Categories
Positive Outliers

Working Out My Work

In my recent post called, A Portal of Possibilities, I described the time I first got my hands on an Apple Macintosh 128K, and how it dazzled me and drew me into a new world of possibilities. The power of these new tools and the possibilities they gave me, consumed my focus.

However, I had a team. Whilst I focused on this new technology, I was neglecting them. I needed to rebalance my efforts, and quickly.

How Do Others Do It?

So, I began to study what other people did to organise their work lives. It was as if I had added one other project to my project portfolio: me.

I had been on time management courses, but I knew that this challenge was a larger matter than really how I sped through things, and how I allotted time to my different tasks. What helped other people to keep focused on what mattered? What is productivity?

In my story about my recruitment blunder, I wrote about the overuse of the term management and, among other things, it is unhelpful and perhaps even damaging, when we use management to the act of engaging with the people around us. I wrote this about time management:

We are in time, so how can we manage it? That’s like asking a fish to do water management. Fish swim, yes. But they don’t control the water.

I was discovering that there was only one person I should manage. In fact, it was, imperative that I did so. That person was me.

In the literature on emotional intelligence, also known as EQ, the bedrock of EQ is first, self-awareness, and then, self-management.

EQ Main Skill Areas

What should I do first? What should I do next?

Sooner or later, we all come to the realisation that even our boss – if we even have a boss – cannot be expected to tell us the What and the How of everything we should do. We need to work that out for ourselves. It also remains for us to identify next, our priority, what or whom we should attend to next.

Leading Yourself
Succeeding from the Inside Out

As I explained in my book, Leading Yourself: Succeeding from the Inside Out, self-management follows self-leadership. The enemy of effective working for any of us, particularly portfolio workers, or even portfolio creators, is stress, driven by hurry and distraction.

So I began a quest for the way to manage my time better. I later realised that this was crucial to making sense of my work and to the process of managing it effectively.

Lists

I had begun with lists, to-do lists. I think everyone creates lists, as they start to order their work. I tried labelling each item with priorities such as A or B or C, as I had been taught on my time management training, but this seemed clumsy. Also, my lists got longer. Important stuff got lost in the middle somewhere. I found myself writing out longer and longer lists. Moving them to my PC seemed a natural way to go, but I ended up printing out and amending these lists by hand. We didn’t have the list apps available to us today. But still, the handwritten vs digital divide seemed awkward to me.

Covey’s First Things First

Early on, I came across the work of the late great Stephen Covey, in such books as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and First Things First. His approach was refreshingly different. I liked the breadth and depth of Covey’s analysis, which encompassed much of EQ. It was practical whilst being principle-based, rather than locking me into one particular methodology. Covey highlighted the Eisenhower Matrix and how something that was urgent was not necessarily important. Making a distinction between what was merely urgent and what was also important became a critical way of thinking for me.

Time/System

This Danish-based system came in the form of a training course backed up with a proprietary set of stationery. We had a quality A5 Filofax-type ring binder, with extensible add-ons that could be tailored to different uses. I remember that it had a detachable perfect-bound calendar pocket notebook that I found particularly useful. 

After a couple of years, though, I found the system a little too prescriptive. It didn’t allow me to evolve and tailor my approach. There were some software integrations later on, but those were in the early days of hybrid paper-digital solutions and software was not seamless or robust. 

GTD

As the world of knowledge workers continued to speed up with multiple streams of inboxes calling for my attention, along came David Allen with his book, Getting Things Done. His GTD approach seemed to offer the benefits of a system whilst keeping it robustly simple. His key was to keep a single inbox and to triage incoming messages to delete, do immediately if less than two-minutes’ effort, store as a project, or archive.

GTD was focused on taming these various ‘inboxes’ of our lives, and it fulfilled that objective well. But I felt GTD lacked something. It did not help me to continually reshape my work as new roles and challenges arose.

Kanban

As a coach and trainer at the time in project management, we were seeing agile software development grow as a movement. Two aspects, in particular, fascinated me:

  1. The use of the Kanban board to prioritise and move team member tasks through conception to completion; and
  2. The cycle of scheduled retrospective meetings which helped an agile development team become an adaptive, self-improving learning organisation.

At the time, I was using Trello to manage my personal commitments. Later, I came across Personal Kanban, by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry. What they set out resonated with what I was doing. I began to incorporate it into a course a client asked me to design and run, called Organising Yourself More Effectively.

The Rise of VUCA

All the while, the world seemed to be accelerating towards VUCA – Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. Like many, I was being challenged with increasing demands, and increasingly complex ones at that. I had to manage my own experience of VUCA and ensure I didn’t become swallowed into the vortex of aimless distraction and chaotic stress.

So, I have evolved how I work out my days. It is a critical skill in surviving these times of noise, hurry and distraction. More than that, I have to find it is possible to do more than survive. We can thrive and overcome. However, I find that I need to keep adapting my own system of self-management.

Three Conclusions

In the course of my own journey out of this chaos, I have concluded that:

  1. Margin is important, whether it be time margin, health margin, financial margin or space margin. Margin protects us from the unexpected, providing us with a buffer against becoming someone who is permanently driven by circumstances. We cannot outrun VUCA. We cannot merely increase the speed and throughput of our work. In fact, it is better to declutter and create space.
  2. There is only ever one priority in any given moment. We need a solution to help discover what that one priority is, helping keep us focused on that, despite all the distractions around us.
  3. We can become too task-focused for our own good, and we need to consider the relationships around us.

Most of the above productivity approaches are one- or two-dimensional. I’m realising now that we need to manage ourselves in at least three dimensions.

I will explain what I mean by these three dimensions in my next blog.

In the meantime, let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo by John Sekutowski on Unsplash

A free course that takes you through the workflows of how I use bullet journaling for my Daily Heads Up, Gratitude List, Weekly and Monthly reviews.

Categories
Leaning to People

Leading Effective Change: A 10-Point Checklist for the Busy Leader

Change management –– or change leadership, as I like to call it, –– is a big subject. So many books have been written on the subject, and there are more books every year. I know this because I was a contributing author to The Effective Change Manager’s Handbook, the standard reference of the global Change Management Institute.

And we live in a VUCA world: a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. We are learning new ways of navigating this new world all the time.

Most likely, most of us will be thrown into leading some sort of change before we have had any kind of change management training. Even if you have had such training, it may be difficult to recall the essentials when you find yourself launched into the thick of it.

There will be pressure to get started. That change won’t wait until you’ve learned everything. So taking all this into account, how would you prevent yourself from getting lost in the weeds?

It is possible to get the essence of change leadership down into a short checklist, something we can carry with us into the VUCA of change. Something like the Pareto Principle is operating here. Despite a huge and complex body of knowledge, it is possible to have a short checklist you can return to again and again that will serve you well.

So I’ve distilled for you the essentials of leading change down to a 10-point checklist, that you can download below. It’s not exhaustive and if you rely on the checklist alone, you are likely to get into trouble, or miss something. But it is a start. Follow this and it will take you a long way.

Categories
Self-Awareness

Ambiguity in a VUCA World

I am very proud of my daughter, Sarah. She has made a name for herself in the very male-dominated world of historic building restoration and ornamental plastering. She uses all her skills as a sculptress and has developed a keen eye for the health of historic buildings. I was walking with her recently through the centre of Newbury, an old market town in Berkshire, UK, that boasts a fairly modern shopping centre. And she began to illustrate for me how ambiguity works in a VUCA world. (‘VUCA’ stands for an environment defined by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity.)

Ambiguity is all around us. The trouble is, by definition, we don’t recognise it.

So when Sarah suddenly objected at the sight of this wall (pictured above) it got my attention. What was wrong with it? To my untrained eye, someone had been responsible for preserving this fine building by re-pointing the wall. That was a good thing, right?

Well, no. Sarah pointed out that the traditional material to bind bricks was lime. Concrete, though less perishable, does not absorb water.

I still didn’t get it. Not absorbing water is a good thing, right?

Again I stood to be corrected. A building such as this, Sarah explained, is a living system. When it rains, where will the water go? It will seep into the most porous and also the most precious part of the structure, the timbers. It will stay there and eventually rot away the wood. In about ten years time, these ancient timbers will be rotting and need replacing. And they are irreplaceable.

This illustrated a couple of things for me about ambiguity:

  • It’s often experience and skill that offers us the only way of recognising ambiguity in our work. I thought the repair was a good, responsible job; my daughter knew it was a restoration crime.
  • The frame of reference we bring to the world matters. In this case, do we think of a building as an inert, static structure or as a living system, a system that needs to flex and breathe? Our frame of reference is how we see reality, how the world appears to us.
Our worldview conditions how the world occurs to us.

In the world of leading change, we make assumptions about people and their behaviour. For example, someone reacts with surprising hostility towards the changes we are trying to make. We can make the assumption that they are a trouble-maker, they dislike us, or that they are just a stubborn reactionary.

We need to look closer. My experience draws me towards that person, towards that conflict; it triggers exploratory, compassionate questions. And my frame of reference is that very few people are sociopaths, so there is probably another reason why this person appears unreasonable.

I look deeper, and I find that this person is going through a domestic trauma and that the only stability in their life right now seems to be their workplace. And I’m about to take away that last refuge of stability.

Suddenly their reaction begins to make sense. Now I can view them very differently. I can begin to work positively with that person.

Ambiguity in this VUCA world is all around us. The problem is, by definition, we don’t see it.

The more we grow in experience and what worldview we bring to our work, the more we challenge our own initial assumptions, the more we are likely to uncover and recognise important ambiguity.

Categories
Self-Awareness

Who do you think you are? Be Unique

One of the key chapters in my forthcoming book, Leading Yourself: Succeeding from the Inside Out, is on Identity, the whole matter of how we see ourselves, our make-up and how we come to be unique. I believe this is pivotal because out of our own self-identity comes so much of what we do and how we do it. My self-identity is the “me” I think I bring to the world, to be unique not least to my work.

The book is about how we can do our best work in this VUCA world. When it comes to moving towards our best performance there is a real paradox: our identity is not in our performance.

Being unique is not about what I do. Who I am is not what I do nor is it how well I do it. This is crucial. If we cannot separate the two we become addicted to our work, and our self-worth suffers if events don’t go so well. Another manifestation of this confusion is the high mortality among people within a year of their retirement. No job, no identity. No, health comes through knowing who we are independent of our work.

We must find a way of discovering our true identity apart from our performance.

We must find a way of knowing our true selves independent of our performance. We must find a value in ourselves that transcends what we do.

I have come to realise that for each of us our identity is in at least two parts: the general and the unique.

For example, regarding my own general identity, I am British. I am growing a deeper appreciation of this as I travel around the world. I am a post-war baby boomer, which has meant I’ve carried around some generational baggage, such as a scarcity mentality. (I was born during rationing, and it informed the value system I was raised in.)

Also, being a post-war Englishman meant I was vulnerable to a post-imperial mentality, where we seemed to live in the shadow of America, marginal to much of what we used to lead. I have, to a degree, grown out of both of these limitations. I now appreciate a positive, abundance frame of reference as being a more real and healthy one. Also, over the last eighteen months, I have been privileged to work with the outcomes of a new kind of Britain, with such clients as the British Antarctic Survey, with various British research bodies and universities producing truly excellent science and learning. In the UK, we seem to have a knack of producing excellence on a shoestring. All this, at a general level, informs the identity I bring to clients all over the world.

The British seem to have a knack of producing excellence on a shoestring.

For our unique identity, we need to look elsewhere. The title of this post is taken from a BBC TV series of the same name. In each episode a particular media personality is shown discovering their family roots and ancestral lineage. This can be a powerful means of understanding part of our unique identity. But that is by no means the sum of where our uniqueness comes from.

Personality profiling also can help, particularly if the profiling tool is positive and non-judgemental. I will soon announce how subscribers can access one such tool, the AEM-Cube© to better understand themselves; even gain a better understanding of how they work with the team they are a part of. And there is Strengthfinder 2.0. This weekend I took my own assessment. I’m happy to share the results with you. My top five themes are:

  1. Connectedness
  2. Ideation
  3. Strategic
  4. Relator
  5. Learner

I’m pretty comfortable with that, but it’s real value to me is that it leads me to an awareness of aspects of my personality that I had hitherto taken for granted. More and more, I have the freedom to play to my strengths, rather than work on my weakness. Out of this comes true performance and fulfilment.

So, my conviction is that Solomon was right, Plato was right, Jesus was right.

Having a right understanding of who we are really, really matters.

What examples do you have of connecting with your unique self? What has helped you?

And how has a greater sense of your self-identity helped you?