Leadership – Page 15 – mardihumphreys.com

Habilitation vs Rehabilitation

I intended to resume lifting you up this week with warm, fuzzy, holiday-ish articles, but I tripped over reality.

It started with a ride along. I accompanied an officer of the Dayton Police Department’s 3rd District West Patrol Operations on part of his tour of duty. You can do it too, if you want. Here’s how. Yes, I saw some citizens exhibiting some questionable behavior. But more significantly, I saw police officers acting as peace officers. For example, we responded to a call about a young man with special needs refusing to enter the house of his foster mom. I watched two grown men ooh and aah over this youngster’s prowess with a remote control car in her driveway. Then they asked him what toys he’d like to show us in the house. The woman said she told the young man that the Dayton Police were good, helpful people and these officers proved her right. Recent events have spotlighted the need for improvement in the Dayton Police Department. Please know these two officers (and other good and helpful men and women like them) are on the force.

The next day I had the privilege of being immersed in the Montgomery County, Ohio justice system as part of the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce’s Leadership Dayton program. Our host warned us that we would end the day with more questions than answers. He was right. Here are three of my take aways.

Do we expect too much from our justice system?

In 2021, the state of Ohio has 50,338 people in its prisons. Do they all deserve to be there? Judges are the ones who decide. There are judges in Montgomery County who routinely see under-resourced defendants with high odds of recidivism. These judges intentionally give those defendants dignity and respect in their courtrooms in an effort to keep them out of jail cells. They use their experience, discretion, and time to filter defendants who are willing to work for a second chance through diversion programs like those offered by the Montgomery County Office of Reentry. They strive to be right on crime, not tough on crime.

Is there an alternative to incarceration?

What if everyone had a second chance and someone to believe in them? Graduates of Montgomery County’s Reentry Career Alliance Academy (RCAA) have a less than five percent recidivism rate post-program. In practical terms, it costs $30,558 a year to incarcerate someone in the state of Ohio. What if that citizen were making that much money and paying taxes on it instead?

Do you need workforce?

Have you (or will you) consider hiring a Returning Citizen? Graduates of the RCAA program work in restaurants, churches, and non-profits, and many other industries. Can you give a Restored Citizen the hope of a second chance at being a functioning and productive member of society? Hey, look at that. Hope. Isn’t that what the holidays are about? It seems this is a holiday-ish post after all.

What do you think of Restored Citizens in the workforce? 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.

Purposeful Procrastination

Here in the Digital Age where business moves at the speed of data traveling through fiber, if I’m not productive every minute I’m at work, I fear that I’m being lazy. Since emails are tasks someone wants us to do and they arrive 24/7/365, it seems I’m not the only one with boundary issues. In terms of time management, we put off completing a task because we have other tasks that are either more urgent or more important. Or, we put it off because we don’t want to do it. But what if we use procrastination as a tool to preserve our boundaries?

If/Then

If we restrain ourselves from replying all to a group email asking for volunteers to organize the office holiday party, then are we lazy or are we allowing someone else to step into leadership?
If we proofread the slide deck for tomorrow’s weekly team meeting because the team member assigned to do so hasn’t done it yet, then are we being helpful or are we doing their job for them?
If we accomplish a last-minute errand for a co-worker, do we then set ourselves up for accomplishing more last-minute tasks for this co-worker in the future?

This is Not the Admin You’re Looking For

For example, sixty-three minutes before my team was scheduled for a video conference with a client, the account manager emailed me saying that the client needed to reschedule. He tasked me with:

Notifying the other team members that the meeting was postponed
Checking their availability for the new meeting time the client proposed
Rescheduling the meeting on our video conferencing platform
Updating the meeting calendar invitation

When this task arrived in my inbox, I was preparing for a different video conference huddle that was only fifteen minutes away. I had time to send a quick group email, but I chose to ignore the account manager’s request and prepare for my imminent meeting.

Sixty-eight minutes later, the emails from my teammates flew, reply-all style. The account manager ended up completing all the tasks he attempted to assign to me.

Confession: I intentionally procrastinated.

Sorry (Not Sorry)

It was hard to restrain myself. I felt bad for not preventing my teammates’ confusion and for using them to force the account manager to do his own administration. But apparently, I did not feel bad enough to go ahead and do the account manager’s administration. I prioritized my boundary above everyone else’s convenience.

Proceed With Caution

Having said (and done) that, please remember that we should exercise good judgement when evaluating such situations. Using restraint to enforce boundaries can look like procrastination and can be detrimental to our brand. We need to examine who may be impacted and how negatively before we intentionally delay action. In the above example, three people were inconvenienced for a relatively short period of time and my brand was positively impacted because I’m not the team’s administrator. I used the passage of time to help me hold that boundary. Hours after the incident, I replied to the account manager’s original email. I suggested that it’s probably not a best practice to rely on me to complete last-minute tasks as evidenced by this incident. I have not received another last-minute task from him since.

Have you ever intentionally put off work? Why? 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.

The Talk

It’s time for “the talk.” Not THAT talk; you need to talk to your family about retirement savings-both theirs and yours. Yes, the economy is suffering right now and it’s tempting to push pause on long-term savings, but the future keeps coming and everyone from Baby Boomers to Gen Z should continue to plan for it.

Don’t Count on It

Do not make the mistake of counting on the United States government to fully fund your golden years. Social Security is intended for use as an emergency resource, not your main source of income after you leave the workforce. Plus, by 2034, projections reveal that the Social Security Administration will be paying out more benefits than they are taking in through payroll taxes because there will be more retirees than employees. If Congress steps in then it probably won’t run out. But if you want to live the rest of your life comfortably, then you should fund your own retirement.

It’s Not About the Money

When talking to your family about future finances, you’re not really discussing money. Whether it’s your adult children who want you to carry them on your insurance or your parents who want you to be the executor of their wills, money is just a representative. What you’re really talking about is both expectations and emotions. Whether fear, resentment, kindness or generosity, feelings are attached to financial conversations. These discussions are not one-and-done. For example, when your parents began telling you about the birds and the bees, it wasn’t just one talk, was it? When our daughter was three years old she asked me where babies came from. I told her Cleveland. That satisfied her for two years. As she grew older, her questions grew more specific. It’s the same for the money talk. As everyone in your circle of care ages, the questions you ask them should become more specific. For example, when speaking with:

Gen Z – Do you have an emergency fund with at least $1000 saved? If not, they should think about automating their savings. Here is how to create a plan
Millennial – Are you aggressively paying off debt? Here are some pros and cons
Gen X – Are you taking advantage of catch-up retirement savings? Here is how they work
Baby Boomer – Have you thought about where you want your assets to go after you’re gone? Here is what they need to know if they live in the great state of Ohio

Awkward

How you manage your money is a very personal choice. When it has the potential to impact, either positively or negatively, the people you care about, you must talk to them about it no matter how awkward it feels. Opening up a dialogue before a financial emergency happens allows you to remain calm when the crisis hits. It may even prevent the crisis. The result of uncomfortable money conversations with your loved ones is it becomes more comfortable the more you do it. The result is peace of mind, and you can’t put a price tag on that.

What stops you from talking to your people about their and your future finances? 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.

No Labor Today

Our wedding anniversary typically falls around Labor Day. My husband and I usually schedule time off work around the holiday weekend to celebrate by traveling a bit. This year marks our 30th wedding anniversary, so we decided to do something special. We visited Grand Teton National Park. We not only needed a grand gesture to celebrate our milestone, but also to get as far away from our day-to-day as possible. Pre-COVID-19, I wrote about how it benefits your job when you take a break from it. Mid-COVID-19, a break feels mandatory. With the blurred boundaries between work, home, school, etc., how can you process what you just lived through (and continue to live through) and use those learnings to iterate the next version of your life post-COVID-19? You don’t have to go all the way to Wyoming, but you should unplug, reset, and filter.

Unplug

We chose to get away to a place with little to no cell service, mostly because I can’t be trusted to enforce my OOO boundary. But maybe your children are in the throes of the beginning of both the school year and their fall extracurriculars so you need to stick close to home. Get creative about taking time to recharge. For example, take half-days off for a week. While the rest of your household is doing their things, turn off your phone, laptop, Xbox, etc., and change your scenery. If your job is sedentary, go to a Metropark and bike, walk, or kayak. If your job is physical, go to the library and read, journal, or listen to music. Whichever you choose, commit to only answering your mobile if there is a life (not work) emergency.

Reset

Get out of your comfort zone. Choose one activity you’ve never done before and do it every day for the week. If you work by yourself, follow CDC guidelines and do a project with others. If you work with others, find a solitary pursuit. You could:

Volunteer at your local food bank, church, or YWCA
Study coding with Python
Learn to cook your favorite restaurant meal with YouTube videos
Listen to different music (e.g., rap if you’re a country fan)
Read a different genre (e.g., non-fiction if you normally read sci-fi)

By the end of the week, you’ll know whether or not your choice is an activity you enjoy. If it helps you reset your mindset, then make time in your schedule to keep doing it.

Filter

At the end of each day, journal about your new activity. You could write, doodle, voice memo, whatever is your choice for making notes. Think about:

What did you see, hear, touch, taste, and/or smell?
How did it make you feel?
What did you learn?
What does it make you want to change?
What does it make you want to keep doing?
How will you use these new insights to influence your work?
Are there priorities you have to reset? People to whom you have to communicate boundaries? Comfort zones you have to get out of?

Prioritizing your physical, mental, and emotional health gives you the energy you need to bring your best effort to work, life, and people in your circle of influence.

What are you going to do to recharge? Please share in the comments.