Archive for Leadership

I am living in liminal space.

The word “liminal” comes from the Latin word “limen,” meaning “threshold.”  Liminality shows up in anthropological, religious, and societal contexts and, for me, conjures up an image of standing on the brink of newness ready to step off a cliff into new, yet-to-be experienced space.

I was first introduced to liminality at my church during Lent. Adrian Cole, the priest at All Saints’ Church in Peterborough NH , spoke about liminal space, the space we all enter when we are in-between how we were before and what we are becoming. The concept started me thinking about learning and leadership and about where I am on my own learning and leadership path.

Those who are close to me know that I have landed on an intriguing topic, a new concept that I’m coining for my PhD dissertation: Rhizomatic Leadership.  Rhizomes—and their wayward ways—are well known to gardeners and landscapers. They are hard to manage; their roots spread perpendicular to the force of gravity and new shoots sprout up from the middle of those root systems, extending the plant in whatever direction nature describes. The root systems of rhizomes are antithetical to a tree’s root system—horizontal vs. vertical, multi-directional vs. unidirectional. Think bamboo, lily of the valley, irises, asparagus, and ginger. Bottom-line: a rhizome is always “in the middle”—an intermezzo—as it grows and extends.

Rhizomes are more than just types of flora, however. According to Delueze and Guattari, who adapted the concept as a revolutionary methodology, rhizomatics allow “for non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation.” This concept of horizontal and multi-directional growth has now expanding, encompassing myriad disciplines—most notably, modern educational theory where it has been dubbed “rhizomatic learning.”

Perhaps, I thought, people might not only learn this way, but lead this way….

In rhizomatic learning, the belief is that learners come to their learning from diverse experiences and perspectives, that a traditional, linear approach to learning (what some, if not most of us, experienced) does not provide learners with the opportunity to build-upon each other’s learning “in the moment,” flexing and connecting to ideas rather than rote remembering for the purposes of assessment. As Dave Cormier describes in his blog, “I want my students to know more than me at the end of my course. I want them to make connections I would never make. I want them to be prepared to change. I think having a set curriculum of things people are supposed to know encourages passivity. I don’t want that. We should not be preparing people for factories. I teach to try and organize people’s learning journeys… to create a context for them to learn in.”

For me, life-long learning has always been a quality of the best leaders. Would it not make sense, then, that there would be rhizomatic parallels in leadership? That there could be a belief that leaders come to their ways of leading through similar, non-linear approaches and that, by exercising such a leadership style, would promote innovation, development, growth, and success rhizomatically?

Back to my liminal space.

I am at the brink of pulling together the philosophical concepts of rhizomatic learning as they relate to the way we lead. Nascent questions that are emerging for me are: What types of environments and cultures might we enable that will encourage our employees to make innovative connections, in-the-moment and outside-the-moment, tracing their own imprint on the experience? How can our organizations increase adaptability so that leaders and followers can function as “directions in motion” rather than unidirectional, hierarchical containment? Where have I experienced rhizomatic learning and what influence does it have on future leadership possibilities?

More to follow as I further develop Rhizomatic Leadership. I would be interested in your comments and thoughts as we take this leap together!

It seems that no matter where you live in the United States, you’ve had to weather more than a few storms recently. Here in the Northeast we’re still recovering from one of the worst blizzards in history, a massive Nor’easter that has since been punctuated by smaller jabs from both north and east (though, thankfully, not again combined). More than three feet of snow fell in some places, and in our own backyard we had to shovel trails just so our dogs wouldn’t disappear below the drifts. Add to that the recent devastation from Sandy and the seemingly constant whipping of tornadoes across the South and Midwest and it seems as if every morning’s news program leads with a story about the weather.

We often talk about “weathering” a storm, a phrase I find ironic since it’s the weather itself we must weather. Dating from the seventeenth century, the phrase, nautical in origin, refers to a ship’s ability to withstand the worst the sea might deliver. Since the nineteenth century the use of the phrase has expanded, and now is as common and clichéd as, well, mom and apple pie….

And then it occurred to me: the business world we live in every day is fraught with storms. They occur when change happens, when teams “form, storm, norm, and perform,” when leaders explore new options, and when strategies shift. They can happen because of our strengths or weaknesses, because of our opportunities or threats. And I began to wonder: are these storms we simply want to weather?

Storms in the business world are not merely passing events; they have the ability to forever wreck the foundations on which strategy and leadership are built. So “weathering the storm” strikes me as a failed tactic for effective leaders; it seems to me they need to do much more. They need to deal with the storms, wrestle them for control, turn the power of their winds and rain to more positive outcomes.

Here are three key elements I believe are important leadership habits when storms arise:

1. Don’t pretend the storm isn’t there.  When a storm is brewing, people know. That knowledge may manifest as explosions between people, but are more likely to occur as subtle behavioral changes. You may see, for example, lowered participation from certain people, or an increase in negative responses. Side conversations may occur as well. All of these are there for everyone to see, and pretending that it isn’t happening will only encourage continued problems. As leaders, the only thing we can be sure of is that if we don’t face the storm, it will blow us over.
2. Avoid declaring the storm’s end.  More than once I’ve seen leaders who assume that the pure power of voice will eliminate conflict. (In my early days as a manager I was guilty of this myself.) It’s naïve to think that a forceful directive will solve conflicts; simply put: wishing won’t make it so. Although it may create a silent veneer over the issues, you can be sure that the issues haven’t gone away. You can’t simply order people to get on board. It just doesn’t work that way, and the result will be that storm simply shifts, moving in different directions but still causing untold damage.
3. Steer into the storm by promoting positive conflict. Leaders grow themselves and their teams by managing conflict, not by avoiding it. Constructive conflict is a great way to fuel innovation, creative thinking, and problem solving. By acknowledging differences in opinion, personality, and team styles, and then defining and encouraging win-win outcomes, leaders can make conflict work for everyone.

Conflict, far from being merely a storm to weather, is a storm to ride—and that ride, when taken with a strong and thoughtful leader, can lead to even better places.

What kinds of storms have you and your teams been through, and how have you weathered them?

Right around the first of every year, we take a look at the workshops we provide and run them through a quick review.  How are they working? Are clients getting the value we expect?  Are there things we’ve learned that can help us improve them?  So last year we began refining a workshop we give on effective goal setting. We provide this workshop both to large and small companies that are looking to systematize their annual goal-setting cycles, and to do so in ways that are both simple and strategic.  (Many companies, it turns out, are anxious to improve this important annual function).

We revisited parts of the standard offering—our use of the SMART model, for example, along with our focus on dependencies and mutual relationships—and found that they still held up very well. Still, we felt that there was probably something we could add that would enrich the program.  Finally, Renee came up with an interesting question, one that stems from her experience as an executive coach.

“Shouldn’t a goal be ‘in service of’ something?” she asked.

We thought about it for a bit during one of our short hikes with our dogs (full disclosure: we consider these daily excursions work time since we do most of our best brainstorming under the trees), and came to the conclusion that she was right.  If someone has a goal but they don’t know what higher-level purpose it serves, then why have it at all?

This idea of “in service of” is both simple and powerful. It’s about making sure that what you’re committing to is valuable to what others are looking to accomplish as well.  It means that the most important things we do are part of a system, and that the system is all the richer for us recognizing and enhancing that connection.

We spent some time thinking about what does and doesn’t work in the goal-setting experiences we had been through in our own careers, and realized that there were two specific areas in which goal-setting often fell short, and where this concept of “in service of” could add rich new meaning to what has historically been a largely rote annual exercise:

• Goals are too often viewed in isolation. It’s our belief that goals can never be fully achieved by one person working completely alone.  There are always some dependencies—what we call “mutual relationships” in our team-building workshops—and that recognizing and surfacing those dependencies leads to more efficient work done by more engaged employees.  By using the concept of “in service of,” we help people recognize to whom they are making commitments and, correlatively, those who are dependent on them for success.
• Goals are only rarely aligned throughout the organization. Whether working with large companies or start-ups, a consistent pattern emerged in the way goals were developed.  Usually the senior leadership team would establish some corporate goals that they would then roll-out to the company, after which managers would work with individuals on setting personal goals.  Only sometimes did departments define equally detailed goals, and we almost never saw anyone take the time to line those goals up side by side to see if anyone’s individual or team goals would help the corporation achieve the higher-level goals.  We realized that asking the simple question—“What are these goals in service of?”—would be an incredibly powerful way to maintain vertical alignment of all the goals within an organization.

Here’s how it could work: Imagine that a company has set an annual goal to increase market share by, say, five percentage points.  The sales group would then know that they needed to increase their prospect pipeline by some percentage in order to close more business.  The customer service department might also want to increase customer satisfaction in order to reduce the number of customers leaving, a key factor in overall market share.  Both of these departmental efforts would be “in service of” that higher level goal—the increase in market share.

A corporation, of course, will have more than just a single goal, and the goals set throughout the organization are not all going to be in service of every one of those corporate goals.  But they don’t have to be. It’s enough to know that every goal is in service of at least one higher level goal somewhere in the company.  That “network” of goal connections is what helps to ensure focus and alignment.

So that’s what we did: we augmented our approach by always making sure our customers could answer Renee’s brilliant and simple question: “What are your goals in service of?”

So: what about you.  What are your goals?  And what are they “in service of?”

[We welcome any inquiries about our goal-setting workshops.  Please email mcharney@charneycc.com for more information.]

I recently sent a thank you note to a boss that I had back in 1995. I’ve had good bosses since then, but this particular person stands out as Number One for me. Working for him was an amazing learning experience, and when I reflect back on that time, I can readily say that what I learned from him I later used with my own teams.

What makes him rise to the top of my list? Here are three top-of-mind things that he taught me (from among the many I could mention):

1. Notice strength. My favorite boss gave me my first managerial role; he believed in me, taking a risk when he put me in the tenuous position of managing my peers. I remember my first performance appraisal that year and, although he didn’t give me the highest rating (it was my first year, after all), he did share with me what he saw as my strengths. He told me, for example, that I was highly adaptable—“chameleon-like,” I recall him saying—and he explained that my adaptability enabled me to work with a wide range of people and types. I guess I probably knew that, intuitively, but it was the first time anyone had made it explicit. I remember thinking, “I need to notice my employees’ strengths and let them know.”
2. Honor and respect others’ time. My favorite boss used a now-common rule that he was quite the stickler about:  show up to meetings on time or pay a dollar. He did not abide disrespecting others’ time and, slowly at first, we all fell in line. (Those dollars add up!) Whenever people began to treat the rule lightly, he would re-declare his expectations, letting everyone know that respect goes both ways, that we were models for the rest of the company, and that respect, overall, is a rule that will not be broken. (By the way, we didn’t use the money for a round of beer on a Friday afternoon. Instead, we donated it to charity.)
3. Change is good. We worked in a software company that was way behind the times.  The programs ran on green-screen monitors, ones that required our customers to enter data into “fields” and use the tab key—a lot. The idea of using a mouse was unthought of. And we were not only in the dark ages of computer software—we still used memos and voicemail to communicate. No email. My favorite boss changed all that. He declared an end to R&D’s ivory-tower attitude, and told everyone that we’d be redeveloping our current system with a graphical- user interface (GUI) that would allow our customers more flexibility and would enable us to develop upgrades more efficiently. Not everyone was happy about the announced changes. Many stayed (despite some kicking and screaming), while others left. For those of us who remained, we learned that when an organization allows itself to think differently and to try something new, amazing things can happen.

So, for all my other bosses out there, I learned a great deal from you, as well.

But for my most favorite boss I’d like to say, again: Thank You.

Change is not always easy. At least, not for me.

Consider this:

I’ve recently signed up at MyFitnessPal, a site that allows me to track how much I eat and how much I exercise. I’m hoping for the best, despite my history. I’ve not done very well with diet and exercise over the last few years, and that’s being very generous. Changing both my eating and fitness regimes (both what and when), has not been something that I’ve enthusiastically embraced or—let’s face it—accomplished. Something seems to be standing in my way.

I think it might be me.

As part of my PhD program at Antioch University, I am rereading Kegan and Lahey’s, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization. In it the authors write that the thing which most gets in the way of changing anything—losing weight, advancing one’s career, adjusting the way we lead or delegate, or even how we have conversations with a spouse—are the assumptions we make and the way we see and know the world. We can’t help it. It’s a frame of reference we’re comfortable with, a personal rulebook of sorts, and one that, if left to its own devices, can make us “immune” to the very change that could positively shift our lives in fundamental ways.

In my case, I think they may be onto something.

The authors argue that we encounter (and deal with) fear and anxiety as a normal part of life. We don’t necessarily feel our fear most of the time because our natural inclination is to create a sort of internal anxiety management system. Such systems help us assess our experiences and defend against anxiety, but they can also create a block to creating the change we want. However, when we open ourselves to recognizing the limitations of these frames of reference, we create the potential to recognize and shift our internally imposed change immunity.

What kinds of changes, exactly, are we talking about? The book discusses two types of change: technical and adaptive. Examples of technical change (for me) include the learning and practicing of new skills and habits related to planning, purchasing and preparing what I eat, or creating new habits around a regular exercise routine. Technical change is fairly straightforward.

Adaptive is, well, a bit more deep.

An adaptive skill requires that I risk changing the way I see the world, calling for me to change my mindset. Our mindsets, though, are driven by all those mental rulebooks—something that the authors call “big assumptions.” They argue that we can only succeed with adaptive change by recognizing the seriousness of our internal struggle, by momentarily stepping far enough outside ourselves to objectively see our own worldviews which, invariably, are designed to reduce stress or anxiety—exactly the things most present when we consider change. For example, in the case of changing how you delegate to others, a big assumption might be that delegating could very well reduce how your own contributions are viewed, something that creates a sense of concern: How then will your contributions, or you as a manager, be recognized and seen as valuable? How will you adapt to the change not only to the way the work is done, but to how you are viewed?

So, what are my big assumptions? Well, I guess when pressed, I would admit that one assumption I have is that I’ve walked down this path before, losing weight, gaining it back, then losing it and gaining it yet again. Since I’ve not fully succeeded before, what’s to say I’ll succeed this time? It’s a lot of work—all this measuring, counting, and tracking. At the end, I know I might feel and look better. But my worldview doesn’t seem to include getting off that roller coaster, and until I can overcome this immunity to change, I may not have a real chance to succeed.

The immunity to change framework works for both personal and professional lives. Our assumptions can block us from moving forward in either. What might make you immune to creating change in your life? What big assumptions might be worth exploring?

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by RENEE CHARNEY & MICHAEL CHARNEY

One of the most widely used and powerful tools for effective goal setting is the SMART model, first described by G. T. Nolan in a 1981 article published in Management Review and later popularized by Paul Meyer in his booklet, Attitude is Everything.

SMART is an acronym, with each letter describing a key quality of any effective goal:

• Specific means that the goal will clearly state what your team will achieve and how.
• Measurable means that the goal will have a specific marker by which you can know if you’ve succeeded.  This is usually a number or a percentage increase in some standard of performance. If my goal were to become a competent runner, I might, for example, set a goal of completing a 5k race
• Attainable (or Achievable) means that you can picture the steps you would need to take to get there from here. Using the running example, it means that I can see myself buying a good pair of running shoes, finding a place to run, and setting aside a regular time every few days to practice.
• Realistic means that I can picture the end goal and it feels reasonable to me.  If, for example, I’d set my sites on running a marathon, well… I can tell you that just wouldn’t happen for me. A 5k though? That I can see myself doing.
• Time-bound means that we give ourselves a date by which we will achieve the goal.  For my running example, that might be the end of the year.

There’s more than just using the SMART model to setting good goals, however.

It is important that goals also meet the needs of others, that they are desired. Your goals should be important not only to you, but to, your team, your senior management, your company, and even other stakeholders such as other companies, strategic partners, and even the community at large. We refer to this idea when we say that your team’s goals should be “In Service Of” other, higher-level goals your company has. If, for example, your company is very focused on excellent customer service, then every part of that company would want goals which support that aim. A marketing department, for example, might have the responsibility to build an easier-to-use customer website, and the IT department might have a goal of 99.99% up time for that site.  All of this would be in service of maintaining the company’s reputation for excellent customer service. It also helps to ensure that the various departments are aligned to the same mission.

Most companies who work with SMART goals stop there.  SMART goals are very powerful, and companies that use them clearly have mature goal-setting processes.  However, we recommend an additional step:  Validate your SMART goals by making sure you can TRUST them.

The TRUST principles are components of a model designed to ensure that SMART goals will actually get you and your team where you want to go. It does this by reviewing the key needs of the people and teams for whom the goals are set.

TRUST, too, is an acronym, and stands for Transparent, Retrievable, Upwardly-compatible, Supported and Team-oriented.

• Transparent goals are honest. As managers, we don’t want to set artificial targets, or have some “secret” target for our team that we want them to hit even though we’ve set the “public” target a bit higher.  We always want the goals to be transparent.
• Retrievable means that the goals will be visible to everyone, and often. Too many times we’ve seen goals that get lost in an email folder or, worse, a file folder, leading to team members who can’t remember what they’re supposed to achieve.  The goals should be “front and center.”
• Upwardly Compatible is another way of saying that the goals should be “in service of” the higher-level corporate goals, those that are set further up in the hierarchy.  This, as we’ve emphasized, is very important, as it ensures alignment through the company.
• Supported means that the team has all they need to do the job. If technology is required, they can get it. If training is needed, it’s in the budget.  If temporary help is required during crunch times, it’s available.  The entire corporate ecosystem—including other departments on whom your team relies—is behind the effort.
• Team-oriented means that the goals are designed around mutual success; when one person succeeds it helps everyone else to succeed.

SMART goals you can TRUST are an important element in any goal-setting program. Having specific, defined and honest outcomes is, we believe, one of the keys to effective teams and effective leadership.

To see a video slide show on this topic, please take a look at SMART Goals You Can TRUST, on the CharneyCoach YouTube Channel.  And for any further information or questions, please feel free to contact us through this website.

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When I was a little girl, my family would take month-long, cross-country camping trips each summer.  After first spending weeks plotting out our route from maps strewn across our dining room table, my parents would pack us all into a van: four people and three dogs, with a trailer looming behind us, hooked by steel and tethered with cables. My brother and I would load up on books (and, in later years, 8-track tapes) to occupy our time, since at least a part of each day was spent traveling long asphalt ribbons on which the scenery rarely changed.

We hadn’t much money to spend on extraneous activities. I remember stopping at the many historic sites marked by roadside markers, lunching at the picnic tables at the roadside overlooks and, vividly, stopping at hokey rock-and-fossil tourist shacks to satisfy my brother’s and my taste for something other than American history. These ramshackle places were usually managed by a proprietor who lived in back of the gift shop.

These were my favorite places.

For a nominal fee my brother and I would each be handed bucket, shovel and pick ax (those were the days when kids were allowed to try their hand at using, by today’s standards, “dangerous” tools) and sent out behind the shack to a sad little rock pile with promises of finding something possibly rare and precious. We were so hopeful. What might we find? Could it be that on this remote road in the western desert lay buried that one gem that might bring us wealth? Would we find a fossil that, when examined by the some museum, would be the link to a long sought-after geological question?

We’d dig, pick, and turn over the earth for what seemed like hours, hearing the tinny plunk as we placed our treasures into our metal buckets.  Then off we’d go to have the shop owner sort through our findings and provide us with his wise and experienced assessment.

Looking back on these experiences, it must have been with great patience that our parents allowed us the time to go on these adventures. I’m sure they had a schedule, and that stopping at a fossil pile was not originally part of the itinerary.  Still, it gave my brother and me time to play and dream.

This experience got me thinking about coaching and how often what we are seeking to accomplish might look, at first glance, like everything else around it, another mound of earth, of rocks, of sand. How might we sort through all that is here to discover and find those most important and valuable treasures? Just as with my experience in searching for fossils, the coaching relationship takes on that same pick-and-sort, save-or-toss kind of experience.

If everything is valuable to use or save, then nothing is. It takes time, work, and curiosity to find those few, precious treasures that will guide us towards effective change.

I remember saving those rocks and fossils on my bookshelf as I grew up. They would be a reminder of happy times spent in an adventurous search for the undiscovered. Today I no longer wield either pick or shovel, except metaphorically. That I do all the time, always looking for the new, the hidden, the treasured.

How might you sift through and examine what’s most undiscovered in your life?

I recently had the privilege of facilitating a team-building offsite for a team that had, for the most part, worked together for a long time yet had never been given the time to explore how to work more effectively together.  Like a family that has lived together for years and gets entrenched in bad habits, they were treating each other and themselves in less-than-positive ways, burying hurts and pretending to be okay when, really, they weren’t.

The organization’s objective in bringing me in was to broaden and deepen the scope of work that the team performed, so some things needed to change.

And quickly.

Over two 1/2-day sessions (conducted a week apart), we explored different working styles and how we, as humans, often jump to conclusions and embrace our personal assumptions, sometimes without sufficient data. We learned and tested a model that would give the team members language and motivation to share more responsibility, define accountabilities, and become more self-empowered. The team practiced new methods of communicating, coming up with ways to help and support each other, and began to realize that making a choice about changing the conversation can change the outcome of the relationship.

It’s a simple beginning to a new way of being.

Here are three ways that the team members’ choices began to change the relationships across the team. These choices are important for any team and its members:

• Choose what you see. We’re all familiar with Rorschach images, those inkblots that everyone views differently. By choosing what you see, you’re acknowledging that what you see may not be what someone else sees, that their interpretation may be different than yours, yet equally valid. Covey says, “Seek first to understand; then seek to be understood.” By choosing to view a situation from another’s point of view, there just may be an even better outcome all around.
• Choose who shows up. There were moments in the offsite when the conversation took on a negative tone, focusing how other parts of the company were standing in the way of the team meeting its goals. But we all know that there will always be issues or roadblocks. We can show up as a victim or as a creator. By choosing to show up as creator, to declare what you want rather than what you can’t have or do, you put yourself—and the team—in a position to think creatively. The creator standpoint says that you “can do” rather than that you “can’t do.” Your peers, then, can contribute by creating a new way with you.
• Choose to collaborate. When an issue is important to address and the relationship is important to nurture, choose to work together to create a mutually beneficial outcome. Both sides may need to bend a bit to accommodate the other’s needs or wishes. By entering into a conversation space with an intention of good will and collaboration, you and your teammates will move towards building a more solid working relationship.

These choices—and they are choices—are made by each individual and by the group as a whole. And, once made, they have tremendous impact, again, on each individual and on the group as a whole.

What choices do you and your teams make each day?

Do you remember Kindergarten?  It’s when we learned to share. Sometimes the idea went against our baser instincts–especially when there were only two toy trucks and four kids wanted to play with them. Still, our teachers knew that sharing was important and we, slowly but surely, recognized at some deeper level that we would benefit through these simple bits of cooperation. We shared the rules of games, our emerging ideas of the world, what we wanted to be when we grew up. Sometimes we’d hand our best friend the towel we were using as a cape just to see if they, too, could fly.

Then we left the “K” and proceeded on the “through 8″ part of our elementary education. For a while sharing was still important, but not so much as it had been before.  Now, a lot of the things we wanted to share were things we weren’t allowed to anymore. We had to work alone, think alone, take tests alone. What used to be sharing they now called “cheating.”

And on it went, through middle school and high school where they tested how much we–as individuals–knew. Despite the occasional joint venture, knowledge became a solitary act.  And then came college, where we were not only tested on what we knew, but on what we knew relative to what others didn’t know–and they called it “the curve.” Now it wasn’t just that there was little advantage in sharing with others; in college they promote an actual disadvantage.

And then we got jobs, and the companies who hired us wanted us to share again, to cooperate, to work closely together for everyone’s (and the company’s) mutual benefit.

Many don’t realize how hard that can be, don’t remember that sharing has been largely bred out of us before we finally hit the workforce.

Why all this preface about sharing?  Because even we, as professionals in this industry, sometimes forget how much we can learn from each other by sharing what we know, what we discover. Without question, the people we interact with are some of the most cooperative and sharing we’ve ever met, but we can all always do more.

Here are three things that we at Charney Coaching & Consulting are committed to sharing with our friends in the HR, Executive Coaching, and Leadership industries:

• Our thoughts and ideas. We’re always looking for new ways to approach leadership development and executive coaching. We’ve explored ways to analyze levels of behavior, the kinds of exchanges that happen in what we call “the conversation space,” and new techniques for building trust. As we develop these–and test them with clients–we’ll tell you about them here on our blog and through the groups we participate in on Linked In.
• What’s happening out there. There are–quite literally–thousands of professionals with millions of ideas. There’s no way everyone can keep track of them all.  However, using a new platform called Scoop.It, we’ve begun to aggregate and link to dozens of very interesting articles and blogs, all reviewed and curated by us, and now available as the re-launched version of The Way We Lead.
  
• The conversations we have with others. Each Wednesday, starting next week. we will begin a conversation on our Facebook page and invite others to respond. Some weeks it will be a question, other weeks a link to something we find provocative or interesting. Whatever it is, it will always challenge our thinking.

With these new initiatives we hope to participate in–and contribute to–the sharing of knowledge about what we do.  We hope you will come and see what we have to say and–importantly–tell us what you have to say.

Thanks.  We look forward to our conversations.

Renee and Michael

As some of you know, I’ve taken my first steps into the world of running by joining a beginner’s clinic specifically aimed at training for an upcoming 5K race. Over the weeks that we’ve been training, we’ve increased our running times from a mix of one- and two-minute walk/run cycles to cycles that have us repeatedly running three and four minutes at a time.  We’ve also changed our routes, incorporating varying terrain like hills, turns and gradual slopes. All of these give us an opportunity to exceed our current capacities and reach ones of greater endurance and pace. As I mentioned in my earlier blog, I’m engaging my beginner’s mind as I run. I’m not out to prove anything (even to myself), and I’m not trying to solve any problem.  I’m out to finish, and, along the journey,  to see what I notice about myself as I build up my endurance and capacity to run. My intention is simply to create a new energy for myself.

A webinar that I’m currently taking, The Empowerment Dynamic (or TED), teaches us about shifts in our mindsets when we set our intentions on what we want, on creating something rather than solving a problem or focusing on what we don’t want. When we shift to an intention of creating something we want, we choose – personally choose – an energy and orientation on an outcome of “I Can Do It” rather than “I’m not as fast|able|agile as the gal or guy in front of me.” It may seem small, yet applying this to my running changes everything – my relationship with myself and my running goal, my relationship and conversation with other runners, and my relationship with how I perceive myself. I’m not focused on whether or not I’m the slowest one in the pack; rather my mindset is focused on bringing into being a newly created identity and outcome – I am a runner.

I experienced a breakthrough at our last clinic: I noticed that after the first two cycles of ”run three, walk two”, that I was not as tired or out of breath as I was the week before. Keeping with my slow and deliberate pace, I psyched myself to keep going to the next tree, then to the next crosswalk, and on and on. I wasn’t gasping for breath and my body wasn’t screaming to stop. The pace that I had developed for myself was serving me well.  I was doing it!

My new practice of running and the new habits I’m forming in the process have moved me beyond where I was a month ago. These are clearly baby steps that I’m taking (I’m not signing up for a marathon anytime too soon!) and I am setting my intention on an outcome – to finish the 5K race. My mindset is focused on what I want rather than what I don’t want. This is a subtle and powerful shift and distinction. What I’ve done, simply put, is to empower myself, to act as a leader for myself by focusing on the positive outcomes I want, and creating the intentions and energy to make those outcomes real. I’m realizing, too, that these ideas can strengthen the leaders I work with.  All leaders can benefit from such an approach, one that focuses on a “can do” mindset for yourself and your team members.

Try this over the next week. See how you might shift the language and your outlook on how you engage with your employees and teams. Where might you instill a “can do” mindset in your conversations? Ask them “what do we want” rather than “what don’t we want”, see what you notice, and comment back. I’ll be curious what breakthroughs you might experience!