Vancouver Girls Don’t Melt in the Rain

Dear Calgary:

Thank you for the grey skies and drizzle. Feels just like home.

If you could possibly keep this up for the 3 days I’m here – and then when I leave, break out the bright sunshine you’re known for – you would confirm my colleagues’ suspicion that I brought the Vancouver weather with me.

Thank you,
Susan

PS – I’m the one without the umbrella. Vancouver girls don’t melt in the rain.

Branding Shenanigans – Yes, I Really Did Wear Orange Pants While Dancing (badly) to “Bom Bom Bom”

Companies are unstoppable when they’re powered by people with heart and a little skin in the game. Add a sense of humour to the mix and you’ve got a recipe for success — and maybe a few shenanigans.

This past week, we finally got to enjoy the result of many months of hard work when we unveiled our new brand joining the east and west into one, single national entity. First came the pre-launch at the national management meeting earlier in the month. This is where the orange pants made their debut. Because wearing neon-coloured pants was not outrageous enough, we donned T-shirts, each with a single letter emblazoned on the back. We entered the room dancing to Bom Bom Bom, proudly sporting our somewhat matching orange garb, eventually forming a lineup to spell the new company name  – Talentcor. Our CEO was there and confidently scored our performance as an 11 on a scale of 1 to 10 when it comes to spirit and enthusiasm. Unfortunately he could only award us a 2.5 for the dancing. He told us not to quit our day jobs. The day’s festivities set the stage for the management team to start planning fun events for brand launch day in their local branches.

The orange pants surfaced a second time on Monday when we did a soft launch for our employees in 17 offices across the country. The Branch Managers outdid themselves with balloons, candies, decorated cakes, and every kind of orange food you can imagine. We posted fun pics on a new Instagram site, keeping them private until Wednesday – which is when we went public.

If you really want to get a sense for all the fun that took place last week, go to our Facebook page and look at the photos. Warning: it may make you want to join our company. Don’t worry. We have openings right across the country.

Thanks, Mom

Our Mom gave us the most wonderful gifts — a love of reading and a thirst for pragmatic knowledge.

I reminded her today of the time she and Dad decided a bathroom window needed to be replaced. Dad can rebuild your car’s engine, change the oil, and give it a wash and wax before you’ve even finished your coffee but he had never done renovations. In typical Mom fashion, we all piled into the car for a trip to the library. Why? To get a DIY book to help Dad. There was never any question as to whether it could be done… Mom’s motto is, if you can read it, you can do it.

Mom, I can’t tell you how many times in a year your life philosophy on learning and doing has gotten me out of a pickle. Actually, it’s also gotten me INTO a few interesting over-my-head situations, but what’s a little tension when there’s learning and achievement at the end?

Thanks, Mom. Love you.

Are You A Pain In The Butt?

Turns out, there may be a legitimate reason. Maybe you’re just creative.

Here’s an excerpt from The Seven Elements of a Creative Personality:

Both the marketing students and the artists were equally prickly when it came to interpersonal relationships. They demonstrated less concern for other people, were more critical and less friendly. “Creative people need to have distance from the world around them, so they can find something that can be improved,” says Martinsen. “But that can have relational implications.” And how. Steve Jobs designed brilliant products, but he wasn’t exactly fun to work with.

Read all about about the creative personality here.

Body Language: The Inside Story

Everyone knows that body language impacts the way we’re experienced by others. In this TED talk, Amy Cuddy demonstrates how our posture and gestures can actually change the way we feel.

My favourite line: Don’t fake it ’til you make it, fake it ’til you become it.

Enjoy.

The One Skill That Beats All Other Skills In The Workplace

What’s the one skill that beats all other skills in the workplace? Here are some hints.

• It can be developed by anyone.
• It takes only an hour or two per week.
• You can do it almost anywhere.
• Some say it contributes to staying young.

Give up?

It’s the skill of being a self-directed learner.

If you have access to the internet, you can study emerging trends in your industry, learn more about your clients, assess your current skill level, connect with others who have similar interests, read online books, join discussion groups, form a meetup group in your community…

Let’s say you don’t have internet access at home. Your public library is full of books to keep your brain engaged and your skills growing. They may even have guest speakers on topics of interest. And how about local associations and interest groups?

There’s almost no end to ways you can stay sharp, grow, and get yourself in front of the curve.

Shortcut to Prosperity

The pages of my favourite books are peppered with highlighted text and notes scrawled in the margins. It can’t be helped. There’s something very satisfying about flipping through a book and catching glimpses of bright yellow marking the passages I want to recall.

This book begged to be read with a pen in hand.

The author presents 10 practices leading to career and life fulfillment. They’re grouped into three main sections:

1. Thinking deeply about what we want
2. Mapping the steps and leaps necessary to get there
3. Recruiting allies to help us along the way

There are thought-worthy nuggets throughout the book. I most enjoyed the pieces on examining one’s source of motivation and using the power of creative tension. Each chapter ends with tips on finding the shortcut and suggested activities to solidify the new learnings. I don’t want to make it sound too intellectual; the lessons are provided through interesting stories about real people with extraordinary accomplishments.

After finishing the book, I read what motivated Mark Hopkins to record these shortcuts:

“As our daughters, Kate and Maren, left Colorado to study in Connecticut, I found myself wondering how I could help them take a shorter path to the incredibly fulfilling life that took Jenny and me twenty-five years of trial and error to achieve.  As I thought about how to share what we have learned, I realized that even though it was the right time for me to write a book, the girls were not yet ready to read it. Shortcut to Prosperity became the perfect vehicle to capture insight that I hope others will benefit from while creating an archive for the girls to draw on later.”

This book is going to live on the shelf among the others that I enjoy returning to from time to time; books like Good To Great and The Art Of Possibility.

Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher

This Leadership Myth Deserves To Be Busted

The toughest part of busting myths is figuring out which beliefs deserve to be questioned. Jim Collins’ latest research book, Great By Choice, reveals several.

Entrenched myth #1 has been a personal bugaboo of mine for years; that is, that the best leaders are charismatic and visionary. Collins’ research actually proves quite the contrary.

“The best leaders we studied did not have a visionary ability to predict the future. They observed what worked, figured out why it worked, and built upon proven foundations. They were not more risk taking, more bold, more visionary, and more creative than the comparisons. They were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.”

I’m not crazy about the use of paranoia as a motivator, but it’s damn affirming to see empirical and disciplined approaches get more air time. In the last five years, several good works have been written about the failures of charismatic CEO’s versus the success of their more pragmatic peers.

I’ll take passion and discipline over charisma any day.

♦

Stress Takes a Holiday

See that picture of the float plane coming in for a landing in Vancouver Harbour? That’s what I see from my downtown office window. I’m not kidding. I see the mountains, the water, helicopters landing and taking off, tug boats, cruise ships, freighters. This harbour is a very busy place.

After admiring the float planes landing and taking off over the past year, I finally got an opportunity to book a flight on one of them. It wasn’t because I wanted a beautiful, scenic trip to the Island, it just happened to be the only way I could get myself to Victoria early enough to be able to spend the day there and still get to Calgary that evening.

As I said, time was tight. I loaded my briefcase with plenty of work. No time to lose, you know. I’m one of those business travelers who gets half a days’ work done just waiting for the next flight.

Well, that’s how I started out anyway. But then something happened. I think it struck me when I got a good look at the tiny little single propeller plane on pontoons, secured to the dock by two massive ropes. The plane and the floating sidewalk I was on were rocking gently in the wake of a large ship. As I ducked into the plane and found my seat, the awesomeness of the experience I was about to have really hit home. With my nose glued to the window, we taxied over the water, picked up speed, and then took off. I couldn’t open my notebook. Work was very far away.

If you think the islands off British Columbia’s coast are beautiful by sea, you should see them from the air in a low-flying plane. I could see the changing depths of the sea and sometimes I could see striations in the rock as it protruded to form tiny isles.

For the entire 35-minute flight, my eyes were glued to the passing scenery below. My only thoughts were of how lucky I am and how beautiful this place is. My career has taken me all over Canada — I’ve lived and worked in a number of cities, from the eastern-most parts of Atlantic Canada, and now to the western-most shores. I still can’t believe I get to live in such a beautiful area and maintain career momentum. Stress just took a holiday.

The Courage to Question

Good business coaches know that uncomfortable conversations are the harbinger of professional growth; the greater the squirm factor, the larger the developmental opportunity. My all-time favourite peer coach, Fiona, had a way of zeroing in like nobody else I’ve ever met. We wrote a contract that we called our Coaching Bedrock, in which we promised to doggedly hold each other accountable to achieve our stated goals. This included calling BS anytime our language even vaguely smacked of avoidance or excuses. I did some of my best thinking with Fiona. She passed away almost 5 years ago and I miss her.

So why would two people intentionally set out to challenge each other’s thinking by homing in on the very things we’d rather avoid? It was our way of living the Stockdale Paradox. Jim Collins defines it this way in Good To Great:

“You must retain faith that you will prevail in the end AND you must also confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.”

The Stockdale Paradox pairs optimistic determination with the courage to proactively search out and face difficult facts. It’s not dissimilar to Andrew S. Grove’s business philosophy described in Only The Paranoid Survive, written while he was CEO of Intel. Instead of celebrating Intel’s phenomenal success, he insisted his leadership team work on predicting where the next business pressures would show up and then prepare for those possibilities. One of his main points is that only those who try to anticipate change will survive when change happens. He also provides honest insight with this line:

“Looking back over my own career, I have never made a tough change, whether it involved resource shifts or personnel moves, that I haven’t wished I had made a year or so earlier.”

What should you question right now?

Problem Resolution Starts with Curiosity

You can’t truly solve a problem until you appreciate all the opportunities it contains.

Obviously, I’m not talking about life events that we can’t control, like the death of a loved one, or the after effects of a natural disaster. I’m talking about situations in which we have a reasonable expectation of influencing the outcome.

I know I’m ready to unpack a gnarly problem when I’ve become so curious that I just have to know everything about it. It’s this sense of curiosity that helps to fully define the issue and clarify what we want to make happen.

There are some hidden benefits to this approach.

• Irritation is replaced by motivation.
• Blaming is replaced by ideation.
• People are pulled into the conversation by the prospect of being part of the solution.
• Stress gives way to a sense of impending accomplishment.

The next time your serenity is shattered by an unexpected problem, take a step back and see how many facets and possibilities you can identify. Think of all the potential twists and outcomes. Grab a thinking partner to help you see further into the issue.

May all your solutions be fueled by unbridled curiosity.