Relationships – Page 10 – mardihumphreys.com

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.

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.

Taking the Lead

The photo above is my reaction to reading my acceptance email to Leadership Dayton. I’m thinking, “This must be how Harry Potter felt when he got his letter to Hogwarts!” The program is offered by the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce. For 10 months, leaders are immersed in the systems that make our community run. Let’s define leader as anyone who has a sphere of influence. Since everyone has a sphere of influence, everyone is a leader at some level. Why should anyone invest time learning how their community works? Even if you don’t commit to a formal leadership development program, giving time to your community benefits the work-life integration of both you and your workforce.

Empower

Your business exists to solve problems. You want coworkers who can quickly identify organizations that have the problems your business solves. A great way to do that is to join a committee for the non-profit organization of your choice. You’ll see their struggles firsthand and work with other volunteers to creatively solve them. Then you take the new problem-solving skills you learned back to work and show your team how to apply them to your next project. With this evidence, you could petition your C-Suite executives to allow individual contributors to volunteer on company time. The ROI for employees, non-profits, and your community is exponential.

Elevate

As a leader, one of your responsibilities is to reach behind you and pull others up the ladder. We usually think of that in terms of advancement in the company, but what your coworkers experience outside of the workplace affects them at the workplace. What do they need help with while not on the job? Do they need emotional support emerging from the pandemic? Help with a non-responsive landlord? Upskilling? Relationships with SMEs you can contact when your employees require resources like bankers, educators, and lawyers is a valuable benefit of working with you. For example, if one of your individual contributors has a child with special needs and is having trouble tracking down a specialist, if you volunteer on a committee at your local Children’s Hospital, you can connect them with assistance. This may seem way above a manager’s pay grade, but recognizing your workforce as human beings with needs you can meet builds trust, and business moves at the speed of trust.

Emulate

Once you get the hang of working with committees in your non-profit community, maybe even serving on a governing board, you are ready to reproduce yourself. Select a direct report with leadership potential and bring them alongside you to serve. When they get their feet under them, allow them to choose a coworker with similar interests and leadership potential and send the two of them off to start the cycle over. They may choose a totally different cause to support than you do, and that’s okay. Your community is full of diverse needs and needs diverse people to meet them.

I’m excited to go on this journey with my classmates and learn how I can use my T.E.A.M. in service to a community I love. How has taking the time to lead positively affected your company? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

The Tide is High

You kept your business solvent during the pandemic. Now vaccines are available and buildings are reopening. Both you and your workforce are deciding where to go from here. Pivots like switching the product you manufacture (e.g., making hand sanitizer instead of bourbon) or shifting your employees to working from home has not only burned everyone out, but also revealed work-life integration paradigm shifts. You need to both retain your current workforce and attract new employees, but how? This week, let’s focus on keeping the folks you have.

Pivot Again

You regularly adapt your business to market conditions. This shift in the balance of power is a condition more abrupt than most, but it offers you a gift. It forces you to look at your mission, vision, values, policies, and procedures and sift them through the filter of The Platinum Rule. For example, employees hear the siren call of flexibility and autonomy in their jobs. Are your company’s paid time off policies amenable to employees with caregiving duties to young children, aging parents, chronically ill partners, etc.? If not, then it behooves you to reevaluate those policies. If your employees are being washed away by the Talent Tsunami, then you need to take a long, hard look at your company’s culture, protocols, and development paths. If your workforce was happy before the pandemic, then they would not be so tempted to leave now. You will be wise to shift your mindset to focus more on taking care of your employees and repeatedly communicating that commitment. People want to work in an environment where they feel valued. If your company has a vision the workforce can believe in, you coach them to share it, and demonstrate how their jobs are integral to realizing it, then employees get invested in meeting the company’s goals and want to stick around.

Engagement Brings Retention

The inconvenient truth is it’s cheaper to keep an employee than to hire a new one. If you don’t know what your employees need to achieve work-life integration, or to feel appreciated, now is the time to ask and actively listen to their answers. Individual contributors who feel they belong and have purpose are less likely to burn out. How do you know if your employees are burned out? Ask them. Company-wide email surveys are easy to create, send, and compile results. You can ask questions like: How do you think the company handled pivoting during COVID-19? How many days a week do you want to WFH? If the company reimburses you for upskilling, will you agree to work for us for a year? The answers will give you data that will not only help you to assess the risk of employees leaving, but also reveal what you can do to keep the good ones.

“Bye” the Way

Unless employees signed a contract saying they’d do one, they are not obligated to give exit interviews. A smart employee will not grant one if they don’t have anything nice to say. An exit interview is more of a benefit to you than to them. It’s an exiting employee’s gift of feedback to you. If the resigning employee grants one, stick to questions that will help you retain other employees. For example: What could the company have done to make it easier for your team to communicate with each other?

What are you doing to encourage your employees to join you in making your business succeed? Please share in the comments.

Making Waves

The pandemic made us take a hard look at our priorities. What is now most important to you? In terms of your job, if you were able to pivot (e.g., a restaurant moving from fine-dining in person to at home delivery) or to transition to WFH (e.g., software developing), you’re grateful to have found a way to continue making a living. But now that we’ve moved into COVID-19’s phase of vaccines and variants, do you want to keep this up?

What Do You Want?

It’s time to decide what aspects of the working-under-quarantine conditions you want to maintain. Has the way you had to work made you want a different job, maybe even a different career path? If so, you have loads of company. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 3.6 million Americans quit their jobs in May 2021. But before you start searching for a new situation, get clear on why you want to leave your current one. If you’re running away from this job instead of running to another one, your discontent is likely to follow you. Ask yourself:

Am I burned out?
Did the pandemic reveal a side of my company’s culture that I can’t support?
Were my manager’s expectations unreasonable?
Did I discover a remote position would be best for work-life integration?

During the work day, when you feel frustrated or stressed, write down what you’re working on or what’s happening. Is it a project, person, and/or PTO? The answers will help you define your non-starters when considering your next role.

Defining what you don’t want narrows your choices down to what you do want. Compensation (salary, PTO, insurance, retirement benefits), location, culture, and leadership development are all obvious details you need to consider. But also ask yourself:

What does your perfect job look like?
Where are you doing it?
When are you doing it?
Who are you doing it with?
Why are you doing it?
How are you doing it?

What values do the answers to these questions reveal (e.g., freedom, culture, growth)? Rank them in order of importance. For one work week, notice what you are doing when you lose track of time as well as what you are doing when time seems to drag. Write these down and analyze them. While looking for a new position, search for one that allows you to do more of the work you enjoy.

How Do You Get It?

Once you figure out what you want, make a list of companies whose mission, vision, and values match yours. LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Business Journals regularly identify great companies to work for. Target people in these companies you can reach out to for informational interviews. Notify your network that you are looking for a new role. Ask them not only for introductions to hiring managers you want to meet, but also ask how you can help connect them to the decision makers they want to meet. It’s tempting to apply for every job that looks like fun, thinking that eventually one will take, but that’s actually a time waster. It’s more effective to invest your time building relationships with your network. Insiders know a position is available before it gets publicly posted. A good rule of thumb is to network with five people for every one job application you submit.

Are you thinking about a new position? What are you looking for in a company? Please share in the comments.

Red Alert

Our daughter was born seven days before my 31st birthday. While pregnant with her, my OB/GYN referred to us as a geriatric pregnancy. Has a bit of a negative connotation, don’t ya think? I prefer to think of us as trendsetters because these days plenty of women are following in our footsteps. At the time, I hoped that within twenty-five years society would evolve to the point where it’s easier for parents of minor-aged children to work full-time. The deadline to fulfill that hope is January 2022. Looks like I’m going to be disappointed.

Acknowledge

The corporate sector has done little to address this issue, and as we discussed last week, bias against working mothers hasn’t changed much in 25 years. Since the pandemic spotlighted their plight, now is an opportune time to use that momentum and advocate for permanent changes with employers for both mothers and fathers. Child care is necessary for parents to work. Work is necessary to drive economic recovery from COVID-19. More than half of the parents who took this survey anticipate that the cost of child care will increase because of the pandemic. The child care crisis is now a red alert and it affects all of us.

Communicate

If you are a parent in the workforce, the pandemic probably taught you the necessity of work-life integration, especially if your children are very young and/or school-aged. For example, the need for your physical presence when your child is an infant is not the same as when that child becomes a teenager. Even if your work responsibilities don’t change during those years, where and when you do the work can. Gone are the days of sitting in an office for eight hours waiting for work to appear. Work happens 24/7/365; so does the rest of your life. Figure out where your boundaries are, then communicate and negotiate them with your manager. When your employer knows that you’ll write the quarterly report after your daughter goes to bed in exchange for attending her soccer game that afternoon, they should respect your work-life integration. If they don’t, then you can find an employer who will. Right now there are more jobs available than people to fill them. You need to be in an employment situation where you can have transparent, on-going conversations with your manager (e.g., performance reviews) where the goal is to define both what the company currently needs from you, and what you need from the company in order to meet its needs. The result should be an arrangement benefitting both you and the company. If you and your employer are both fair and flexible, not only will you successfully integrate the responsibilities of your life, but you, your employer, and your children will benefit also.

How does your business address the needs of working parents? Please share in the comments.

Defense Mechanism

It’s my mom’s birthday and I’m reflecting on some of the work she’s done so far: Registered Nurse, Director of Nursing, Sunday School Teacher, and now a Christian Counselor. These jobs share a common thread: compassion. Being the well many draw from saps her energy and she has to intentionally replenish it. Can you relate? If you are a parent, teacher, or in any type of care-giving role, what you assume is burnout due to the constant stress, change, and loss thanks to COVID-19 may be Compassion Fatigue (CF).

What is it?

Also known as secondary traumatic stress, CF is one of your body’s defense mechanisms. You become emotionally and physically exhausted when you’re repeatedly exposed to stressful events. This can leave you numb to others’ suffering. The condition is usually associated with health-care workers, but anyone who is consistently exposed to someone else’s hardship (e.g., first responders, clergy, public librarians) can experience it. CF can also be caused by a heavy workload, excessive demands, and long hours. For example, the mom working from home while supervising her children’s online school is a candidate for CF. You’re particularly susceptible if you watch a lot of news, have too many priorities competing for your energy, or work in a dangerous environment. Remember, since COVID-19 began, environments once considered innocuous are now seen as dangerous (e.g., grocery stores). Any time you have less energy, add more fatigue, then have to expend more energy, you are at risk. For example, you’re worried about your at-risk parents’ health while you are working longer hours, then a friend tests positive for COVID-19.

What Does it Look Like?

Symptoms of CF can be both physical and emotional. Watch for these behaviors in both yourself and those you interact with:

Physical:

Distracted, forgetful, withdrawn
Aches, pains, nauseous, insomnia
Work absenteeism, unproductive, relationship conflicts
Self-medicating/Substance abuse (food, alcohol, drugs, gambling, more work)

Emotional:

Helpless, sad, hopeless, isolated
Anxious, worried, overwhelmed, depressed
Irritable, restless, tense, self-doubt
Dissatisfied with self and/or job

What Can You do About it?

Self-awareness: When you feel three or more of the above symptoms, define your triggers. When you just don’t care anymore, why is that? What is the root of the stress? What can you control? Will you accept help from others at home? Can you delegate tasks at work?

Boundaries: Prioritize your needs over what others need from you. Set, maintain, and enforce limits for: work-life integration, time spent scrolling through social media, care giving, realistic expectations.

Self-care: Do something everyday that boosts your energy: eat well, exercise, read, listen to music, drink water, journal, sleep, meditate, pray, talk to a friend, spend time in nature, laugh.

Compassion Fatigue should not be normalized, but talking about it openly should be because it’s not going away. Everyone has a new, longer-term complication and they want your support. For example, adjusting to emerging working conditions (e.g., remote, in-office, hybrid), concern for their young children going back to school, or comfort after the death of a loved one. Figuring out how to balance restoring, conserving, and giving away your energy is a key to effectively helping those you love and work with.

Are you experiencing Compassion Fatigue? What measures are you taking to recover from it? Please share in the comments.

Travel Team

It’s vacation season and if you have a spouse, you want to travel together. But there are things you want to do that they don’t, such as spend five hours at one art museum, spend three hours at a coffee shop, or spend an hour reading a book at a botanical garden. Luckily, you have friends who think these pastimes sound heavenly. In addition to traveling with your partner, take a trip with a friend. These adventures are ripe with lessons you can take back to work.

Getting to Know You

Constant togetherness reveals hidden talents as well as idiosyncrasies. For example, you discover that your friend has an uncanny ability to quickly spot your Uber while they notice that you can easily navigate large airports. On the other hand, maybe you are irritated by your friend’s obsession with the weather forecast and they are annoyed by your insistence to walk everywhere. We learn to be more considerate of each other because our time together is finite. The same is true at work. Projects have lifecycles. Acknowledge an interpersonal conflict when it starts. Be quick to define both your and your teammate’s boundary. Additionally, recognize that taking the time to unravel and resolve miscommunication is time well spent.

Plan B (or C or…)

When traveling, sometimes Plan A won’t work. Issues like flight delays, a car rental company losing your reservation, and a broken air conditioner in your hotel room provide multiple opportunities to not only find out how good a business is at customer service, but also work with your friend to figure out how to overcome the obstacle. Which one of you will: Take the lead in patiently communicating the unacceptable situation to customer service? Motivate the other to remain calm? Influence the service you receive by confirming that everyone is working toward the same goal? After recovering from the setback, you can take the lessons you learned (e.g., active listening, empathizing, aligning expectations) back to work and apply them to your team’s next project. When unpredictable obstacles occur, you can confidently take the lead to solve them because you’ve experienced the emotional intelligence required to get through a frustrating process.

Teamwork

The first time you travel with a friend to a destination that’s new to both of you, logic dictates that you set the parameters of the trip and start negotiating. Who is booking the transportation? Who is booking the hotel? Who is booking reservations at the restaurants, museums, sites, etc. that you want to visit? You divide up the task list according to talent. They are good at determining how much time you need between connecting flights. You can detect if a hotel is as good as its marketing says it is. You must trust each other to complete these tasks. During the trip, you both are gracious when unforeseen challenges happen. You patiently support one another when mistakes in judgement cause setbacks. You encourage each other to stretch outside of your comfort zones. You remain flexible so both of you can reach the individual objectives you have for the getaway. See what I did there? These activities are examples of collaborative teamwork. The same skills and mindset you use traveling with your friend apply to the project you’re tackling with your coworkers.

Do you plan to travel with friends this summer? Where are you going? Please share in the comments.

Reservation Highly Recommended

Dad and Me Father’s Day 2021 Photo by MSH

During one of my networking groups last week, we discussed what we learned from the men in our lives in honor of Father’s Day. My dad unintentionally taught me the power of follow-up. In a conversation he habitually listens more than he talks, asks engaging questions, and, even if it’s weeks later, texts or calls for an update. You’d assume the follow-up would be the most powerful part of the process, but no. It’s the listening. If you’re just listening to reply, you’ll jump into the conversation at your first opportunity. But if you restrain yourself and listen to understand, (e.g., repeat what the speaker said back to them, ask investigative questions) you build trust. Acting with restraint is useful in many work situations.

Social Intelligence

Robert Greene advises “Never outshine the master.” You may be smarter than your manager when it comes to the assigned task, but if you push back too hard, you reveal that you lack social intelligence. For example, once upon a time I was in a brainstorming meeting with a group of five people: an executive, his assistant, and two of my teammates. The exec kept falling down rabbit holes and I kept pulling us back with the same phrase, “So, the goal is zero waste…” The third time I said it, the exec seemed embarrassed. By the fifth time I said it, both the exec and his assistant were annoyed and my teammates were uncomfortable. In demonstrating I knew what the goal was, I exposed that his ideas would not achieve it. Remember the cliche, don’t bite the hand that feeds you? When applied to work, don’t break the finger of the hand that signs your paycheck.

Emotional Intelligence

Let’s say our team missed a deadline because you spent more time on social media than working on our project. If I pointed this out, how would you react? Would you get defensive and lash out? Or would you take a few deep breaths and ask for a safe place outside your workspace to store your phone while you’re working on our project? The latter choice shows restraint. Reacting out of ego won’t serve you in the long run. Humility is strength, not weakness. You fell into temptation. Get up, make the necessary adjustment, and keep going.

Business Intelligence

Creative freedom is an oxymoron. Freedom leaves choices wide open. You’re more creative when given parameters like a direction, deadline, or dilemma to solve. In other words, a restraint. For example, I’m constantly looking for ways to promote brand awareness that won’t break my budget. The views on the company’s social media pages go way up when I post photos or videos of our dog. Thus, “Tails From the Home Office,” a photo/video series starring my adorable-but-less-than-helpful “assistant” was born. Restraint is also crucial when searching for B2B clients. No one wants to miss a lead, but lack of focus denies you a priority. BTW, Priority implies one. If you have multiple priorities, then you don’t have any. Define yours and filter decisions through it. If your sweet spot is fast-growing manufacturers with 50 or fewer employees, build relationships with them. Don’t let FOMO cause you to miss those you serve best.

How has showing restraint helped you get ahead at work? Please share in the comments.