations for success, and give employees autonomy to do their jobs.
  1. 8.  Introduce “two-way performance reviews” where employees receive feedback and provide it to their supervisors without fear of retribution.
  1. 9.  Hold managers accountable for treating all employees with respect and care and for acknowledging their positive contributions.
  1. 10.  Enable employees to focus without interruption on their most important priorities and to think more strategically and creatively,
  2. ideally on projects that fuel their passions.
  1. 11.  Provide ongoing opportunities and incentives to learn and grow in job-specific skills and in softer interpersonal, leadership, and life skills.
  1. 12. Stand for something beyond profits: products and services that add value in the world and enable people to feel good about their companies.

 

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Gender at Work and the Case of MIT: Progress Has its Drawbacks

12 years ago MIT acknowledged it was a hostile place for women faculty. The university became a national model in higher education for addressing gender equity. Its mea culpa encouraged other institutions to evaluate their treatment of women faculty, and the National Science Foundation and the National Academies launched major initiatives to increase opportunities for women in science.

Much has been done at MIT in the last twelve years: systematic efforts to hire women faculty have doubled their numbers; structures give women a seat on all university committees; year-long pauses in the tenure clock, full semester leaves for all with a new child in the home, campus day care, and subsidies for childcare during business travel support work-life balance; women hold important campus leadership positions (including university president); salaries, lab space, resources, research support, and teaching loads are now more equitable; and more.

Progress? Absolutely. But a recent MIT evaluation notes unanticipated consequences.

“Because things are so much better now, we can see an entirely new set of issues,” admits Hazel Sive, the Associate Dean in the School of Science who led one of the committees preparing the report.[1]

The new issues include perceptions that women’s promotions and hiring reflect affirmative action, not hard work and personal accomplishments. With so few women faculty, they can lose half their research time serving on campus committees. Tenure extensions and terms off favor male colleagues who use the time for research and lucrative consultancies, not childcare – creating new professional inequities. Lingering stereotypes keep women navigating a “narrow personality range” of not too aggressive or too soft.

What’s the learning in all this?

On gender in the workplace: we may have come a long way, baby, but we have miles to go before we sleep. Societal perceptions and organizational policies still result in unequal playing fields for women professionals. Inequity may be subtle, but it’s there. We have our head in the sand if we deny that.

On leadership, I see two key learnings. First, every leader needs strong skills in systemic thinking. Change one policy or practice, and there will be consequences elsewhere. Effective leaders anticipate the  implications of their decisions – and engage others in helping them see their own systemic blindness.

Second, strong leaders take on tough issues. We’ll never make progress on a complex issues like gender equity if leaders across organizations and sectors play it safe, or worry about making mistakes. Leadership is all about taking a stand.

MIT admitted gender inequity hasn’t been eliminated on its faculty, but there’s been progress — and there will be more. That’s something to celebrate.  

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/us/21mit.html

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Avoiding the Black Swan Syndrome: The Paradox of Compassionate Service

The film Black Swan has created quite a buzz. In it, Natalie Portman’s character, Nina, secures the role of her dreams – the lead in Swan Lake – only to be destroyed by the pressures that accompany doing it well. There’s an important leadership lesson in that.

We can only lead well and strongly when we retain our balance and perspective. Doing this asks leaders to navigate an interesting paradox: total immersion with measured detachment.

Leadership is all about commitment, deep relationships, and authenticity. It’s hard to be successful if you  stand on the sidelines. But leaders get in trouble when they forget they are playing a role and others are responding to them in it. Reactions and dynamics – positive or negative – that look very personal aren’t really very personal at all. In the leadership dance, we relate role to role.

Anyone who has ever been a lame duck having announced his or her decision to step down knows exactly what I am talking about.

Boston University social psychologist William Kahn in his study of caregivers identified a paradox in compassionate service that sheds insights on all this.

Caring professionals who serve others in need require simultaneous openness to and distance from those they seek to aid. They need clear boundaries to sustain objectivity, protect themselves from the stress of the work, and nurture essential autonomy in others. At the same time, good caregivers, like good leaders, need to understand others deeply to respond to the unique realities of their situation over time.

This only happens when caregivers “take in” those they serve – fully grasp others’ fears, capabilities, limitations, frustrations, anger, and needs. Learned skills in “clinical detachment” enable clinicians to bound this process – remain a full step away from being personally involved.

However, skilled professionals still risk “the strain of absorption”– accumulated stress from closeness to those in need, recognition of others’ pain and frustration, and the “constant waves of emotion” that wash up against them in the course of their everyday work. Over time, compassion fatigue takes a toll. It is easy for caregivers – and even easier for leaders – to ignore this and lose their sense of balance.

Leaders face internal and external pressures to produce and dynamics that keep them focused largely on follower needs. Leadership guru John Gardner acknowledges a universal ambivalence toward leaders: people want leaders who are powerful and capable of results. At the same time, they hate dependence and giving power to others. The ambivalence pushes followers to blindly up-the-dependence-ante and then punish leaders who don’t – or can’t – deliver quickly enough.

Shared conceptions of heroic leadership – the solitary superhero whose brilliance and strength save the day – support a leader’s stoic acceptance of the added pressures. So does the reality that all leaders serve at the will of their followers. Rising expectations bring the potential for rising disappointment.

The stage is set for leaders to forget the important distinction between taking their work seriously and taking their work too personally – and we saw where that led one fictional ballerina named Nina.

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Resilience 101: How to Build it

If resilience is an essential leadership skill, as I discussed in an earlier post, how do we build our capacity for it?  As someone for whom resilience doesn’t come naturally, I’ve thought deeply about the question.  Five suggestions from my musings:   

Start with what we know we can control or change – ourselves. It is easy in frustrating situations to hope that others will change. We know from research that’s a common, first response for all of us.  But we have the most influence on the change process when we focus on changing ourselves, our responses, our ways of framing a situation. This is not to say that we should cocoon, pull back, and not express our preferences or work to influence challenging or ineffective situations for the better.  It is more a question of how, when, and why we do that intervention work – and a reminder that we stand a better chance of influencing others when we know what we want and when we are trying patiently and openly to make things work.

Embrace our control over our full range of choices and options.  It’s easy to feel stuck – as if there’s only one way out of a sticky situation or only one way to understand it.  It’s harder to think of options and alternatives.  Resilience comes from being a stronger and broad thinker – no one trick pony – and from having the confidence in knowing that we can, even under the most stressful of conditions.

How do we develop those cognitive capacities? Practice them. Be playful. Take a minute now and then to ask simple questions like, so what else could I do now? What other options do I have? How else could I respond? What else is possible? What are five different reasons to explain why someone is now acting as he or she does? Once we get into the hang of it, these kinds of experience-broadening questions become second nature.  They enable us to see a bigger, richer, and brighter world.

Learn to reframe and do it often. Reframing is the process of standing back and deliberately looking at a situation from multiple angles and perspectives before jumping to the conclusion that you know what’s really happening (for you and for others).  Reframing is an especially important skills when we feel high stress, anger, anxiety, or other deep emotions.  That’s when we regress to our most primitive thinking and knee-jerk responses. 

If I tell myself I’m stuck, I am. If I say that I’m lost or overwhelmed, I will be. When I believe there is an opportunity, it’s always there.

When driven blindly by feelings, we react. It may feel good to settle, vent, or blame, but for what purpose?  Professionals have confidence that they know how to respond. The difference between reacting and responding is huge.  It’s the stuff upon which great careers are made.  What are the stories that you tell yourself in the face of frustrating situations?  Try an alternative framing, and you’ll see your mood lighten and your options grow.   

Need a primer to enhance your reframing skills? Try Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership by Lee Bolman and Terry Deal. Expanding the frameworks that you bring to make sense of social settings gives you a leg up in perfecting your reframing skills.      

Accept the reality that not everything is equally important. This sounds trite and obvious, but think about how often you have gotten yourself into a major stew over the small stuff.  We all do it — and more often than we like to admit.

Despite what many of us have learned from well-meaning teachers and sports coaches, not everything is worth doing well – and some things are not worth doing at all.

Sure there are consequences to our choices. Choose not to do something, and you’ve missed an opportunity. This is where knowing yourself comes in.

What’s really important to you? Where do you not want to miss out or not make a mistake? What are the issues or areas in your life where you can cut yourself some slack? Let go? Be less perfect?  Punt without shirking your responsibility to others?  

That’s the essence of resilience and the key to managing work-life balance and overload – and you hold the key to all that.  As you climb the hierarchy with increased responsibility over your career, you will never be able to do everything – and you’ll never be able to do all that you do perfectly.  How can you learn to accept that in yourself?  How can you use your supports and resources to share the load? Build networks of trust? Delegate? That’s not easy for people with high expectations  and needs for control, but it’s essential.            

Laugh.  A good sense of humor is mandatory for a long life and a strong career – and that means laughing at yourself, your mistakes, your flat spots, and your foibles. It’ll help keep things in perspective – and you’ll have a better time.