Harold Jarche points us to a recently released study on corporate responses to the recession/depression we're currently in:
This morning the CLC (Corporate Leadership Council)
released the results of a survey that asked CEOs which areas were to
suffer the most in response to the crisis. L&D [learning &
development] came out on top at 38%. So this means, globally, that a
third of organisations surveyed will stop investing in development of
employees. Recruiting was second and IT infrastructure was third.
Aside from the obvious implications for L&D (which Harold dissects nicely), the bigger issue is that here is yet another reason why no one can afford to depend on their company for professional development. You must take responsibility for your own learning.
Smart companies use the downturns to prepare for when the economy improves. That's what smart people do, too. So some questions to consider in preparation for what promises to be a long, cold winter:
Do you know what skills employers are looking for? (This article
says that part of what we're dealing with here is a fundamental
mismatch between what people know how to do and where the jobs are).
Do you know which of your skills are obsolete or on their way to becoming so? Are you doing something to build new ones?
In times of great upheaval and negativity, there's a tendency to conserve. It's a natural human tendency to withdraw and "hunker down" when the outside world feels like it's on the attack. We're pulled into thinking small, focused on saving what we have rather
than on thinking big and using downturns as an opportunity to make things
happen
But this is a mistake. When we move into scarcity mode, we become competitive, not collaborative. We hoard information and ideas rather than sharing them freely. We stop learning because learning requires risks and the possibility of making mistakes and it feels like we can't afford mistakes when everything around us is falling down.
In bad times, we get stuck in doing things that "worked" even when it's clear that they no longer do. We're looking for any port in the storm, rather than finding a way to use the storm to take us some place better. We are reacting, using instincts and intuition that come from our animal brains and our need to just survive. We are not initiating, which requires us calm our fears and to be thoughtful and imaginative. We become victims of circumstances rather than actors in our own lives.
We have another choice, though. We can use bad times to do things differently, to start new habits and find new ideas, to get creative about where and how we want to move forward. In adversity, we can find new strengths within and new opportunities in the world around us.
We can see upheaval as a time to stop . . . or as a time to start. It can be a time to hoard or a time to share. It's up to us.
A.J. Jacobs, Esquire writer and author of two hilarious books is a man after my own heart. As he explains in this TED Talk, he spends much of his time immersing himself in learning experiments, such as what it's like to outsource your life (the best month of his life) or to be "radically honest" (the worst month of his life). Not only do these become fodder for his writing, they also teach him some important lessons.
This is one of those deceptively simple, profoundly important realizations. It's the "fake it till you make it" school of thought that says if you want to become something different, you have to start by behaving differently. We tend to think the opposite, that our beliefs must change first and then our behavior will come along later. Much of professional development is about trying to change people's attitudes by "training" them them that they should think differently. This is often unsuccessful because in many cases, we need to first change our behavior before we can change our beliefs. I'm not going to truly believe in the power of exercise until I actually begin doing it. I have to start with acting differently and it's the process of engaging in new behaviors that helps me start to develop new attitudes.
Think, for example, of trust. Yesterday I wrote about how I think many of our failures of development are the result of a lack of trust. In comments, Roberta asked what we can do to change this. The simplest and best answer I can come up with is for us to start behaving as though we trust people and for us to behave in ways that encourage people to trust us. Act trusting and trustworthy and trust in yourself and in others will follow.
Same thing with using social media. We talk a lot about getting people to change their attitudes towards blogs, wikis, etc. This is really asking them to change their beliefs about these tools. What if, instead of trying to talk people into seeing value, we simply said, "There may be no value in these at all for you. But can you take a week to be open to using this tool, can you act as though there is value for 7 days? Just an experiment of immersing yourself in this world. If at the end of the 7 days, you still see no value, then it's back to your previous life." What if we could get people to "fake it" long enough for them to see how their outer changes are impacting their inner attitudes? That could create some really great changes.
Where else can this apply in our lives? How can we use outer changes to affect our inner thoughts? Is this something you've tried yourself? How has it worked?
One of my favorite Steve Jobs stories is the one he told during this Stanford Commencement address a few years ago:
Seventeen years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a
college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my
working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition.
After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I
wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me
figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had
saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it
would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking
back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped
out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me,
and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the
floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to
buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday
night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved
it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and
intuition turned out to be priceless later on (my emphasis). Let me give you one
example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy
instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every
label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had
dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to
take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif
and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between
different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.
It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science
can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my
life (my emphasis). But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh
computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac.
It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never
dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never
had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since
Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would
have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on
this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the
wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to
connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was
very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Every time I think about this story, I think about how we do staff development. If Steve Jobs had worked at a company, he never would have learned calligraphy--at least not on company time or on the company dime. He would have been busy attending the "required" courses for his job grade. There would have been the the compliance courses and the conflict management course his supervisor decided he needed since he didn't always get along that well with his co-workers. Maybe some coding classes and a "team-building class."
Most definitely Steve would not have taken something as "impractical" as calligraphy. Not only would he not have been allowed to pursue learning by following his "curiosity and intuition," he would probably have had little time or encouragement to even consider what he was curious about. The company would decide what he needed to learn and that would be that.
But think about what happened to Apple--in fact the entire industry--because a man pursued learning in an area that excited him and that piqued his curiosity. It transformed our lives.
I know all the reasons why company-sponsored professional development isn't based on people's personal interests--there's no immediate pay-off for the company, certain kinds of training to meet regulatory requirements are required, companies aren't in the business of supporting individual growth, etc. I do question a company's ability to really know the future, though. How can they predict what skills people will need in 5 years? How might they be restricting their own growth because they aren't helping the knowledge workers they depend on to grow in ways that might actually have benefits for the company not immediately perceived by the organization? Steve Jobs had no way of knowing how a calligraphy course might apply, yet it was this investment in something that wasn't "practical" that helped him completely re-define the way personal computers operate.
I also recognize that the pay-off for Apple didn't come until 10 years later and that if Steve had learned calligraphy on company time, his company might not be the one to benefit. For many (most) organizations, it is this concern more than any that holds them back.
I can't help but feel, though, that there's still a way to balance a company's interest in developing people for its own purposes and supporting the development of people for purposes beyond the job and work they have today. If we did this, I think we'd have more Sachas in the world and more Steves, having more creative ideas and making greater contributions, both to their organizations and to the larger societal benefit of all of us. Not to mention what it would do for individual lives. For me, it's these possibilities that drive my own belief in the need for professional development that's based on individual growth.
What do you think would happen if professional development started with people's curiosity and passion? Would it be a good thing? How would it benefit organizations? How would we start doing professional development differently?
Last week we held our Community Forum on at-risk youth. This was without a doubt one of the most personally and professionally rewarding projects I've ever worked on. With a team of 10 young people, ranging in age from 17-22, we looked at the issues facing teens who drop out of high school, age out of foster care and who become teen parents. We collected peer interviews and researched national, state and local data to pull together a story of these issues in our community. Then we invited schools, community-based organizations, businesses, churches, government and everyone else we could think of to hear what these young people had to say. We wanted to pull the community together so that they could hear the stories behind the numbers. We wanted them to understand that when we talk about 704 kids dropping out of high school in a year, this isn't just some abstract number. These are human beings who are facing challenges some of us can't even imagine. And they're facing them with no support, as adolescents.
The young people we worked with just blew me away with their honesty and passion for the issues. One young woman stood up and talked about she got pregnant to have someone in her life who would always love her and would never judge her. Isn't that what parents should be doing? Or church? Or members of her community? This isn't a weight that should be put on a baby, but it's completely understandable when you consider the lack of any other supports in the lives of these young people.
Another shared the story of how when she sought daycare for her young son, a case worker condescendingly told her, "When I was your age, I was playing hopscotch." This girl broke down in sobs as she told us this, saying "Please don't judge us. We know we've made mistakes but we're trying to do the right thing." How incredibly sad, especially when you consider that she's someone who's been in foster care since she was 8 years old and is now enrolled in college to try to have a better life for her and her child. What she needs is not our judgment but our congratulations for getting this far on her own and our support to keep moving ahead with her plans.
One young man in the project dropped out of school at 17 in part because he was scared to go to school because he refused to be affiliated with a gang for protection. He survives because he stays "below the radar" as much as possible. Right now, he's working on getting his GED and helping to register voters in his city. At the forum, he talked about how he wanted to experience something beyond the few blocks of the neighborhood he's lived in for the past 19 years. "It's not that I hate where I live, it's that I want to know what else is out there. I want to find out what it's like to live someplace else and do other things," he said. Isn't that what we'd all like for our children? Mine have gone on a European vacation with their dad, while this poor kid just wants to get out of his tiny Pennsylvania neighborhood
Working with these young people was just incredible. Most people consider them "lost causes," but what I found was that they will do anything if they feel you personally care for them and you involve them in the process as co-decision makers, something they often have not experienced. They also LOVED using media to tell a story. It was a big part of what kept them engaged in the process. We had them get the videos and they decided on the key themes to highlight in our final presentation. At first we were going to script out the entire Forum to present it in more of a report format, but at their urging, we decided to let them respond to audience questions to further share information about their personal experiences. Even when people asked questions like "Why aren't you taking more personal responsibility for what you've done?" (a ludicrous question because the kids were taking responsibility), these young people handled their responses with a grace and professionalism that, frankly, was far greater than some of what I've seen from the so-called adults I've worked with in this arena.
I was also blown away by how these young people want to give back. They want to take their show on the road, going into local high schools to share their experiences and persuade kids to stay in school. They don't want other kids to make some of the mistakes they've made and their willingness to open their lives to other people so that they can all learn is really amazing to me.
Luckily we video-taped the Forum presentation, so our plan is to use some of that video for ongoing dialog and work. In the meantime, you can see the videos we put together and shared at the forum here. There are three videos on the channel. The first summarizes some of the statistics and research we found. The second is on advice that the kids who were interviewed have on dropping out ("DON'T DO IT!") and the third includes interview excerpts on issues like why students dropped out, whether or not their schools tried to engage them in staying in school, etc. This is raw, powerful stuff and I'm really proud of what these young people accomplished in a few short months.
I'm a freelance consultant and for the past 10 years that's meant finding the delicate balance between getting the work done today that needs to get done and finding new work to do once my current projects are finished. People who work for organizations think that their situations are very different from mine, but in reality, the only difference is that I'm always aware of the fact that I have to constantly be looking for my next opportunity.
At the end of June, a few major projects of mine will be ending and I'm now in the process of trying to find new business to replace them. This is a scary thing, I don't mind telling you, especially when I'm the primary breadwinner and we're buying a new house at the end of the month. Work has always come to me, so on some deep level I have faith that it will all work out in the end, but in the meantime, there's a lot of angst going on inside me. After reading this article on the fourth straight month of job losses in the US and this one on Philadelphians pawning their valuables to buy food and gas, I know I'm not alone in my anxiety.
Fortunately, as a friend mentioned to me this morning, the universe has a way of bringing you what you need when you need it. This morning I found The Scary Times Success Manual via Pam Slim's Escape from Cubicle Nation. It's 10 tips that I think can serve us well in scary economic times, but also in other times of our life when we're gripped by fear and anxiety. In a nutshell, they are:
Forget about yourself, focus on others.
Forget about your commodity, focus on your relationships.
Forget about the sale, focus on creating value.
Forget about your losses, focus on your opportunities.
Forget about your difficulties, focus on your progress.
Forget about the "future," focus on today.
Forget about who you were, focus on who you can be.
Forget about events, focus on your responses.
Forget about what's missing, focus on what's available.
Forget about your complaints, focus on your gratitude.
These were written for individuals, but a lot of organizations could benefit from this advice, too. How many companies, schools and nonprofits are operating primarily from a place of fear and anxiety, rather than a place of optimism? It feels to me like there's a lot for us to unlearn and forget so that we can focus on the important things that will move us out of our fears and into a brighter future. I have some forgetting to do myself right now.
When it comes to professional development and who's in charge of learning, you know I come down on the side of individuals. I don't care who you're working for--we're all independent contractors in a global economy and we have a responsibility to ourselves and our families to always remember that. This is something I keep harping on, but it's a sentiment that bears repeating.
Now, via Stephen Downes comes a great post from Ian Delaney that pretty much summarizes my opinion on the subject. He's talking about the results of a recent report on "Learning 2.0":
People nowadays don’t have jobs or even careers for life. We have
these portfolio careers and we’re all entrepreneurial about those
careers. The average in-house marketer stays in a job for four years;
it’s even lower in agency land.
Our employers don’t have our individual agenda at heart when
they design training or development programmes. They have the company’s
interests in mind.
There’s a conflict of interest here, of course - you might
want to do a public speaking course, for example, because you envisage
yourself as an effective public speaker. But if your boss doesn’t think
that’s part of your job, the chances are, you won’t be doing one.
Employers also tend to confuse training and learning.
Training gets done to you. Learning is something an individual does
themselves. Companies tend to think of training as their
responsibility, rather than learning. They also think (62% of them -
HROs - do) that “done to” training is the most effective way to deliver
education for the job, according to survey results.
Educationalists have identified at least 37 different types
of ways in which we learn stuff, from reading a book to playing
simulations. Each individual will have their own preferred and most
effective learning styles. In-house training tends to focus on one - sit in a room with a bunch of other people and get talked at.
Yes, Yes, Yes! This is the problem with the state of professional development right now--too many people are willing to abdicate the experience to their employers and too many employers don't really operate from a strengths-based place that looks at how you can build your organization based on the interests and talents of your employees. Individually, we're really screwing ourselves if we don't start taking a more pro-active role in our own learning and organizations aren't benefiting from our growth either.
Ian goes on to point out that so much of what passes for professional development right now is event-based ("Hey--you should go to that training on phone sales we'll be running next month."), when in fact we'd learn more and develop faster if we started blogging, networking and using our RSS feeds more effectively. I agree wholeheartedly, but continue to wonder what needs to be done to help people recognize this and make a transition into being more self-directed in their learning. I can see, too, that there's a need to provide the right kinds of structure for people to look at their learning styles and the available tools so that they can begin to construct for themselves a more effective personal learning environment.
Take a look at the post and let me know your thoughts.
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Katya Andresen has a GREAT post on operating your organization with no excuses. Apparently she recently did a presentation on tweaking your marketing messages, where she was told by her audience that her suggestions weren't possible because:
1. I don’t have the budget to do that.
2. I don’t have the staff to do that.
3. I don’t have the time to do that.
4. I don’t have the internal support to do that.
5. I don’t have the expertise to do that.
Katya goes on to take each of these "constraints" and turn them into possibilities, urging us to think in terms of what we CAN do, not what we can't.
Katya's experience is something I get all the time, particularly when it comes to suggesting that staff change how they are currently operating. It seems that it's easier to spend time making excuses for why things can't change, rather than trying to figure out how they can change.
I'm doing a lot of thinking lately about leadership in organizations and Katya's post underscores the point that leadership is about making solutions, not excuses. It's about recognizing where there may be some constraints and then using those constraints to propel you forward.
Retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties.
AND at the same time
Confront the most brutal facts of
your current reality, whatever they might be.
Many companies have failed because they are unwilling to confront the brutal facts, but I suspect that in the nonprofit sector, the bigger problem is going beyond the brutal facts to create something different. There seems to be a pervasive mindset that a lack of resources means an inability to change or have impact. From what I've observed, however, it's often not the lack of resources that is the problem. It is how the resources are being allocated and used that is the issue. In Katya's post, for example, she points out that instead of thinking "I don't have enough time to tweak my marketing messages," the answer should be "My time is better spent fixing a bad message rather than sending out more bad messages." It isn't about the lack of time as much as how the time is being used.
In so many cases, it seems that organizations just sort of give up and give in to their excuses. This, to me, is one of the most profound failures of leadership. It's impossible to have any kind of vision if your sight is clouded by all that you can't do. Vision, by it's nature, is about seeing the possibilities, not the limitations. It's about seeing what CAN happen, not what isn't working. Excuses don't create change. They maintain the status quo, something that presumably many organizations are trying to change.
It also seems like this kind of "excuses only" leadership could become one of the primary reasons that many nonprofits may find themselves becoming irrelevant. In a recent post, Seth Godin talks about the death of direct mail and how he he's worried about the ability of the largest nonprofits to change:
I'll start with the bad news: I despair for most of the top 50
non-profits in the US. These are the big guys, and they're stuck.
Unlike the Fortune 100, not known for being cutting edge in themselves,
the top charities rarely change... if you're big, you're used to being
big and you expect to stay big. That means that generation after
generation of staff has been hired to keep doing what's working. Big
risks and crazy schemes are certainly frowned upon.
What I see here is the potential for more "excuses only" leadership--"We can't change because we've already invested so much into doing what we've been doing" (a constraint), rather than "The rules of the game are changing, so how can we keep up?" (a possibility).
What Katya's post opens up for me is a call to "No Excuses Leadership" that individuals and organizations must learn to heed. If they don't, then they'll get left behind.
Yesterday was the "Take Back Your 9-5" Career Retreat that Rosetta Thurman and I began planning for a few months ago. Quite simply, it was amazing. Just incredible to be in a room with 18 professional women, most of them in their 20's and 30's, taking a day for themselves to really explore where they were at and what they wanted to do. It became much bigger than talking about careers. It was about how do you build a LIFE that's interesting and satisfying and that helps you feel like you're making a difference.
Things are still a bit jumbled for me, but I wanted to blog this while it's all fresh. Moments/thoughts/themes that stood out for me. . .
Women need a place and space of their own for professional development. One of the reasons that I originally approached Rosetta about the retreat was because I've had a feeling for a long time that women need a space of their own for career and professional development planning. Our needs are the same as men in many ways, but we approach things differently and place value on different things. We're also more likely to be juggling work/life balance and we still (sadly) fight all sorts of discriminatory attitudes and behavior in the workplace, including the things that we do to ourselves. What was amazing about the retreat was the positive, supportive energy in that room and the ways we were able to bring together a group of relative strangers and end the day feeling like we'd done something huge, both for ourselves and collectively. One of the overriding themes was that it was necessary to do this as a group of women because it brought new and different insights from what occurs in professional development venues that include women and men together.
This space to think and plan for personal development is particularly important in the nonprofit sector. All of these women are incredibly dedicated to both their causes and to their profession. As we discussed, the difference between working for a nonprofit vs. a for-profit is that non-profit staff tend to have a sense of zeal about their nonprofit's mission that can lead to burnout quickly if not moderated by other things. This is compounded by the lack of resources in many nonprofits that has staff performing many different and important functions that will quite literally make or break the organization. That's a lot to be dealing with and these women do it day in and day out without getting the opportunity to take a step back and see what's working and what isn't. I think a lot of people yesterday saw places where their lives needed to get more into balance. It's like we discussed, you can't help anyone else until you put your own oxygen mask on first.
Visual tools can bring some amazing insights. Most of the group were hardcore left-brainers. They've had to be because it's the logical left brain that is generally most valued in the work that we do. But the problem with the left brain is that it's the "judging" part of the brain--the part that has everything figured out already and isn't interested in understanding what you REALLY want to do. It's also less creative, less able to see new solutions to old problems.
Pictures help bypass that left brain, so we used them a lot in yesterday's session. Everyone LOVED Christine Martell's VisualsSpeak tool for exploring their career visions. For many, they gave some fresh insights into what they'd thought was well-traveled territory. Most also elected to use collage to develop their mission statements. What was wonderful was seeing how the hard-core wordsmiths took to using visuals and their excitement in seeing how it brought them fresh perspectives and new options to explore.
Reflection is CRITICAL. Probably the biggest thing that stood out at the retreat was the value in taking 8 hours of uninterrupted time to explore these questions about career and life. We probably could have taken more, but just this one day boosted many of these women past what had felt like hardcore obstacles in their paths. By taking the time to truly reflect and explore some different questions, they got much greater clarity and understanding about ways to move forward. This doesn't happen when you take a piecemeal approach.
So is a support group. People spent a lot of time on solitary reflection, but we also took time to share what we were learning about ourselves and to give advice and support to each other. I also think that there's something to be said about engaging in solitary activity in a group setting. There's a certain energy in the room that makes you realize you aren't alone in your quest--energy that isn't available when career and professional development planning is done alone or with just one another person like a supervisor or career coach. One-on-one and alone time are certainly necessary parts of the overall equation, but I think that group support is a critical piece too.
Build It and They Will Come. The final big insight/thought here. My belief is that while we can all benefit from feedback and advice from others about our growth and development, in the end, we're the ones who have most of the answers that will work for us. I believe that if you provide people with the right space, the right tools and the right questions, they will take those things and use them to transform their understanding of themselves and of their world. This retreat proved that to me.
In my career, there have been a few transformative experiences that have changed my direction and path. This was one of them. I actually did the retreat as another one of my personal learning experiments, to test my hunch that there's a need for this kind of career and professional support done in a group environment using tools and processes that aren't the usual "take this interest inventory" kind of approach. The reaction and feedback I got yesterday told me that I'm very much on the right track with this. Not only is there a need, there's a way to have impact on people's lives that is powerful and exciting. And who DOESN'T want that?
One more thing--huge props to Rosetta for all of her help in planning and organizing this. She was amazing. Also, thank you to Maryland Nonprofits who rented us the space for the retreat. And, of course, the biggest thank you of all to the women who participated in yesterday's retreat. You were a HUGE inspiration for me on a lot of different levels and it was wonderful to meet and spend time with such a pool of amazing women. Thank you!
A few months ago I wrote a post entitled, Note to the Next Generation of Leaders: Don't Wait for Baby Boomers to Hand Over the Reins. In it, I suggested some strategies for Gen X and Y leaders to develop themselves. One of my thoughts was to get "disruptive"--start your own organization to do it better, rather than trying to get your foot in the door of an existing one.
What makes Kiva different from other microlenders? “If you have
$10,000 to lend, you have many options,” says Matt, ’00, MA ’01. “If
you have $25 to lend, this is the only option.”
People
are lining up. In fact, Kiva has so many lenders—more than 123,000
extending $12.4 million to some 18,000 entrepreneurs in 39
countries—that it recently limited each participant to $25 per
business, “so that everyone has a chance to make a Kiva loan.” After
two years in operation, Kiva attracts $1.5 million a month, Matt says.
The impact is bigger than it looks, notes Jessica, MBA ’07, because
“each loan is touching 15 people, whether it’s other workers in the
business, or family.”
A great story, but what really caught my attention was this:
Significantly, the 16 full-time employees at Kiva’s offices in San
Francisco’s Mission district are mostly in their 20s and 30s. (The
organization has some 250 active volunteers.) This generation’s
idealism tends to be more global, more strategic, more entrepreneurial
than previous generations, with a good deal of media/marketing savvy.
Matt says his contemporaries are “not looking to make a lot of money,
retire and give it away. We’re looking to live our whole life in an
integrated way. It’s not a binary approach.”
Seems like those Gen X and Gen Y folks are figuring out that they don't necessarily need to "pay their dues" or wait their turn. They're seizing their own opportunities. And doing a lot of good in the process.
I think it's something for existing organizations to consider--aren't Matt and Jessica exactly the kinds of people you would have wanted working for you? The bigger question is are you creating the kind of environment that appeals to young people with this kind of initiative and talent?
