Seeing with new eyes

"Auntie Sylvie, Auntie Sylvie! We caught a frog! Come and see, quickly!" By the time I reach the lakes edge, I see three small blond heads huddled together peering over a sand bucket filled with water and there it is, a big green frog. They are so excited - this is a big deal to them. Back from where they come from, Australia, the frogs are exotic, often poisonous, creatures that live in the rain forest.

My niece and nephews, ranging in age from 6 to 2 years old, have come from to visit us with their parents for a month. They have spent much of that time at the family cottage by the lake and they are gloriously happy. They revel in the nature around them.

Every day, several times a day, one of them will squeal with delight when they see a chipmunk and they all start racing after it, spotting a few more and coming back to the adults to report on the result of their Canadian safari. A family of ducks spotted on the lake or the sight of a small school of fish in the water elicits the same kind of excitement and glee.

The oldest loves to scour the bottom of the lake to find "sea shells". "Look what I found Auntie Sylvie!" he says with a proud smile on his face as he hands me a very ordinary looking snail shell. At the edge of the dock there are eight other shells lined up - his growing collection. I look at it amused because I remember how excited I was collecting "real" sea shells along the beaches of Australia like conch shells and bits of coral and sand dollars. To him, swimming in a lake is a welcomed novelty. To me, the turquoise water of the ocean and the white sand beaches was my novelty. When confronted to a new situation we see with different eyes: we are curious, observant, pleasantly surprised and grateful.

This reminds me of the story of the green frog that I tell my clients as a metaphor for culture change. If you take a frog and drop it into boiling water it will jump out, of course. But if you put the frog in a pot of cold water it will swim happily around. If you turn on the heat slowly it will adapt to the warmth: "This is getting warmer than I am comfortable with but I can deal with this." The frog will "deal with it" until the water is boiling and it is a boiled frog.

Many of us are boiled frogs in our workplaces. We work harder and longer hours to try to extinguish the growing number of fires popping up around us. Some of us have become cynical - we do not believe that things will change so we just keep our head low and do our job. Some of us have given up and are counting the days till retirement. Some of us have burnt out...

It could be different if we just took the time to listen to the green frogs in our workplace - the new employees, the young employees, the external stakeholders - people who are looking at our work culture with fresh eyes and are saying: "We see another way."

A funny thing happened as I was spending time with my Australian niece and nephews, I started noticing and appreciating things again, things that I had been taking for granted in my surroundings like the chipmunks, the ducks on the water and the frogs. If we humbly acknowledge that our ability to truly "SEE" diminishes proportionally with the length of time we have spent in the same situation we would pay more attention to how a visitor sees our world.

Ideally, we may get to the point where we seek out new eyes on a regular basis to help tune up our vision of the world we live in. New eyes allow us to see you new possibilities. New possibilities revive our optimism and resolve to move forward.

Humanity in the workplace

At a leadership training session last week I boldly declared to all forty participants that my mission in life was to bring humanity back into the workplace. Pretty lofty goal huh? What does it mean anyway?

To me it is crystal clear but, as I have made this declaration over and over in the last eight years or so, more often than not I have gotten blank stares or puzzled looks from my colleagues and friends. So let me explain...

I believe it is in the book Gung Ho written by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles that I came across the best description of what it means to me to have humanity in the workplace. In a humane organization "people do not leave their spirit at the door of their workplace".

Humanity in the workplace means that as an employee, I proudly bring my whole self to work: my strengths, my weaknesses, my passions and my dreams. There is no need for me to develop a split personality: a work persona and a "at home" persona.

How often have you bumped into a colleague out there, in the real world, doing something "unexpected" like volunteering for a charity or running a marathon or coaching their kid's hockey team. Would you have guessed that your quiet cubicle neighbor had those interests? Why is that?

There seems to be an unwritten rule that says that the only relevant contribution we can make in the workplace is directly related to the skills and knowledge we learned during our formal training. In our current workplace culture, a competent worker is someone who is doing exactly what is expected of them according to their job description… period. Like they say in my workplace, you may think you are indispensable but you would be surprised at how easily you can be replaced. I can accept that the functions I perform can be done by someone else. But what does it say about the human being who was responsible for those functions - what does it say about me and everything that makes me unique? Does it not count for something?

It is unfortunate that we are not tapping into the vast resources of our human workforce within our organization. What treasures we could have access to if we encouraged every employee to bring their spirit, their enthusiasm, their zest for life into the workplace!

As part of the leadership sessions that I lead we build in many relationship building activities like interactive icebreakers, speed networking, storytelling circles, coaching exercises, etc. I am always amazed at how much we find out about each other if we just take the time to ask and to remain curious. At every one of those training sessions people come up to me at breaks and confide that even though they have worked with such and such a person for years they never knew that he or she was... a watercolor artist, an avid butterfly collector, a classicaly trained pianist, a professional photographer, or a mountain climber who reached the top of Mount Everest (you fill in the blanks).

What could a pianist possibly contribute to the workplace you ask? Well my friend André Beaudoin, an accomplished pianist, produced a multi-media show on leadership that features splendid photographs he has taken during his mountain climbing days with thought provoking captions on leadership and a breath taking live rendition of classical piano pieces. As a scientist, André's job description does not allow him to showcase his artistic abilities. The strength of his passion and the gentle encouragement of some friends gave him the impetus to find his own unique way to put to use his many talents as a powerful medium to start a meaningful dialogue on leadership in his organization.

My challenge to you this week is to ask yourself if there are any parts of your identity that you are not allowing yourself to express in your workplace. And if so, how can you bring those many aspects of who you are into what you do at work?

References:
Gung Ho!
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Pub. Date: October 1997
ISBN-13: 9780688154288

Ken Blanchard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ken_blanchard

Influencing Change

I have been reading a fascinating book entitled Influencer - The power to change anything by Kerry Patterson… (et al.). The authors propose that in order to have impact on human behavior you need to address two fundamental questions:

* Do I have the skills, knowledge and ability to do what is required of me? In other words "Am I able?"
* What's in it for me? In other words "Am I motivated?"

Influencer explores the concepts of ability and motivation in the context of personal, social and structural factors.

Under personal motivation, the notion of "making the undesirable desirable" is introduced as a key element to influencing others.

What would this mean in the context of organizational development? As change agents we need to ask ourselves "Will this new behavior we are proposing (this new way of doing business) bring people pleasure and if not, how can we make the "old ways" less rewarding and the "new ways" more fulfilling?

For many, change is bad. Change is unsettling. Change requires time and effort to learn new ways. Change is feared because it is the unknown. Therefore, we cling to what we know. We cling to the "old ways" because it is safe and comfortable. For most then, there is little pleasure in change.

How do we make change more enticing in the workplace for example? The authors say that "there are two very powerful and ethical ways of helping humans change their reaction to a previously neutral or noxious behavior: creating new experiences and creating new motives" (p. 88)

1. Create new experiences

* By getting people to try it: For example, invite people to attend a staff meeting where a lot of time and energy was spent to create a festive atmosphere and to design a process where everyone's voice is heard and celebrated. Chances are people will leave feeling positive and more likely to support new approaches of doing business that are in line with the values that were demonstrated during that event.
* By making it a game: Transform the tedious into something more appealing. How can you make strategic planning more enticing? Instead of spending agonizing hours word smiting a mission statement you could ask small groups to put their creative minds together and come up with a poster with illustrations and slogans that describe their purpose and then make a "sales pitch" to the other teams. The best poster becomes the mission statement for their Branch.

2. Create new motives

* Connect to a person's sense of self: We cannot motivate people, we can only help create the conditions which may help them find motivation within themselves. If people feel that by adopting a new behavior they uphold the image of who they want to be they are more likely to change their behavior. How can we help people see that changing their ways can be a defining moment in their lives, a moral quest of sorts? The most powerful human motivator is passion - the power of a committed heart. What are ways we can engage the head and the heart of people? Storytelling is a good tool because in the telling of that personal anecdote or experience we are connecting facts with emotions. If your heart is open, chances are that your mind will be more open to change as well.

Food for thought...

Dare to become who you are…

In Lewis Carroll’s book, Alice in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat tells Alice “if you don’t know your destination, then it doesn’t matter which road you take”.

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to
Alice: I don't much care where.
The Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.
Alice: …so long as I get somewhere.
The Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.

Are you an Alice, frantically racing from one thing to another or madly climbing the corporate ladder? Have you ever stopped long enough to ask yourself on which wall that ladder is leaning and if that is truly the wall you are meant to climb?

What about your organization? Is it stuck in the “we’ve always done it this way” rut? Extinguishing fires faster and faster and with bigger hoses without taking the time to figure out how those fires start in the first place?

To deliver bigger and better things faster, you sometimes have to slow down. Stop the wheels from turning for a moment or two and reflect on where you have been and where you want to go.