Bringing your Best Self to work

Last week, I experienced a career highlight: I call it 'al-fresco learning' (outdoors, fresh air learning). Check out the scene in the photos. It was absolutely a joy to be in the Sarasota, Florida breezy afternoon sun, temperatures in the upper 60s, surrounded by palm trees, lawns, the pool and the bay.

But wait, there's more!

As if the surroundings and atmosphere weren't perfect enough, I was lucky enough to be doing GREAT work. It was my role to coach a group of 11 smart, engaged, and successful managers on what it means to be at their Best Self, at work. This is a subject about which I am VERY passionate. I truly believe that each of us has special gifts and strengths, and we should strive to leverage, optimize, and maximize them at work -- daily! It was wonderful to be working for a client who also believes this and is willing to invest in helping their employees get this right.

I want to share with you the exercise we worked on.

How to Bring your Best Self to Work

Take out a notebook, journal, or your favorite word processor and complete the following sentence:

"When I'm at my Best Self, I am..."

Some examples may include

"...adding value by suggesting creative, outside-the-box ideas to solve problems or improve products, services, or processes."

"...collaborating with others to create synergistic solutions."

"...focused and calm."

"...thinking about serving others."

List some of the potential and actual barriers to being your best self at work. What might get in your way of being creative and thinking outside-the-box, for example? Perhaps barriers for you include self-sensoring and being too critical of yourself, or maybe it's not getting enough creativity-stimulating inputs from fresh and divergent sources. If being focused and calm is how you want to be, for example, then maybe your barriers include having a very noisy environment, or not having a clear plan for your day's work.

Devise three specific routines, or habits, that you will incorporate into your daily and weekly work to help ensure you are bring your best self out as much as possible. Be specific, and phrase them in the positive (i.e., say what you will do instead of what you will avoid or stop doing).

For example, you might say, "I will read three articles each week from other industries or other professional fields to diversify my perspective and generate new insights into existing problems." Or, "I will close my door for a 90-minute stretch each morning at 10:00 a.m. and dedicated uninterrupted energy and attention to a highly important focus project."

Create accountability structures. How will you stay true to what you have committed to and how will you track your progress? Consider enlisting an accountability buddy or a peer coach to help you keep yourself accountable and stick to your plan. Another method is to keep a journal of your progress and reflect on your accomplishments and challenges.

What do you think? Are you bringing your best self to work? Do you know what it takes? What are your challenges and successes? I'd love to hear about it!

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Leading for Compliance vs. Commitment [vlog]

Is your leadership style all about ensuring compliance or engendering commitment? In this vlog (video-blog) episode, I discuss the difference in the business results and employee engagement that can result from each leadership approach. What do you think? Use the comments below to jump into the conversation - I look forward to hearing from you!

TRANSCRIPT

Halelly: Welcome to this episode of the TalentGrow vlog, where I’m going to discuss two concepts that come up a whole lot in my work with leaders. Those are the issue of compliance versus commitment. Now, think about this – compliance and commitment, two very different kinds of goals. But when you have employees orienting their work toward one or the other, the kind of work that results is going to be of a very different quality.

So let’s think about how do people work when their goal is to be compliant? Compliance means that you’re trying to meet some requirement that’s stipulated by policy, by a law, by procedures, by instructions, very specific and oriented toward the control of the way in which you work, so that the results match some predetermined quality. This is important, and in a lot of work places this is something that cannot be ignored. But if all of the leader’s work is oriented toward achieving compliance, something else is going to happen that they may not have planned on. How do people work when they’re trying to meet the minimum requirements? Do they give discretionary effort? Do they go above and beyond the call of duty? Typically not. Are they able to think innovatively, to change the way that they’re doing things because they have a new idea or because they think that they can improve on it? A lot of times they can’t. They don’t feel like they have the freedom to do it. So compliance gets people to work hard toward the minimum requirements and that’s about as far as they’ll go.

Now, let’s think about commitment as something very different. When people work in a way that’s oriented towards commitment, it means that they care about the results, that they have some kind of a drive to achieve a purpose or a mission that they think is important. Now, the kind of work that this generates is really different than the kind of work compliance generates. Because if you’re doing something you care about, you’re not going to do the minimum requirements. Since when do we work on something that’s important just to meet some minimum requirements? We don’t do that. Employees are going to work through commitment in a way that really gives them the opportunity to be innovative, to put their whole effort into it, to give above and beyond, because they want the results to be good, because they think that the results matter.

So as a leader, are you generating work that meets compliance? Or are you generating commitment and generating results that surpass compliance and go above and beyond? It’s in the way you lead. Think about it.

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Empowering Employees: The Most Laissez-Faire Employee Handbook I've Ever Seen

Wow. I finally got around to reading the much-discussed copy of game design company Valve's employee handbook, which has been posted on the Internet for all to see. Probably to put all other handbooks to shame. And, I am impressed.

In a nutshell, it seems that Valve has taken some key principles of Laissez-Faire Capitalism and applied them to one company's corporate culture. 

Here are just a few of the impressive highlights:

Valve is a flat organization. For real. No one 'tells you' what to do. You don't 'report to' anyone. As in a truly free society, it is a group of individuals who are not beholden to anyone, who are free to pursue their own ideas in a rational, voluntary fashion.

Employees choose their own work 100% of the time. Not like those other companies I described in chapter 11 of Employee Development on a Shoestring (e.g., Google, Atlassian, 3M, Facebook, and Twitter) that give people the choice for a percentage of their time. Valve employees are fully self-directed - they are not forced to follow the whims of others.

"you were not hired to fill a specific job description. You were hired to constantly be looking around for the most valuable work you could be doing. At the end of a project, you may end up well outside what you thought was your core area of expertise. There’s no rule book for choosing a project or task at Valve. But it’s useful to answer questions like these:

• of all the projects currently under way, what’s the most valuable thing I can be working on?
• Which project will have the highest direct impact on our customers? How much will the work I ship
• benefit them?
• Is Valve not doing something that it should be doing?
• What’s interesting? What’s rewarding? What leverages my individual strengths the most?"

Because all work is self-directed, it's up to employees to constantly communicate to learn about what others are working on and to let others know what they want to work on, what experience they've had, and what their strengths are (as seen in the funny 'Fig. 2-4 graphic above). Their desks have wheels and they can roll their desk to any location and work with any group of people they want to. And when they find something they are interested in, they can just get started working on it - no approval process is necessary. "You will be welcomed—there is no approval process or red tape involved. Quite the opposite—it’s your job to insert yourself wherever you think you should be." (p. 14)

Work-life Balance. Valve promotes a healthy work-life balance and effective time management. "While people occasionally choose to push themselves to work some extra hours at times when something big is going out the door, for the most part working overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in planning or communication. If this happens at Valve, it’s a sign that something needs to be reevaluated and corrected." (p. 17) This means that employees act with enlightened, rational self-interest, being productive and taking care of themselves to ensure they can remain productive.

Supply and demand hiring practices. "Hiring well is the most important thing in the universe.  Nothing else comes close. It’s more important than breathing." (p. 44) Now that's a pretty unambiguous statement! Valve wants people who are highly collaborative and who possess skills that are 'T-shaped': broad-range generalists with a deep expertise in one area. And everyone is involved in the hiring process, since there are no 'managers'. Everyone is accountable for the results that are produced by their peers, so everyone has a vested interest in helping to ensure that every hire is a good fit and successfully acculturates. So while working in their own rational self-interest, all employees have an inherent interest in the success of others with whom they are interdependently linked to achieve a shared goal.

Finally, I liked how Valve also included an Epilogue in which they disclose what they're NOT good at, such as onboarding new people, mentoring, and disseminating information internally. These can become project opportunities for those employees who choose them as points of focus. Or they may just be 'warnings' to those who may feel compelled to complain about their absence, as in, "we told you so!"

What do you think - how similar is this to your company's employee handbook? How would you like to work in this kind of environment? What else do you think about this? I'd love to have a dialogue in the comments, below!

Image: Valve Employee Handbook Fig. 2-4

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Halelly Goes to Vlogland - Welcome, and 2 Requests

What are your big goals for this year? How are you forwarding your action on achieving them?

Well one of my goals this year was to venture into the wonderful world of video blogging. And I've decided to just leap into the deep end. So - here is my first 'vlog'. I hope you like it - and please give me suggestions and feedback. Thanks! 

TRANSCRIPT

Halelly: Hi. This is Halelly, from TalentGrow, and welcome to my first video blog, or vlog. I wrote down my goals for 2012 and this is one of them – I want to create more video delivery of content. I write in my blog, I wrote a book, I speak with clients via my workshops and my conference presentations and my training and facilitation work and teambuilding, but I’ve never done a video. So I decided, why not? Let’s do it.

You write down a goal, you have to write down what actions you’re going to take to make that goal a reality. There has to be something that you can do everyday, or at least every week, to move you every big closer to achieving that goal, even if it’s just baby steps. Because stuff gets in the way. Emergencies, crises, other people’s priorities, all can actually hijack your goal. And sometimes if we don’t revisit them on a regular basis, they can go to the wayside. And that’s a shame, because your goals are what’s important to you. It’s what you decided you really want to do. So I hope I encourage you to work on your goals, not to forget them.

So, this is my attempt to take a baby step and so I decided that my very first vlog will be one that’s kind of easy because I’m just going to make it public. Now I can’t back out because everybody knows I’m planning doing vlogs. And I also want to ask you – I actually have two requests. The first request I have for you is for suggestions on content. What topics would you like me to talk about in short segments, about three, four minute segments, that don’t take a long time to listen to or to watch, but that bring you value, that teach you something new or give you an idea or make you think of something in a different way. You know, the topics I usually focus on are related to leadership and communication, especially interpersonal communication in the workplace, related to employee development and employee learning, and also related to working in teams and to emotional intelligence, especially at work.

So what do you want to hear about? Do you have a special challenge or a particular question, something that came up that’s been bugging you or you weren’t sure if you handled it the best way? Please share with me any ideas you have, because that’s going to be really helpful. As I said, I’ve lined up some ideas already, but I’d love to hear what will make it valuable for you. So that’s my first request, what content would you like me to share with you?

My second request is for feedback. All of us see ourselves as we can, but we don’t really know how other people see us. We don’t really know what effect or impact we’re having. We know what our intentions are, but not our impact. So I really need to know, how am I doing? What could I do differently to make this better? I’d love for some specific suggestions from you, and you can put them into the comments, you can send them to me in the various social media. I’m very active in social media. Or you can just email them to me, halelly@talentgrow.com is my email address. And I would love to hear from you. It’s going to make it really much better for you and for me because my goal is to give you quality and useful content. So thank you so much for watching, and listening to my first vlog. And I really look forward to connecting with you soon. Have a wonderful day and let’s make this the best year yet. Take care.

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Sign up to my free weekly newsletter and get more actionable tips and ideas for making yourself a better leader and a more effective communicator! It’s very short and relevant with quick tips, links, and news about leadership, communication, and self-development. Sign up now! 

Also, subscribe to my podcast, The TalentGrow Show, on iTunes to always be the first in the know about new episodes of The TalentGrow Show! http://apple.co/1NiWyZo 

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