jalléCafe

What is professional?

Mr. Ness, who I count as one of my best blog fans, actually was the person who most encouraged me to create a blog and who sent me the links to the first blogs I ever read.  He commented to me some weeks ago that, while he enjoys reading my blog, he initially suggested it for more professional or business purposes than where I've evolved it. 

I had to think about that a while because my instinct tells me that this blog is growing to be an important tool in my business. I couldn't quite define it when he and I were talking at the time.  I agree with Mr. Ness that I'm not yet putting the blog to its best commercial use.  I need to comment on other blogs and link them to mine.  I need to better use widgets, blog search engines, etc.  All things I hope to do more of over time.

Yet in fact, I purposely keep some commercial separation on this blog.  Here, I express myself as an individual professional.  A woman who works.  I don't talk a lot about my personal life and surely never expose people who are in personal relationships with me.  But I do state more of my real opinions and in truth my blog has given me the courage over time to show more of myself to the people with whom I interact professionally.

What has suprised me most about my blog's role in my profession is that the quality of my interactions professionally have improved.  People will read my blog and then respond "in kind" via an e-mail or when I see them.  Then entire conversations take a far more open and candid tone.  And we can talk about "effective communication" at work including what's really on their minds -- like, I want be myself.  My blog, when I really consider it, has led to some of the most valuable and human interactions of my business.

Mr. Ness already brings his own voice to his work and has from the start of our working together.  He's a great example of a person who can create an excellent, highly-professional business outcome, while proving the theory of my home culture, "You can take the boy out of the farm, but you cannot take the farm out of the boy."   In addition to professional advice, he can describe farming life in colors and temperatures so vivid that you feel the yellow-brown, hazy humidity of the river beds even in January.

Mr. Ness mentioned in the same blog conversation that perhaps my writing is becoming more artful.  But maybe it's just becoming more me, my real way of expressing.  It may not be so commercial, but I think it is like his own voice -- a way of encouraging others to do the same.

Week 29: why we work together

Through the last week, I worked with a number of teams:  the people in our office, the people on the Executive Committee for the Professional Women's Group of Zurich, a business team with one of my clients.  What defines a team, I suppose, is a sense of shared purpose or goals.

Working with a team can be both the most humanly fulfilling and the most challenging aspect of daily professional life. And for me, I've realized that a successful team outcome does not necessarily drive the fulfillment.

Teams often create deep knowledge of each other through the work together.  We see how each person responds through a range of situations.  We learn how to support each other, how to rely on each other, and when to leave each other alone.  Collectively, we belong to something.  Together, we often create a result larger than we could have created alone.

It's challenging to let people "be themselves" and still work together as a team.  Takes maturity.  Overlooking little stuff that niggles.  Keeping your eye on the bigger purpose.  Fundamental respect that each person is trying to do his or her best, even when it looks differently in the moment.

Over the years, I grown to believe that three things differentiate the best team experiences:

1) The toughest challenges.  You always feel best when success was not a given

2) How strongly each person shares the personal commitment to the team result (not just to their own personal reward)

3) Team members keep the humanity and humor in the process out of respect for each other as people

When all three elements collide, the ride can be almost magical!

Change, patience, and avocados

ASTA's AVOCADO

Asta and I knew each other first through a Women's International Networking Conference in 2005 (which she attends every year) and then later through the Professional Women's Group of Zurich.  Now she also participates enthusiastically in jallé Leadership & Learning Community seminars (and gives Sandra & I highly valued feedback).  After a recent Friday lunch dialogue, she compared her own experience of gardening to mine. 

And I told you about my "avocado tree" (what is really only a vision). My tree has even not yet real leaves. But I do have patience and am curious how far it will go or: how far I can make it grow (me and my not green thumbs!).

Unlike Asta, at least I already knew my plants had roots and green leaves.  I just waited for flowers.  Asta waited for weeks watching an otherwise dead-looking avocado pit to show any sign of life at all. Turning it and nurturing it when hope for success was not certain.  Now that's patience.  And faith. And something even more needed with humans, perhaps.

Week 28: work and life

Last week flew by again quickly.  On Friday, my accountant/business advisor Juergen and I rather spontaneously organized a late, long lunch to review my 2006 books and a wide range of priorities for the next year.  We sat in the garden of a lovely old mansion that serves as a "practice school" for students learning to operate five star restaurants and hotels.  The students serve and cook. Their eagerness to get all of the details right - while occasionally getting them a little wrong in their nervousness - makes it absolutely charming to visit.

Friday was a sun-avoidance day.  So hot that you absolutely needed to sit in the shade or roast.  Juergen and I kept scooting our our table a little to the right and toward the flowers as the sun moved overhead. (There are no inside, air-conditioned options here. And anyway, it would have been a waste of a lovely summer day to be inside.)

It was me who asked twice to reorganize this discussion for other client meetings.  It was Juergen who said that his last weeks required so much work that he hardly has time to think of anything else. He also owns his own business now for some years.  He was ready for his two-week holiday to start, still one week away.

Yet we both sat in a garden on a Friday afternoon for lunch.  Talked about business mostly from 1:30 - 4:00.  Drank two glasses of wine.  As we left, the waiters were resetting the tables for dinner.  I spent a couple more hours in the office.  Bet he did too.

This was the way that I was "officially" re-elected by my shareholders (Juergen and me) to be Managing Director for another year.   It all feels a little more like living than some years earlier.  I know this time of my life will pass by quickly, as well.  And I know by now enough about myself and the world to savour it a little. 

Lessons from Mom: Change & flexibility

Mom worked for decades in a school with about 25 teachers.  She saw them every day.  Like many of us professionally, she out-survived a number of "bosses" (aka school principals).

Did you have to be open to change as a teacher?

I asked perhaps with a stereotype in my head:  so many years of the same routine in the same walls, the same bells ringing to change class at the same time, the same teachers in the lunchroom, the same school cook in the school cafeteria.  Only the kids changed and then again maybe they act the same at the same age, too.

"You have to change as a teacher," she said.  "We would get new curriculums or change from one text book to another."  It started with bringing in standardized testing.  And then more change was coming. You might have to learn something new in order to teach it.  To study more. To take a class. To listen to someone else speak. (Teachers don't like to be taught by a speaker apparently.  They prefer to be talking in front of their own captive classrooms.)  "They are the worst people in a meeting ever," Mom added. "There will always be five over on the side talking the whole time,"  At least in corporate meetings we are trained in the good manners of acting like we are listening.

The beginning was always the hardest.  Frustrating.  "Sometimes I would just have to walk out in the hallway, stomp around and walk back in again."  If you are not going to do that, keep walking back in and trying again, you are just going to be more unhappy. You are going to have a harder time.  Every aspect of life has change.

And (I can say from real experience with Mom, it often comes back to this...) a person needs a good sense of humor through the whole thing.  "I mean, really, keep candy in your desk."

Week 27: talking

Alright, I tried these weeks in review a while.  Like them.  Five great things.  Three not perfect.  A lesson learned.  Still.  To stimulate my creativity, I need a little change-up now: 

My "theme of the week."  I nearly always have one.  I write the latest question I'm pondering in my journal. Then I look for clues in my life.  Last week's theme:  men!  Don't get too excited.  I wasn't fanticizing...(I once read that 80% of the audience in any presentation are actually daydreaming about passionate encounters.)

I don't work as much with men any more.  And as a result, I miss some of the natural friendships with men that evolve by communicating so often.  In fact, I miss sometimes the challenge of needing to communicate more directly, which often seemed to be the case with men. Of course, that's just an unfounded perception on my part.  Last week, a University of Arizona study (reported here by my beloved NPR) declared that men talk as much as women.  The researchers sampled 396 students for two days to two weeks to confirm this.  Mom, as you may recall from my recent posts, spent 30-some years with 10-year-olds to come to the same conclusion. I might argue with scientific theory, but not with Mom.

In learning science, we also note that women and men tend to learn better from the diversity of perspectives in mixed gender groups.  For me, I just like being around both men and women.  That can be a surprise to hear from a 44-year-old single, who has had her share of dates with men who talked only about themselves such that any woman listening would have been fine.  ("My specific presence was not required," I sometimes have said in both real humour and exasperation.)

Then as life often does when I ponder, I talked with Mr. Ness about work and life, I met a new client contact Max for a truly enjoyable first lunch, I received e-mails from two former colleagues (Alastair and one especially good friend Jeff who has showed-up again after some years), and gained some good benchmarks from the experience of Johann.  All in five days. A little pondering can go a long way sometimes.

Symbols of Renewal

My father once cut an overgrown plant in my Michigan garden nearly to the stem.  Looked as bald as this one.  I was mortified.  He promised it would grow back more beautiful than before.  I was skeptical.  Spring eventually returned after a seemingly endless Northern winter.  And I sent a photo on Father's Day, "Dad is always right." Great lesson about how things sometimes need a good pruning.

Plus, this specific little shrub has a past...my grandfather kept exactly the same variety in his garden.  I loved how it changed colors over the seasons from green to pink to yellow-orange.  I put one in my Michigan garden some years ago partly in his honor.  And then I found this one in my garden box here. 

It is the only plant I saved from the compost in April.  Kept in honor of my grandfather, pruned in honor of my father, and in fact, also remembering that my landlord's father once lived in my apartment and perhaps originally planted it. 

I like how its colors return.

Happy Birthday to Mom!

Today, July 3, Mom celebrates a "big number" birthday, as she told me on Sunday.  I willl not state the number here (but you can find it in an earlier blog post...smile).

On my birthday in April, as I was asking Mom about communication between 10-year-old boys and girls, she had a lot to say about the models we learn from our parents.  She said one goal is to get children to learn new models, even if the first models were strong and positive. That we need to question our models to learn additional skills. 

In a speech I prepared for a client this week, I referenced Mom's father as one of my first strong models of leadership. Grandpa taught me to explore, to love learning, to treat all people with respect.  He was a school superintendent -- managed a bunch of teachers for decades.  Learned to work with all kinds of people. I was 10 years into my career before I consciously recognized what an influence his way of leading had on my way of leading even in a different context.

But when I interview Mom I realize she had an even stronger influence on the way I lead today.  As we were talking about models she moved naturally to the underlying goal that she wanted her students to learn:  to cooperate with each other. It's one of the most important things we do in life.   She said, "You may not like or agree with a person, but you have to learn to work with him or her.  That's the way life is.  You have to learn to work together with people who are different than you."  Notice she says different -- not better or worse.

"It's about keeping an open mind," she said.  "Accept people as they are...sometimes you have to be willing to let them do it their way.  Be flexible.  You have to decide what is going to matter for you the most.  Is it really going to disturb your life to try it their way?  Are you doing something for your own credit or to get it done and have a good result?"

Openness to people, their ideas, and ways of working.  After four decades, it took writing a blog to finally give credit where credit is due for that leadership model.  It is not just a lesson, it is one of the many gifts from Mom. And I thought it was her birthday!

Week 26: Keeping it more simple

This week, I tried the "slow down to do more" strategy.  Limited my after-work commitments to two evenings.  Started the week and each day with a few clear priorities.  The strategy worked in the big picture; I still left on Friday with a few things I wish I could have finished.

The good things this week:

1. I noticed that the marketing plan I wrote in January and then updated in April seems to be moving and still on-track for the year.  Even I am surprised that the overall approach and priorities fit what I still see now as the business progresses.  Feels good to create a plan and watch it develop.  I need to stick to it.
2. Strong progress on client project work, as needed on a deadline
3. My colleague Sandra delivered a seminar on Friday for our Leadership & Learning Community lunch event that made me feel proud and grateful to be associated with such a professional.  Plus we had a full group at the table after now four months of marketing.
4. I'm testing out some ideas about the overlap between leadership development and internal communication that several of my contacts who I respect find interesting. I love a new idea that takes builds and grows through conversation!
5. I finished my first book of the summer -- The Jane Austen Book Club, recommended to me by Helen who reads hundreds of books.  Next up (and started):  The Joy Luck Club (had not yet read it; didn't see the movie.  Love it so far.)

The not-so-good:

1. Just wish I had more patience for accounting, especially as I learn the Swiss rules.  Closing the books on 2006 (due in June) took longer than I estimated and raised my stress level a little.
2. Might have found one more day to jog, but that's just niggling really.  Overall, I took care of my health this week. Even had enough sun for a light little tan to start showing.

Lesson Learned

On certain things you do the first time, like the accounting noted above, sometimes there is nothing to be done except slow down, learn the details and do the job right.  The best way to relieve stress in those situations is to get realistic about what the job requires -- time and effort.  And plan for it.  My impatient nature will often try to bypass such reality.  Yet, I felt much better after I put a more reasonable time schedule in place this week and stopped acting like it was someone's problem other than my own.  Sometimes I ask myself when will I ever really learn?!?!????