The Art of Magazine - Volume 21 by The Art Of

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Want to Make Your Workplace Happier? Neil Pasricha

How to Create Sustainable Change Robert Richman

Trying to Make Everyone Happy is Making Them Miserable Dr. Liane Davey

Old School. New School. No School. Ron Tite

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VOLUME 21

MARCUS BUCKINGHAM

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WANT TO MAKE YOUR WORKPLACE HAPPIER? Neil Pasricha

THE PRODUCTIVITY INVESTMENT David Allen

BOOK SUMMARY: MARCUS BUCKINGHAMâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S FIRST, BREAK ALL THE RULES Peter Taylor

HOW TO CREATE SUSTAINABLE CHANGE Robert Richman

BUILDING A FOUNDATION FOR LEADERSHIP Amanda Hodges

TRYING TO MAKE EVERYONE HAPPY IS MAKING THEM MISERABLE Dr. Liane Davey

WORK LIFE BALANCE IS A MYTH DO THIS INSTEAD Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall

WANT TO MAKE YOUR WORKPLACE HAPPIER?

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WORK LIFE BALANCE IS A MYTH DO THIS INSTEAD

12 THE PRODUCTIVITY INVESTMENT

CONTENTS

FROM OUR STAGE: INSIGHTS FROM DR. TASHA EURICH

40 26 OLD SCHOOL NEW SCHOL NO SCHOOL

TRYING TO MAKE EVERYONE HAPPY IS MAKING THEM MISERABLE

OLD SCHOOL. NEW SCHOOL. NO SCHOOL. Ron Tite

ARE YOUR LEADERS MEDIOCRE? Dr. Vince Molinaro

WHY ITâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S TIME FOR A UX REVOLUTION Nick Goldberg

COMPETE TO BE UNIQUE Richard Robbins

FEELS LIKE (VIRTUAL) TEAM SPIRIT Frances Cole Jones

FROM OUR STAGE: Dr. Tasha Eurich

LEADING THE CHARGE ON UPSKILLING PwC Canada

BUILDING TOMORROWâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S LEADERS

TODAY Since our inception in 2008, The Art Of has shaken the complacent and challenged the status quo as weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve forged a dynamic global community that has helped define and inspire thousands of individuals and businesses over the last 11 years. Thank you for joining us on this journey!

OUR VIEW, TOO Just like you, we know the opportunities and challenges of doing business in Alberta. Our affordable benefit solutions put the needs of your business first. Put an Alberta Blue Cross group benefit plan to work for you. ab.bluecross.ca/employer | 1-866-513-2555

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Founder’s Letter PUBLISHER

I can still remember attending my very first conference, fresh out of school and weeks into my career. I was eager to learn, contribute, and network. With a handful of freshly printed business cards, I set out to make my mark on the world. Instead, it made its mark on me and my love affair with professional development and continuing education was born. Returning to the office the next day with every one of my business cards still accounted for, I found myself armed with more actionable concepts than I had ever acquired throughout my previous studies. Don’t get me wrong; my days of academia provided me with foundational requirements, but being able to apply this learning in real time was a game changer. The ability to capture an insight and immediately understand its value to my organization (and my own personal growth) created a completely different learning experience. We’re fortunate to have an abundance of resources available to support us in our continued learning journey. Between books, articles, videos, podcasts, workshops, etc., there is no shortage of tools, only the time that we choose to invest in our growth. The key is to have an honest conversation with ourselves about the improvements we need to make in order to help solve the critical problems facing our organizations. In so doing, our investment in continued learning will yield our best return.

Christopher Novais

EDITOR Kristy Brezina

CREATIVE DIRECTOR Joey Van Massenhoven

ADVERTISING SALES Handel Viarruel

HOW TO REACH US The Art Of 46 Sherbourne Street, 3rd Floor Toronto, Ontario Canada M5A 2P7

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It was that very day that sparked the passion to create The Art Of and 11 years later, with over 80 conferences produced, that love affair still burns strong in me. I encourage it to burn in you.

online upon publication and at select newstands. It is distributed to 15,000 conference attendees from coast to coast. The Art of Productions Inc. All rights reserved. The publishers accept no responsibility for advertisers’ claims, unsolicited

Wishing you continued success!

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WANT TO MAKE YOUR WORKPLACE HAPPIER? Try this revolutionary approach to mandatory vacation. NEIL PASRICHA

Have you ever felt burned out at work after a vacation? I’m not talking about being exhausted from fighting with your family at Walt Disney World all week. I’m talking about how you knew, the whole time walking around Epcot, that a world of work was waiting for you upon your return. Our vacation systems are completely broken. They don’t work. The classic corporate vacation system goes something like this: You get a set number of vacation days a year (often only two to three weeks), you fill out some 1996-era form to apply for time off, you get your boss’s signature, and then you file it with a team assistant or log it in some terrible database. It’s an administrative headache. Then most people have to frantically cram extra work into the week before they leave for vacation in order to actually extract themselves from the office. By the time we finally turn on our out-of-

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office messages, we’re beyond stressed, and we know that we’ll have an even bigger pile of work waiting for us when we return. What a nightmare. For most of us, it’s hard to actually use vacation time to recharge. So it’s no wonder that absenteeism remains a massive problem for most companies, with payrolls dotted with sick leaves, disability leaves, and stress leaves. In the UK, the Department for Work and Pensions says that absenteeism costs the country’s economy more than £100 billion per year. A white paper published by the Workforce Institute and produced by Circadian, a workforce solutions company, calls absenteeism a bottom-line killer that costs employers $3,600 per hourly employee and $2,650 per salaried employee per year. It doesn’t help that, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the United States is the only country out of 21 wealthy countries that doesn’t require employers to offer paid vacation time.

Would it help if we got more paid vacation? Not necessarily. According to a study from the U.S. Travel Association and GfK, a market research firm, just over 40% of Americans plan not to use all their paid time off anyway. So what’s the progressive approach? Is it the Adobe, Netflix, or Twitter policies that say take as much vacation as you want, whenever you want it? Open-ended, unlimited vacation sounds great on paper, doesn’t it? Very progressive, right? No, that approach is broken too. What happens in practice with unlimited vacation time? Warrior mentality. Peer pressure. Social signals that say you’re a slacker if you’re not in the office. Mathias Meyer, the CEO of German tech company Travis CI, wrote about his company abandoning its unlimited vacation policy: “When people are uncertain about how many days it’s okay to take off, you’ll see curious things happen. People will hesitate to take a

vacation as they don’t want to seem like that person who’s taking the most vacation days. It’s a race to the bottom instead of a race towards a well rested and happy team.” So what’s the solution? Recurring, scheduled mandatory vacation. Yes, that’s right—an entirely new approach to managing vacation. And one that preliminary research shows works much more effectively. Designer Stefan Sagmeister said in his TED talk, “The Power of Time Off,” that every seven years he takes one year off. “In that year,” he said, “we are not available for any of our clients. We are totally closed. And as you can imagine, it is a lovely and very energetic time.” I thought about this when I recently collaborated with Shashank Nigam, the CEO of SimpliFlying, a global aviation strategy firm of about 10 people, to ask a simple question: “What if we force people to take a scheduled week off every seven weeks?” The idea was that this would be a microcosm of the Sagmeister principle of one week off every seven years. And it was entirely mandatory. In fact, we designed it so that if you contacted the office while you were on vacation— whether through email, WhatsApp, Slack, or anything else—you didn’t get paid for that vacation week. We tried to build in a financial punishment for working when you aren’t supposed to be working, in order to establish a norm about disconnecting from the office. The system is designed so that you don’t get a say in when you go. Some may say that’s a downside, but for this experiment, we believed that putting a structure in place would be a significant benefit. The team and clients would know well ahead of time when someone would be taking a week off. And the point is you actually go. And everybody goes. So there are no questions, paperwork, or guilt involved with not being at the office. After this experiment was in place

for 12 weeks, we had managers rate employee productivity, creativity, and happiness levels before and after the mandatory time off. (We used a fivepoint Likert scale, using simple statements such as “Ravi is demonstrating creativity in his work,” with the options ranging from one, Strongly Disagree, to five, Strongly Agree.) And what did we find out? Creativity went up 33%, happiness levels rose 25%, and productivity increased 13%. It’s a small sample, sure, but there’s a meaningful story here as the data complements feedback we got from employees who, upon their return, wrote blog posts about their experiences with the process and what they did with their time. Many talked about how people finally found time to cross things off of their bucket lists—holding an art exhibition, learning a new language, or traveling somewhere they’d never been before. Now, this is a small company, and we haven’t tested the results in a large organization. But the question is: Could something this simple work in your workplace? There were two points of constructive feedback that came back from the test:

This is early research, but it confirms something we said at the beginning: Vacation systems are broken and aren’t actually doing what they’re advertised to do. If you show up drained after your vacation, that means you didn’t get the benefit of creating space. Why is creating space so important? Consider this quote from Tim Kreider, who wrote “The ‘Busy’ Trap” for the New York Times: “Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration—it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.” Fix your vacation system. You’ll be doing better, more important work.

• FREQUENCY WAS TOO HIGH. Employees found that once every seven weeks (while beautiful on paper) was just too frequent for a small company like SimpliFlying. Its competitive advantage is agility, and having staff take time off too often upset the work rhythm. Nigam proposed adjusting it to every 12 weeks. But with employee input, we redesigned it to once every eight weeks. • STAGGERING WAS IMPORTANT. Let’s say that two or three people work together on a project team. We found that it didn’t make sense for these people to take time off back-to-back. Batons get dropped if there are consecutive absences. We revised the arrangement so that no one can take a week off right after someone has just come back from one. The high-level design is important and needs to work for the business.

Neil Pasricha is the author of seven books including You Are Awesome (November, 2019). Get his latest writing for free at www.neil.blog

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THE PRODUCTIVITY INVESTMENT DAVID ALLEN

We can all be more productive, as individuals and organizations. There is always value that can be added with only the resources at hand. But what increases productivity? Not more resources, as a rule. More money that produces the same result per dollar spent is no improvement. What generates more for the energy invested is the conscious insertion of at least one of the four things that donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t happen by themselves: clearing, focusing, structuring, and action. 12

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1. CLEANING AND CLEARING Any activity that does not handle its own waste appropriately is going to increase drag on the system and cause unnecessary effort to endure and deal with accumulated residue. What’s not needed anymore? Old projects, outworn policies and procedures, old un-renegotiated commitments, hung up body toxins – anything taking up space and attention and not creating value, when removed, will increase flow and output automatically. But it takes intention and action to eliminate stuff – it becomes more and more inert if it isn’t consistently infused with conscious interest.

communication, focus, visibility – with minimal energy expended. With no structures we would have a heck of a time maintaining those experiences with just our own bodies. With no list of all our errands at hand when we’re out and about, we’re likely not as productive as we could be. If no one is designated to answer the phone, everyone has to waste attention on it when it rings. If my paint brushes are not in order, I’m limiting my creative expression. Structures don’t show up by themselves. Productive people are always asking: How can I better organize and streamline what I’m doing?

2. FOCUSING Psychic and physical forces are automatically mobilized with a focus and rapidly dispersed and exhausted without one. What’s the purpose for this meeting, this proposal, this vacation, this department, this desk, this job? What are we trying to do? Where are we going? Clear answers to these questions create energy which produces results with less effort. But it takes focus to direct a focus. Unattended, distraction creeps in like a thief in the night.

3. STRUCTURING Look around at the physical structures you see right now. They exist not as value in themselves but for what they create – comfort, protection, support,

4. ACTION It’s easier to move when you are already in motion. It takes less effort to redirect something going in the wrong direction than to get something going from a standing start. Fear of the unknown and of potential negative consequences of imperfection can easily create the analysis paralysis. If something needs to be different than it is and there is no “next action” decided yet, there will tend to be debilitating angst as well as zero motion. Initiating a simple next physical step is often the key to releasing stored energy and generating productive momentum. But it requires concentration of intention to hold the mind steady toward a pinpoint of action.

“A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment.” Walter Lippman

Any one of these four dynamics can improve the quality and quantity of your outputs, but each requires a conscious effort to employ. And any one of them, underemployed, can undermine it. You could have a clean, focused, active department that lacked good job descriptions, and it won’t be as effective as it could be. A team could be well-structured, working overtime, with clean in-baskets, and still not be focused on what they needed to do appropriately. And you could have a hard-changing goal-oriented, organized executive with tons of incomplete communications and commitments weighing him down like an albatross. A person in sustainable high performance keeps a focus on what’s important, captures and organizes all the open loops still relevant to their life and work, and consistently takes action on expressing and completing that which is theirs to do. If you’re not operating from that place as much as you’d like, which of these productivity relevant areas is your weak suit right now? Which might be the improvement opportunity for your organization, or for your family? Are things as clean, focused, structured, and active as they could or need to be in all meaningful areas? What would be a good investment strategy? “A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment.” – Walter Lippman TheArtOf.com

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A LOOK AT MARCUS BUCKINGHAM’S BOOK

FIRST, BREAK ALL THE RULES SUMMARY WRITTEN BY PETER TAYLOR

“ Before they do anything else, they break all the rules of conventional wisdom” - FIRST BREAK ALL THE RULES, PAGE 3

“Measuring the strength of a workplace can be simplified to twelve questions. These twelve questions don’t capture everything you may

This book is a result of an exhaustive study undertaken by the Gallup organization involving 80,000 managers across a large number of industries exploring the concepts of employee satisfaction, selecting and maintaining good employees, and means of measuring employee satisfaction. The approach was revolutionary when published (1999) and has become a business classic because it challenged the status quo. First Break All the Rules asserts that the status quo is counter productive, and encourages management to adopt innovative approaches to employee engagement. There are four keys for unlocking potential in your employees: select for talents, suggest outcomes rather than direct control of process, focus on employees strengths and work around weaknesses, and finally find the right fit for your employees.

THE BIG IDEA MEASURING STICK If you are in business it is paramount to know how you are performing relative to your competition through the eyes of your employees. With rigorous research and data analysis Gallup isolated 12 questions that strongly reflect a company’s success:

want to know about your workplace, but they do capture the most information and the most important information. They measure the core elements needed to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees.” - FIRST BREAK ALL THE RULES PAGE 20

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1. Do I know what is expected of me at work? 2. Do I have the equipment and material I need to do my work right? 3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? 4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work? 5. Does my supervisor or someone at work seem to care about “Normally we

me as a person?

associate talent with

6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

celebrated excellence.

7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?

Great managers

8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my

disagree with this definition of talent. It is too narrow and too specialized. Instead they define talent as a recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behavior than can be productively applied.

work is important? 9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work? 10. Do I have a best friend at work? 11. In the last six months, have I talked to someone about my progress? 12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow? As a manager it is your responsibility that your employees reply with an emphatic “yes” to these questions. Positive responses to these questions were strongly correlated to profitability, productivity, employee retention, and customer satisfaction. If you can generate positive responses to these questions then you have the ability to attract and retain quality employees. The importance of influential perks, pay, or a charismatic CEO were not established in the author’s research.

The emphasis here is on the word recurring. Your talents, they say, are the behaviors you find yourself doing often.” - FIRST BREAK ALL THE RULES, PAGE 67

INSIGHT #1 IDENTIFYING AND UNDERSTANDING TALENT Great managers know that every role in a workplace requires talent because there are recurring patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Managers that are able to select for these patterns will have more harmonious results on their team. One of the biggest mistakes managers make is selecting for other factors like experience or intelligence, and ignore required talents (for example, empathy is a required trait for nurses). In my own experience, the results of applying this concept have been profound. However, it can be difficult to define and explain the concept of talent to others. Buckingham and Coffman have divided talents into three basic categories: striving talents, thinking talents and relating talents.

STRIVING TALENTS explain the ‘why’ of a person: what motivates them, do they want to stand out, and is ‘good enough,’ good enough for them?

THINKING TALENTS explain the ‘how’ of a person: how they think, their decision making processes, are they focused, disciplined, strategic or non-linear in thinking? 16

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RELATING TALENTS the ‘who’ of a person: who do they trust, who they build relationships with, do they avoid confrontation or have a desire to win people over? Do they love or hate surprises? We all possess talents within the contexts of these categories. It is important to recognize that talents can’t be taught, they can only be cultivated and encouraged within the work roles assigned to that person. Skills, on the other hand, can be taught (i.e. typing speed, surgical techniques, software etc.). This does not mean entirely that people can’t change over time, but as managers we need to be aware of underlying talents and work with them rather than against them. As Tom Rath says, “the key to human development is building on who you already are.”

INSIGHT #2 TEMPTATIONS TO AVOID “The most efficient High performing managers understand that trying to achieve direct control of employees is futile, and that trying to change people’s natural talents will not work. The solution is both simple and elegant: define a required outcome and then let the employee find their own way forward, through a path of least resistance. This can be difficult as managers may believe that certain processes achieve results, and it’s tempting to stick with what’s worked in the past. The authors identified four temptations that lead managers away from adhering to setting expectations. •

Creating “perfect people” by imposing a “best way” attitude and that you have the right answers. This is disempowering, demeaning and prevents self exploration and learning.

•

Believing that employees don’t have enough talent, which can be true, but not if your hiring criteria is critically based on talents rather than selecting for other strengths.

•

Believing that “trust is precious—it must be earned.” Great managers must reject the concept of earning trust: if you expect the best from your team you will often get the best.

•

Believing that “some outcomes defy definition” such as abstracts like employee satisfaction and customer feedback.

way to turn someone’s talents into performance is to help him find his own path of least resistance towards the desired outcome.” - FIRST BREAK ALL THE RULES, PAGE 113

Buckingham and Coffman suggest breaking these principles down into emotional statements and using them as expectations. Try using and rating the first six questions for employee engagement (outlined above), and define what positive emotions you hope to see in relation to your clients. “I want our customers to feel respected and cared for,” is a value driven statement that will guide the emotional direction of your team. This is a business book that has stood the test of time, and is highly recommended to any management team interested in achieving better results. TheArtOf.com

HOW TO CREATE SUSTAINABLE CHANGE ROBERT RICHMAN

What’s the change that would make a huge impact on your company? It could be going digital, using Artificial Intelligence, acquiring a new company, becoming agile. Whatever it is, you’re the expert on your industry. But you might not be an expert on change itself.

Oddly enough, trying to be the expert is what could get you into trouble. In 1996, John Kotter rocked the business world with his international bestseller, Leading Change. Considered by many to be the seminal work in the field of change management, his

IMPLEMENTING & SUSTAINING FOR CHANGE

8-step process (outlined below), gave meaning and order to what felt like pure chaos through any big corporate change (a merger, a turnaround, a new system, an enterprise-wide software change—anything that requires a massive change in behaviour).

8. MAKE IT STICK 7. BUILD ON THE CHANGE 6. CREATE QUICK CHANGE

ENGAGING & ENABLING THE ORGANIZATION

5. EMPOWERED ACTION 4. COMMUNICATE THE VISION 3. CREATE A VISION FOR CHANGE

CREATING THE CLIMATE FOR CHANGE

2. FORM A POWERFUL COALITION 1. CREATE URGENCY

Kotter ’s 8 steps to transform your organization are brilliantly conceived. So what’s wrong with this picture? A strategy cannot succeed without the

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proper culture, thus the famous adage, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” In fact, without the right culture, the 8 steps can cause more damage than

if you had never followed it. Here are the three key points to keep in mind if you’re going to implement any model for change:

“So what happens if we give up entirely on the idea that we can make people do things? What if everything were optional? What if all meetings, initiatives, projects and tasks were voluntary?”

Robert Richman is the author of The Cultural Blueprint and X: The Story of a Magic Pill

2. CHANGE IS NON-LINEAR

Success

What people think it looks like 1. CHANGE IS EMOTIONAL Basic behavioural psychology shows us that unless a change is universally positive, it will produce an emotional response. It will provoke denial, anger, resistance, and avoidance before it finally turns to acceptance. Asking people to let go of the past way is asking them to move on. And when people are attached, moving on doesn’t happen without grieving. And where does an 8-point strategic plan include the space to process the emotions of grief? It makes no sense, unless one is so focused on the future that they want to forget the past. That may seem like a good intention, but letting pain remain unprocessed is the equivalent of telling someone in a hospital bed to just get up. Resentment remains, and that can derail cooperation. Processes such as facilitated conversations, and Open Space allow people to process all the emotions before moving forward.

What it really looks like

Kotter’s plan makes us feel comfortable because we think that we simply have to follow 8 steps in sequential order and then we’ll have our new initiative in place. But change doesn’t happen that way. Change is messy. Change can look like moving backward or sideways, or in zig zags before moving forward. Change can bring up a lot of painful conversations. The 8 steps are an attempt to process people like they are part of a linear supply chain management procedure. That’s why operations people love the 8 steps so much. They don’t want to hear about the most effective way to get messy. They want to clean things up as fast as possible and move on. In reality, you may not get the vision right the first time around. You may need

to return to it based on experimental data. The coalition team you assembled may fall apart. Those “short-term wins” may turn into short-term losses and people start to give up and want to “return to Egypt.” At this point, you as the leader will have lost credibility. Your people will have lost faith in you, and the board will want to replace you with someone who can “drive it through.” But there was nothing wrong with your leadership. You were just trying to follow a strategy, rather than working with the culture first, which brings us to the most important point…

3. CHANGE CANNOT BE FORCED One of the most insidious beliefs in corporate management is that we can make people do things. If that were true, there would be no need for an 8-step process in the first place. People can drag their feet in all kinds of ways, from being unproductive to outright sabotage. And most of it will happen below the radar. So what happens if we give up entirely on the idea that we can make people do things? What if everything were optional? What if all meetings, initiatives, projects and tasks were voluntary? Some people believe this would be total chaos. But if you have strong people who care about your company, what might happen if you set them free?

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BUILDING A FOUNDATION FOR LEADERSHIP AMANDA HODGES Senior Vice President, North America Marketing, Dell Technologies Technology has changed the way we live and work. Today, the lines between our personal and professional lives are blurred, resulting in an “always-on” world. As technology continues to advance, the workforce will continue to transform, and information and demands in this global economy will continue to increase. As a leader in today’s fast-paced world, you need a career plan that leverages your strengths to advance your business, team and career. Effective leaders formulate their own foundation for leadership that is built on a passion that is contagious, a brand of both how they are perceived in the organization, and how they are prioritizing their resources, and a vision for how they will lead. This foundation helps to keep an effective leader grounded and focused, and helps their team and business thrive in times of change.

BE PASSIONATE Work is not a place, but a thing we do. It’s a part of our lives. When you are passionate about your work and career, it shows, and is a critical differentiation in today’s hyper-competitive world. People often ask what it takes to have a successful career. Working hard, being resultsdriven, having organizational agility, being strategic, etc.—those are all table-stakes. If two people possess all those qualities, the one who is more passionate will win every time. Why? Because passion is powerful. It will motivate 20

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you to always go the extra mile, not because you must, but because you are excited to see the impact it will drive. And when you are passionate, everyone around you will know it, and be motivated by it. Your team will be excited, and customers will feel valued. But best of all, you will love what you do. Ask yourself, what is my why? What drives you and pushes you forward. Whatever it is, that is your why. Its why you do what you do. Your why should be used as a guidepost to decide what companies and roles to take next. If you’re like me, your why may be multiple things. Your why could be that you whole heartedly believe in the work you are doing and how technology is enabling human potential. Your why could be that you want to build a better world for your children or the community around you. Whatever your why is; knowing it is important. Your why will fuel your passion and your career.

BUILD YOUR BRAND News flash – you already have a brand. Whether you have created it or not, people already have an opinion about you. Your brand represents who you are at home, in your company and in your community. A good brand conveys credibility, quality and experience, and can open doors for you. A bad or mis-informed brand, on the other

hand, can severely limit your possibilities. So why not take control of your brand instead of letting your brand control you and your career? When it comes to leadership, knowing your brand is critically important. Possessing the self-awareness to recognize what works for you and where you need to make some changes is equally important. Identify the three areas that you want to be known for; establish areas of expertise; prioritize your time and resources; and consistently demonstrate your capabilities and commitment in those areas. Being true to your brand helps people know what to expect from you and can inspire and drive confidence in your team.

HAVE A VISION Develop a big picture vision for where you want your career to go. Focus not only on your next role, but also on two to three roles ahead. Take roles that both leverage skills you already have, enabling a fast start, and allow you to gain new skills to continue to grow and develop. And when a job takes you off your path, or a role no longer sparks your passion, then consider changing roles. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s easier to succeed when you know what success looks like for you and the path you must take to get there. Regardless of where you are in your career journey, your vision should also include a focus on how you will lead. At Dell Technologies we look at seven categories of leadership that include relationships, drive, judgement, vision, optimism, humility, and selflessness. Through regular surveys, we measure our leadership team on these characteristics. We do this to better understand which characteristics a successful leader possesses. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s good news. Our studies shows that you do not need to master all these skills. However, a successful leader must be exceptional at one of these skills. Once you know how you will lead, build upon it; be authentic and true to your leadership style. For example, if you know that building relationships is one of your strengths, leverage that to build your team and customer loyalty, and to drive differentiated high-performing interactions. A well thought-through foundation for leadership will morph over the course of your career. I encourage you to adjust and build upon it. Stay true to your goals and let your foundation serve as your guide to success as a leader. TheArtOf.com

TRYING TO MAKE EVERYONE HAPPY IS MAKING THEM MISERABLE DR. LIANE DAVEY As a team effectiveness advisor, I understand the importance of civility in the workplace. Lately, the desire for civility has morphed into a dangerous compulsion to keep everything happy and harmonious. Our propensity to duck, dodge, and defer the conflict that’s inevitable in organizations is only redirecting it, intensifying it, and embedding it in our teams. I call this phenomenon conflict debt. Conflict debt is the sum of all the undiscussed and unresolved issues that need to be addressed to be able to move forward. Conflict debt is incredibly common for two reasons. First, because conflict is a given in organizations. From the most strategic decisions such as how to make tough trade-offs between priorities, to the most mundane like how to allocate workload, conflict is required. That would be ok were it not for the second fact: while organizations require conflict, humans run from it. We’re naturally conflict-averse, and that tendency is only strengthened by our socialization at home and at work to see conflict as not nice, impolite, or uncivil. The result is mounting conflict debt. As with any debt, the original cost is compounded the longer you leave it unpaid. With conflict debt, that often comes in the form of growing misalignment, eroding trust, and increasing stress. Once a conflict has been avoided for a while, it’s 22

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time consuming, delicate work to extricate the team from the mess. In trying to make everything happy and harmonious, we have actually made everyone miserable.

THE ANSWER MUST BE SYSTEMIC For the most part, our answer to insufficient conflict has been to teach conflict skills. We have excellent training on difficult, fierce, and crucial conversations. The problem is that we are building a skillset that most employees aren’t using. We solve for the productive conflict skill, but not for the will. What we really need to focus on is making conflict more frequent, lower impact, and more of an ongoing habit rather than a major event. How do we, as leaders, do things that will help employees face fewer unpleasant and uncomfortable conflicts? Here are three ideas you can introduce in your organization.

1. Neutralize Potential Conflicts T he f r e ne t ic c u lt u r e i n m a ny orga n i zat ion s causes leaders to shortchange planning in favor of action. The irony is that failing to clarify expectations slows things down and sets up unhealthy conflict. Prevent these misunderstandings by helping your team clarify roles and set expectations from the outset. Define the unique value you expect

each layer in the department to add. Be clear about the everyone’s role as work is planned and delegated. Articulate what good work looks like. Specify what value you expect managers to add in first-line review. And just as importantly, be explicit about what you don’t want people to do—the types of issues where you want them to escalate. More conversations about what is expected of everyone will eliminate so many of the unproductive conflicts that come when people don’t know what’s expected of them.

2. Normalize Required Conflicts Next, normalize the productive conflict by mapping out the unique value of each role on your team and the tensions that should exist among them. For each role, ask: 1) What is the unique value of your role on this team? What are you paying attention to that no one else is? 2) Which stakeholder is your role most focused on? Who do you serve? 3) What is the most common tension you put on team discussions? What one thing do you have to say in your role that frequently makes others bristle? Answer those questions for each member of a team, emphasizing how the different roles are supposed to be in tension with one another. Articulating the productive tensions on your team helps reframe a disagreement; instead of thinking the person is being hostile, it’s understood that they

“THE SECRET IS TO INCREASE THE FREQUENCY AND DECREASE THE INTENSITY OF CONFLICT UNTIL IT BECOMES A HABIT THAT IS SO NATURAL THAT NO ONE RAISES AN EYEBROW WHEN A CONFLICT EMERGES.”

are living up to the obligation of their role. With heightened awareness and a shared language, your team will start to realize that much of what they have been interpreting as interpersonal friction has actually been perfectly healthy role-based tension.

3. Build a Conflict Habit The ultimate goal is for productive conf lict to become a habit; one employees engage in routinely without requiring significant attention or effort. The secret is to increase the frequency and decrease the intensity of conflict until it becomes a habit that is so natural that no one raises an eyebrow when a conflict emerges. When you develop a conflict habit, people stop taking things personally, their emotions no longer

scuttle the conversation, and they don’t bother getting defensive—they just work through the issues and move on. There are many ways to introduce healthy conflict, particularly into your meetings. Set meeting ground rules where everyone is expected to improve the quality of the discussion with one or more of the following: test statements passed off as facts by asking for the supporting evidence; introduce diversity by exploring a different side of an issue or thinking from the point of view of another stakeholder; expose risks in plans by highlighting assumptions or imagining the implications. Don’t try to build a conflict habit by starting with the most contentious issue you’ve been burying for months. Instead, build the habit over time by teaching people to

be comfortable being uncomfortable.

PREVENT UNPRODUCTIVE CONFLICT Organizations require conflict but humans run from it. If we’re going to address this gap without getting into conflict debt, we’re going to need something more than conversation training. First, we need to do a better job of clarifying expectations so we can neutralize many conflicts before they happen. Next, we need to normalize the productive tensions on our teams so they aren’t interpreted as interpersonal friction. Finally, we need to build a conflict habit so that conflict becomes much more frequent but lower impact. We, as leaders, have a critical role to play in creating a culture of productive conflict.

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WORK-LIFE BALANCE IS A MYTH DO THIS INSTEAD MARCUS BUCKINGHAM AND ASHLEY GOODALL If you think about it, work-life balance is a strange aspiration for a fulfilling life. Balance is about stasis: if our lives were ever in balance — parents happy, kids taken care of, work working — then our overriding thought would be to shout, “Nobody move!” and pray all would stay perfect forever. This false hope is made worse by the categories themselves. They imply that work is bad, and life is good; we lose ourselves in work but find ourselves in life; we survive work, but live life. And so the challenge, we are told, is to balance the heaviness of work with the lightness of life.

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“Each one of us, for no good reason other than the clash of our chromosomes, draws strength from different activities, situations, moments and interactions.”

Yet work is not the opposite of life. It is instead a part of life — just as family is, as are friends and community and hobbies. All of these aspects of living have their share of wonderful, uplifting moments and their share of moments that drag us down. The same is true of work, yet when we think of it as an inherent bad in need of a counterweight, we lose sight of the possibility for better. It seems more useful, then, to not try to balance the unbalanceable, but to treat work the same way you do life: By maximizing what you love. Here’s what we mean. Consider why two people doing exactly the same work seem to gain strength and joy from very different moments. When we interviewed several anesthesiologists, we found that while their title and job function are identical, the thrills and chills they feel in their job are not. One said he loved the thrill of holding each patient hovering at that one precise point between life and death, while he shuddered at the “pressure” of helping each patient get healthy once the operation was complete. Another said she loved the bedside conversations before the operation, and the calm sensitivity required to bring a sedated patient gently back to consciousness without the panic that afflicts many patients. Another was drawn mostly to the intricacies of the anesthetic mechanism itself and has dedicated herself to defining precisely how each drug does what it does. Each one of us, for no good reason other than the clash of our chromosomes, draws strength from different activities, situations, moments and interactions. Think of your life’s many different activities as threads. Some are black, some are grey and some are white. But some of these activities appear to be made of a different substance. These activities contain all the tell-tale signs of love: before you do them, you find yourself looking forward to them; while you’re doing them, time speeds up and you find yourself in flow; and after you’ve done them, you feel invigorated. These are your red threads, and research by the Mayo Clinic suggests that doctors who weave the fabric of their life with at least 20%

red threads are significantly less likely to experience burnout. The simplest way for you to do this is to spend a week in love with your job. This sounds odd, but all it really means is to select a regular week at work and take a pad around with you for the entire week. Down the middle of this pad, draw a vertical line to make two columns, and write “Loved It” at the top of one column and “Loathed It” at the top of the other. During the week, any time you find yourself feeling one of the signs of love scribble down exactly what you were doing in the Loved It column. And any time you find yourself feeling the inverse — before you do something, you procrastinate; while you do it, time drags; and when you’re done with it, you hope you never have to do it again — scribble down exactly what you were doing in the Loathed It column. Obviously, there’ll be plenty of activities in your week that don’t make either list, but if you spend a week in love with your work, by the end of the week you will see a list of activities in your Loved It column that feel different to you than the rest of your work. They’ll have a different emotional valence, creating in you a distinct and distinctly positive feeling, one that draws you in and lifts you up. Our research (a stratified random sample of the working populations of nineteen countries) reveals that 73% of us claim that we have the freedom to modify our job to fit our strengths better, but that only 18% of us do so. Your challenge, then, is to use your red threads to intelligently change, over time, the content of your job, so that it contains more things that you love doing and fewer that you’re aching to escape. The most helpful categories for us are not “work” and “life.” We should not struggle to balance the two. Instead, the best categories are “love” and “loathe.” Our goal should be to, little by little, week by week, intentionally imbalance all aspects of our work toward the former and away from the latter. Not simply to make us feel better, but so that our colleagues, our friends and our family can all benefit from us at our very best. We can’t always do only what we love. But we can always find the love in what we do.

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OLD SCHOOL NEW SCHOOL NO SCHOOL In a chaotic business environment, someone in your organization needs to be Champion of Change so you channel your inner innovator and lead transformation, create disruption, and blue ocean your way back to the top. You organize an offsite at the RitzCarlton in Maui to present a strategy that will increase the “Return on Wow” (ROW). You print posters that say, “ROW Together!” and you bring in Ladysmith Black Mambazo to lead the company in a musical performance of “Row Your Boat”. Sadly, this isn’t far off from how some business leaders think. When faced with seismic change, leaders tend to default to one of two approaches:

THEY KICK IT OLD SCHOOL There’s a reason your CEO got his MBA. He’s been desperately waiting for a chance to apply his learning. It’s as if Henry Mintzberg is in a breakout room screaming, “Release the hounds!” And boy, does he. Before you can say “move the needle,” he’ll bring in consultants to re-craft the mission, hire a facilitator to reimagine the vision, complete a SWOT analysis leading to the Four Pillars of Success, apply to be certified for the latest iteration of ISO 9000, initiate a full CX review so the company can truly become customer-centric, and, naturally, redesign the logo, write a new tagline, and change his title to “Chief Excitement Officer.” Here’s the problem: It takes an 26

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entire organization working together in complete unison to really drive organizational momentum and growth. And 99.9999 percent of the organization didn’t go to business school, doesn’t care about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, or threats, and has never known the difference between Mission and Vision, let alone how either of them relate to specific functions on the front line. Old-school kickers try to change the organization with McKinsey Quarterly while most of their people are checking out BuzzFeed.

THEY KICK IT NEW SCHOOL “You know what this organization needs to become a category of one?” your leader asks the emotionless faces crammed into the main boardroom and waiting for the big brilliant reveal. “Snapchat.” Yup, when your organization’s ecosystem changes, some think the best strategy is to throw money at contemporary tactics even though the C-suite has a rudimentary understanding of the new platforms (at best). So you’re directed to start purchasing hardware and software for a Big Data push to the cloud, organize Hack-a-Thons to unearth a culture of disruption, start running ads on Instagram, install vending machines that only accept crypto currency, create an innovation “lab” so your clients think you’re cooler than you are, and go all-in on social by building a nimble war room so you can tweet stuff during the Oscars.

RON TITE Also, uh . . . something-something Blockchain. Without a strategic foundation, a responsible approach to development, or a full understanding of the people and process implications, these tactics are rarely successful and, worse, are obsolete when 2.0 launches. Look, I’m not anti-education (Cha Gheil!) and I don’t complain about the downtown elites in management with their big fancy degrees. I actually helped launch an Executive MBA at a prestigious university, so I believe in the importance of academic models to business success. Still, true organizational change doesn’t end with those biz school exercises, it starts with them. Most of the people within an organization have been through enough company-wide transformation initiatives to know that if they just wait long enough, there will be another one by soon enough. They don’t know who to trust, so spare them the lecture on why this time it’s really going to work. So, what do you do? Great organizations and great leaders align the actions of all those around them to generate momentum and growth. They don’t do this based on some perfectly written mission statement, a few hollow buzzwords, or by chasing the latest tactic. They do it with these three pillars: 1. What they think. 2. What they do. 3. What they say.

THINK: WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE? In 1970, Milton Friedman wrote, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits”. For close to 50 years, no one questioned it. In fact, many embraced Friedman’s essay to justify any activity that maximized shareholder return. Well, the world has changed and finally, the purpose of the corporation has changed along with it. The Business Roundtable, a group of 181 CEOs (acting for nearly 30% of total U.S. market capitalization), recently declared, “Each of our stakeholders is essential. We commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities and our country.” The stakeholders they listed: Employees, Customers, Suppliers, Communities, Shareholders. So, yea. The corporation has to believe in something that goes beyond what you sell. Organizations need to go from product to purpose. So do you. An organization can’t have a true purpose unless its leaders have a purpose. What do you believe in?

DO: WHAT DO YOU DO TO REINFORCE YOUR BELIEFS? Customers and colleagues don’t know who to trust because for decades they’ve experienced companies and senior leaders claiming to believe in something, only to find out through organizational actions and personal behaviours, that they don’t. Believing isn’t enough. You have to act with intent to reinforce your beliefs. These actions are based on who you do it for, what they want you to do, and who you do it with. Let’s face it, the people on your team shouldn’t read your values. They should experience them.

SAY: HOW DO YOU SPREAD THE WORD? If you believe in something greater and you behave in ways that reinforce that belief, well, that’s worth talking about. And if you’re going to talk about it, do as great leaders do: Say it in an authentic, honest, and compelling way that sidesteps business bullshit to have real conversations. These are complicated times and they’ll get more complex before they get simpler. The noise isn’t going away and the demands on people’s time are escalating. The trust those people have for companies, institutions, and leaders is eroding. You can win that battle. You can think it. You can do it. You can say it. They’ll look. They’ll listen. And we’ll all be better off for it. Go get ’em.

Ron Tite is the founder of Church+State, executive producer and host of the podcast, “The Coup” (Rogers Frequency), coauthor of Everyone’s a Artist and author of Think Do Say: How to Seize Attention and Build Trust in a Busy, Busy World .

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ARE YOUR LEADERS MEDIOCRE? DR. VINCE MOLINARO

Dr. Vince Molinaro is a leadership adviser, speaker and global expert on leadership accountability.

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You might find that a rather unusual, even provocative question. But increasingly, as I travel the globe working with leaders, I end up posing this question to CEOs or CHROs who complain to me about the woeful state of leadership in their organizations. Most of the people I talk to can’t answer the question. They know that some of their leaders are pretty bad, but they don’t really know how to describe or define the problem. And they certainly don’t know how deep it runs. So, to help answer these questions, I decided to take matters into my own hands. First, I began to take a pulse survey at events I attended and with organizations that called me in to speak to their leaders. This allowed me to build a database of the worst kinds of leadership behavior that respondents witnessed on a dayto-day basis. Then, I extended the research with various online surveys that reached out to hundreds of leaders in North and South America. The results—which eventually captured more than 1,800 responses—confirmed a fear I had long held: mediocre leadership was complex, and it was present in almost every organization. The top five characteristics of mediocre leaders were alarmingly consistent regardless of continent, country or leadership position.

“MEDIOCRE LEADERSHIP IS A SCOURGE THAT DRAINS THE ENGAGEMENT AND PRODUCTIVITY OUT OF YOUR ORGANIZATION.”

1. Willingness to Blame Others These leaders consistently pass the buck when something goes wrong. When the going gets tough, they always find a finger to point at someone else.

2. Selfish to a Fault Some leaders are only in it for themselves. They take as much as they can from the job, for as long as they can, without regard to the welfare of anyone else.

3. Uncivil and Mean These leaders regularly and routinely mistreat, disrespect and insult the people around them. They believe that demeaning the people they lead is a sign of strength.

4. Generally Inept Some leaders have risen to a station well above their skills and experience. These leaders simply do not have the right instincts for leadership.

5. Lack of Initiative When decisive action is needed, these leaders delay, defer, procrastinate and prevaricate. They show up every day and do nothing and hope that nobody notices. As profound as these results were, the real emotional impact for me came from the open-ended responses that we captured. I asked respondents to describe in their own words how mediocre leadership impacts them personally. The responses ranged from disappointed and angry to despondent. “It’s such a struggle to come to work,” said one middle manager from North America. “It’s worse if you manage a group of people who look up to you. Slowly but surely, you die a little at a time.” Death by mediocre leadership was a constant theme in the open-ended responses. “Mediocre leaders suck the very energy, drive and ‘can do’ spirit out of you,” said another manager. It was hard to ignore the link between mediocre leaders and mediocre performance. “When leaders ignore their best people and ideas, maintaining the status quo is easiest for

them,” said another middle manager from North America. “After a while, we’re all just treading water.” Fortunately, there is hope. It will require some dedicated effort, but there is a solution to mediocre leadership: accountable leadership. In my book, The Leadership Contract, I suggest that leaders and their organizations adopt behaviours and mindsets that demonstrate strong accountability at a personal and collective level. In other words, I ask them to commit to what I call the four terms of the Leadership Contract. The first term is that leadership is a decision, and that you have to make it. You must be all in and define yourself as a leader. To be an accountable and maybe even a great leader needs your full commitment. Anything less and you run the risk of becoming mediocre. The second term notes that leadership is an obligation, and you have to step up. You need to have a clear sense of your obligations as a leader, and a commitment that you will leave your organization in a better place than you found it. It’s about leaving a lasting and positive legacy. The third term acknowledges that leadership is hard work and you have to get tough to tackle it. Far too many leaders only like the easy tasks of leadership. But, being a leader requires you to make unpopular decisions, give frank feedback to colleagues, and call out unproductive behaviour. These are hard things to do, but necessary if our organizations are to succeed. If you avoid the hard work, you weaken yourself, your team and your company. The final term notes that leadership is a community and you need to connect with your fellow leaders. Too many leaders are disconnected from one another. To be an effective leader, you must build relationships with peers and colleagues across the organization. You need to break down silos and actively network to share ideas and drive innovation. Mediocre leadership is a scourge that drains the engagement and productivity out of your organization. Left unattended, it will drive down results, and drive out your top talent. The antidote is within reach. You must sign the leadership contract and lead with accountability. It’s the quickest and most enduring way to improve your leadership. TheArtOf.com

WHY IT’S TIME FOR A UX REVOLUTION NICK GOLDBERG CEO, WorkLifeLabs Powered by

“Beautiful in design, easy to access, simple to navigate, and powerfully engaging, our new app will radically change the way people experience coaching and dramatically accelerate their development.”

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Need a taxi? Tap an app and off you go. Fancy a burger in front of Game of Thrones? Grab your phone and wait for the doorbell. But what about booking annual leave with work? Or scheduling a review with your line manager? Or, heaven forbid, logging into the e-learning portal to catch up with your training? For too long now, the systems we expect people to use at work have been over-complicated and badly designed. There are multiple stages to get through, forms to complete, hidden buttons and boxes to tick, approval to wait for, windows to open and reopen, functions that crash and inexplicably complex messages that leave you none the wiser. Is it really any wonder that HR teams spend their lives chasing people to complete the most basic of tasks? Enough is enough. At WorkLifeLabs, we’re working with app developers, with UX specialists, with HR teams and with employees to make the technology we interact with at work as user-friendly as the apps we use at home. Our first product is an app that quickly and seamlessly connects people to world class professional development coaches. Our new app will radically change the way people experience coaching and dramatically accelerate their development. Beautiful in design, easy to access, simple to navigate, and powerfully engaging, we have leading global organizations already signed up ahead of launch. When developing the app, our research into the needs and behaviors of users informed our design process. Here’s what I learned:

1. LESS IS MORE Think simple layouts, big buttons and only a couple of functions. That sounds obvious in the real world of UX and design. But one of the main problems with most work systems is they try to do everything and then inevitably fail to do anything well. We wanted to do the opposite. 2. SIMPLIFY THE PROCESS If it takes more than a couple of taps or clicks to get the results you want, people get distracted and move on. (Let’s face it, there will always be something more interesting than booking an e-learning course.) 3. MAKE IT WORK ON A PHONE People don’t sit at desks all day anymore—they work from the backs of taxis (that they booked with an app), from shared workspace (that they booked with an app) or from home (where the apps on their phones and TVs make the comparison with work systems even more obvious). 4. KEEP PEOPLE IN THE SYSTEM Imagine if Deliveroo required you to pick your food then order via WhatsApp. So many HR systems have corresponding paper forms or separate steps that disrupt the process. With our new app, letting people talk to coaches from within its platform— instead of via FaceTime or Skype—has made a huge difference in keeping people engaged. 5. MAKE IT LOOK GOOD People don’t judge applications against other HR systems or work technology; they are holding it up against the best brands, the slickest apps and the most seamless websites they encounter every day. Investment in design will never be wasted.

So, what can you do if you work somewhere with systems that clearly aren’t working? Where people don’t do what the business needs them to do, or where seemingly simple procedures take up valuable working time? Firstly, try the process yourself. Have a go at booking a course, or signing up for a coaching session or even just flagging something with HR. Note the sticking points—the confusing design, the bits that take you out of the loop, the extra stages that allow you to get distracted. See if there’s anything you can do to make it more seamless. Ask people what kind of system they’d want to use— and not just what they’d want to use every couple of months, but what they’d like to have on their phone and use every day. Then rewrite anything outdated, redesign anything cluttered and rewire anything complicated. Put user experience first—just as the creators of the apps you use every day did when they were starting out. Creating a great user experience is a mammoth task, and like most great things it takes time and expertise, but even making a couple of changes to the systems you rely on will make a huge difference to productivity and engagement. At WorkLifeLabs we’re looking to revolutionize the working world by making the technology we use at work as simple, slick and seamless as any app you’d use in your everyday life—even more so, in fact, because it’s so unexpected in this world.

The revolution starts here www.helloezra.com TheArtOf.com

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COMPETE TO BE UNIQUE RICHARD ROBBINS

The greatest challenge facing many people and organizations today is their inability to stand out when what they are offering appears to most people as the same products or services that everyone else is offering. When we continually compete and compare ourselves to others, we become trapped in their game, and worse – we lose all creative freedom to express

the best of ourselves. Without creative freedom, we lose the ability to uniquely shape our businesses, our lives and our world. We become mechanical in our approach and miss out on the pure enjoyment of being ourselves. It’s time to stop competing to be the best in the same game everyone else is playing. It’s time to create your own game and your own playing field. So

how do you create this “competitive free” zone and truly set yourself apart from the competition? The answer is simple – BE different, and not just for appearance sake, you must truly BE unique. The good news is you are unique – there is no one else in the world just like you. Any person, professional or organization can create their own

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own “competitive free” zone by first identifying, then announcing to the world, their own unique contribution. People that compete to be unique feel compelled to express the best that is within them. They don’t strive to be better than others; they strive to become better than themselves. Their greatest competition is not the competition with others, rather it is the competition they have with themselves. After all, no one can be better at being you, than you. While everyone is playing the conventional game and trying to be the best in that game, step out and play your own game by expressing who you are through what you do. Those who compete to be unique are not as focused on conventional ways of doing things but rather more on what makes them come alive and light up while doing it! They know that ultimately what the world needs is more people and organizations operating with passion, purpose and authenticity. T h e g r e a t e s t n e ve r - e n d i n g motivational force is joyful passion, not conformity, fear or ego. When you spend your life being who you are, doing things the way you love to do them, you are 100% engaged. You are fully present in that moment, time flies by and you are almost lost in your creative thoughts and work. It is this pure presence that produces exceptional work the world gets to enjoy.

requires you to decide who you are not and what you are not going to do. You cannot be everything to everyone and competing to be unique will bring with it many critics as you are not trying to conform, you are trying to create. What we are discussing here is very difficult because it challenges conventional wisdom and requires a leap of faith. It will require letting go of some old conditioned beliefs; the ones that trap us and keep our businesses and our lives small. Trust your vision and release the greatness that lies within you. T h i s w i l l requ i re you to move away from thinking about success to thinking about significance; from thinking about what you are going to “get” to thinking about what you are going to give and contribute. What is the unique and meaningful contribution you are going to make to others and the world? What we do is not as important as the authenticity we bring to our work. This is called our authentic intention.

spend more time improving the value of products/services it delivers and creating a better customer experience, rather than spending most or all of its time on business development. When you and/or your company are truly unique, you become an i ndu st r y leader embody i ng t he at t rac t ion pro ce s s a nd e nter a competitive free zone. Here, business

WHEN IT COMES TO BUSINESS

CREATING A COMPETITIVE FREE ZONE

Most authentically unique people work for the pure enjoyment it brings to their lives as well as the lives of others. Their passion and enthusiasm transcend into an enormous positive impact and contribution to the lives of their customers. This is not magic, although it can be magical. This is the attraction process. Competing to be unique not only requires you to decide who you are and what you are going to do but it also

In business, we are often caught in what’s called a commodity trap or “competitive convergence” which is when we are competing primarily on price because in the consumer’s eye, we all look the same. When we make a unique contribution, we create our own competitive free zone, and no longer pursue business but attract it. When an organization or person reaches the point of attracting business, it can then

becomes an absolute pleasure! You will begin to give up non-productive and unprofitable ralationships, and focus on highly profitable and mutually rewarding relationships where you share common values. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a teenager, a stay at home parent, a taxi driver, a server in a restaurant, an employee, a commissioned sales person, an owner of a small business or t he CEO of a mu lt i nat iona l organization, everyone can compete to be unique.

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“THE GREATEST NEVERENDING MOTIVATIONAL FORCE IS JOYFUL PASSION, NOT CONFORMITY, FEAR OR EGO. WHEN YOU SPEND YOUR LIFE BEING WHO YOU ARE, DOING THINGS THE WAY YOU LOVE TO DO THEM, YOU ARE 100% ENGAGED.”

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FEELS LIKE (VIRTUAL) TEAM SPIRIT

FRANCES COLE JONES

With more and more companies using the latest technology to find efficiencies, far-flung, “virtual” teams are becoming a part of many people’s work day. Therefore, I thought it was important to put together a top ten list of the most effective strategies for building, and maintaining, virtual team spirit—the spirit that builds trust, and encourages concrete results.

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GATHER ‘ROUND AND GO AROUND

We all know a picture is worth a thousand words so sharing pictures of team members is critical. Still more valuable is posting them on a one-sheet that’s a diagram of clock face so members can say, “This is Ellen at 9 o’clock” thereby saving team members from having to scroll frantically through members’ pictures to remind themselves who’s speaking. This method counteracts disembodied voices on conference calls, and helps prevent “hiding” by participants.

ONE MAY BE LONELY, BUT IT’S ALSO THE MOST EFFECTIVE NUMBER

On conference calls, if even one member of the team is in an office by his or herself, the remainder of the team needs to be separated from one another – even if they are in the same offices. This can seem like a pain to arrange, but anything else leaves the person working solo feeling still more isolated.

SORT THOUGH THE HOLIDAYS AND HO DOWNS

If your team is international, building trust is about more than the time zone in which they’re located. Many countries celebrate different holidays, start work later, stay longer, etc. Additionally, some Asian countries have a policy of working on Saturdays that needs to be acknowledged and factored in at the outset. If you work this out in advance, you can even gain efficiency by working out the ideal schedule for “handover” of work.

ESTABLISH YOUR “NOTE-PASSING” POLICY

The same way it is distracting to a teacher and fellow students to have

two people passing notes in class, it is distracting for two people to be IM’ing or emailing during a call. (And please don’t think others don’t notice. They do.) My recommendation is that the only use of IM or email during a call would be to alert others to a technical breakdown.

VERSION 2.WHAT?

Few things are more maddening than scrolling through six versions of a document—each with a very slightly different draft name—trying to figure out who touched it last. My suggestion is begin with V.01, for version 1, and move on from there. This will, at least, take you through V.99 before you need to recalibrate. A great add-on is to adopt the protocol that “whole numbered versions” (e.g. V2.0) are “client-ready”, whereas fractional numbers (e.g. V.023) are still works in progress.

going to be missed, state by when you will be in touch.

SILENCE IS NOT (NECESSARILY) GOLDEN

“DON’T YOU PUT THAT SHEEP ON MY HEAD”

Too often a question is asked and falls into silence, leaving the questioner wondering, “Are they quiet because they agree with me, disagree with me, are not paying attention to me?” Establish your silence policy – i.e. silence signals agreement/disagreement; or each question must be met with a round of polling—explicit yes’s or no’s from all participants.

SHOW YOUR WORK

Should you make any changes in a document that has the potential to be misconstrued (i.e. anything beyond fixing typos/grammar/clarity) include a note explaining the rationale behind the change. This will either mollify team members or give you a jumping off place for discussion – rather than dissension – at your next meeting.

Different countries have different idiomatic expressions – the above was a striking reinterpretation of “Don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes.” Alternatively, ideas we “run up the flagpole” or consider “a home run,” may be similarly misconstrued by listeners in different countries. Clarify and/or (for fun) keep a running list everyone can learn from. (nb: Poland uses “I wouldn’t bet my head on that” for “I wouldn’t bet my life”; and one of my favorites is the Italian equivalent of “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too”: “You can’t have a full bottle of wine and a drunk wife.”)

STANDARDIZE YOUR TEAM TURNAROUND TIME OR STATE YOUR “BY WHEN”

People wait far more patiently if they know by when something is going to happen – this is the reason most mass transit has begun incorporating announcements regarding where the next bus/train is, and when it can be expected. Have a stated turnaround time for your team. If that deadline is

MIX IT UP

With far-flung teams, there is no opportunity to blow off steam together after work – yet the interpersonal connections forged during these get-togethers is vital to creating camaraderie. What to do? Arrange a weekly test-drive (and subsequent commentary on) the “libation of your nation” – beer, chai, sake, double espresso, or create a signature drink peculiar to your team alone.

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FROM

OUR STAGE: Insights from

Dr. Tasha Eurich We recently brought The Art of Leadership conference to San Diego and Chicago, and featured a line-up of thought leaders who touched on some of the most forward-thinking concepts facing leadership today. One of these thought leaders was Dr. Tasha Eurich, an organizational psychologist, researcher, and author of the New York Times bestseller Insight. Tasha has built a reputation as a fresh, modern voice in the business world by pairing her scientific grounding in human behaviour with a pragmatic approach to professional development. From our stage, she shared the following insights on how to increase our performance and self-awareness.

Do you know or work with someone who is not self-aware? Tasha’s research has identified “74% of people work with at least three unaware co-workers.” Tasha refers to self-awareness as “the meta-skill of the 21st century” and her research has identified self-aware leaders are: More successful at their jobs • More promotable • More respected leaders • More confident and more effective communicators • Better friends • Likely to have happier marriages • Likely to raise less narcissistic children •

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As Tasha says, “On a good day, 80% of us are lying to ourselves about lying to ourselves.” In addition, Tasha suggests, “The least competent people tend to be the most confident about their performance.” Yikes. Tasha shared four tools we can all use to help gather feedback and introspect the right way.

1 MINDSET SHIFT - WE MUST ALL STOP ASSUMING WE ARE SELF-AWARE In her research, Tasha found that 95% of people believe they are self-aware, when in fact the percentage of people who

were actually self aware was 10-15%. So how we do get to be more self aware? Knowing who you are internally and knowing how others see you is critical. Self-aware people: Know what they value Understand their passions • Know what they aspire to and the experience they want to have • Know the environments in which they fit • Know their strengths and limitations • Know their reactions • Know the impact they have on others • Are highly self-accepting • •

“ON A GOOD DAY, 80% OF US ARE LYING TO OURSELVES ABOUT LYING TO OURSELVES.” – DR. TASHA EURICH 2 ASK “WHAT” VERSUS “WHY” Great self-aware leaders also introspect the right way. Asking ‘Why’ gets us stuck into what is wrong and it holds us back. Instead, by asking ‘What’ we are able to look at possibilities to propel us forward. For example: •

Instead of asking “Why do you want to change your job?” ask “What do you like about what you’re doing?”

3 ASK THE MAGIC FEEDBACK QUESTION Self-aware leaders proactively seek feed-

back. To get an appreciation of how others see us, Tasha recommends we get some loving critics (who you know will give you honest, respectful feedback) to whom you can ask the magic feedback question: •

In the future, what can I do to be a better______? (leader, coach, facilitator)

4 THINK OF A BUSINESS PROCESS REVIEW If you want to build a self-aware team, implement a regular process that identifies the areas and processes that are working and not working.

Awareness for everyone allows for success and to identify areas for improvement. Leaders who pave the way and provide the safety and expectation to tell the truth is a key element in creating self-aware teams. The journey to self-awareness happens incrementally through daily commitment to making small insights and discoveries about ourselves. Tasha encourages us all to ask ourselves: ‘What am I going to do today so that I can transform my level of self-awareness and become a future-ready leader?’

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LEADING THE CHARGE ON UPSKILLING Unlocking human potential in the new digital era PwC Canada

From the growing number of devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) to the expansion of data analytics, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), the impact of technology is rapidly increasing. The speed and scope of the changes associated with this technological revolution are like none we’ve seen before, reshaping work and home environments and how we interact as a people and a society. Today’s business and local government leaders are facing a tremendous challenge: the need to navigate the digital era amid a growing gap in the skills required to harness new technologies. To address this challenge, businesses will need to invest in upskilling their workforce. Are you ready to guide your organization through the challenges ahead?

THE WIDENING SKILLS GAP According to our annual CEO Survey, 88% of Canadian CEOs are concerned about the availability of important skills in their industry, up from 51% in 2018. Global CEOs expressed a similar concern, placing the availability of key skills as the third top threat to growth, up from No. 5 last year. But unlike their global counterparts, Canadian CEOs are less likely to prioritize upskilling. Just 16% of Canadian CEOs cited significant upskilling as the most important solution to addressing a skills gap, versus 46% of their global counterparts. Instead, they cited strong educational pipelines as their preferred (41%) solution. The growing skills gap represents a very real issue that stands to hold back organizational performance

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and prosperity. Adding to the challenge is the concern about job displacement associated with technological advancement as automation threatens many existing jobs. Hundreds of millions of young people around the world are coming of age and finding themselves unemployed and unemployable, while many older, long-established employees are discovering their jobs are becoming obsolete. In the meantime, jobs requiring knowledge of AI, robotics, and IoT are going unfilled in ever-greater numbers. Together, these trends have broadened the gap between the employees of the present and the workforce of the future. Unless we find a solution, the social impact of job loss—for individuals, the organizations that employ them and the communities around them—will be even more staggering than it has been in the past.

UPSKILLING DEFINED Upskilling refers to the expansion of people’s capabilities and employability to fulfill the talent needs of a rapidly changing economy. An upskilling initiative can take place at the level of a company, an industry, or a community. Upskilling shouldn’t be confused with reskilling, a term associated with short-term efforts undertaken for specific groups. By contrast, upskilling is a comprehensive initiative to convert applicable knowledge into productive results. It involves identifying the skills that will be most valuable in the future, the businesses that will need them, the people who need work and could plausibly gain those

“Upskilling is a complex journey that requires a significant shift in mindset–no easy feat for any organization entrenched in its own ways of doing things. At PwC Canada, we’ve begun our own upskilling journey and we’re determined to leave no one behind. Corporate Canada has a responsibility to get upskilling right. Evolving workforces for the future is a key step in a multipronged approach to help us secure a greater piece of the global economic pie–for the benefit of all Canadians.” - Nicolas Marcoux, CEO, PwC Canada skills and the training and technology-enabled learning that could help them. It’s not a one-time endeavor, and it involves every member of the workforce. From the front lines to the C-suite, the goal of upskilling is to have all members continually expand or augment their skills. Those skills aren’t limited to the realm of technology. They also include soft skills like the ability to learn and grasp new knowledge, improving communication, fostering teamwork and developing leadership. This way, employees can adapt to fit the roles needed for tomorrow that we can’t forecast today. Some of the most effective upskilling initiatives take place at a community level, where government, business and not-for-profit organizations work together, often in new ways.

COST CONCERNS At first glance, the costs of upskilling appear daunting. But they should be considered in the context of the alternatives: severance costs for laid-off workers, plus the time and expense involved in finding, recruiting and on-boarding new people with the skills most in demand. Moreover, an upskilling program doesn’t need to upgrade skills for the entire workforce at once. In any given year, only 10 percent of a company’s workforce is immediately at risk. What’s more, skills mismatches have a direct impact on a country’s GDP, tax revenues and social safety net bill. Analysis of the return on investment for existing cases suggests that $1 invested in upskilling tends to return at least $2 in revenues or savings.

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ROAD MAP FOR AN UPSKILLING INITIATIVE

4. Match jobs and engage workers:

Our society’s intellectual capital may well depend on deepening our understanding of how to effectively design and implement upskilling initiatives. Below are six key action steps:

It’s rare to find the perfect match right away; make use of IT systems that quantify the skills gap between the candidate and job requirements. It’s also important to ensure positive communication with supervisors, transparency about the project and its implications for employees, encouragement to ask for help when needed, strong support for workers’ upskilling decisions and standardized rules for all HR advisors.

1. Analyze the situation and define the initiative: Some upskilling efforts may begin as regional initiatives, driven by government leaders; others might start within a single enterprise. All will have some elements in common: • a commitment to lifelong learning rather than the preservation of specific jobs; • support for individuals undergoing change; and • a reasonable time horizon, generally nine to 18 months, for the first round of activity. Begin by convening candid dialogues with key stakeholders. The initiative must coordinate decisions and actions on several levels at once. To keep these activities aligned, a core group of sponsors and a project leadership team must manage the initiative and organize communications. There’s also generally a technological component developing digitally enabled methods for gathering data, assessing skills and facilitating lifelong learning. Set quantitative objectives indicating the desired return for each stakeholder group (for example, the government, the company and the individual). It’s also important to set non-numeric objectives, which articulate the positive future state and motivate people.

5. Select training and providers: The quality, value and efficiency of the training experience affect every aspect of the upskilling initiative, from its costs to employee outlook and motivation. In selecting professional programs, your key criteria are market recognition, track record and the trust built in the past through placing graduates in new jobs.

6. Administer the project and monitor results: Upskilling is challenging for everyone involved. Bring together the HR departments of relevant companies as administrators, and use digital HR tools to keep track of activity and results. Set up a communications plan, publishing success stories and communicating the benefits to the broader community and to the media. Showcase individual employees as role models and set up opportunities for workers to communicate with one another via support groups, informal meetings and online platforms.

2. Design a skills plan:

UPSKILLING AND PROSPERITY

Base your priorities on the types of jobs that will be affected most by new technologies, the employees who are most at risk and the businesses that have the most to gain. Off-the-shelf analytic workforce planning tools can help you estimate the impact of new technologies on companies, the savings that automation will generate, the types of new skills that will be needed and the number of months or years it will take for these changes to happen.

If this approach to upskilling seems exceptionally complex, that’s because it’s addressing an exceptionally complex problem. The assumption that people would be able to easily acquire new skills through vocational or on-the-job training in the future no longer holds true. And as the digital transformation of the global economy continues, the payoff for upskilling can be immense⁠—in economic results, overall quality of life and increased opportunities.

3. Assess and advise individual employees: Some form of individual transformation will take place for participants, sometimes taking them out of their comfort zones. A considered assessment program that includes personal coaching and advice can go a long way toward relieving employees’ fears. For each participant, create an individual skills development plan, defining the steps and training necessary to address the new job requirements or even make broader changes. Ideally, individual workers should feel they’re in charge of their own process.

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Adapted and reprinted with permission from “A strategist’s guide to upskilling” from strategy+business. © 2019 PwC. All rights reserved. PwC refers to the PwC network and/or one or more of its member firms, each of which is a separate legal entity. Please see www.pwc.com/structure for further details. www.strategy-business.com This content is for general information purposes only, and should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional advisers.

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Craig DeMartino Climber

Arc’teryx specializes in technical, high-performance apparel, outerwear and equipment. Design is our way forward. Make it yours.

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Arc’teryx Equipment | Vancouver, Canada | arcteryx.com