Culture – Page 10 – mardihumphreys.com

Minimize to Maximize

Social media bombards you with images of your connections allegedly living their best lives. FOMO compels you to keep up, but that doesn’t make you feel any better. It’s time to embrace JOMO (Joy of Missing Out). This acronym is usually associated with redefinitions of productivity and/or self-care, particularly in terms of disconnecting with social media. Here are three other ways you can apply it.

Sift Through Stuff

You still have the interview suit you bought five years ago because it may come back in style later. You saved 198 business books to your Amazon Wish List because you may want to read them later. You’re thinking about renting a storage shed because your twenty-five-year-old daughter may need her American Girl Doll collection later. (No? Just me? Okay.) At some point, you have to acknowledge that now is actually later. It takes energy both to identify what you don’t need and to let it go. Learning to be content with what you have, instead of being afraid you’re going to miss stuff after it’s gone, is a major mindset shift. Start small. For example, go through your closet and remove items you haven’t worn for five years. (I’m spotting you a couple of years to allow for COVID.) Bag them up for donation drop off, but don’t take them. Set the bags on the floor of your closet. If you don’t miss the bagged items after three months, then donate them.

Use a Filter

Instead of saying yes to every volunteer opportunity, choose the nonprofit you most connect with and put your energy into that one instead of exhausting yourself trying to serve several. Use your personal mission statement to set a boundary. For example, if your personal mission statement is, “I want to help people obtain what they need to succeed,” then that may translate into “I want to volunteer at The Foodbank four hours a month.” Then focus your efforts and your mind on that experience.

Narrow Your Choices

The classic example of having too many choices is the jam study by Iyengar and Lepper. They set up a display of 24 gourmet jams at an upscale grocery. They offered a $1 off coupon to shoppers who sampled a jam. At a later date, they set up the display with the same offer, but only made six gourmet jams available. The display with 24 choices received more traffic, but the display with six choices resulted in more sales.They concluded that it is good to have options, but too much of a good thing is still too much. If there are only six jams to choose from, then you are more likely to be satisfied with your purchase. If there are 24 jams to choose from, then you are more likely to wonder if maybe you should have purchased the blueberry bourbon pecan flavor instead of the balsamic fig. It’s like your performance review. For example, you can give your manager a list of all the great things you did last quarter, but you benefit more by reexamining what your manager’s goals were for last quarter and only presenting illustrations of how you helped them reach those goals. Maximize their satisfaction by minimizing their choices.

How have you avoided FOMO by embracing JOMO this week? Please share in the comments.

I’ll Think About Procrastination Tomorrow

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make when they go by.”
Douglas Adams

I felt bad about moving the T in my S.M.A.R.T. goal back. AGAIN. Then I discovered Hofstadter’s law. In 1979 cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter said any plan you make will always take longer to complete than you expect it to; even if you over estimate how long the plan will take to complete. So, it’s not just me; it’s all of us. In fact, intentionally pushing back deadlines, or procrastination, can be a useful tool.

Purposeful Delay

The key to making procrastination a superpower is to do it intentionally. In 1927 Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnick proved that if you are interrupted during a task and you leave it unfinished, then you actively remember it until the task is completed. When you purposely leave a task unfinished in order to remember to do it, that is active procrastination. It’s different from passive procrastination, which is leaving a task unfinished because you don’t want to do it. For example, if you binge watch euphoria to avoid returning a client’s voicemail, then you are passively procrastinating. However, if by the end of an episode you discovered how to address the client’s concern and return their call, then you are actively procrastinating.

Problem Solving

If you pressure yourself to get everything done by the end of the work day, (shoutout to Team Inbox Zero!) then it takes self-control to let an issue go undecided. But when procrastinating to problem solve, you have to allow enough time for creativity to happen. The trick is knowing how long the creativity will take. You can’t tell your manager that you missed a deadline because you were thinking about all the possible solutions. For example, set a time limit, like half an hour, and do something totally unrelated to the challenge you’re trying to resolve. Walk the dog, play solitaire on your phone (or with a real deck of cards), shoot some hoops. Switch to a physical activity that engages more of your senses and less of your brain. Revisit the project after your set time is up. Whatever new avenues you now see to explore, limit your choices to those.

Priority List

Intentional procrastination is useful for prioritizing. In some cases if you put a task off long enough, then you realize you don’t need to waste your time doing it. For example, at the end of your work day you make a list of what you did not get done today and intend to get done tomorrow. If there is a task that ends up on that list every day for a week, then at the end of your work week think about why you didn’t accomplish it. Is the task necessary? Is it a lengthy process that needs to be broken down into multiple tasks? Is it a task you can delegate to a direct report?

How do you make time for procrastination and still meet deadlines? Please share in the comments.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

While researching for last week’s article, I came across Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” How have I gone my whole life, including college English and history classes, and not known about this?! I fixed that oversight in my education. The 20-page letter is an eloquent expression of indignation and disappointment. How demoralized King must have been every time he banged his head against the brick walls of racism. His determination to wield his disappointment as a catalyst for change is a master class in rhetoric. His example can inspire our behavior at work.

Open Your Mind

When you are disappointed because you didn’t get the reaction you wanted, pause long enough to let the emotion finish its cycle. Then, analyze the situation with as much objectivity as you can muster. With that particular door closed, what window just opened? For example, if you were rejected for a promotion, then you need to consider your role in the organization through the selection committee’s eyes:

Did you work really hard at projects they consider housekeeping?
Did the person who received the promotion spotlight themselves more than you did?
Is the promotion political instead of based on merit?

The answers to these questions plant another decision tree:

Will the selection committee give you feedback regarding why you weren’t promoted?
Are you willing to do what it takes to get promoted?
Do you want to remain an employee of this company?

When eight fellow clergymen publicly criticized King for his Birmingham Campaign, he chose to use his time in jail to write a treatise that still speaks to us today. Even though his body was incarcerated, his mind was free.

Practice Emotional Intelligence

When you are disappointed because your expectations are not aligned with your coworkers, communicate.You are probably not alone in your disappointment. You can state in a meeting or an email what you perceive, then ask for clarity. For example, Does everyone on your team know what their role in a project is? Do they know what each other’s roles are? Does everyone know which project has priority and when it is due? Not all projects are equal. The client who supplies your organization with the most revenue will receive most of the team’s energy even if they are not the team’s favorite client. “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is King’s comprehensive effort to communicate with his fellow clergymen and align everyone’s expectations.

Level Up Your Goals

When you are disappointed because you failed to reach one of your S.M.A.R.T. goals, use the setback to refine and iterate your next one. For example, is the system you’re using to qualify leads not helping you meet your monthly quota? Analyze your process. Are all the elements sound? Did you not make quota three months in a row? Were any external circumstances negatively impacting your process? In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King broke down his process of the non-violent campaign into four basic steps and gave examples of how he and his coworkers for justice moved through them.

How do you use disappointment to push yourself forward? Please share in the comments.

Hidden Treasure

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels

Continuous improvement is my business, so I’m habitually looking for manual processes to automate. Some of my clients get nervous because automation could eliminate an employee’s job. But that employee has a big advantage over the automating software application: soft skills. Only human beings can combine wisdom, communication, leadership, and self-awareness to get work done. If the employee is valuable, then I suggest the client take this opportunity to advance them into leadership. That decision calls for careful consideration because individual contributors tend to get promoted for their technical skills. However, the promotion often comes with people to manage requiring soft skills the new manager may not have. Here are three characteristics to look for when identifying a potential leader.

Growth Mindset

Leaders are constantly learning, questioning their own assumptions, and seeking feedback. For example, leaders:

Take personal initiative to adopt the company’s mission. They decide to find their role in furthering it even if being an individual contributor is not their dream job
See the big picture and think strategically about how they can help the organization get from where it is to where it wants to be
Not only focus on what they can control during a crisis but also look for new opportunities the crisis may spawn
Realize the next step toward a goal may require two steps back
Develop confidence when they refuse to be victims of setbacks
Favor performing small experiments to get the team comfortable with failure. They frame these failures as necessary to eliminate what doesn’t work
Don’t wallow in regret when they make a mistake. Instead, they find out where they went wrong to prevent it from happening again
Recognize the importance of celebrating every baby step the team takes toward their goal

Inspires Collaboration

Bestselling business author Daniel Pink, says 70% of employees spend at least some of their workday “persuading or convincing others.” People who do this well and for the benefit of both the project and the people working on it, are leaders. They:

Positively build, cultivate, and engage a disparate team to promote a workplace culture of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging
Give relentless respect to earn trust and strive for mutual understanding
Rally the team to buy in to the plan that will complete the mission
Manage conflict to foster debate instead of defense
Encourage everyone on the team to maintain an attitude of, “It’s us against the problem, not us against each other.” This bonds the team and makes everyone stronger for the next challenge

Chronic Curiosity

In his book, Play Nice But Win, Michael Dell, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Dell Technologies says, “Change, true transformation, is a race with no finish line.” Thanks to technology the rate of change is increasing and it’s not going to slow down. Leaders:

Champion transformation and look for what is coming next
Are more interested in relevant results than in looking the smartest person in the room
Apply the scientific method to business challenges. For example, COVID is forcing leaders to think critically about how work gets done because business “as usual” no longer exists. Solving that challenge begins with curiosity

What qualities do you look for in a potential leader? Please share in the comments.

Filling in the Gaps

I love to see people thriving in second act careers. There are plenty of reasons for someone to work beyond the age that the Social Security Administration dictates: The novelty of retirement has worn off. Your children have grown and flown. You served twenty years in the military. You can’t afford to retire. Traditionally, the older you got the less opportunity knocked. Enter COVID-19 ushering in the Great Resignation. Companies are now forced to get creative in hiring. If you are an elder job hunter (a forty-year-old employee is considered old in America, btw) now is the time to act. One way to differentiate yourself from other candidates is to offer your services as a mentern.

What’s a Mentern?

A mentern is an employee who simultaneously teaches and learns, combining the characteristics of a mentor and an intern. Usually over 50 years old with about 25 years of experience in the workforce, a mentern wants to teach skills, like emotional intelligence, while learning skills, like digital intelligence. For more information, the book Wisdom @ Work by Chip Conley is the story of the birth of a mentern, and the movie The Intern is an example of the concept in action.

Why Would Companies Want Them?

Technology disrupts every industry. It is a huge fault in logic to assume that digital natives (Millenials and Gen Z) have an indisputable advantage over their elders (Boomers and Gen X) when it comes to IT skills. Technology changes at a speed that can give you whiplash. New software comes online every day. Every employee has to learn, use, unlearn, rinse, and repeat with each upgrade. Menterns have years of experience refining and iterating processes based on experimentation and feedback. This knowledge can be transferred to a digital native open to learning from other people’s wisdom. When digital natives are promoted to managers, they are habitually promoted for their technical skills and not their people skills. They are left to fend for themselves to figure out how to coach a team. A mentern has years of practice communicating, problem-solving, collaborating, and leading. Pairing a mentern with a digital native can fill in the gaps of both. This is how sustainable companies are built.

How Do You Become One?

If you are a good leader, you already have an inclination to both learn and serve. If you are also humble and curious, then you have the makings of a successful mentern. Your goal is to share your wisdom, experience, and network with a coworker two generations younger than you while also listening and learning how to use the tools you need to successfully navigate emerging business processes. It’s work to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory skills, but the ability to do so is the secret to a successful menternship. As with most skills it becomes easier with practice.

Elders and digital natives both want the same things: opportunity, income, and flexibility. If each generation starts on their side of the gap and then starts building a bridge to cross it, imagine the resulting exponential growth in productivity. Interested in becoming a mentern? Here’s a website you should check out.

How would your company benefit from menterns? Please share your experience with the concept in the comments.

It Can Be Tricky

Photo by Rasa Kasparaviciene from Pexels

The approaching holiday has you all up in your thankful feels, but you’re worried about inadvertently offending instead of appreciating. When it comes to acknowledging your managers, remote teammates, clients, coworkers, volunteers, board members, mentors (Wow. You have a ginormous sphere of influence.), if you express your gratitude sincerely, specifically, and sensitively, then it has the best chance of being received well. Here are some examples of what not to do followed by a better way.

Sincere

DON’T: You stop at your teammate’s cubicle and see they are out to lunch. You leave a blank envelope containing a five-dollar gift card to their favorite local coffeehouse on their desk, then you go out to lunch. Your teammate returns and finds the random gift. Instead of feeling appreciated, they are creeped out.

DO: Wait for an opportunity to see them in person so you can look them in the eye and tell them why you’re giving them this gift. How did their recent action positively affect you? Simply saying, “I appreciate you having my back in the report-out meeting last month. Please have a cup of coffee on me at your convenience.” Will not only prevent them from being creeped out, it should also ensure their future support.

Specific

DON’T: You just gave your direct report a glowing performance review. At the end of the meeting, you say, “Great job last year. Keep it up. Have a good rest of your day,” then leave the video conference.

DO: You have to go through the standard on-a-scale-of-one-to-five form for HR, but if you want to retain this employee, you also need to draw a little deeper from the appreciation well. There are probably several instances when they made your life easier last year. Choose one and expound on it. For example, “Thank you for putting the Powerpoint presentation together last July for the contract renewal meeting. It took a lot of time to shepherd all the departments involved, fact check the slides, and incorporate everyone’s notes. Would you please write a report with your suggestions on how we can improve that process?” Not only does that express your gratitude for their mad follow-up skills, it also validates their work, lets them know they have a future with the organization, and encourages them to take on more responsibility.

Sensitive

DON’T: Once a year you give an award to the individual contributor that received the most positive feedback for customer service. This year’s recipient is known throughout the organization as an extreme introvert. You present the award to them in front of the whole company and their plus ones at the annual holiday lunch. Instead of feeling honored, they are embarrassed.

DO: Is it necessary to announce the award winner at the holiday lunch? If so, don’t force the extreme introvert to walk up in from of everyone to accept it. An award of appreciation should be thoughtful, creative, and personal. An announcement in the company newsletter and a handwritten note thanking them for the good care they took of your customers last year is more appropriate for an extreme introvert.

Thirty percent of employees quit their jobs due to lack of appreciation. Maybe your New Year’s resolution could be finding one thing to sincerely appreciate about one person every day. A daily gratitude habit can be contagious. You could revolutionize your workplace.

How often do you intentionally thank those around you? Please share in the comments.

Help Me Help You

You don’t get a raise because you need the extra money. You get a raise because you’ve made a positive impact on the bottom line and the company anticipates you’ll contribute in the future. If you executed duties above your job description, brought in revenue, and/or saved the company money, then you deserve a raise.

It’s Work

If you don’t have a “Brag File” yet, start one. Right. Now. Populate a new folder on your desktop with complimentary emails from both clients and coworkers, the link to your recommendations page on LinkedIn, awards, and any other evidence of the great job you did over the past 365 days. With this research, write a report quantifying your value to the company using explicit data to empower your case. For example, “I saved the company $19,800 in training expenses through my network connections and research.” Practice talking about how what you’re currently working on will benefit the company in the near future. Check out websites like salary.com to find out what others with your job title make. All these things pulled together enable you to enter the meeting knowing your worth.

It’s Scary

Your goal is to make you, your manager, and your company successful. You did your due diligence and have every reason to be optimistic, but it’s natural to feel nervous. Set a positive tone when you walk into the room. After greetings and small talk, use your curiosity to dive into your agenda. Ask your manager what their priority is right now. Follow up their answer with what you did this past year to help them get closer to their goal by pulling that report from your Brag File. Thank them for their insight. Tell them you’ll use it to further refine your process to assist them in achieving their priority. Of course, that means you will take on more responsibility and you anticipate that more compensation accompanies that effort. Say that with a poker face. Take the emotion out of the conversation. Report what you did to further the company’s success last year, demonstrate how you intend to keep doing it next year, and put a dollar amount on what the company should invest in your time, energy, and attention. It’s more scary to not get the raise you could’ve received if you’d simply asked for it.

It’s Worth It

Seventy percent of employees who ask for a raise get one. You may be told no even though you performed your job above and beyond its description. COVID-19 decimated our economy and your employer may not have the funds to give you a pay increase right now. Ask if the company is open to other forms of compensation (e.g., flexible schedule). If your requests are rejected, schedule a meeting for six months from now to revisit the possibility. Ask what KPIs your manager would like to see you hit in the interim. Keep your manager updated on your progress either through scheduled 1:1s or an end-of-week emailed report showing that your work is aligned with both your manager’s and the company’s goals.

If the compensation conversation intimidates you, reframe your fear as excitement. You’re anxious to share the good news of how you’ve improved both yourself and the company during the past year. If your enthusiasm is welcomed by your manager, then that’s a good sign you have a future with the company. If it isn’t, well, that tells you something too.

What do you do to build up your confidence to ask for a raise? Please share in the comments.

Cultural Competency

Feedback is a gift. It’s usually one I want to return. But a few days ago I received feedback that I want to keep. I had the privilege of finding out how privileged I am by spending the day in diversity and inclusion training. When I tell people this, they usually wince and ask, “How did THAT go?” I get it. While mentally preparing for the day I braced for difficult conversations, sore toes, and conflict. What I experienced was respectful dialogue, open minds, and advocacy.

It had a great deal to do with the intentional way the day was facilitated. (Shout out to Dr. Karen. If your organization wants help with diversity education, contact her at DrKaren@DrKarenTownsend.com). Dr. Karen both coached and invited us to co-facilitate the learning with her. There was a rhythm of a truth presented, illustrated, a question asked about it, then discussed amongst the group. For example: What would the world look like if it was a village of 100 people? Here is a summary:

Nationalities: 61 Asians (of the 61, 20 would be Chinese and 17 would be Indian), 13 Africans, 12 Europeans, 9 Latin or South Americans, 5 North Americans (Missing: Australia, Oceana, and Antarctica)
Gender: 50 male, 50 female
Age: 26 would be under 15 years old, 74 would be adults – 8 of whom would be over 64 years old
Health: 1 would have AIDS, 26 would smoke, 14 would be obese
Living Conditions: 87 villagers would have access to safe drinking water; 13 villagers would not. 77 people would have shelter to live in; 23 would not
Religion: 33 people would be Christian, 20 would be Islamic, 13 would be Hindus, 6 would be Buddhists, 2 would be atheists, 12 would be non-religious, and 14 would be other religions
Education: 1 villager would have a college degree while 18 people would be illiterate
Technology: 33 villagers would have cell phones, 18 would have cars, 16 would have computers
Employment: 28 would work in Agriculture, 14 would work for Industry, 28 would have service jobs, and 30 would be unemployed
Income: 53 people would live on less than $2 (US currency) a day

The world is big and interconnected. You want everyone in it to use your product or service. You have a better chance of appealing to customers of various ages, races, genders, sexual orientation, military service, physical abilities, and religions if your staff represents those demographics. The trick is, you can’t stop at just hiring for diversity. You also have to promote diversity up the organizational chart. You have to fairly compensate every employee for their work. You have to be inclusive by listening to, and being influenced by, diverse viewpoints.You have to intentionally create a culture where all employees feel safe to share their experiences and backgrounds.Your staff needs to be both seen and heard in order to reap the benefits of both employee retention and market expansion.

How do you foster a welcoming and supportive environment at your business? Please share in the comments.

It’s About Time

When did the United States know it was time to bring workers from the fields to the factories? Who decided working eight hours a day for five days in a row was the best schedule for optimum productivity? The 40-hour workweek became a law in the United States in 1940. If we haven’t thought about how long it should be since then, may we please use COVID-19 as the trigger for redefining how long it is now?

Not News

How long both the workweek and the workday should be is not a new conversation. One of my favorite thinkers is organizational psychologist Adam Grant. He has lobbied for the death of the five-day workweek for at least a couple of years. There is plenty of evidence to support his position from respected sources like The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and The Huffington Post.

Mother Knows Best

The catch is, if employees spend less time on the job, isn’t it logical that the job should pay less? Mothers have struggled with this prevalent employer attitude for years. In Mika Brzezinski’s book, Know Your Value: Women, Money, and Getting What You’re Worth, Carol Smith, former publisher of Elle magazine told Mika, “I love hiring women (for) four days a week because they actually will produce at least five days’ worth of work for four days’ worth of pay.” As an employer that’s a benefit to her, but as a woman, it is a detriment. Her story in the book goes on to note that the moms of young children who work for her are willing to do anything to have a four-day workweek including accepting 60% of their salary.

Proof of Concept

Of course, employees do not want to make less money, but why should employers shorten the week without also shortening the paycheck? Here are two examples. This article talks about a four-day-workweek-no-pay-reduction experiment the company Buffer offered its employees. To shorten their workweek, they cut back on meetings and social events, sped up the pace of their day, and improved their focus (e.g., employees reported spending 35% less time surfing the web). The experiment was so successful, it’s still running. Buffer made $21 million in revenue in 2020. Also, American businesses should vet the plan Iceland commissioned from Alda (Association for Sustainable Democracy), an Icelandic non-profit, and Autonomy, a British think tank, to condense the workweek. These two organizations partnered to run two large-scale trials of a four-day workweek from 2015-2019. They published their results in June 2021. In addition to productivity remaining the same or improving in their test-subject companies, the study also concluded that employee welfare markedly increased (e.g., less burnout). Even if employers prioritize revenue over employee well-being, these studies prove a four-day workweek is profitable.

Life always holds an element of uncertainty. Did we really need a pandemic to remind us of what our priorities should be and how far we’ve strayed from them? Let’s rethink the current workweek model and consider what compensation for productivity could look like in 2022.

Would you rather be paid for your time or your productivity? Please share in the comments.

My Way or the Highway

I keep stumbling over the word agency because it’s a contributing factor to The Great Resignation. It’s trending in the context of one of its lesser meanings (check out #9). As I struggled to visualize it, I received an unexpected email of encouragement from my manager. In reassuring me that I am achieving our goals, his email helped me label how I achieve them. It also woke me to the fact that not everyone has this freedom in their work. Employers had to give up a certain amount of control over their workforces at the height of COVID-19 when they weren’t allowed to have employees work under their watchful eyes. An employer who has issues with employees working remotely is not a logistics problem, it’s a trust problem.

Control

If it’s not enough to complete the task correctly and on time, but it also has to be done the way the manager prefers, then you have a lack of agency. For example: toward the end of her life, our grandmother was not physically strong enough to wash the windows on her house herself. During a visit, my husband offered to do it. She immediately pointed out what equipment to pull from where, gave him a recipe for the cleaner, dictated while he mixed it, and window by window instructed him on how to clean them. Kudos to him for his patience. There were 13 windows on that house. It was a long afternoon. Haven’t we all had a micromanager? Or one who insisted we be available to them 24/7/365 like Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada? If this is your current situation, can you set boundaries on when you’re available to your manager? Can you transfer to another department that allows you more freedom? Is having agency important enough to you to find a different job? Whatever you decide, take time to think about how you got into this situation. Are you habitually involved with people (managers, people you date, etc.) who want to control you? If you determine that you’re the common denominator in these relationship equations, talk about them with a trusted friend, therapist, or coach to help you identify red flags in both your behavior and your manager’s. Otherwise, the lack of agency is likely to follow you to your next role.

Trust

Your lack of agency means your manager doesn’t entirely trust you. Some things to consider:

Have you done something to lose their trust?
Are they micromanaging everyone, or just you?
Is your relationship strong enough that you can ask them what they are afraid of?
Is there a way you can reduce their insecurities?
If you do what you’re told the way you’re told to do it every single time, there’s no learning. Would your manager let you experiment, fail, then learn from the result? For example: Can you do a project how, where, and when you want to, successfully complete it, deliver a report of the results to your manager, then ask for this process to become your standard operating procedure?
Have you had success on your own initiative that you can remind them of to prove your credibility?
Would more communication (e.g., weekly status reports) on projects give them more confidence in you?

You train people how to treat you. You cannot change other people’s behavior, you can only change what behavior you will accept from them. If you can’t achieve the autonomy you need at your current position, then your decision is whether to stay or go.

What do you do when you experience a lack of agency at work? Please share in the comments.