Energy

Communication is Key

I love it when people ask me if I’m worried about robots taking my job. They think Artificial Intelligence will be faster, smarter, and cheaper at creating content than I am. They’re right. But instead of displacing me, AI has promoted me. I am now a Prompt Engineer. How can you protect yourself from being replaced by AI?

Embrace

We fear what we don’t know, so get to know at least one AI chatbot. Here are a few you can try for free. Use AI to help you speed up your process. It’s like washing your car. When you drive through an automatic carwash there are no humans with buckets, sponges, and hand-held vacuums employed to hand wash your vehicle. Technology changed the way you wash your car. Just like technology changes the way most work gets done. Take control and upskill yourself.

Engage

The more work AI can do, the more important the human touch becomes. Use communication to:

Build Trust – Is there a coworker you avoid because the only time they speak to you is when they want something? Don’t be that coworker. Up your interpersonal communication efforts. If you get into the habit of engaging your team in conversation every day, then they will be more open when you ask them for help.

Make it Easy – Use tools like Google Drive to keep KPIs, planning notes, task assignments, etc., in one place so it is easy for your team to check the status of your joint projects. Keep meetings to a minimum. If a meeting is the best way to communicate, then invite one representative per project and let them brief their teams.

Spread Positivity – Take every opportunity to be a cheerleader. Whether it’s your direct report, coworker, or manager, when someone does a good job let them know. Reference a specific action they took and sincerely tell them why you think they rocked it. When someone helps you, thank them in front of their manager, if possible. Even people who do not enjoy the spotlight appreciate praise in the presence of someone who impacts their career.

Enhance

AI does not eliminate customer service. It enables you to be better at it. A human still needs to communicate:

Empathy – Clients want to know that you hear them, understand their challenges, and have experience solving the problem they are facing. After actively listening, you achieve that through what you say and how you say it. Customer service is warm, soothing, and personal.

Subject Matter Expertise – Your clients trust you to give them the tools they need to grow their businesses. You are their guide. You cut through the noise surrounding them. Use AI to research and evaluate options, then present them with the best plans for spending their time, energy, attention, and money.

Emotional Intelligence – It takes a human to figure out how a client likes to communicate then tailor the message to the medium they are most comfortable with. Slack? Email? Phone call? Zoom? Clients want to know someone is taking care of them. Ask them what their business needs beyond what your company provides. When you find out, introduce them to someone in your network who can help.

How has AI impacted your job so far? Please share in the comments.

Don’t Let Me Down

I had to take a class in small group communication in college. It was there that I learned one of my all-time favorite jokes: I want the members of my small group to be the pall bearers at my funeral so they can let me down one last time.

The absence of collaboration on a team makes you feel let down. One challenging element of collaboration is group goal setting. In this, Part Two of our Before and After series, let’s think about the traditional approach to setting work goals as Before, and how that approach can be improved as After. The Before approach is a systematic and disciplined process for success, but your team can waste a lot of energy using it. It typically goes like this:

Define the Objective – Identify what you want to achieve. The objective should be clear, specific, measurable, and aligned with the company’s overall business goals, vision, and mission.

Break it Down – Divide the objective into small steps to create projects. Assign projects to team members.

Prioritize – Determine the order in which the projects need to be done. For example, if Jane needs data from Joe’s project to complete hers, then Joe’s project is due first. Set deadlines, figure out what resources each team member needs to complete their project, and brainstorm possible obstacles to completing projects on time.

Track Progress – Schedule regular meetings to track the team’s progress towards meeting the objective. Identify who is falling behind and why. Adjust their resources to stay on track.

Evaluate – After achieving the objective, gather feedback from the team. What worked well? What didn’t? What do they wish they’d done differently? Put these notes in a folder in a shared drive as a reference for the next objective.

The traditional method dictates that you set a goal, reach it, then begin to identify another one. Sounds logical, right? But, in the quickly evolving world of work, Before methods of goal-setting are no longer working. This happens for several reasons, all having to do with a lack of something:

Flexibility – Traditional goal-setting methods often involve setting long-term goals and sticking to them, but that ignores the pace at which the work environment moves.

Employee Input – In the world of Before, your manager hands an objective to the team leader who doles out assignments. Lack of employee input produces both a lack of buy-in and a lack of motivation to achieve the objective. Employees are more engaged and motivated when we understand the broader purpose and meaning behind our work.

Learning – Traditional goal-setting methods tend to focus solely on achieving specific outcomes and not on the value of experimentation. In today’s knowledge-based economy, failing fast supports figuring out the best ways not to do something. These learnings are evergreen and the processes of elimination can be applied to achieving future goals.

The changing nature of both work and the workforce means that Before goal-setting methods may be ineffective in achieving your objectives. Instead, organizations should consider adopting the After approach. It relies on flexibility and employee-driven input to goal setting. This prioritizes learning, development, purpose, and adaptability.

How can you integrate the After approach to goal setting into your workforce retention plan?

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

You started out as friends. He came to rely on you more and more and you were happy to support him. You shared private jokes. You made him look good in front of others. You knew what he needed before he did. Now, he takes you for granted. What began as a sweet relationship has turned sour. You want a divorce. I’m not talking about your life’s partner. I’m talking about your work spouse.

Breaking up with a work spouse is neither an easy nor a quick decision. Maybe you were hired because you were friends. Seventy percent of Americans found their current job through their networks. This makes changing your relationship even more difficult. Here are five things you can do to handle the situation with both empathy and respect.

Be Honest and Grateful

Schedule a private meeting with your work spouse. Honestly and kindly communicate your feelings. Be clear and straightforward about your decision. Thank them for the positive impact they had on your professional life and assure them you will continue to support future collaboration. If you need some inspiration, then read the story of how Dolly Parton broke up with her work spouse, Porter Wagoner.

Set Boundaries

After breaking the news, set clear boundaries and expectations for moving forward. You are trying to prevent as much awkwardness and as many misunderstandings as possible. If your former work spouse decides to lash out and go low, then you need to go high. For example, if they start overly criticizing your ideas in weekly team meetings, then come to those meetings prepared to defend your ideas.

Prepare for Professionalism

Think about how you will control your reactions when you see your former work spouse every day. Keep any negative feelings to yourself and commit to remaining publicly amicable. This should help minimize the negative impact of your breakup on your coworkers. They will feel the new friction between the two of you even if you avoid talking about it and they will have questions. Can you and your work ex-spouse agree to deliver the same elevator speech to those inquiring minds? It’s essential to both your careers to maintain a professional attitude. For example, you still have to effectively collaborate on projects every day, but maybe you communicate more through email than face-to-face.

Allow Time for Adjustment

Give your work ex-spouse some space and time to adjust to the new normal. It’s natural to feel disappointed when a close professional relationship ends. Be patient and allow them to process their emotions at their own pace. Meanwhile, you need to adjust to your new single status. Your former work spouse had input into your projects and now they won’t. For example, if you always ran your monthly report by them before submitting it to your manager, now you need a new proofreader.

Make New Friends

Connect with other people on your project team. Grab coffee with someone this week and lunch with someone else next week. Creating stronger relationships will help you get to know, like, and trust each other. Since business moves at the speed of trust, investing in key relationships helps your team work both faster and more efficiently.

What do you do when you need to set new boundaries around a work relationship? Please share in the comments.

Best Stressed

In my role of serving the local IT community, I get to eavesdrop on many conversations. A recurring theme is the challenge of recruitment and retention, as you may imagine. The recent mass layoffs at big tech companies have caused stress waves that are crashing over both employees and employers.

Stress Has Many Flavors

There are different kinds of stress. For example, there are hindrances. These are things you cannot control, like a pandemic. Hindrances cause bad stress. There are also challenges. These are things you can rise to meet with effort, like learning a new skill. Hindrances demotivate while challenges boost motivation. Hindrances make you feel like you can’t get over them no matter how hard you work. Challenges make you feel accomplished when you meet them.

Help Instead of Hinder

In their book, Designing Your Work Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans say that humans have intrinsic, psychological needs: autonomy, relatedness, and competence (ARC). As an employer, if you can meet these needs for your employees, then you will have an easier time attracting and retaining talent.

Autonomy – This is controlling your own life. Employees want to feel like they have the freedom and trust to do their jobs the way they think they should be done. For example, let’s say you’re a manager at a home decor store. You have an employee who has ideas for how the store should be styled. Could you assign them to merchandise an end cap and a display table at the front of the store for one month? If the items on those displays keep getting sold, then you could assign them a whole section next month.

Relatedness – This is connecting to a community. Employees want a squad to belong to. This survey found nearly 57% of their respondents said they enjoyed work more because they made a friend there. For example, let’s say you’re a manager in charge of a fundraiser. You have to bring employees from different departments together to plan the event. If you facilitate a getting-to-know-you conversation at your kick-off meeting, then the diverse group can begin to develop empathy, camaraderie, and buy in for the mission. This not only makes collaboration between teammates possible, it may also start better collaboration between the various departments represented even after the fundraiser is over.

Competence – This is being good at what you do. Employees with a growth mindset look for ways to do more of what they like at work. For example, let’s say you’re the manager of a software development company. You have an employee who is really good at explaining one of your products to small groups of onboarding sales people. You’d like her to develop her onboarding talk into a presentation that she could deliver at an upcoming industry conference, but, she gets stage fright. If you record her next product demonstration, then you’re helping her take the next step in public speaking and you have a video that you can show during your conference presentation.

Motivating employees is a challenge as old as the organized workforce. As an employer, you cannot eliminate stress for every employee. The goal is to give them more good stress than bad stress in their jobs.

What are some ways your manager gives you good stress? Please share in the comments.

Be Quiet

Welcome to the final installment of the It’s so Quiet series. We’ve talked about Quiet Promotion, Quiet Quitting, and Quiet Firing. All three have some things in common. For example, The absence of reflection, unaligned expectations, and lack of communication. What would the quiet situations feel like if those issues were resolved?

Groundhog Day is this week. In the movie of the same name, the main character is stuck in the same day over and over doing a job he doesn’t want to do. What would a Groundhog Day look like for you if you were in the right role, using the right processes, working for the right organization? You would be Quiet Thriving.

What Is It?

Quiet Thriving is when you do your part to be responsible for engaging with your work. If you steer your tasks toward the things you like to do, remind yourself there are aspects of this job that you really like, and have a good friend at work, then you may be quietly thriving.

What Can You Do?

Document: You took this particular position because something in the job description interested you. What was that? Are you doing that? If not, can you start? Pull out your “Atta Baby!” file. What do the things that people praised you for have in common? Did you get satisfaction from those duties? If so, can you do more of those? If not, what are the barriers to doing more of the projects you enjoy?

Communicate: Time for a 1:1 with your manager. Managers are usually tasked with motivating employees. It’s much easier to motivate someone who enjoys their job. You offering to do more work makes their life easier. Respectfully discuss how you can use that phrase “and other duties as assigned” in your job description to receive assignments that you like. Any task that makes a positive contribution, especially if it makes and/or saves the organization money, should be welcomed.

Strategize: The questions in the Document section above are meant to help you craft the job you want to do. Do you have the agency to craft your job? If so, try to spend 20% of your day doing the tasks that energize you. Can’t think of what those tasks would be? That’s not surprising since we’ve been in crisis-mode for three years. You need creativity to solve problems. Dealing with crisis after crisis after crisis drains that. To recharge your creativity, can you journal? Maybe write your perfect job description. Or sketch what your perfect job would look like, or bullet point work you see others doing that you’d like to do. Can you make a friend at work? This survey found nearly 57% of their respondents said they enjoyed work more because they made a friend there.

Thank you for your feedback on this series! I appreciate both your point of view and your relentless respect. Let’s keep the conversation going in the comments. What do you do to quietly thrive at work?

Be Ready for a Call to Action

This article marks five years of writing, “Is It Worth Your T.E.A.M.?” It began as a call to action (CTA). I needed somewhere to store the advice I wanted to give my daughter but she did not want to receive. Yet. One year ago, LinkedIn offered to turn future articles into a newsletter. That was also a CTA. People in my networks began subscribing and presenting their challenges, another CTA. We are surrounded by them every day. Some CTAs are expected; for instance, hunger. You can put off eating until it’s convenient, but eventually you have to feed your body or die. They can also be unexpected. For example, in 2022, over 120,000 tech workers were laid off. Losing your job is a CTA. With the world of work constantly in flux, you are wise to always (and I don’t use that word lightly) be ready for a CTA when it comes to your job. But how?

Upskill

If you like your job, congratulations! Many of those 120,000 tech workers liked their jobs too and had no intention of leaving. Think of continuous learning as a survival skill as well as a CTA. If you like your industry, be sure to keep up on the latest trends. To illustrate, if you are a tax advisor right about now you are studying all the rules around preparing 2022 tax returns. With these skills if you unexpectedly lose your job, then you can easily market yourself to another employer or go into business for yourself. Not sure what the trends are in your industry? You can gain both insight and new skills if you have a Dayton Metro Library card. They offer free access to LinkedIn Learning.

If you don’t like your job, you are in the majority. According to Gallup, in 2022, only 21% of global workers were actively engaged with their jobs. Your CTA may be to look at job descriptions for positions you want and obtain the skills, experience, and/or certifications you need to get hired. Let’s say there is an opening at a company you’d like to work for and this company is known for philanthropy. Grab two or three friends and volunteer at their favorite non-profit organization. Mention the experience in your cover letter and prepare a story to tell about it for your interview.

Network

Meet people who work at companies you want to work for.

What networking events do they attend?
Can you connect with them on LinkedIn?
What non-profit boards do they serve on?
Can you get an informational interview with someone who works there?
Do they belong to a trade association they would enjoy telling you about?

Even if companies you want to work for don’t notice you, you will inevitably discover other organizations where you’d like to work that you didn’t know existed before these efforts and now they have a CTA to get to know you.

If you have a call to action that you are wrestling with, feel free to join the discussion I’m facilitating for Women in Christian Leadership’s virtual Coffee and Conversation on Friday, January 6. Register here.

What call to action are you struggling with as we enter 2023? Please share in the comments.

Your Favorite Things

We have arrived at the end of another year. Being the data geek that I am, I analyzed the stats to see what articles received the most views. If you missed these conversations, or you’d like to revisit them, here are the top three most viewed articles in each category.

Time

Time for a Brand Refresh

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Attention

Child-free by Choice

Join the Resistance

Treat Me Right

Money

Back to Basics

Isn’t it Romantic?

On the Road Again

Thank you for walking down memory lane with me. The best holiday gift you can give me this year is your feedback. What topics did you like? What other topics would you like to discuss? What challenges at work do you need help solving? Please share in the comments.

Did I Do That?

Last month I mentioned Atomic Habits by James Clear. This book rocked my goal-setting world from Chapter One when he stated, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” Clear says, “The Four Laws of Behavior Change are a simple set of rules we can use to build better habits. They are (1) Make it obvious, (2) Make it attractive, (3) Make it easy, and (4) Make it satisfying.” How might we apply this strategy at work?

Let’s say it was brought to your attention in a performance review that 360° feedback revealed people find your behavior at in-person meetings intense. What you think of as enthusiasm, a number of coworkers perceive as, at best, overwhelming and at worst, scary. Your manager wants to promote you to Team Leader, but if you intimidate people, then you cannot effectively influence them. The feedback mentioned that you:

Consistently arrive just in time for meetings to start and jump right into the agenda
Always sit at the head of the rectangular conference room table
Rarely look up from your note taking and when you do, you’re frowning

Acknowledging these are habits you to need change, you decide to use Clear’s four laws to come up with the following plan for improvement.

Make it Obvious – Before your next internal meeting, email the participants a short note stating you are making a couple of adjustments to your processes. You hope they will make meetings more effective for all attendees and you will privately seek feedback.

Make it Attractive – To you: Approach this exercise as a learning experience that will give you examples you can report to your manager, and witnesses they can consult, to prove you have what it takes to lead a team. To them: People are typically happy to give advice. Tell your coworkers that you respect their opinions and your intention is to make their work lives easier.

Make it Easy – Create more margin in your schedule so that you can show up ten minutes early to the next meeting. Use that time to greet each coworker and exchange pleasantries. Meet in a new location with a round table. If you have to meet in the same location, then sit on the side of the rectangle among the other attendees instead of the power position at the head of the table. For note taking you could audio record the meeting on your phone. This allows you to transcribe your notes later, maintain eye contact during the meeting, and ask follow up questions. Or, you could request that someone take notes for the group and email them to everyone after the meeting. State that in future meetings everyone will take a turn performing this task.

Make it Satisfying – For you: Reward yourself for trying new things and make notes of any improvements for your next 1:1 with your manager. For them: Send a thank-you email to the meeting attendees for participating in your experiment. Ask them follow-up questions like, What did they like/dislike about the changes? What other adjustments do they suggest?

How could you apply the four laws of behavior change to a current habit you need to break or start? Please share in the comments.

Military Schooled

Veteran’s Day is this week in the United States. Thank you, veterans and your families for your service. Is motivating troops at all similar to motivating the workforce?

Similarities

Both military and civilian organizations take people with nothing in common, put them on teams, and require them to execute complicated projects
The military rewards personal sacrifice, shared sacrifice, and accomplishments through a system of challenges and rewards. Some companies offer overtime pay, team recognition on their social media, and pay submission fees for industry awards
The military asks you to put your country and its larger cause ahead of your own interests and safety. Essential Workers are asked to do the same
Goals for both the military and the workforce are: increase production, efficiency, and desired results
Motivation is also the same because humans populate both groups and everyone wants the same things: job satisfaction, achievement, recognition, and professional growth

Differences

From the beginning of military service, the focus is leadership. There are formal training programs in all branches of the military (e.g., military academy, ROTC, Officer Training School) and leadership training continues throughout your career. Does your organization offer career development? Do they reimburse you for continuing education?
The military hold ceremonies for changes in command. These formally acknowledge that change is happening and make the environment less disruptive. When was the last time you got to meet your new department head before they were hired?
The military physically train together. Does your company have a softball team? Axe throwing league? Charity walk/run?
The military has great expectations and expects the troops to rise to meet them. As James Clear says in his book, Atomic Habits, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” The military’s systems are designed to use positive peer pressure and incentives to build self-motivating troops. Does your company have a mission statement? Can you quote it?

Learnings

A 1994 study revealed motivation predicts success better than intelligence, ability, or salary. The military uses motivation techniques that can apply to the workforce. Rewards, (e.g. salary) only work as long as they are perceived as rewards. When the reward goes away, so does the motivation. Pay your workforce enough to live on, give them tools to become Subject Matter Experts, and agency to give their jobs their best efforts
The military is motivated to protect their country. Patriotism is a feeling. What feeling can you encourage in your employees? Loyalty? Service? Sustainability? Legacy?
The military emphasizes and rewards incremental progress. (e.g., moving up in the ranks). Giving your employees a several-step career path, defining the parameters to reach each step, then rewarding them with the next step when they reach those parameters, can help you retain them. A 1998 study determined people found life 22 percent more satisfying when they accomplished a steady stream of small goals rather than a few large goals
Sticking together is ingrained in military culture. It drives everyone to achieve a higher purpose. How do you bond your team? What contribution does your company make to society? Employees want to know they are working together to accomplish something that serves the greater good

What other ways do you think the workforce can learn from the military? Please share in the comments.

Secret Identity

In 2018, Mike Robbins wrote a book called, Bring Your Whole Self to Work: How Vulnerability Unlocks Creativity, Connection, and Performance advocating authenticity in the workplace. If you have about 12 minutes, his TEDxBerkeley Talk is worth watching. Since the concept depends on interpretation, how do you know what bringing your whole self to work looks like at your organization? As an employee, what is your responsibility? Is it really a good idea to bring your whole self to work?

What Does it Look Like?

In 1990, through his research in diverse workplaces, organizational psychologist William Kahn defined employee engagement. He theorized that employees have personas they put on to go to work, like actors portraying characters. The gap between employees’ true selves and their personas depends on how engaged they are with their jobs. For example, when an employee wants purpose from their job, they are crushed when they don’t get the promotion they expected. This can lead to disengagement like complaining about the job or looking for another one. If the employee doesn’t base their identity on their job, they recover from the same setback more quickly. At the most basic level, bringing your whole self to work means revealing what is impacting your life outside of the job and how it is affecting you on the job. It also means respecting coworkers who share that information about themselves with you.

What is Your Responsibility?

At minimum, managers should strive to create an environment where people feel accepted and respected no matter how invested they are in their work personas. Normalizing the fact that what we experience outside the workplace (e.g., family responsibilities, discrimination, COVID-19) affects us on the job produces a more loyal workforce. It takes a great deal of courage to bring your whole self to work. It also takes cooperation, tolerance, and patience. It has to be part of an organization’s culture. It is work in addition to the job you were hired to do. Bringing your whole self to work requires self-awareness and emotional intelligence. As a team member, you have to pay it forward by extending grace to your coworkers. For example, if you gave your best effort to a project and the client still rejected it, do you blame the coworker who was distracted by a sick child? Or do you choose to believe that they gave their best effort too?

Is it a Good Idea?

A workforce enabled to be real is a workforce empowered to show empathy. This is especially useful in relation to customer service. Some things are universal, like the desire to be heard. For example, when a customer has a complaint, they want acknowledgement. When a member of your workforce spends time listening to the customer’s experience, the customer feels more positive toward your business even if their problem isn’t immediately solvable. Now, having said all of the above, it is not lost on me that the rules of bringing your whole self to work are different for people of color. That is a whole ‘nuther conversation, and you can start it here.

How do you define bringing your whole self to work? Please share in the comments.