During the past two years, all types of organizations, from small non-profits to corporate giants, have experienced enormous upheaval. Keeping a steady hand on the tiller as you face and adapt to the changes that appear, and paying attention to opportunities, are vital to how you capitalize effectively on setbacks. It is crucial that leaders cultivate the most productive approach on how to deal in-the-moment, and yet maintain the long-term view on how to stay the course.
Read MoreSmarterWisdom has written a lot recently about uncertain times, times of change that provide opportunities to transform your approach to leading and learning. We see the leading with people, not the leading of people as key to your team’s success, especially now. Placing the science and expertise of organizational change front and center, will ensure that you can navigate unknown situations ahead, and be ready for a sustainable future. In a recent blog, Marcie wrote about psychological safety and how leaders can create workplaces that are healthy; earlier Jane wrote about burnout and resilience, teams redefined and how individuals need to consider the ethos of the culture where they work to ensure they are in the right place. In all of these pieces, we urged leaders, at all levels of the organization, to ensure they had time to lead and coach their team members, checking in, asking them how they can help, and engaging in active, forward-thinking mentorship. In some ways this need for leaders to coach and tend to their colleagues is a new aspect of leadership, but in many ways not: generative leadership always pays attention to the health and well-being of the team, building trust and developing engagement.
Read MoreSomething I learned early on as a leader was the idea of managing up. I remember my Harvard MBA spouse describing the idea to me after a particularly unproductive series of meetings with my boss at the time. It seemed I could never get my needs met, that she never seemed to notice anything that I did that I felt good about, and that she had a lot of needs of her own that I was unsure about. Fast forward through almost 30 years of leadership, working for one boss sometimes and working for entire boards of directors at others, to today and the work SmarterWisdom does with leaders facing the same issues. How do we collaborate best with our immediate supervisors? The advice my MBA spouse gave to me was to manage up, which meant to considering more where the “boss” or “the board” was coming from and work it. Is this effort really necessary? Does it pay off? How does it integrate into the whole picture of leadership success?
Read MoreIn a recent coaching session, I was working with a senior leader who felt as if she was heading for burnout. If she said yes to one more thing, she stated, it would be her undoing. But how could she say no—to her boss (and risk losing her job?), to her immediate colleagues (and risk being seen as a non-team player) to the head of another department (and risk not being seen as a colleague?). She was caught, and she knew it could not go on.
My client was right. She could not continue in this manner, seeing her work as a bucket to fill, yes even until it overflows, was not productive. She knew she had to find a way to stop, reassess and develop an approach that took her out of the potential disaster ahead. She needed to think more expansively, pay attention to what was important for her and her colleagues in this moment and create a sustainable solution to her dilemma.
Read MoreBurnout, Resilience & Agility
While it was somewhat cathartic for SmarterWisdom to look in the rearview mirror at 2020 in our January Words of Wisdom post, as leadership consultants we are more typically focused on helping people look forward and plan for what is to come. There are, of course, many unknowns ahead; and, after a year of living and working in a world-wide lockdown, perhaps these unknowns are even more complex? My own recent doom-scrolling confirms many experts’ concerns about job loss (already showing up significantly with women and BIPOC communities) burnout and mental health issues—the latter affecting all ages, from young school-aged children through the middle-aged. It is not a rosy outlook at all, but as I look at the work of Jeffrey Hull, Jacinta Jiménez and Angela Duckworth, among others, I feel hope and see some preventative solutions that we might try, as leaders and colleagues.
Read MoreIn reflecting on our observations of our clients over the past six months, we have noted a range of responses to the unusual situation in which we have all been living and working. Without question, each organization’s workforce has expressed an evolving set of emotions; what workers were feeling in the earliest stages of the pandemic has been largely replaced multiple times over as the duration of the crisis has lengthened. Keeping a finger on the pulse of employee needs and emotions has been one of our strongest recommendations to our clients; knowing where their workforce is “at” is a critical component of keeping employees engaged and productive. It also underscores the reality that what got workers engaged in February 2020 cannot be assumed to have the same effect in October of the same year.
Read MoreIn his excellent book WISDOM@ WORK (Doubleday, 2018), author Chip Conley lays out a road map for organizations to create lasting benefit for success by tapping into the wisdom of the ages. By creating partnerships and teams of both younger, frequently more tech-savvy professionals, and also older more work-wise individuals, he argues that we will build stronger and more agile places of work—and ensure a healthy teacher/student relationship that flips from one group to the other. He also tells his own story about his journey to become a “modern elder.”
Conley’s basic premise, which aligns beautifully with SmarterWisdom’s philosophy, is that people who have been on this earth for a while have amassed work and life experiences that are invaluable. He also makes a strong argument for “rewirement,” positing that open-minded, growth-oriented professionals have plenty of time and space for learning more. He acknowledges, as we all do, that younger people have grown up in a time where uses of technology, social media and other modern tools have become part of their lives—the intersection of the generations, then, provides an enriched source of learning and creative possibilities for organizations.
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