Career Coaching
Manage Your Organization as a Portfolio of Learning Curves (via HBR)
The S Curve is about one’s trajectory: a period of slow progress, a rapid ascent as you learn more, and a sense of mastery at the peak. Where you are on the S Curve can help govern your talent development plan to keep you learning. Managers that understand S Curves can develop succession plans, recruit talent, and build a team of people with diverse and complementary strengths.
Communication
Visual Storytelling in PowerPoint (via LinkedIn Learning)
This course takes less than an hour, and walks you through how to use built-in PowerPoint features to turn a typical deck into a compelling story. Key phrases: visual storytelling, structural storytelling, keep people engaged, be memorable. The bonus was learning about PowerPoint’s Rehearse with Coach to give qualitative feedback.
How to Interrupt Someone’s Workday — Without Annoying Them (via HBR)
- Assess how critical the request is
- Don’t pile on
- Identify the right person to interrupt
- Pay attention to busyness cues
- Decrease the time burden
- Give advance warning
Emotional intelligence
Empathy Rules (via HBR)
- Embrace not knowing. “It’s not what you know, it’s what you’re willing to learn that provides space for empathy.”
- Embrace radical difference. “It’s about full engagement, even when it is uncomfortable.”
- Embrace commitment. “You have a stake in helping your neighbor make things better.”
- Embrace community. “If you’ve been heard, and the rules you’ve been asked to follow take your situation into account, you feel part of something larger than yourself.”
Leadership
Managing Anger, Frustration, and Resentment on Your Team (via HBR)
“Anger and resentment across your team can make an already stressful leadership job feel worse. But how you respond to your employees’ frustrations is critical to ensuring negative emotions don’t limit your effectiveness. The author offers four recommendations to try: 1) Balance your emotions first before reacting to your team’s frustration. 2) Lean into their anger with an intent to learn. 3) Redesign team goals together. 4) Build deeper trust by owning your part.”
Building a Stronger, More Innovative Organization
- Everything is in flux.
- We need to ask ourselves (as employees, as leaders) what our future of work is; everything is on the table.
- Organic interactions build relationships; these things are gone when we’re not in the office. Companies have to do more now to create relationships. Examples: social only (i.e., no work talk) meetings. Leave a Zoom meeting on just to have a face/voice.
- Key skills: listening, empathy
- People need to be seen and heard.
- Let people figure out their best schedule. You must have good communication for this to work.
- Involve people in decisions that impact them.
- In general, leadership development is lacking. We are not teaching people how to have difficult conversations, how to practice vulnerability. Companies that have invested in leadership development are suffering less.
- When people leave, you need to do forensics. How did we fight those people? What are we getting wrong? What are those people emotionally reacting to?
- Leaders need to ask “are you okay” and actually care about the answer.
- People need to see that leaders are human and don’t have it all under control, all the answers, etc.
- There is no such thing as a perfect leader, just like there’s no such thing as a perfect parent. You are always learning and curious about improving yourself.
- Universities don’t teach leadership; they teach management.
- More often than not, it’s the environment, not the individual. People are not towels that you wring productivity out of.
- Peer recognition is key — it’s not just about pleasing your boss.
- Who exemplifies our values (i.e., not just our production quotas)?