Be Courageous and Get On With It after Graduation

Blue skies and sunshine set the tone for Granite State College's commencement ceremony yesterday, celebrating the accomplishments of hundreds of newly minted alumni. Juggling full-time jobs, families, disabilities and more while tackling rigorous curricula, many of these graduates model values of persistence and discipline that all of us can emulate.

Yet... as the songs, speeches and thunderous applause all drew to a close, I couldn't help but to ponder silently: What's next for each of them? What will they do with their education and degrees? While completing the years of coursework is commendable, earning a degree is still a fairly structured process with a well-defined beginning and end. Life, however, is very open-ended, and life's unknowns are exactly what face the graduates as each one descends from the stage, leather diploma cover in hand.

I wonder whether they were moved by a common message from the speakers, that all of us can do something extraordinary for at least one other person, if we set our hearts and minds to it. Hal Jordan posed a challenge to the audience: "Be courageous. The opposite of courage is not cowardice. It's apathy." And apathy is what worries me. With so many resources invested by all parties in this education, apathy is a sure way to net little in the end.

Apathy is not usually intentional, either. I think it's just the comfortable default. When there is a clear goal in sight, we can motivate each other to reach it. But once the concrete objective of completing a collegiate program is attained, one doesn't always leave with a clear goal for what's next. Change the country? Change our state? Change our local community? These sentiments sound great, but it's unclear how to really make a difference. Instead, I fear that we will simply go back to the known goal of improving our own situations.

So, I have just one wish for all who were touched by #GSC2013: Each participant at commencement today picks a single dream or aspiration and defines a short-term goal to move in that direction. Then, as Lucile Jordan advised, we can "get on with it." Let's achieve the monumental eventually, starting with a realistic game plan that builds on the momentum of graduation.

It's never too late to change or to affect change

As my first 90 days in this new leadership position draws to a close, I find myself sitting blankly in front of my luxurious company laptop, dissatisfied and disappointed with myself.  90 days or __ hours later since I started, what do I have to show for myself?  Too little, by my own judgement.

Sure, I've kicked off a few projects with high visibility: launching a new portal for students and faculty, and migrating to Salesforce from Intelliworks.  And I'm working with fortuitous support from great colleagues to roll out a transformational communication tool, Chatter.  Also, I'm setting performance goals with my direct reports that I plan to reinforce in order to focus our efforts.

But I can't shake the feeling that I'm starting to run faster and faster on a shaky foundation that I have less and less time to solidify.  With one staff member gone just before I arrived, and with another one on his way out right now, have I really established the right rapport with the right people to continue advancing the organization's mission?  Am I really running the department?  Or am I just riding my staff's previous momentum?

At this critical milestone, 90 days since day 1, I find myself in an uncomfortable position of my own creation.  Fortunately, I believe that if I have the power to dig a hole for myself, I also have the power to elevate myself to better heights.

In short, it's never too late to stop, hit the reset button, and put yourself back on the right path.

In managerial accounting, there's a concept that's supposed to help us move forward without the baggage of the past.  If you guessed "sunk costs" for the concept, then you're on the same wavelength as me.  I look at my previous work, good and bad, as sunk costs.  The experience and knowledge should be treated as objective data for consideration in future decisions.  What was good can be sustained.  What was bad can be stopped.  And what I should have done but didn't do can be started.  As long as I remember that the past does not determine the future, I wield ultimate control of my performance and contribution to the organization.

So, I am mentally hitting the reset button, picking up a copy of Michael Watkins' The First 90 Days and  taking charge of the next 90 days.  In the words of a favorite song on my playlist:  "... we'll turn it all around 'cause it's not too late.  It's never too late."

Worktime expectations: giving and receiving feedback

It's hard for me to decide which is more difficult: giving or receiving feedback.  But since there are numerous benefits to doing both in the workplace, I believe we should reasonably expect an employee to participate on both sides of this activity.  The reason is simple.  An organization needs feedback at the organizational level, just as humans need feedback on an individual level.

Just think:  How well would you function if your stomach doesn't tell you when you're full?  Or if your ears don't relay the sound of a fast-approaching vehicle?  Or if your eyes don't show you where your hands are as you're threading a needle?

An organization is much the same.  We know in our minds that it's important to stay coordinated with our colleagues, and everyone seems to lament the fact that often the left hand knows not what the right hand is doing.  So, let's do something to connect our organizational senses.

Giving feedback is pretty straightforward:  After each significant engagement with another individual within the organization, provide some feedback to explain the good, the bad and the ugly.  The other individual can be anyone: a peer in your department, your manager, your direct report, a colleague in another part of the organization.

The challenges to meeting this straightforward expectation are mostly cultural.  Do you feel that your feedback is valued?  Are you afraid of giving feedback?  Do you know how to give feedback in a professional manner that gets the point across while avoiding personal attacks?  I believe it's a leader's job to remove these barriers to facilitate the critical flow of communications up, down and across an organization.

Receiving feedback is a bit more complicated, as two steps are involved.  First, you have to create a channel through which feedback is created.  Then, once feedback is received, you need to confirm receipt of the feedback and then act on it.

The appropriate action on feedback depends on whether the comment was positive or negative.  If feedback was positive, then continue doing whatever it was that merited the support.  If the feedback was negative, then adjust your behavior, explain your behavior or ask for further discussion of the comment.

The primary challenge to meeting this expectation is also cultural.  How much feedback are you able to take?  Positive feedback is always pleasant on the senses, but it's the negative feedback to which we need to pay the most attention.

After all, it's easier to adjust the oven temperature while baking than to salvage burnt cupcakes.

Worktime expectation: self-reflection

In trying to set performance goals with my staff, based on my worktime expectations of an ideal employee and our organization's mission and objectives, I received good feedback that the broad categories of my expectations are currently unclear at best.  So, I aim to explain each of them in a series of posts, starting with what I hope is the simplest category: self-reflection.

To me, self-reflection in the workplace is the solo act of reviewing and adjusting one's own behavior to better serve the organization's needs.  The process can be outlined in three simple steps:

1. Review your recent activities, assessing how productive and well-aligned they were.  Consider your own personal goals and the organization's goals in your assessment.
2. Make a short-term action plan, noting which activities to start doing, to stop doing and to still continue to do.
3. Execute your short-term action plan.

The length of the "short term" is up to the individual to decide, based on that person's individual capabilities and the time constraint set by leadership.  For example, take an employee with a short attention span who is expected to spend 2.5% of his time on self-reflection.  This employee may decide that "short term" equates to one week, which is just enough time for him to start losing focus on the action plan.

As implied, self-reflection is not a one-time process, but rather a habit that should be developed over time.  I searched on Google for "why is it important to self-reflect" and found a few useful resources that explain how the process helps in many situations:

• Real Talk blog: "Why Self Reflection Is Important"
• College of the Canyons: "Self-Awareness"
• DJUS Online: "Cognitive Effects of Self-Awareness on Thought"

And when would be good to start this process?  Well, how about today?

Customer-focused? Prove It

One of the major points that The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan continuously makes is that everything a leader does and doesn't do is communicating to those around him or her.  The order in which the leader completes his tasks and schedules his meetings also speaks volumes about priorities and interests.  With that in mind, I started thinking more about one of the phrases that stick out in my mind as an important philosophy from GSC's president: "student-focused" (a.k.a. "customer-focused").

Bradt, Check and Pedraza give a very thoughtful and poignant example of how easy it is to say what sounds good and then act in a completely different manner.  Basically, the story focuses on a new CEO's plan to show up on day 1 and then immediately launch internal committees to tackle priorities.  When the CEO was asked how his actions would speak to his espoused goal of becoming more customer-focused, the CEO realized that his actions were giving the wrong message.  After reconsidering, the CEO decided to meet with key customers to understand their delights and disappointments with the company.

While it may seem like a cop-out to emulate this tactic, I think it holds a lot of water in my entry into a technology leadership role that has responsibility for providing technology services that directly impact customers, or students as the case is at GSC.  Having no direct experience as an online learner or instructional designer in the higher education industry, I have a lot of catching up to do.

So, for me personally, I plan to register for one of GSC's online leadership classes at the earliest opportunity when I start my new job, and I will take time to speak with students who are served at every single one of GSC's campuses.  I will also plan to talk to students studying at competing institutions in NH, such as UNH, KSC PSU and SNHU.

I'll close this post with a slightly modified quote (borrowed with thanks to Railsfactory) from Mahatma Gandhi that I feel helps align me with the president's goal of becoming more student-focused.

A [student] is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work - he is the purpose of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to serve him.

What's an Appropriate Opening Address?

In a few days I will have the opportunity to address all of my staff for the very first time.  None of them have any significant history with me, and many (if not all) of them have significantly more years of work experience than me.  So, what am I supposed to say, without knowing any of them and without having a good understanding of the situation at my new organization?

The opportunity to make a first impression led me down the road of taking a deeper look at why I was brought on board.  How am I expected to add value to the organization?  Fortunately, my new boss was kind enough to remind me of my key areas of responsibility, which includes educational technology, information technology and business intelligence (a.k.a. institutional research).  For each area, my job is to understand, develop and communicate my boss's (and his boss's) vision to my staff and then help them take steps to realize that vision together.  The understanding, developing and communicating of a vision will be pretty easy, since I can do that mostly on my own.  The real challenge will be how to collaborate with my staff to actually execute a plan to achieve that vision.

In order to collaborate, I feel like I must have the respect of my staff.  And herein lies the real problem on my mind:  What can I say that will not make me look like an arrogant, self-absorbed ass?  What can I say that will still be believable and exciting to people I've never worked with before?

I could talk about my past experience, but that would seem self-absorbed.  I could talk about the vision, but I don't really know what that is yet.  I guess all I'm left with is talking about my philosophy and expectations, with an emphasis on my own eagerness to learn from everyone and a concession that I am not and will never be perfect.  As for adding value to the organization and my staff, the proof will be in my actions, not in my words.

100-Day Plan: Communication

Leaders communicate. I get that... I think. The book actually makes a very sharp point: A leader communicates continuously without interruption. This means that everything one chooses to do and not do is an act of communication, implying ideas and motives behind a leader's m.o. As my previous boss Tom often told me, true skill lies in knowing what not to do.

The book also makes a point about the order in which proactive communication occurs. The authors state that people contacted first will feel more valued and that people contacted later will feel less valued. Since this is probably true, I need to take extra steps to ensure that everyone I talk to feels as equally valuable as possible. The truth is: Each person should be equally valuable in my eyes until his or her actions lead me to believe otherwise. For example: I originally scheduled the order of meetings with my direct reports based solely on alphabetical order. If this creates a sense of inequality or bias, that consequence is completely unintentional.

But more importantly, the book reminds me to know myself and fully adopt my own mantras so that all that I do and not do automatically reflect and project the values that I hope everyone will adopt. Those values are still a work in progress, but I can start with these three guidelines.

First, see the vision. This really means that we each should understand where the organizational leader is going and know, at a minimum, where our individual places are in that vision. It then becomes the duty of the intermediate leaders (a.k.a. mid-level managers) to propagate the vision accurately to their direct reports.

Second, seek responsibility over accountability. This idea is actually the product of a few key points. One point is that we should avoid blaming others and instead take ownership of resolving issues and problems as they arise, collaborating with others when appropriate. Another point is that we must be painfully honest in order to understand where responsibility needs to be assumed or conceded, especially when it comes to assessing each team member's strengths, weaknesses and goals.

Finally, live for laughs and smiles. I don't know whether this statement is exactly what I want to say, but what I hope to get across with this is that we should maintain our sense of humor as we work to bring smiles to our customers, internally as well as externally. Also, we should strive to generally have fun working together and remember to consume a healthy serving of humor as part of our regular diets. "Great cheese comes from happy cows," as the California Milk Advisory Board promoted.

Now the challenge is working those ideas into the basic fabric of my person so that I truly walk the talk.

100-Day Plan: Acronyms to Remember

In the interest of retaining what I'm reading, I'd like to try to remember some of the acronyms used in the New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan.

ADEPT is used as an adjective to describe the kind of people one needs to hire and retain, but the actual components of the adjective are verbs: acquire, develop, encourage (or empower, in my vocabulary), plan and transition. Those are all of the actions that a leader must take in order to surround him- or herself with truly adept or competent people.

BRAVE is also used as an adjective to describe the members of a high-performing team. Without having read the actual chapter where this is discussed, I'm guessing that brave employees are ones who are equipped to make and follow through on major decisions (relative to their roles) without needing myriad levels of approvals or reviews. The acronym itself is composed of nouns (behaviors, relationships, attitudes, values, environment) that must be aligned in order to enable staff to be brave, although not to the extent of being foolishly brave.

The final one I remember is called ACES, an acronym I really like: assimilate, converge and evolve, or shock. I used to play poker and love the word "aces", and it aptly summarizes the two strategies (I think) of a new leader for creating change in an organization. One is smoother, and one is more abrupt. I can't wait to dive into the chapter where this is discussed in more detail!

100-Day Plan: Introduction

So, I picked up the New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan (3rd ed.) to guide me through the transition into a new leadership position at the end of June. Having never been in a position of formal leadership, I figured it would be smart to try starting off on the right foot.

My first day with the book was spent reading the Introduction, which was great. The Intro was concisely written and summarized the content in the book, and most importantly it clued me to the chapters that I should skip to maximize my benefit from the book. As it exists, the book actually contains 4 chapters through the first two parts that deal with getting a new job, which was not apparent in the book's synopsis. But, I guess that means less for me to read over the coming weeks, which doesn't hurt.

The gist of the Intro from what I recall is that a new leader must hit the ground running by knowing in general terms what needs to be done in the first 100 days. The preparatory work begins now, before the new job starts, so I'm glad I found the book thanks to LDRLB's book review.

The other key message I got was that a leader's main responsibilities are to communicate the vision and empower his staff to achieve the larger goals of the organization through their individual efforts. And to do this, the new leader must set milestones and execute in order to meet those milestones.

Thankfully, there's nothing too unexpected in the book so far. But the proof will be in the execution, not in how well I conceptually understand the book's message.