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Summer time, summer time. Happy Memorial Day. Eons ago, I vacationed in Malaga, Spain with my dad and my sister. We had a blast. My dad's beach book was a phenomenal compendium of Frederick Forsyth's short stories called No Comebacks... Harry Joiner Read MoreTrend watch: HR, texting, needlepoint
I am in NYC with no money. This used to happen all the time. When my company was running out of money, I would go to San Diego to give a speech and stay at a four-star hotel and not have a cent. And no credit card, of course. I would fly first class, stash all the extra treats they offered, and eat them until I could charge room service to the organization I was speaking to.
I am an ace at traveling without any money, but I’m sick of it. I thought it would never happen again. After all, I have a company credit card.
But I think Ryan Healy canceled my card. Or put a hold on it. I think this is maybe because I charged a ton of garden supplies on the card last weekend. I couldn’t find my own card, so I thought I’d just charge a few things and then write the company a check. But then I charged a bunch of roses. Twenty. I mean, the farmer can just dump a bunch of dirt in a pile and dump a bunch of stones around the pile, and voila – I have a huge garden plot. So now I have a sun garden that needs a little more spunk.
I discovered the credit card problem while innocently buying a Bluetooth headset in NYC so I could do the gazillion conference calls we do at Brazen Careerist with a CEO in DC and me on a farm and Ryan and Ryan in Madison. I mean, every meeting is a conference call and I’m getting a neck ache.
Also, I’m getting fat. The conference calls are hard for me. They bore me. I like big ideas, I like hypothesizing and predicting and synthesizing. The job of actually getting stuff done is not that interesting to me. But we are in execution mode at the company, and I need to stay focused. So I eat when I'm on the conference calls. On a good day, I eat ten apples. Cut into halves, then quarters, then cookie cutter shapes like stars. On a bad day it's one apple and ten apple pies.
So I am needlepointing, to stay focused on execution instead of food.
I remembered about needlepointing from when I was a kid, bored out of my mind in Miami with my grandma, when I spent summers at the Doral, where every evening was black tie, and kids ate dinner alone, in pajamas. I learned to needlepoint there. In between getting sunburned and getting spanked. And the needlepoint was the highlight of my trips. Well that, and my diary, featuring entries like, “Granma hayts me. I hayt Auntie. I want to dye.”
So I thought, maybe I should needlepoint to calm myself down now, so I don’t have outbursts on the phone. I am trying to be a more amicable co-worker. I am not sure if it’s possible, but I know that to achieve my goal of amicability, I have to stop getting angry on the phone, which comes not out of passion but rather out of boredom.
So now I needlepoint. And then it was so effective that I started needlepointing everywhere. I did it while I had dinner with my mom. She told me I was crazy. I did not say pot calling the kettle black.
I stopped following the color pattern exactly by the time I was so addicted that I was needlepointing while getting a Brazilian. And by the time I was doing needlepoint in the board meeting, I was disregarding the whole pattern in favor of a completely free-form approach, (which, by the way, strikes me as the future of all needlepoint — less rigidity).
Now I’m convinced I need beads for my needlepoint, and I’m actually super happy thinking of spending my days threading beads. The problem is that I don’t have any beads. There is a bead store near the farm, but they are not interesting beads, and I knew I was going to New York City, which must be home to many amazing beads. I was thinking that even though I don’t know where my bank card is, I have the company card. And now that I’ve charged garden stuff, the beads won’t get anyone any more annoyed.
But now I’m cut off from the credit card. I’m going to have to ask Ryan Healy, or even Ed, our CEO, why. They will say, “Have you been using it for anything weird?” They will ask innocently maybe, although they constantly worry about me and weird. They worry that weird will overshadow all the good about me.
But just because I am not able to charge beads while I’m in NYC with no money does not mean that I am out of good ideas. Don’t underestimate my workplace trends genius.
Like, I’m thinking that the future of all writing is short, twitter-like stuff, based on traits we see in Generation Z. This group only uses phones, and very few use phones for email. For Generation Z, email is for diatribes and texting is for communication. There are few laptops in our future. Laptops will be for dorks, and keyboards will be too small for big typing sessions, so only dorks will write long form.
Here’s another idea: The future of human resources is death. Good managers will do their own recruiting by having their own great network. (Great article from ERE about how Brazen Careerist will be a part of this revolution.) And RPO companies will take over the legal part of HR. So there won’t be a reason for HR. Which is good because it’s a cost center, which means there are no line manager positions in HR, so it’s a dangerous career move for everyone.
One more trend. This one is for all the investors that my CEO will be worrying about when they read this post. Bloggers will rule the world. They will own advertising, because it’s so effective to target audiences through blogs. And blogs have the best content, because if someone writes great content, why would they do it for someone else? They should build their own brand.
Okay. So, look. My career as a workplace genius is not over. And anyway, my career was never built on me being conventional. I think my company is going to have a fit over the gardening charges. I wish I were scared about what will happen. But I am feeling fearless, thinking that if I am simply honest about what’s happening, I’ll be fine. Or, at least I’ll have a blog post.
A Time for Recognition and Remembrance
Tomorrow is the U.S. holiday Memorial Day. The purpose of the holiday is to pay homage to the people who have served in the armed forces. I’d like to think that most every country has their own version of Memorial Day, whether it’s Remembrance Day or Veterans Day or something else, even if they don’t recognize it this weekend.
So as you’re grilling, watching basketball or spending time at the beach, take a moment to thank a veteran for the sacrifices they’ve made. And think about the challenges facing them as they return to the civilian workforce. I found a great resource called Military.com that shares practical information about making a professional transition.
This week also marks the start of hurricane season. This might not be big news for everyone but, where I live, hurricane season is important and it’s essential to get prepared. Even if you aren’t subject to hurricanes, there’s probably some other kind of natural disaster you need to prepare for. Make sure you’re familiar with your company’s disaster plan and you have a family plan as well.
Lastly, I’m doing a bit of celebrating and wanted to share the news. HR Bartender was listed on Fistful of Talent and HR Capitalist’s Talent Management Blog Power Rankings and Evan Carmichael’s Top 50 Human Resources Blogs to Watch in 2010. Lots of terrific blogs are on mentioned. Be sure to check it out. You might find some new reading along the way. (Oh and P.S. There’s a caricature of me on the Evan Carmichael site! At least I think it’s me…haha)
I can’t really think of an eloquent way to wrap up these random thoughts except to say thanks. Thank you to the people who keep me safe and to the folks who recognize the work I do. I’m one very lucky Bartender. Cheers!
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What will be the most important leadership qualities over the next five years?
The “2010 Global IBM CEO Study” was recently published, it’s one of the largest one-on-one CEO interview studies, surveying 1,541 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders from 60 countries and across 33 industries. The four primary findings of this year’s survey are as follows:
- Today’s complexity is only expected to rise and more than half of CEOs doubt their ability to manage it. Seventy-nine percent of CEOs anticipate even greater complexity ahead. However, one set of organisations we call them ‘Standouts’ has turned increased complexity into financial advantage over the past five years.
- Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs. Standouts practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organisations. Creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realise their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.
- The most successful organisations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes. They are adopting new channels to engage and stay in tune with customers. By drawing more insight from the available data, successful CEOs make customer intimacy their number one priority.
- Better performers manage complexity on behalf of their organisations, customers and partners. They do so by simplifying operations and products, and increasing dexterity to change the way they work, access resources and enter markets around the world. Compared to other CEOs, dexterous leaders expect 20 percent more future revenue to come from new sources.
After reviewing the findings it becomes clear the extent to which the economic downturn has affected customers, business and society. We will not simply go back to “business as usual” once we recover from this economic downturn. The world has undergone a significant paradigm shift and we will never be the same.
As we move towards a recovery in the world economy, global leaders are experiencing high levels of complexity and uncertainty, “eight in ten CEOs expect their environment to grow significantly more complex and fewer than half believe they know how to deal with it successfully.” This environment creates an urgent need for leadership. Given this, the survey explored what CEOs consider the most important leadership qualities required over the next five years, the results are illustrated below.
CEOs cited creativity as the most important leadership quality over the next five years…
Creativity is essential when uncertainty is high and where the future is expected to be a significant departure from what we’ve known in the past. When uncertainty is high you cannot just repeat the successful practices of the past and expect similar results. You will need to find new ways of thinking, new ways of operating and new ways of behaving. The IBM survey puts it this way…
“Creativity is often defined as the ability to bring into existence something new or different, but CEOs elaborated. Creativity is the basis for ‘disruptive innovation and continuous re-invention,’ a Professional Services CEO in the United States told us. In addition this requires bold, breakthrough thinking. Leaders, they said, must be ready to upset the status quo even if it is successful. They must be comfortable with and committed to ongoing experimentation… It’s not that CEOs are just now becoming aware of the importance of creativity they have long been aware of the need to innovate their products, their processes and their customers’ experiences. Even in 2004, CEOs were telling us that ‘CEOs the world over were refocused on growth and they viewed innovation as the way to get there.’ But today, creativity itself has been elevated to a leadership style. Traditional approaches to managing organisations need fresh ideas, ideas that are intended to disrupt the status quo.”
It seems that we are entering a period in our history that places a premium on effective leadership. It’s not often that we have the opportunity to re-invent how we choose to approach our life and work. These are exciting times indeed…!
- What are you doing in response to this increased demand for leadership?
- Are you re-examining your existing leadership practices?
- Are you experimenting with new approaches, new paradigms, new ways of working? If not, why?
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The Power Of Leading By Example
A recent post “Developing future leaders” by Mitch McCrimmon provides and interesting perspective on the importance of leading by example as follows…
“Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela had a one-off leadership impact on their respective governments without being members of those governments and having no authority within them. Similarly, when knowledge workers promote new products to management, they have a one-off leadership impact with no managerial authority over their bosses.
Leading by example is not restricted to those in managerial roles. Employees can show leadership by example to their colleagues. And companies can show leadership by example with innovative products despite having no managerial authority over their markets… Pure leadership means showing the way for others, either by example or by explicitly promoting a new direction.”
We all intuitively know that leading by example is the most powerful form of leadership, but ironically it’s often the most overlooked. As Mahatma Gandhi once said “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” The insight from Mitch, is that leading by example is something that we can all do, no matter our role, no matter our position. We can all make the choice and take responsibility to be the change we want to see. We can all take initiative, we can all make the decision to “show the way for others”.
- Are you leading by example?
- Have you chosen to be the change?
- Have you chosen to show the way?
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