Workplace Environment

A podcast with Leaders of Transformation

By |2016-03-11T09:50:49-06:00November 20th, 2015|Blog|

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I met Nicole Jansen from Leaders of Transformation at a Small Satellite Conference. Nicole interviews successful Leaders of Transformation to help you gain the inspiration, education, resources, and leadership skills to transform your life and the world around you. I was thrilled with the opportunity to meet with her and talk about bringing forth the feminine in the workplace. It’s podcast #28 on her site. 

[button colour=”accent” type=”squarearrow” size=”large” link=”http://leadersoftransformation.com/podcast-2/” target=”_blank”]Head over to Nicole’s site to listen![/button]

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Betwixt and Between

By |2015-05-22T19:55:22-05:00May 19th, 2015|Blog|

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How do you get from where you are to where you want to be?

I’ve written a lot on this blog about the need for women to build new businesses – different kinds of businesses – if we hope to achieve a better balance in our workplaces and in our lives. But how does that happen? How do you live well in the world you have, even as you work to make a better one?

You live betwixt and between.

That’s what I’ve been doing. I spend my days moving between two worlds. First is what I have begun to call my “old world” – working independently to provide supply-chain management and large-program management consulting services, the way I’ve earned my living for a long time. Second is my “new world” – that of building Morf3D, a company of the type I’ve proposed women build in my GirlAuthentic blogs.

I’m spending 24-40 hours a week providing supply-chain and ERP implementation work, supporting a wonderful client I have worked with multiple times. I am also traveling and meeting with potential new partners and clients to help build Morf3D. It’s a common story you hear about many others who have started a new business: You use the current work to keep paying the bills and help fund the new business, “burning the candle at both ends.”

Living in both worlds leaves me feeling I’m not doing either very well. I am constantly working on one area while being asked to do something for the other, or thinking about the other. Some days it is exciting; other days it is exhausting.

And I’ve come to a conclusion: I just have to get comfortable with being in transition.

I know this will be part of the “story” of building Morf3D that I can share in the future with other women and men who I hope will also make the leap to build the kinds of companies we want to work in – companies that are involved in changing the world, in making our workplaces places we all want to be. But I also I have a feeling the anxiety, stress, and excitement of building Morf3D is going to be around for a while.  So, I better figure out ways to be with it.

And that’s not easy! Prior to this level of activity with Morf3D, I felt I was pretty good at quieting my mind, being still, relaxing. Now, I realize I have a lot more to learn about how to do this. Stillness has been a struggle – at a time when I need it the most.

But I realize something else too: Building Morf3D feels right. This is our chance to build what we have said we wanted to see in this world in terms of the opportunities we want to create and the type of company we want to give people a chance to work for. This is just the beginning of this journey.

It might be a lifetime journey. Does anyone who is involved in building something new ever feel “done”? Or do they just get comfortable continually building, knowing they are never done? Are we here only for the finish line – or is “betwixt and between” exactly where we ought to be?

What do you think?

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When “Equilibrium” Means “No”

By |2015-05-19T14:40:35-05:00February 13th, 2015|Blog|

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One of the greatest forces we have for equilibrium is the power of our own choices.

I was reminded of this last month as I sat wringing my hands in Galway, Ireland, making a choice of my own. It was New Year’s Day, I was midway through a wonderful vacation with my family – and I was supposed to be working.

My December hadn’t gone the way I thought it would. I’d been planning to have that whole month at home, not traveling, to work on a long list of things I wanted finished by the end of 2014. Among them was a January blog post for this website, GirlAuthentic. I like to send these posts to my creative team by the beginning of each month so we can workshop things a little. So December was my window.

Well, that didn’t happen. Instead of being at home working, I found myself traveling every week of December – right up until Christmas. Two days after that I left for a 2-week vacation in Ireland and the U.K. with my kids. That’s how I got to Galway. Behind on my work. With friendly e-mail check-ins and reminders coming from my team. Where was the January post? Would it be ready soon?

You know that “ugh” feeling? I had that feeling.

And I had a choice to make. I could take time away from my kids to write a blog draft – which I chose not to do. I could get a little less sleep one vacation night and write the draft at the end of one of our long days together – which I chose not to do, either. Or I could choose to not work, to just be present with my family, even if it meant waiting until February to get the year started for the GirlAuthentic blog.

That’s the choice I made. For me, that choice was equilibrium (although it didn’t completely relieve that “ugh” feeling).

At the top of this page you can see the tagline for GirlAuthentic – “Equilibrium at Work.” It’s a brilliant phrase suggested by a brilliant woman who helped me put a lot of the look and feel of GirlAuthentic together (thanks Jessica!). Over the last year and a half I’ve found this play-on-words can mean a lot of different things to different people.

Is “Equilibrium at Work” about equal numbers of women and men in the workplace? Is it about a feeling of balance or equilibrium for your team – or for you personally? Is it about what happens after we achieve this equilibrium, when it begins to truly work for us?

Last month, for me, “Equilibrium at Work” meant one word: No. It meant I had a choice, and I could use that choice to feel more balanced in my own life. You can, too.

As someone else reminded me last year, it helps to look at the big picture. This person pointed out that true progress, considering all GirlAuthentic represents, is measured best in terms of decades. I had always had that thought in the back of my mind, but also sort of felt like I wasn’t living up to delivering on expectations (I’m not sure whose!) if I didn’t make things move faster.

It was such a relief in a way to give myself permission to approach this effort in terms of decades, not just months. Skipping one month of the blog, in the course of a couple of decades, wasn’t going to be the end of the world. But it would increase equilibrium in my own life.

And now – back to work.

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Bye-bye to the Long-Hours Culture

By |2015-05-19T14:43:59-05:00December 11th, 2014|Blog|

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The title above was the subtitle of a recent article by Lucy Kellaway, a columnist for the Financial Times. This full-page piece ran in the Business section of “The World in 2015,” by The Economist. I was so excited to see a global periodical dedicate a full page of commentary to changing attitudes on work hours.

Why? Because women have been leading the way on this issue for years – but it’s not actually a women’s issue.

Kellaway says it will soon be “cool” for executives to put a stop to unhealthy work habits and start working more efficiently between 9 and 5. Her piece describes the future like this: “Holidays will be holidays. The out-of-office email will no longer be followed by a reply from the ski-slopes. A spare jacket will no longer be needed on the back of the office chair, as going home will be all the rage. To get your work done by a reasonable hour will not be a sign that you are a slacker, but that you are working efficiently.”

I’ll take it! And Kellaway isn’t alone – there has been a lot of writing this year about how we need to adjust the culture that rewards workaholic behavior. I think the conversation starts by asking “why”: Why should taking time off work (for anything – children, sabbaticals, taking care of a sick parent, simply taking a break, whatever it may be) mean you automatically get dinged in terms of salary or promotions? Why do we assume that if you forego those activities you deserve higher pay or an earlier promotion? That simply reinforces a workaholic reward culture – or worse, it actually rewards a person for being less productive and less efficient with their time.

Of course, this piece was published in The Economist – a European periodical. Our friends across the ocean have been leading the way for a long time on healthier attitudes toward work. European workers take more vacation and work more reasonable hours than their American counterparts. How flabbergasting for us that they still manage to have global economies!

It isn’t just Europeans leading this conversation – it’s women. We’re lucky in a way – because this has mostly been framed as a gender issue or a women’s issue in the past, we’ve gotten to frame the conversation, ask the questions, and create something new.

What’s the something new? The idea that this is not a gender issue after all. This is a labor issue. Many men are looking for as much freedom from the old behaviors as women are – women have just been more vocal about it thus far. But this isn’t a “women’s issue” – it’s a human issue.

I love conversations like these, because they help us create a better future. But I still believe it’s going to take a long time to actually change the culture of unhealthy work habits – and I’m impatient.

That’s why, over and over at GirlAuthentic, we’re proposing a shortcut. Instead of waiting for the old businesses to change, we need to be about creating new businesses with healthier cultures that will bring sanity for those who want it.

Who’s going to create those businesses? Women, we need you to lead the way again.

 

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It Was the First Time There Was a Line

By |2015-05-19T14:41:51-05:00October 12th, 2014|Blog, Women and the Workplace|

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I was going to have to wait in line to use the restroom. And I couldn’t have been happier.

I’ve been attending my profession’s annual global conference since I was a junior in college in 1987 (I’ll let you do the math). There was often a line for the men’s room, but never for the women’s room. It was, we used to joke, one of the perks of attending our profession’s conference as a woman. You could get into the bathroom any time, no waiting. There just weren’t that many women in our industry.

And then, this year, it was different. I walked in to the restroom – and there was a line!  I was a bit taken aback. I had been so used to attending the conference, and there never being a line. Another woman and I just stood there looking at each other, realizing we were sharing the same thought.

This was terrific!

That moment, we knew, represented a turning point. It’s something I am proud of the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) for helping to make happen in our field. And it didn’t happen by mistake.

I was lucky – I was part of the first wave of women who benefited from my profession’s efforts to create opportunities for women. And it did take specific efforts! Over the years, CSCMP has worked tirelessly to help advance women in our profession. So have many great companies. So have the terrific universities and professors that are educating the next generation of Supply Chain Management professionals.

What did they do? They started by having the right conversations and asking the right questions. What can we do? How do we attract more women? How do we support them? They do research to show whether women truly are advancing in the field, and they actively seek out women to interest them in their profession, their university programs, their companies, and the terrific jobs this field provides.

Contrast this with the International Manufacturing and Technology Show I attended with one of my business partners a few weeks earlier in Chicago. There were more than 113,000 attendees at the conference. But twice during the four days we were there, I found I was the ONLY person in the women’s restroom. (It was sort of spooky, really.)

Two professions – very different gender balance.

There is tremendous opportunity today for women – in both supply chain management and in manufacturing technologies. We may have made more progress in supply chain management today, but we can do the same in manufacturing tomorrow. We’ll do it the way we do anything in the professional world. We’ll work at it. We’ll make an effort.  And, women can lead the way by building these companies of the future.

I can’t wait to wait in more lines.

 

 

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Is your workplace built on love – or fear? Here are 2 ways to tell.

By |2015-05-19T14:45:19-05:00July 17th, 2014|Blog, Women and the Workplace|

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We are embedded in fear – more deeply than we realize, much of the time. It’s ingrained, so we don’t even realize it much of the time. It’s become part of our autopilot at work – and in life.

If you want to see whether you’re operating mostly out of fear or out of love, there are two places to look: the actions you take and the language you use.

Fear actions:

  1. Monitoring people’s time at work (because you’re afraid they won’t work otherwise)
  2. Not talking about whether the women are being paid the same as the men for the same job (because you’re afraid of retribution)
  3. Tolerating abusive, bullying behavior (because you’re afraid of being labeled a “whiner”)
  4. Continuing to work somewhere where you’re not happy (because you’re afraid of the unknown)

Love actions:

  1. Allowing people to manage their own schedules (because you trust they want to do good work and will get their work done)
  2. Paying women the same as the men without being asked/coerced (because it’s simply the right thing to do)
  3. Enforcing the “No Asshole Rule” (because you love others)
  4. Moving toward what feels good or right in your career (because you also love yourself)

You can see this fear-versus-love dichotomy in the actions we take all day long – or you can look for it in the words we use. How do you talk about competitors, colleagues, customers, and other institutions?

Fear language aligns us against others:
Win, Beat, Dominate, Crush, Annihilate, “War on…”, Adversary, Knockout, Attack, Closed, Control, Kill, Defeat, Faction, Enemy

Love language aligns us with others:
Trust, Serve, Join, Collaborate, Share, Open, Transform, Build, Give-and-Take, Care, Seek, Generosity, Allow, Build, Partner, Connection

As we focus on operating from love, not from fear, we can create environments that help and support us. We may not know exactly how that is going to look – which makes us afraid. But we can have the faith that we are being presented with everything we need at the moment – which is living in love.

I believe we can use these perspectives, behaviors, and language to create the companies and social structures we all want to operate in. What do you think?

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I call it the Art of Coming and Going

By |2015-05-19T14:47:07-05:00January 13th, 2014|Blog, Women and the Workplace|

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I call it “coming and going.” I have set up one form of it for myself, and I have seen others with many variations on the theme.

What do I mean? I mean the ability to “come and go” from a job place, a company, a profession – even from work altogether. The ability to choose to work for periods of time, and NOT to work for periods of time.

Why do we have this notion that we are supposed to work at least 160 hours per month for 45 years? Tolkien said it best – “not all those who wander are lost.” People who “come and go” pick up all sorts of new experiences and perspectives. If they leave a work environment and choose to return, they do so with so much more to offer. So why do policies discourage this?

What if we simply stopped viewing “coming and going” as a bad thing?

I have. I was lucky enough to garner a set of skills and work experiences that let me work independently as a consultant – which means I choose who I work with, and when. I know many who’ve found similar ways to work. It’s a trend in many professions, in fact – from journalism to various areas of computer science. And, with new national health-care policies that mean your healthcare coverage doesn’t have to be tied to employment, I think we’ll see even more workers empowered to indulge their “wandering” side.

Many are beginning to talk and write about how we are all heading toward being “free agents.” Don’t miss the key word in that phrase – “free”. What if we could fashion careers, professions, jobs, and companies that helped more of us embrace this freedom?  What if we operated in a way such that we knew people would want to “come” to a job or a profession for a while; “go” for a while; and perhaps come back? Whether that is to pursue personal interests, care for family, children, etc. – for both women AND men.

When that happens, we take our power back. I read a comment once that we had become lazy – most of us had traded our freedom to corporations in exchange for security. But we’ve learned that security was an illusion, and the price was often too high.

So how about reclaiming some freedom instead?

Your true job – and mine – is to be happy. But to do so, to feel good about what we are doing, we may have to take our power back. I choose what I do, and when, and with whom. That’s the kind of world I want to live in. That’s the kind of businesses I want to see us building.

How about you?

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