Inspired

Finally a keynote address to get inspired by -- General Rick Hillier, what a leader! It wasn't so much his message about leadership that moved me, it was the enthusiasm for his military career and the people that touched his life that really inspired me. Here is a man that actually reminds me a lot of my own old man by the way he tells a story, curses and makes people belly laugh. And in spite of his fame and power, he comes across as an ordinary Canadian -- sincere and down to earth. Here's some of the advice I heard: People come first -- not processes, projects or technology. Keep your people close to you -- INFORM them of your plans and recognize their talent. Keep yourself in check -- never let success go to your head. Be true to yourself -- falsity is easily detected. Use humour!

I can't remember all of the other gems, but I do remember feeling quite impressed by not only the General's career, but by his confidence and joie de vivre. Pure awesome.

I Can't Go Back There

More about how freakin' phenomenal work has been this past month. Give people autonomy, show sincere appreciation for their efforts and trust them to get the job done. That's it baby -- that's it. This simple formula would not have moved me this much were it not for the fact that I've been micro-managed for four long years. Imagine never being allowed to make a decision or work with your colleagues. Think of what if feels like to write a million drafts that go no where. For someone so action-oriented I especially could not tolerate the indecision and perfectionism. Everything was a priority and nothing ever got done because it was not perfect enough. Ugh. When you are trained to seek approval on every insignificant detail, you forget what if feels like to think for yourself. You start to question your own abilities and become paralyzed with fear of making a mistake. All it took was autonomy, trust and gratitude for us to soar. I am not going back there EVER.

The Power of Staying Positive

What am amazing stint this acting job has been. I haven't felt this alive in years -- things are moving, work is flying off our things to do list, everyone is smiling, my colleagues are even telling me that I'm doing a great job and wish that it would never end. It feels really good to be a part of something so positive.

This is yet another example of how toxic negative energy can be. Blame, criticism, defensiveness -- these behaviours do more than make you look bad. They fester and spread, they cloud your perception and creep into your psyche. I know that it's true in my relationship. When I carry hurt in my heart, I am miserable. And now I see that it's true at work too. Once we stopped making excuses for our lack of focus and just put our heads down and did the work as best we could, we produced quality work and loads of it! What did I do? Nothing -- I simply let people do their jobs. They are competent and I showed my faith in them and they soared. Hell, I look good because they worked their asses off. It can't be this easy?

And now sadly, it will come to an end in a few days. But now that I know how great it is living with positive vibes, I can't go back to living in that storm cloud. The team and I, we've changed. It's not going to be the same again.

I'm the boss

Finally, a chance at the job I am perfectly suited to. Hurray, my dreams have come true!! So why am I miserable? It's over-whelming and I don't know where to start. Part of me wants to start from the start. What is our mandate and our objectives. This will set our priorities. K, but then I can see too few staff aimlessly working on big loosely defined projects. But what about those urgent tasks that hijack our projects.  Maybe I need to track these to stay on top of the work that's actually getting done. Sadly, this inability to focus has become a way of life for us, including myself who used to be the productivity master. How can I help us achieve? My day has finally arrived and I haven't a fucking clue to lead us to victory. Part of me wants to have daily scrums with the team -- name two things that you will accomplish today. That's it, just two things. But then part of me feels we need a break from micro-managing. The team doesn't need more interruptions from me nor do they need to keep providing status updates. Frig! I have to trust that they know what they are doing and empower them to make their own decisions instead of making them ask for permission all the time. It's been years since any of us have had a normal work life and I'm worried that it's too late. My worst fear is that nothing will get done and my dream of making a difference will be just that, a dream. I think I have to follow my gut on this one. We will complete three things this month. We will work together. We will measure our progress. We will succeed!

Tele-working future

Is the idea of a self-sustaining neighbourhood a pipe dream? What would it take to transform my city into a collection of thriving communities where everyone could go to work where they lived? It seems so simple really, especially in a government town. I work at my nearest satellite office alongside other feds; some of my team are there with me and the rest are scattered about other generic GC office buildings -- no HQ required. Rush hour would be history. All of the pressure to 'densify' the core beyond what is sustainable would suddenly disappear.

So why is this not happening? Or is it? Proponents will say that a decentralized work force is unmanageable. However, does sharing the same office space really make us a team? A change like this requires that we redefine our concepts of work and management. Today, we pay people to sit at their desks for a fixed number of hours a day and we pay managers to supervise their productivity. The easiest way to do this is to make sure your employee is physically present. Sadly, this is where management begins and ends in the public service. Since there is no real accountability, there is no planning. Work just falls from the sky and gets doled out as it happens. Ask most managers if they know exactly what their staff is working on, when they expect to have it completed and what it will look like when it's done and I doubt they'd be able to give an honest answer. You start moving employees across the city and all of a sudden you have less of a need to manage staff in the traditional way.

 

In order for any kind of teleworking arrangement to work, you need to believe that your people will continue to work even when no one is physically watching them. Trust is key. The lack of trust between employees and management is ingrained in the culture of some organizations. When a bus strike brought my city to its knees a few years ago, I sat in a meeting and heard my peers express their serious 'concerns' with permitting teleworking for some employees. It really angered me to hear them speak of their staff this way -- the problem was not teleworking -- it was a lack of trust (and clearly a lack of leadership ).

In order to motivate employees, you need to inspire them -- remind them of the team's purpose and show them how their work is contributing to that end. You also have to understand the results you expect to attain and be able to measure if your team is making the grade. Again, if there's no accountability then why bother measuring results? K -- this is turning into another one of my leadership rants, so I better sign off. What I meant to do was document a particularly fruitful discussion I had this week that started with urban intesntification and eventually evolved to leadership in the public service. Love making all those connections. Any longer and I'm sure it would've ended with campaign finance reform! I hope that my generation makes this a reality -- we stand so much to gain from tele-working -- more productive employees, happier families, healthier environment ... the future is bright and I'm excited about it!

Change Management

This is one of my favourite management terms that we give lip service to. It's right up there with 'Risk Management' (e.g. Hold the phone, this scope document has got to address Change Management ... errrr, okay, so what do we say about it?) It's about being honest with the change. WHY ARE WE DOING THIS? What's in it for me? How will this affect me? No, how will this really affect me?

No one wants to really answer these burning questions. No one except me that is. I love being brutally honest, even when the message is not all that rosy. Problem is, I'm not much of a spin doctor and management does not want to draw attention to anything negative. Everyone knows that people naturally don't want change so it's best to just do it rather than spend time talking about it.

A colleague and I were talking about change the other day and came to some other interesting realizations:
People don't want to feel stupid. I now know why my projects were de-scoped to practically nothing. Even though I believed in my heart that once the end users understood how much better life would be in the new work environment, it was too far a leap from their everyday work habits. They would have been cursing our name for months, years even.  Start small.

Always let them change on their own time. Think of how you feel when you log into your fav Social Media app and it's completely turned on it's head and for no apparent reason. You should always give people an option to continue doing things the old way -- they will soon realize that they will be left behind if they don't change. A good example my friend gave me is that he refuses to text -- it's something he's just stubborn about, but knows that it will eventually happen because his kids will force him into it out of necessity.

Let others sell the change for you. This is often what we try to aim for by running small pilots. We secretly hope that the success will go viral and users will be bragging to their colleagues about how great the new systems is. Sadly, this is rarely the case. But I can always dream.

Be honest. If the change requires training, costs, minor inconveniences or more time then just be up-front about it. Too often we focus too much on the benefits of change without addressing the reality. People are already skeptical of change, so not being upfront just enforces the resistance.

This blog post isn't particularly enlightening but I'm learning a few things along the way and I like writing about them with the hopes that they'll stick.

Inspire Me

Whenever my colleagues and I bitch about how dysfunctional our work place is, we inevitably end up blaming it on a lack of leadership. It's not to say that we are blameless. But when it is so systemic in the public service, there's got to be a bigger reason then just laziness. Why are our managers failing to inspire us? Should it be their main priority? How do you even go about doing it?

A friend of mine says that it starts by showing people how their work makes a difference. You've got to draw a dotted line from their mundane tasks to the strategy and vision of the organization and you've got to instill in them a sense of pride in their contribution to the company's objectives. Here's a good case in point that he shared with me:
Back in the 60s, when the Kennedy administration was committed to putting the first man on the moon, the story goes that there were rumors of problems at NASA and that the people there weren't dedicated to the administration's vision. So President Kennedy hopped on Air Force One and headed to NASA for a personal visit. He wanted to reinforce his commitment. Before the meeting, he stopped into the restroom where a janitor was emptying the trash and puttering around. The President asked, "How are you?"The janitor replied, "I'm doing great. I'm putting a man on the moon."The President left the restroom, got back on Air Force One, and flew back to Washington. There was NO problem at NASA.1
The other thing leaders need to do is talk to us about WHY we are doing what we are doing rather than focus on WHAT we are doing. Leave the details to the middle managers. Just keep slamming the vision down our throats until we start to feel it too. And I'm not talking about lip service here -- it's got to be tangible and attainable. Instead, the vision becomes a corporate exercise that's undertaken every five years, engraved on a plaque and ignored.

The last thing we talked about was empowerment to effect change. I had a small taste of it this week and boy did it rock my world. For the first time in months I was engaged, fully charged, and productive! It's sad that we demean our employees by making them ask permission so often for non-important things. They don't trust us to make decisions that count and it's so sad that they don't realize how badly to erodes our confidence, abilities and in the long term, our productivity.

I'm learning a lot about what NOT to do during my tenure here. I just pray it hasn't ruined us. Maybe we can inspire ourselves and show our leaders the positive effects of their attempts to break the dysfunction? Or maybe we can just wait it out until it's our turn to lead.

Our mission

A colleague asked me this the other day. And I had to stop and think about it for a minute. What is my Team's purpose, really? Who do we serve? What are we trying to accomplish? Those are simple questions that should direct our every move. But somewhere along the way we've lost our purpose. And now we have a new big boss who sees our role quite differently than we see it. He's helping me realize that we exist to serve our clients -- in the FIELD. We're a small team and there's always been a lot going on at headquarters or even within my branch to keep us busy. We've never really supported the field, other than socially (they're a great bunch of people). And since it's only a functional relationship (they don't report to HQ), it's really not much of a relationship at all.

I used to always mock those corporate mission exercises. Talk about a waste or consulting dollars. The statement is never more than its fancy plaque. How do you actually implement a new mission -- how can you change the culture without changing the players? But maybe we need to take a closer look at this. Right now, we are falling way short of everyone's expectations and that is not a good feeling.

 

I've been thinking about it all weekend. None of the old priorities -- the EDRMS, Classification Structure or Retention Schedule -- the pillars of our existence up until now, seem to mean anything to our new boss. Good god, he wants us to pitch in and start boxing up legacy records! I know some of our team (myself included to some extent) think we are beyond clerical work. We're stuck in the theory and would rather leave the minions to figure out how to implement it. Well those days are over. I've gotta get all cosy with paper files again and start showing my new value or else we will no longer exist as a Team -- yikes!

Butterfly Story

Not a bad little story here to remind me of the importance in letting people solve their own problems, especially my children. I was in a mgmt course this week and the facilitator told a short tale of a man who was observing a butterfly coming out of its cocoon. When it looked like the butterfly was having difficulty busting out, the man decided to help by carefully tearing open the cocoon. Only this did not give the butterfly an opportunity to strengthen its wings, so it fell to ground and subsequently died. Yikes.

Stop telling the kids (and my partner) what to do and instead help them realize that they already know what to do!

Culture of insubordination

I think I've finally figured out why things are so dysfunctional at work. We survive in a culture of insubordination. No one respects authority, there's really no accountability. As my friend says, "the cheques just keep coming in no matter how much or how little we do." So nobody cares and it's contagious as all hell.

Take today for example, I heard my bosses' boss say that he wanted us to meet to develop a work plan that clearly showed what the priorities, time frames and persons accountable would be for each item listed in our Audit Action Plan. But my manager had her own plans. She wanted us to talk about a work plan she had consultants create for us two years ago. Yes, it was a good plan but OMG, this is not what your boss wanted!! Our priorities are his priorities! Of course, I am one to talk. I question everything that I am told to do because I know it will change like the wind and go no where. I remember a couple years ago I complained to a co-worked -- "why should I do that?" "Because she is your manager" was his response. It dawned on me then that I too had absorbed the culture of insubordination of my workplace.

Well, we've got to change. And it starts with me. I WILL step it up and help my manager develop this work plan dammit. I WILL take her requests seriously and live up to my commitments, no matter how frivolous I think they are. Like this classification project I've been bitching about. No, I do not believe in it. But who cares? That's not what they are paying me for. I've got to just follow my orders and stop faffing about. Bloody hell, I will NOT continue to contribute to the dysfunction. I will not.

♥ Mark ♥

Mark McEwan is the bomb. Every time I watch his show "Heat", I feel like leaping into the TV, throwing on an apron and cooking up a frenzy with the rest of his staff, and I'm not even a chef.

He is such an inspirational leader -- someone who believes in his employees, has a vision and sets the bar high. I would LOVE to work for someone like this. I would never dread going to the office, I would just lose myself in my work, I'd feel like I was valued and that my efforts were making a difference. Is this possible without working for someone as great as Mark McEwan?

In my fantasy I am working really hard in his kitchen when he whizzes by, gently touches me on the shoulders and sincerely asks me it there's anything I need. I blush, show him my canapes, he nods approvingly, gives me a few pointers to make the process even more efficient and hurries on his way. I have renewed energy, I feel alive, I can't stop. THAT'S what I want out of life.