authenticity

May 15, 2015 by Christine

Question: Dare You Use the “L” Word In Business?

Love.

In the business context it’s a word and indeed a concept that’s a little taboo.

Makes me think of these awful team-building exercises I went on in my corporate years, where we were encouraged to say nice things about one another, and to have team hugs at the end. Even if we couldn’t stand each other and there was no way we’d be talking, never mind hugging, when we got back to the office.

Sad. But I think that talks to how many of us think of love if we think about it at all. We imagine it’s a warm and fuzzy feeling that emerges in relation to people who affect us in a particular way. Something indefinable, and around which we’re out of control. Hence something that sits a little awkwardly with the often more rational side of business.

But is that really how it is? And is there really any way you could use it as a force for good in your own set-up?

What is love?

Before we go on, let’s step back and ask that question: what IS love?

I get that we can all talk about loving what we do, or saying glibly how we love this or that person we work with. That all has its place. But that’s not the context I want to set for this conversation.

What I want to offer you is the possibility that love is not after all a gooey thing that just happens. Instead it’s an energy; an attitude; a force that we can choose ourselves to use and to direct at any time. A decision we can make. A force that enables some of the most profound healing and change. You may think that love has no role in business. But I just want through this post to have you pause and consider whether or not that’s true.

What might it look like?

Well, let’s break it down.

Love for ourselves

The first person we can choose to love in business is ourselves. As entrepreneurs, self-employed folk, or business leaders, we can often be incredibly tough on ourselves. We can set ourselves big goals – bigger than other mortals would think to set – and then when we don’t achieve them 100%, or in a particular way, we can beat up on ourselves, worse than our worst critic. Sometimes our negative thinking acts like a whip that keeps us chasing the results we seek. But often it just gets in our own way.

Taking an attitude of love towards ourselves turns this around. It allows us to keep setting our sights high if that’s congruent with who we are. But it also allows us to be more curious; more able to be with what is; less judging about when things don’t go so well. Which in turn allows us more headroom, creativity, thinking space.

In fact, if we want to be forces for good in our worlds, we need to start here, and with ourselves. We need to fill ourselves up first. Without it, we can’t convey love to others. Not real love.

Love for others

Loving others in business is really all about extending ourselves to them in a way that serves them well. That enables them to be their very best. Because we trust that the more they can happily be who they are, the better everything works.

If we choose to come from love to clients, for example, it might mean that we embolden ourselves such that we offer them exceptional services, or value-adding products.

If we come from love with colleagues we may choose to share with them our gratitude for who they are are as people and how they touch our lives.

It might also mean that we choose at times to say something or to give feedback on something that feels awkward or uncomfortable.

Conversations that name the elephant in the room can in some instances cause profound upset. But for the most part it gives the experience, at least in the long term, of being seen and understood and offers the opportunity for profound personal growth.

Which is a core aspect of the whole love energy thing.

Health warnings

The kind of love I’m talking about has no strings attached. When you choose to love yourself, or another you don’t put conditions on it. You don’t *need* the woman to whom you deliver delightful service to tell you how wonderful you are. You don’t *need* the man with whom you share emotive feedback to think your his savior.

You put your love out and you let it go. Either way it will teach you something.

Is love the future?

So much of business is, in my experience, impersonal and devoid of feeling. We can sit in meetings and have bland conversations using management buzzwords and ideas that mean little at all.

Leverage. Logic. Learning. These “L” words trip off the tongue.

Love?

Not so much.

And yet it’s where our humanity is. It’s what life’s about.

I’m not suggesting any need to become in any way alternative. I’m not even inferring that you have to like everyone you work with. Or that you have to use the word out loud or to adopt any weird behaviors. But you can take an attitude of love, an attitude of service, into everything you do.

Try it out. Let me know how it goes!

May 1, 2015 by Christine

How To Speak Your Truth in Leadership Without The Sky Falling in.

Authenticity in leadership gets talked about a lot.

Just Google the term: you’ll get over 20 million hits. Stand in the corner of any leadership development intervention (hate that term, but you know what I mean) and you’ll most likely hear it espoused. In fact the word “authenticity” itself appears on the list of values of quite a number of big organizations.

I get why it’s important: the more how you are in business and at work aligns to who you are and what you believe, the more resourceful and productive you can be. In leadership honest conversation can enable clear – if not always easy – progress. And results unhampered by hidden agendas and emotional baggage.

How easy is it to speak your truth?

But being yourself and speaking your truth is not always that easy.

I know you know that feeling. Something comes along that rankles with you. You have a strong point of view on it. You know you ought to put your opinion ought there. But the risk of doing so seems immense.

Maybe there’s an unspoken complicity in your business or team dynamic that things be done a certain way. And that how you want to do things breaks the taboo. You know that in breaking the taboo you stand to help things change and change for the better. But you fear that you run the risk at best of being judged as being disloyal. At worst of losing your job, your reputation, your career…

I know because I’ve been there too.

Personal story

Some years ago I was the HRD of a business within a much larger business. My boss was the UK HR board director, reporting to the MD. Let’s call them Dan and Phil. They were both powerful, charismatic men, with immense, strategic business brains and a phenomenal view of where the company was going. I loved working with and for them because of the level of access they gave me to big, sexy stuff. This was, in fact, a double-edged sword because often they’d drag me into work that was well over and above the already heavy work load me and my team had in serving our own client business.

But part of the thrill for me was that both of them *got* the importance of the whole people dynamic in business. They valued talent and performance.

And yet, paradoxically, there was an implicit value in the business that success meant working all the hours God sent. To my cost, I did the hours most of the time, as did my boss. In fact, at the time of this story, both he and I were going through our own painful marriage break-ups. But I was careful on behalf of my own team not to expect that because I was choosing that lifestyle, they had to too.

At one point, we’d bought another company and my team were dealing with the sea of changes you have to manage from a people perspective in that scenario. And we were doing it to some major deadlines, which meant that I asked my team, for a period of a few weeks, to put in the extra time. They were happily doing this and doing a phenomenal job of pulling things together, but as time went by, I could see them start to look weary.

One evening at around 7pm as we were all engaged in figuring something out around a desk in the open-plan office, Dan walked up to us and began a conversation with me that everyone else could hear.

He was buzzing because he’d just had a great conversation with the Phil. He’d persuaded Phil to consider something and Phil had asked for data to follow the idea up. Problem was, in his enthusiasm, Dan had promised to have the information with Phil the following morning.

I could see my people’s shoulders drop as Dan warbled on, because they knew what that meant: the 8pm finish we’d promised ourselves wasn’t going to happen, because we were going to be the ones to pull the information together.

And inside, I knew that on this occasion I had a choice. I could cave in and just get on with the unasked request to do the extra work because that was what the culture required of me.

Or I could speak my truth and push back.

For a few moments I did nothing other than just sit with the maelstrom of conflicted feeling going on inside me. I may well have gone and sat in the ladies to give myself space to breathe. I knew the right thing to do was to push back, but I feared that in doing so these two powerful characters would think less of me. Which was a concern because, at the time, I was seen as a kind of rock star HR person and I wanted to continue to be seen in that light.

I was quaking when I walked into my boss’s office and said:

“Look, Dan, you had no right to promise Phil that we’d pull that stuff together, without asking me if that was okay. The team is already working well above and beyond their normal workloads. If I just expect them to do this stuff tonight, they will do it, and the results will be good. But I don’t think it’s fair to expect. You and I may not have a life right now, and that’s a choice we’re making. But they do. And I want us to honor it.”

He went crazy at me. I don’t actually recall now what he said. Just that he ended up escorting me out of his office and slamming the door.

I was mortified. Cursing myself for being so stupid as having opened my mouth. I was sure that I’d be fired. But I was also sure that I was going to stand by my word.

One of the women said, “So, do you want me to start working on that thing for Phil?”

“No,” I said. “I want us all to stick with what we were already doing and call it a night when we get through.”

I could feel their relief.

Next morning I was in before Dan. As in fact was my whole team. He’d normally come by my office and say hi, but this day he walked past me, still clearly angry, and with his head down. I spent the entire morning feeling somewhat distracted. I was getting on with all my stuff, but I was sure I was going to be let go for insubordination. Or worse, that I’d become one of the people that weren’t on Dan’s Christmas card list, and be subjected to one of his drip-drip crusades of organizational bullying that would mean I’d end up leaving anyway.

As it turned out, later in the day a huge bouquet of flowers arrived at reception for me, with a note. “Forgive me.”

I walked along to his office to say thank you.

“Thank you,” he said. “I didn’t like that you said what you said, or did what you did. I felt stupid having to tell John that we’d have to rethink when he’d get his data. But I reluctantly came to see that you were right. I was not respecting you or your people. I’m sorry. I won’t make that mistake again.”

Now, not all the times that I’ve spoken my truth have gone this way. There’s another story I’ll save for another day that happened more recently where, on the face of it at least, the sky did fall in. Or so it seemed in the beginning. I have no sense now of how speaking my truth on that occasion affected the other person involved. But I know that it was transformational in helping me shape the direction of my life and work to this point now.

Ask yourself these questions:

If you’re in a situation where you’re feeling challenged to either speak up or shut up – be yourself or be some version of you that business requires – there are three core questions you can ask yourself.

1. What is your truth?

Be really clear. What’s your position on this thing that sits uncomfortably for you? If you can’t immediately be clear, just sit with the morass of feelings for a while. Center yourself with some meditation, or at least some deep breathing. Let your clarity emerge.

2. How comfortable are you with your truth?

Hopefully, with clarity, comes certainty. If you are okay that your position is okay, then you can speak it with gravitas and be heard, no matter the outcome. The worst place to speak your truth from is one where you yourself feel on shaky ground. That lack of conviction and confidence translates energetically and people pick it up.

3. How safe is it to speak your truth?

I didn’t consciously logic this out when I was in the grip of my own story, but clearly some part of me felt that Dan – and indeed Phil – would be able to hear what I was saying. But I know that, bottom line, there can been situations where your truth may fall on stony ground.

Sometimes self-protection is completely appropriate. And then you need to make a conscious choice on what best to say or do in order to be true to yourself regardless.

What do you think? How do you put your truth out there when you need to? Have you ever spoken your truth and lived to regret it?

February 12, 2015 by Christine

How To Shine Your Light, Even When You Don’t Know Who You Are

Someone emailed me after last week’s article:

“I loved your post about letting your light shine. But what do you do when you haven’t found yours yet?!”

They meant it in jest, but their question talks to the heart of something I come across, particularly when I’m working with you solopreneurs whose businesses are built around your personality.

There’s this whole insidious belief that you can and should nail some specific “thing” you’re meant to be or do that will transform your work and life. Indeed, that any failure you have in achieving the results you want will come down to your own lack of clarity in this arena.

The Insidious Belief

This whole thing comes at you in two key ways:

Self-development gurus

Much of the self-development world exhorts you to discover who you are. The implication is that “you” are a constant and that, when you can define the essence of yourself, then you will be able to put yourself out there so much more clearly.

Look, I’ve been there. At a time of feeling less clear and more lost, I felt pretty pumped up reading books with titles like “reclaim your soul” or “discover your purpose”. The authors were obviously so sorted about who they were, and what they were here to do, that they were writing about it. I devoured lots of stuff like that hoping some of their certainty would spark something in me.

But in the end it all just made me feel that I was missing something, because I couldn’t get my raison d’être down to one pithy sentence that I could wrap my whole life and being around.

Business marketing advice

And there’s a ton of stuff too that comes from the small-business marketing world. Particularly from the self-appointed experts who spend most of their life online.

They talk right at all of your uncertainties about how well your business is doing – or not, as the case may be. They’ve thought about your deepest vulnerabilities and they’re smart at wrapping slick words and offerings around them that look on the face of it like they’ll give you answers about that unique thing you think you’re missing. The thing that’s going to bring it all together.

Like I’ve said before, these guys may have some smart tools and techniques to offer you, some great platforms to use or whatever. But they cannot ever give you the key to the holy grail.

Because that’s not how it works.

Misunderstandings

Stumbling as I have done myself through all of this, I’d love to offer a couple of big reflections.

First, I now don’t believe that we ever go through life with only one purpose. Or only one perfect way in which we can put ourselves at the service of the world.

I think we evolve and that how we give our gifts and talents to others can and perhaps should morph over time, dependent on a whole load of factors.

So, for me, purpose is dynamic, not static.

Then, to trust that a success strategy someone else developed or discovered will also work for you is misguided. Only because you are not them. They are not you. They have their access to wisdom. You have your own.

And if you go outside yourself time and time again for answers, you’re shutting yourself off from your own knowing, your own clarity.

So how to work inside-out?

Want to get better at listening to your own internal knowing? Here are a couple of suggestions. I offer them to you on a test, don’t trust basis. They aren’t THE answer. And your own wisdom make take you elsewhere. But if you really are unsure of what it even means for you to shine your light, start here.

You’re okay right now, exactly as you are

There’s nothing different you have to be or do in order to be okay. You’re already okay. Trust that. Go with that. Allow that its own resonance within your being.

Understand your character strengths

In the absence of being able to articulate your genius, dip your toe in the water of character strengths.

Character strengths are those enduring qualities we automatically turn to just in being ourselves. I particularly like VIA‘s take on all of this. They look at strengths across six categories: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence. And within these they define 24 separate distinctive strengths, like creativity, courage, love, leadership, forgiveness and playfulness.

Do their questionnaire. It’ll give you feedback on how you score on all 24 of their strengths. But look at the top five or six and consider how they’re at play, not at some future point, but right now in your life.

What’s the magic thing you can already see happening when you use them in combination?

Go to work with a hypothesis

So, maybe you do all of that and you’re still not crystal clear. Like I said, that’s okay.

Just work with what you know.

Amp up that little bit of magic you’re already in touch with.

Don’t demobilize yourself thinking you must be crap because everyone else seems to be able to nail their thing and you can’t. Just see past the need to be that defined even. Stay in action with what you have some felt certainty about.

Go give your best in the way that you know how right now.

That’s all that’s required of you.

The clarity on the rest of it will follow if you just stay tuned in to what’s happening on the inside.

January 30, 2015 by Christine

What The Velveteen Rabbit Can Teach You About Leadership

Leadership is a bit of a conundrum.

A lot of the world-class examples of what good looks like seem to be almost perfect. And yet, in my experience, the need for perfection is the very thing that all but guarantees you won’t succeed.

This theme came up in conversation with a client this week. She has just landed what some might consider a dream job, leading a major division of a big corporate. While clearly she has to keep all her stakeholders happy, she nevertheless has a high degree of autonomy around how to lead the business.

We sat the other day surveying the landscape of her new territory. The acres of stuff she has to get to grips with if she’s going to succeed.

First, having taken over from a successful predecessor, she has to ensure some kind of steady state on existing performance.

But then, she has an ambitious vision of how it can be different.

And she wonders how she can get people excited about it. “Engaged”.

At the same time as they’re running flat out to keep up with everything they’re already doing.

She has a big, demanding direct reports team. Just giving regular face time to them alone takes half her week.

Are there too many of them? Are they up to the job? Dare she deal with the performance management issues she knows are lurking there that her predecessor didn’t deal with, despite his success?

There’s the org structure too. Is it fit for purpose? Does it help or hinder business growth? How can she get the various bits of the jigsaw puzzle working better together?

Meantime she has a diary that’s running her, rather than her running it. Stuff just seems to get put in. How can she better figure what she should and shouldn’t be turning up for?

Oh yes, and there’s also life beyond work. Her children. Her desire to train for and run a marathon. Longer term desires to do some philanthropic stuff.

“Big agenda,” I said.

That took her to reflecting on how important it was for her to achieve things right across the board. To make her life matter.

“How can I be super-effective across all the important areas of my work and life?” she finally asked.

It was a genuine question. And she looked at me like I might know the answer. But I had another question:

“Can you be?” And…

“What happens if you aren’t?”

She took a deep breath at that point. Like it would be the end of the world. Like she’d somehow have monumentally failed.

Servant Leadership

Here was my client apparently wanting to be powerful and perfect across a whole range of things. And what we got to right then was the anxiety she felt under as a result. The pressure she was putting on herself to be almost super-human.

I didn’t think of The Velveteen Rabbit in the moment. Where I went instead was the concept of servant leadership, the essence of which is really simple: drop using power and authority as a way to get stuff done; instead put yourself at the service of those you serve – the board, direct reports, employees, customers.

And I’m not talking about this like it’s a neat technique.

I’m talking honest, in your bones stuff.

Come from service.

Robert Greenleaf explains it:

The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…

And:

The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?

But coming from service as a leader requires a particular ingredient. One that many, many leaders struggle with.

See, if you want to lead from a place of service, you have to put a lot of ego away and allow some vulnerability in.

You have to get out of your own head, trying to make sure you look good, to stepping into other people’s shoes and really understanding what’s important to them.

You have to stop being mechanical. Going through all the motions that you think you *should* go through in a senior job. Let down some barriers and embrace some spontaneity.

Like we said last week, fail sometimes.

Acknowledge when you don’t have the answers.

Be honest about where you are emotionally and not like some wind up ra-ra machine.

Stop being so brittle and controlled and allow some softness.

Allow yourself to be okay to be you: imperfect and yet still enacting your vocation to lead.

In brief: you have to be real.

Vulnerability and The Velveteen Rabbit

It was only after I’d finished talking with my client, leaving her with the homework of reading Greenleaf’s book and reflecting on what she made of it in the context of her challenges, that I remembered the story of The Velveteen Rabbit.

If you haven’t read it, or not in a little while, you should have a look. It’s the tale of a toy rabbit given to a child one Christmas.

It has so many take away messages about all things work, business, life, love…

All revolving around this thing about being real.

See, the Rabbit starts off in life all self-conscious, trying to figure his role in the hierarchy of the toy cupboard, concerned about what other toys make of him.

Life in the toy cupboard certainly seems to have its politics. Certain toys thinking they’re more important than others. More real than others. And being disparaging or bullying of other toys as a result.

The mechanical toys were very superior, and looked down upon every one else; they were full of modern ideas, and pretended they were real.

He wonders what it means to be real. He begins to ask himself what the even means. By chance he finds himself under the mentorship of the Skin Horse, an old toy whose seen it all in the toy cupboard, and is unaffected by the shenanigans. Rabbit asks horse what it means to be real.

He said, “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Life conspires to have Rabbit promoted, however, to being the little boy’s main toy. He ends up being chucked about and loved by the boy so much that he’s no longer in perfect nick. But by then he’s no longer thinking about how pink his ears are, because he no longer cares.

He has served his purpose. He has been an important transitional object in the little boy’s whole growing up.

But the most meaningful thing that happens to Rabbit is that, when the child’s nanny dismisses him as being “just a toy”, the little boy insists that he’s not. And that he’s REAL.

Toy or Real?

And that’s the question I think it’s valuable to ask yourself if you’re in a big leadership job.

Is it just another way to turn up and play out your needs of power and perfection?

Or are you going to be real in it?

As we talked through the long list of my client’s challenges, we looped back to her wish to have everyone excited about her vision. To have them all pulling in her direction.

“If you want to get people behind your vision,” I said, “help them articulate their vision. Of course you’re going to be a co-creator in that process. You’re going to inspire and lead in the conversation. But let your people make it theirs. Then you don’t need to coerce them. And you’ve played your role full-out.”

That’s what I think being real looks like for her.

How will she go about it? Will she? I guess time will tell.

And, look, I know this talks easy and does hard. Which is why the whole Keeping It Real thing is a theme we’re weaving into our business here and will be doing and writing more about. So, for more and for further thoughts make sure you’re signed up for updates.

Meantime, jump on the comments below and let me know what lessons you take from The Velveteen Rabbit.

Picture credit: Eugenio Marongiu

October 22, 2014 by Christine

What I Got From Creating My Blog (and Why I’m Closing It Anyway)

It was a blast.

While, five years ago, I still had a traditional site here supporting a traditional consulting business, it felt like a liberation to go off and create a somewhat more contrarian offering called A Different Kind of Work.

But today, as I unveil the fundamental recreation of my core business here, I’m pulling the curtain down on it.

Look, it was a lot of fun and I got a heck of a lot from it:

I got some clients from it which, after all, was a core reason for creating it.

I made some great connections – either through the blog itself, or from its social media outposts.

It totally forced me to upskill myself in the geek technical skills department.

And the writing I did there, not only allowed me to produce some great pillar posts, it also enabled me to learn a whole lot about myself. As a coach. As a writer. As a person.

Kill your darlings

But here’s the thing…

I think there comes a point for many creations when they’re done.

I could plow on with it. I’ve tried to. ADKoW has been a darling of mine. But as Stephen King and others have said about writing, you have to know when to kill your darlings.

And I’m pretty through with it.

Plus, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about things at a deep level this year. And while so much of what I wrote on ADKoW was rule-breaking in it’s own way, it was all delivered in a kind of “tips and techniques” kind of way. And I no longer believe that the kind of approach cuts it any more.

That’s because I am starting to see that people and their businesses don’t need more tips. They are swamped with tips. Just look at the blog posts on any of the big business or personal development sites. There’s no end of suggestions on how to hack just about anything.

Consider too the way that most coaches and consulting companies work with their clients. There’s just an overwhelming mass of advice, information, tools and solutions out there.

What I’m starting more and more to get is that people come with the ability to solve their own problems. And that my job is increasingly is to help people see beyond the superficial. To dig deep. To understand their own fundamental psychology and indeed how everything actually works.

To take stuff OFF of people’s minds not add to it.

So that they can be more effortlessly themselves in whatever it is they’re doing.

Core business

But there was something about the essence of ADKoW that I don’t want to lose. I loved the freedom I felt it gave me to say what I wanted, without having to imagine that I needed to be careful of offending any corporate clients or bill payers.

I loved its ability to put stuff out there that was a little unorthodox.

There was – is – an audience for what’s different, edgy and contrarian in business. People often gave me the feedback about ADKoW that, in a world of noise and bollocks, it was refreshingly different.

So that’s not going to disappear. But what I have decided to do is channel that whole vibe through everything we do here.

Day to day

What that means is that, day to day we’re helping business people get clear about what they want to achieve and why they want to achieve it.

Then, helping them – basically – get out of their own way as they set about trying to deliver on their goals. With a clear mindset, and a good understanding about the real source of things like creativity, innovation, resourcefulness, and resilience, great performance becomes a lot less like hard work. And the results speak for themselves.

Feel free to read more about the specific service offerings that the business delivers by browsing through some of the pages on the site.

Honestly? It’s kind of what we’ve always done had we not been – for whatever reason – so apologetic about it.

Bigger picture

Underpinning all that we do we have a piece of emergent thinking which we’re calling Keeping It Real. It’s brand new and we imagine that we’ll use this philosophy as the foundation for a variety of forthcoming programs and workshops. You can see more about Keeping It Real here.

Emerging clarity

So, there’s a big creative shift going on here and, frankly, who knows what that will mean for websites or web presence in the future.

For now, however, what I’m clear about is that ADKoW has served its purpose and that we’ve reinvented things back here “mothership”.

And we’d love it if you’d come along with us for the ride as stuff develops.

So, be sure to give us your email address here and we’ll share content and news with you as we go along.