Upholding the Common Good

“Timing is everything” they say. If so, sitting in a busy Starbucks on a Thursday afternoon is not exactly the best time to find yourself with tears streaming down your face.

Mind you, this was not exactly the café community experience I envisioned when stopping off today for a latte and to sort through some old files. In doing so, I ran across the full-page ad I had clipped for a special Annie Leibovitz series of photographs that American Express commissioned more than a decade ago. 

It was at this inauspicious moment that I began to quietly cry uncontrollably. And the catalyst for all this unexpected emotion was a simple photo of the now-deceased Congresswoman, Barbara Jordan, of Texas, in her wheelchair and wrapped in an American flag.

That damn photo, no bigger than a business card, latched on to my heart like a magnet and simply would not let go. And the price it required in order for me to get back to sorting through other papers was a most simple one … tears. Lots of them. In combination with periodic gentle sobs, swipes at my eyes, and a little full body trembling for good measure. 

I never met Barbara Jordan. I have read only a little about her life.  I vaguely remember watching the television broadcast of her speech at the 1992 Democratic National Convention. But she epitomizes for me the essence of democracy, grace, and leadership. Just look at some of her oft-quoted observations:

“The majority of the American people still believe that every single individual in this country is entitled to just as much respect, just as much dignity, as every other individual.”

“Justice of right is always to take precedence over might.”

“What the people want is simple. They want an America as good as its promise.”

Seeing her photo allowed me to hear her booming voice, so eloquent in its rhetoric, so powerful, confident, and uplifting in its cadence.

And so I cried … some tears for Barbara Jordan and the class with which she exercised political leadership … but the biggest tears were reserved for the power of her beliefs in the dignity of every individual and the power of America’s promise.

As a people we can, and should, be so much better. As an individual person, I can, and should, be so much better.

As the last few days of political posturing have demonstrated, we desperately need more individuals like Barbara Jordan to model the way, to remind us to be as good as our promise ... individually, as a nation, and to and for the world. Too many of our leaders fail us as they fail to bring dignity to our discourse.

As I finished my coffee I couldn't be quite sure whether I had been crying for the past or shedding tears for our future.

5 Shifts to Recharge Creative Conversations

The past two weeks have found me held hostage in more poorly organized, under-managed, and enthusiasm-draining meetings than any human being should have to endure. In this day and age it is simply unacceptable to ask volunteers and our staff colleagues to share their valuable time and to then misuse it in such a manner.
If your meetings are plagued by underwhelming results and lack the spirit needed to promote creativity and innovation, the following five practical pointers might help.

Change the players.
Creativity is often enhanced by involving a pool of individuals other than the usual suspects in your meetings. Bring in “wild cards,” individuals not tied to your department or organization, but who are known to be good thinkers. During the meeting use social media and other online channels to cast a wider net for input and feedback. Involve people who will bring different perspectives without any of the preconceived assumptions that the regular attendees might have. So long as you have unity of purpose you can honor and tap into a diversity of perspectives.

Change the place.
Behavior is a function of how people interact with their environment (Kurt Lewin), so you can elicit different behavior by changing the environment or changing the people. Use different settings to send messages about what a meeting is designed to accomplish. Quick stand-up meetings in an open area suggest fast idea generation and getting back to business. On-line meetings suggest tapping into talents of people geographically dispersed. A meeting outside the office often suggests an attempt to free yourself from regular work constraints.

Change the process.
Though meetings occur for different reasons, many organizations use a “one size fits all” approach to managing the process for all their meetings. Sessions specifically designed to elicit creativity and innovation need to be intentionally structured to do so using appropriate creative and collaborative thinking techniques and facilitation styles. Similarly you should adjust your discussion process for those agenda items that are part of a longer meeting agenda if they are meant to foster new thinking.

Change the power.
Power ripples throughout organizations and meetings in a variety of ways affecting who says what … to whom … and how it gets said. A creative and innovative mindset in meetings requires a more dispersed power structure that spreads the wealth and reduced fear of intimidation or retribution by either personal or positional power. Pay attention to room settings, small group participant distribution, reporting out mechanisms, idea collection techniques, who’s facilitating, and much more as you examine and try to adjust the power quotient in your meetings.

Change the pace.
We can foster greater creativity and innovation in meetings both by speeding up and slowing down the thinking process. We can speed it up by interjecting short bursts of creative thinking techniques that challenge us to maximize our idea generation in a compressed period of time (i.e., 5-10 minutes). We can speed up the thinking by having on-line discussions (or individually completed worksheets) prior to ever coming together in person to make a decision or react to the advance thinking. We can slow the process down by separating the idea generation process from the decision-making process, allowing ample time to reflect and incubate between the two. 


What other shifts have you found helpful to refresh the creative conversations in your meetings?

Designing for Learning to Emerge

I love May in Indianapolis. While much of my home city wraps itself in the black and white of the Indianapolis 500, the well-designed landscaping bed surrounding my bungalow bursts with color. Every day I awaken to some new growth emerging, some new form taking shape, some glorious color crying out to me. Because of the talent of the landscape architect who planned this cycle (definitely not me), the seemingly never-ending sequence of growth and color unfolds for several weeks.

If only training and professional development experiences could mirror the imaginative thoughtfulness of my landscape design. Imagine participating in a program where you were part of a steady, but constant unfolding of awareness, insight, and new learning. Your curiosity would be awakened, your senses and interest would be engaged, and your contributions to the experience would be heightened.

How rare these experiences are, however. Much of what is billed as “high impact learning” at many conferences amounts to little more than talking head panel presentations with some discussion groups thrown in as an afterthought. I know when it comes to learning styles that there are different strokes for different folks. In fact, I can recall many a time when I sat with rapt attention listening and learning from a masterful storyteller, lecturing for hours on end with nary a visual aid or handout. But those successful spellbinders are few and far between.

Our efforts need more attention during the design process. To begin we need to more clearly identify the learning questions to be explored and the learning outcomes worth achieving. We then need to prioritize the key points to be made in the content. Time is not endless, and if I hear one more presenter begin a session with “If only I had more time, we could talk about ____” I may need someone to post bail for me. It is incumbent upon the program designer (and sponsor) to design for the time available. Having clearly prioritized pieces of content makes that more manageable.

After all this has been done, we need to spend far more time exploring the truly endless number of discussions, exercises, and other teaching techniques that can be used during the session. Once techniques are identified for all of the individual segments, the overall program design needs to be examined through several lenses: (1) the lens of content flow: does the flow of discussions and points being made have an appropriate logic or order to it? (2) the lens of attention: do the various techniques employed ensure a sufficient variety and level of interaction to capture attention; (3) the lens of learning: have enough learning checkpoints been built in so participants can reflect and capture their new insights?

While this may seem an ominous task, I would suggest program participants deserve nothing less. I guess I could have skipped the landscape architect’s effort and simply thrown a bag of wildflower seeds into the ground. I’m sure some seeds would have grown into something nice, but a whole lot of ithen would probably have become weeds.

So the next time you get ready to sponsor or present a program, put on your kneepads and bury your hands in the real dirt of program design. It will produce a much prettier result.

You can download a simple planning template I use to design my own sessions that captures the steps outlined above.

Managing for More than the Moment

Retailers have long understood the value of samples and two-fers.

When Procter and Gamble was introducing their home dry cleaning product, Dryel, they shipped free samples to thousands of sorority houses, a target market they perceived as being a natural fit for the new product. Visit any Sam's Club or Costco on a Saturday and you can essentially eat a complete meal if you accept samples given at the end of almost every aisle. On the two-fer side, don’t be surprised if that cleaning product you just bought at Target has a sample of another product shrink-wrapped in with the item you purchased. 

Both of these marketing approaches relate to a simple concept: when we've got your attention we want to imbue it with meaning beyond just this moment. 

In our time-pressed world, organizations would be wise to extend this concept deeper into their products and services mix. A continuing education workshop could also include a social or networking component. The evaluation form for that workshop can also be turned into a marketing tool by offering a discount to a future program if registration is completed at that very moment. 

The possibilities are endless. A board or staff meeting could also include a needs assessment component by having participants work the phones and call members or customers randomly to solicit their ideas and feedback. By getting answers to a few simple questions that could be used to guide future offerings, a membership application or renewal form also becomes a marketing research tool. An evaluation form volunteers use to offer feedback on their experiences also becomes a referral tool if it solicits the names of individuals they suggest contacting about getting involved. 

In terms of sampling, we could learn from the example of many software or online service providers.

It is not unusual for either to offer a 30-day free trial at the end of which your credit card will automatically be charged the full product price unless you cancel in advance. The key is to get the actual registration and purchase decision made upfront as a part of committing to try the product, not making people register and buy at the end of their trial period. That approach is far less likely to lead to new sales or memberships. 

We need to become more adept at maximizing and leveraging the attention of our information-weary target audiences any time we actually get individuals to perk up and take notice. Expanding an initial action or commitment on their part into additional choices can deepen the relationship we have with them over time. 

To put this into practice in your organization, the next time you are planning a meeting or event or designing a response or order form, consider how you might use the moment to elicit more commitment or action in support of your organization’s goals and objectives.

Isn't That Special?

I generally trust restaurant servers to steer me in the right direction, so I had no problem last night explaining that I couldn't decide between the special and the chopped salad.

"So here's the thing," the server said.  Today's special is a great value for the price and it's really good.  But even though you can get it every day, the chopped vegetarian salad is really, really good.  I mean, it is really special. So if it was me, I'd forget what's on special and order the thing that is really special."

I ordered the salad.

"You chose well," said my server with a bit of a smug grin on his face.

Here's the thing.  While value shoppers will always be looking to get a good special, a good deal, it commoditizes what we do.

The real opportunity is creating everyday items that in and of themselves are so full of value that they are experienced as special by whomever purchases and uses them.

And it can be as simple as asking "What are we going to do to make this effort extra special?" for all of our work.

So when it comes to specials, what's your choice going to be for your work and the value you create?  

Excellent.  You chose well.

No Deposit, No Return

Times change, things change, people change, everyone is so busy nowadays, blah, blah, blah. People can use whatever cliché phrases they want, there is no mistaking how difficult it is to be a part of a once-thriving friendship or relationship that seems to be operating on life support.

You don't want to see it go or even acknowledge what it has become, so you keep calling, sending emails, trying to connect in person. But the interaction becomes less frequent, the conversations less meaningful, and eventually you feel nothing but hollowness where once there was great joy and anticipation.

You begin to realize you have more depth with individuals you see much less frequently or even with people who may have entered your life only recently. The vast accumulation of trust, interest, understanding, and community has been wiped away by years of slow erosion. Because it was there once, wasn't it?

It must have been because the memory of it now lingers like a ghost who won't go away … or maybe more a squatter who long ago should have been forced to new territory. Well after years of letting it overstay its welcome, I recently found a way to exorcise myself of my own ghost in this regard.

A friend and I were having one of our less and less frequent and less and less satisfying "catch up" calls and had worked our way through the pro forma checklist of mundane topics: work, home, and travel. Just when I felt he was metaphorically gasping for air, he turned to the one topic left: apologizing for not being in touch.

Now I've been down this same well-worn path many a time, and I know the response I'm supposed to give to keep the script moving, but this time my mouth said different words: "No need. The silence helped me put things in perspective."

His reply perfectly cemented the futility of trying to maintain what had once been so important to both of us: "Well if you want to try and connect more I'm open to all that, but you'll probably need to be the one to do more to make it happen." I felt like someone had slithered off the seat of a teeter-totter while I was suspended high in the air. It was a perfect symbolic resolution capturing the lack of balance that had been present for far longer than I have ever wanted to acknowledge.

While little voices inside my head said "What the ____?," the adult one that controlled my mouth calmly replied, "No. I don't think that's going to happen anymore.  I'll always value the memories of our time together, but we're in very different places now.  Let's not make keeping our relationship alive yet another thing on our packed to do lists.  Let's connect when we are excited to do so, but let go of the expectation when or if it will happen."

And that's when it hits you. No matter how much we ever create with another person or with a group of people, if the relationship is not at least periodically nurtured or stoked by all parties involved, like any fire it will eventually consume the fuel that once drove it and only ashes will remain

Relationships are indeed a renewable resource, but not when they are reduced only to recycling memories of the past.

What are you doing to renew the relationships that matter most to you?

Don't Cut Off the Caring

"The time has come. The young generation always comes up and beats the older generation. It's how life is."

Marta Karolyi, head of the United States women's gymnastic team

Despite the fact that the elders may be able to extend their athletic prowess and dominance longer, at some point they will be defeated. Records will fall. Champions will retire. Legends will become memories.

It is the way.

Now if only everyone involved in volunteer leadership positions could understand that this circle of life also applies to them, things might run a bit more smoothly.

In the past few weeks, I have found myself facilitating several strategic conversations about how organizations can help people "let go" of their positions when their term of office has concluded. Rightly so, the new leadership sometimes sees the "old guard" clinging to their past power and responsibilities as potential interference. And without a doubt, some individuals do not know how to exit the stage gracefully.

But I'm beginning to think the more powerful question is not one focused on letting go, but one that explores leveraging and redirecting: How can we now leverage and redirect the talent, knowledge, caring, and commitment of individuals no longer holding significant leadership positions in our organization? Instead of talking about how to rid ourselves of these people, we spend our energy discussing how to retain the best of what they can bring to our community. It yields a much richer and more respectful conversation.

While one's capacity to compete might diminish over time, one's capacity to care does not necessarily decline. It is why we see former champions now serving as coaches and commentators. They still believe in and care about their sport, but they have selected news ways to contribute to it and to grow with it.

It is time we rethink and reconfigure our organizations and communities to allow opportunities for as many individuals as possible to act on their caring. Doing so will strengthen our capacity to do good things, as well as strengthen individuals' connections to each other and the work of the organization. How can that be a bad thing?

For more on this topic, read my article Don't Cut the Strings, Tie a New Knot.

Defensive Living and Leading

Doesn’t anyone use turn signals anymore?

That was the thought running through my mind after two recent near collisions with other cars making sudden turns or darting recklessly between lanes. It sometimes seems that people have forgotten our roads are community spaces meant to be safely shared with others. Doing so requires giving some advance notice to our driving colleagues about what we plan on doing before we get actually do it.

Flash back to your days of driver's education and you may remember being extensively schooled in defensive driving. I can still recall the acronym SMOG as the precursor to changing lanes: Signal, Mirror, Over the Shoulder, Go. It seems like a quaint and forgotten custom nowadays that you might actually signal your intention first, check the mirror for traffic behind you, look over your shoulder to scout for cars that may be in your mirror's blindspot, and then proceed if it is safe to do so. While it may seem cumbersome, doing this often helps you avoid causing an accident.

Given our fast-paced world, our information overload, and people's greater attention to their own needs rather than those of the community, I'm thinking we might benefit from having a defensive living mindset for life overall and a defensive following mindset as a member of a team or organization. If cutting people off on the road inspires road rage, similar behavior with colleagues at work or in volunteer settings can only inspire real rage as well.

1. Fostering respectful relationships that acknowledge both work and volunteer organizations are community spaces can flow from adopting a modified version of the SMOG principle. When going about our paid or volunteer work we would be wise to: 
2. Signal to all interested parties and stakeholders what our intentions are and/or when we want to introduce a significant change.
3. Check in the mirror to see if there are any lessons from the past that we should draw on to inform the efforts we are about to initiate.
4. Look over the shoulder to cast a wider net in terms of identifying how our actions might affect others and their efforts.
5. Go forward when we feel we’ve done appropriate due diligence. Acting in this defensive manner might reduced the likelihood of others finding us offensive.

Many avoidable sources of conflict in organizations result from individuals or departments simply "changing lanes" without any advance notice to others or any real awareness of how their actions are going to effect others. Human nature being what it is, the more stressed the conditions or the greater a hurry individuals are in, the more likely they are to focus their attention on self-interests as opposed to shared or community interests.

We certainly don't want to turn leadership into being the traffic cop who often only elicits safe driving behavior so long as drivers are within visible range of the squad car pulled off alongside the road. Leaders would be wise, however, to have some equivalent of the radar gun at play in their organizations, some mechanism that generates real-time feedback as to the speed at which others are operating and how much it is exceeding defined limits for the community's safety.

And all communities and work groups need some succinct, mutually understood rules of the road to guide their efforts in the efforts and workspace they share with others. Creating relationships grounded in genuine commitment among all involved and to the "rules of the road" often can allow for feedback between and among peers as the primary enforcement system for any violations.

Initial violations of an organization’s or community's shared principles might send you back for a bit more driver's ed to school you in the organization's culture and expectations for individuals who want to be a part of it. Consistent lack of regard for the rules of the road should result in one’s license being revoked and your ability to "drive" in the organization being ended.

Driving is a privilege, not a right ... as is being a member of a team or community. Our individual choices and behaviors at work and when volunteering need to demonstrate that we are concerned about the safety of others and that we value sharing the road with them.

Leave A Little in Reserve

"I'm never going to be a star," she says, "but it's nice to be pushing 60 with more to do than I've ever had before. And my life is a manageable size. So if someone gets sick or someone gets happy or a baby is born, I can be there."

—Actress Kathleen Chalfant 

And my life is a manageable size. While manageable is certainly in the eyes of the beholder, isn't having a manageable life a worthwhile goal for just about everyone? 

One of my first mentors, Dr. Sara Boatman, told me that people who do good work will always have more opportunities available to them than they should realistically consider pursuing. One of the things I'm beginning to realize about so many aspects of life is that it often comes down to self-restraint, choosing to pass when it is so tempting to say yes.

It isn't always an easy thing to do, particularly if the opportunity being presented is a second helping of your favorite dessert, the chance to work with a favorite colleague, or an opportunity that has the possibility of opening some doors down the road. But just as two helpings of turtle cheesecake (now you know) will make ME an unmanageable size, so might pursuing an additional project that my schedule really won't sustain.

So how is it then that our lives become unmanageable? For me it is when I simply act without even a smidgeon of thought about how the choice I am making might affect other aspects of what's going on in my life. It is the downside of the otherwise positive "living in the moment." It parallels eating a meal so quickly that your stomach doesn't have time to signal your brain that you were full about halfway through.

Another way I find I get myself into awkward situations is letting the voice inside my head stress all the positives of the choice I am making and minimizing the real consequences of what may be about to occur. "Oh this won't take that much time. You might never get the chance to work on something like this again."

When I reflected more on Chalfant's comment I was left with the sense that a manageable life is one leaving something in reserve. It isn't going full speed all the time. It has capacity to expand, to shift gears when a particularly desirable moment (like a new baby) occurs or when a more challenging situation (like a loved one becoming ill) demands your involvement.

So cleaning our plates isn't the best approach at the dinner table or in life. Leaving with a little room for more is key even though that runs counter to our conspicuous consumption society. As I learned from Sara Boatman long ago, "too much of a good thing is still too much." 

Note
This topic is one I am increasingly addressing in conference keynotes, building on this 5-minute IGNITE talk. 

You Don't Need To Be the Center of Attention

I reread recently an old New York Times article in which the popular actor Hank Azaria commented on how fellow actor William H. Macy had taught him that you don't always have to be the center of attention. "There is a tremendous dignity and honesty in not doing that," Azaria said. "You can really let other people have their thing. And if you do that honestly enough, it’s its own terrific thing."

One of the most frequently repeated leadership truisms is that you can get a lot accomplished if you don't mind who gets the credit, a philosophy generally attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt. But what Azaria and Macy are talking about goes even deeper I think.

I've witnessed quite a few leaders in my time who are very good at letting others get the credit, but they still somehow manage to be the focus of attention. In some cases, that's because it seemed like they were just going through the motions, giving credit to others because that's what good leaders are supposed to do. In other instances, it felt as if these individuals couldn't quite imagine maintaining their leadership position without also being the center of attention. And I am sure that at other times, some individuals genuinely did not want to command all of the attention, but those around them would not allow that to occur.

I imagine that one of the greatest challenges for individuals in high profile positions is to maintain a strong enough self-awareness, a self-regulating internal compass per se, to know when they are overshadowing or crowding out attention that others deserve. Just think about the humility and fortitude it can require to not let yourself be the object of others' attention, appreciation, and affection. Sure we all need positive feedback, and our efforts deserve to be noticed. But attention has a strange self-amplifying quality to it. Those getting attention seem to keep getting more of it in some sort of ever-increasingly spiral of envy, adulation, or appreciation. Those not noticed by others often toil away in perpetual obscurity.

The individuals I find myself most respecting are the ones who act as prisms, refocusing (when appropriate) the appreciation and attention of others on the individuals who are most directly responsible for the achievements being realized. I can only imagine that at one point in their careers they were the benefactors of similar efforts and they are secure enough in their own self-concept to shine the light on others. The example they set is one worth all of us considering.