Becoming More Effective Employers
I believe that every person has potential. We also need to make sure we are developing those we serve for what is going to happen. This development needs to happen on the front end and not on the back end like so many organizations do it. We must become more effective employers. Today’s employees need high level development opportunities and high level challenges. We talk a lot about transformation. Here is the correct formula:
_____(fill in the blank)_______ Transformation = People Transformation
Additionally, we need to find out what those we serve want to learn, accomplish or create that would benefit the team. Put them on a challenging project. Help them find a mentor. Have them be a mentor and teach someone else what they know. Invite them to participate in meaningful, tangible learning opportunities. Loving those we serve means we develop on the front end of change, freedom to choose, and paths that look different for each person.
Move And Prove
So much great learning is going on in Hamburg, Germany right now at the SMART Factory League 2022 Summit. It is such an honor to get to both chair, moderate a panel, and speak at this event. One thing is for sure after Day 1 is that we need to have innovative mindsets and understand change management. And, great organizations work on a bold plan! One of the concepts yesterday that jumped out at me was the idea of multi-use of information to get the big picture. In education we are constantly talking about multiple data sources of information, but it is interesting to think about multi-use. Because we cannot wait to know everything, we must move and prove. If we wait to know everything nothing gets done and we lose all agility.
In order to reach infinity and beyond we must move and prove. To do this we need to:
- Assess our current setup – no wish list, but reality
- Define our north star and explain it to everyone (eg. Tesla is not about cars, but about sustainable energy)
- Implement consistently in sprints (small edible bites)
The sprints part of this is important. By doing small pieces of a change at a time we can measure benchmarks and iterate along the way. This is editive manufacturing. We need to Be Open, Be Active, Be Infinite.
The Moments That Change Our Lives
What are your life-changing moments? I think about life-changing moments a lot. These can be very small things to very big-time events. As I think about those moments that changed my life, I realized that they also changed my perspective. As my son enters his senior year in college we are experiencing the life-change of our developing an adult father-son relationship. This has caused me to reflect on changes that happened when I was younger, and made me feel like I was leaving my younger self behind. I was moving into adulthood, never to return. My son is moving into adulthood never to return to the “little man” as I always called him. The incredible Nothing More song, Fadein/Fadeout states it like this: “Son, I have watched you fade in; You will watch me fade out; I have watched you fade in; You will watch me fade out; When the grip leaves my hand; I know you won’t let me down.” I want to create as many moments possible with my son as he continues to fade-in.
We all had the chance to go to Matt Winn’s Steakhouse this weekend and our server, Brandon, who was awesome, got us to discussing life-changing events when he told us the biscuits would “change your life.” They did, by the way! What are those life-changing moments in our lives which reveal something powerful and influence our perspectives as we mature? We went on to discuss that the lobster tail “brought new meaning to life,” and the honey pie “is the answer to life.” I know these were goofy little quips to be coming up with, but they struck a deeper conversation about the fact that all the things we do in life change our life in some way. I even reflected on the times my mom and I use to spend lying on the ground looking up and clouds and imagining the shapes they made. Did this help shape the creative person I am today?
What are your life-changing moments? We all have those blips on our life’s metaphorical screen that shape our lives. We also need to consider the blips we are creating on others’ screens. Let’s make sure the life-changing events we bring to others are like the biscuits, lobster tail, and honey pie.
Turning Talk Into Reality
To go from talk to action is a journey. We better support ourselves and others when we understand what the journey to proficient implementation really entails. Yesterday my son and I were in Screven County, Georgia for an annual event with the Screven County FFA. Last June I had told the agriculture teacher and National FFA Ambassador, Nancy Sell, that I wanted to be a part of the event. We walked the talk and made it happen. Once I got clarity about the exact date, what else would be going on at that time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera; I was able to say, “Yes, I’ll be there.” Then, there was no backing out. If YOU SAY IT, DO IT! As someone commented yesterday, “We turned the talk into reality.”
How many times do we hear people say, “I’ll be there.” Then, they won’t be, and you knew all along they would not be. Or, even worse, “I’ll take care of this and __________will happen.” Then when it doesn’t you get the, “I’m sorry, so and so said we can’t do that” “Or, I didn’t know…” This really is a case of faking it. Or worse yet, lying. Michael Fullan (2001) called this “false clarity.” False clarity occurs when change is interpreted in an oversimplified way; that is, the proposed change has more to it than people perceive or realize” (p. 77). The problem with false clarity is we know less than we think we do. We can relate this to walking the talk or turning talk into change/action. So many times leaders see talking as doing. The real work begins when the talking ends. Successful teams make decisions that impact behaviors and produce visible results.
Bottom-line here is that successful leaders move through talk to action!
Fullan, M. (2001). The meaning of educational change (3rd ed.). New York: Penguin Group.
The Power For Change
I have always been a believer that we need to view our worlds from the perspective that there are no wrong decisions as long as we base them on all the information we have at the time. I was reminded of this last week and have now taken time to pause and reflect about this. The reminder was a comment in The Bookshop At Water’s End by Patti Callahan Henry. The book was amazing and I highly recommend it. Here is what was written: “We do what we can with what we know at the time. And, with what we believe.” This is so true. Our knowledge, wisdom, and beliefs come into play when making decisions. Additionally, our emotions play a role and I believe this is a good thing. Every moment of success in our lives has been a result of all the decisions we’ve made combined, whether we call them bad or good, or right or wrong. Our decisions are additive.
I love another line in the book where the character said, “We can’t subtract or undo decisions but we can make new ones.” This speaks to the additive nature of decisions I spoke about. What I really reflected on while reading this great book was that while some decisions open doors wide to success, others pull us into real and sometime perceived problems. But, it’s our attitude toward those decisions that decide our fate, not the nature of those decisions.
Let me share one more quote from the book to help make my final point: “Inside the very worst things you can find the power for change.” Sometimes decisions that seemed wrong at the time, help us make the right decision. For example, the student who chooses to do an internship in a medical office and hates it. The decision was not wrong, it was the right decision to let her know she didn’t like that field and should pick something else. So don’t judge your past decisions too harshly, instead learn from them and move on. Don’t use them as an excuse to affect your present.
Where Do You Want To Rise Up Next?
The title of Chapter 23 in Mindset Mondays With DTK by David Taylor-Klaus (DTK) is “Rise Up.” This caught my attention and immediately made my mind go to my friends in Alter Bridge and their great song “Rise Today.” When the first sentence in the chapter was “In our house, we like to use rock & roll life style as a metaphor,” I knew we had serendipity.
DTK told us in this chapter that no matter what happens we must step up and put on the best show possible. This made me reflect on the fact that we have the opportunity to change the world every day. As it says in “Rise Today,” “Yeah, oh yeah; I want to rise today; And change this world; Yeah, oh yeah; Oh, won’t you rise today; And change this world?”
I blogged about this song before in “How Do We Change This World?” DTK told us in this chapter there are so many opportunities when things are far from perfect and that every obstacle is an opportunity. So let’s choose to show up and step up! “Oh won’t you rise today
And change this world?”
Make Your Changes Out Loud
We know that a best practice for editing written work is listening out loud. Hearing our written work offers a new perspective to help us catch grammatical errors, poor sentence structure, plot holes, or pacing issues that your eyes skip over when you read. Because our minds will automatically make corrections when looking at something, listening provides another perspective for us to review our written work. In fact, there are apps for this. These apps allow you to edit documents while exercising, taking a run, or in my, case milking cows.
Last night when working with teacher leaders from Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee we were discussing how to adapt boldly and one of the participants said that we need to “make your changes out loud.” This was a ‘click the mic moment’ (the Zoom equivalent of ‘drop the mic’). This comment was genius. If we make our changes or intended changes out loud we can get feedback from others to make the proposed change better and give others a chance to understand the changes before they happen.
Let’s go back to using writing as the analogy here. Whether we are working on a blog, novel, or business document it’s critical that each paragraph is well written and tells the complete story necessary in that block of verse to get our point(s) across. Reading audibly as opposed to only in our head, changes our perspective on the text and provides deeper meaning. By employing making your changes out loud you will inspire others to greater engagement, ownership, and action to create positive change. So, I challenge you to listen to make your changes out loud, make sure others are listening and providing feedback, and listen to yourself as you speak or read your own words of change.
Waves Of Change
“Sometimes in the waves of change, we find our true direction”
Unknown
As I read this quote I thought about how very relevant this is to us all in 2020. Changes from the global pandemic continue to hit us hard. Sometimes things are unexpected and we have to adjust on the fly to changing circumstances. As we ride the waves, the unrecognizable becomes clear, and finding new direction becomesJust as the tide changes, other things in our life can change too, and this can push us towards the path that we were destined to follow.
Change is something we cannot keep from experiencing, but the way we get over the hurdles is where the difference stands. We all have extra obstacles put in the way right now during the global pandemic. The question becomes what are you learning, what are you doing with that learning, and how are you sharing the learning? We must be a community. How are you breaking through and finding the right path?
Do Ideas Cause Change Or Does Change Cause Ideas?
In the great book, The Upswing: How America Came Together A Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett posed the question of, “Do ideas cause change or does change cause ideas?” I am loving reading the research and work of Putnam and Garrett. I am only about 80% through the book and I love how he always points out when there cannot be any correlation, causality, or answers gained from leading or lagging indicators. I see this a lot in education; people want to jump immediately to causation. Putnam is a brilliant political scientist and Shaylyn has had a brilliant career as a change-maker and social entrepreneur. The two of them together have put together this award winning literary analysis of economic, education, civil rights, political, and other social trends for over a century. The book posits we have gone from an “I” to “We” and back to “I” society and gives us hope and ways to get back to we.
Change is defined as to simply make something or someone different, unlike the way it was before. Change can also be defined as moving from one thing to another. Synonyms for the word change consist of transform, alter, and modify. A lot of people have ideas about changing the world and making it a better place for people to live. This desire to change the world sounds very noble and heroic.
Now, back to the question prompting this post: do ideas cause change or does change cause ideas? I believe it is both. For example the idea of us carrying a source for listening to music in our pocket caused an entire chain of events (changes) leading ultimately to the SMART phone. Conversely, Coronavirus has hit the world in 2020. This has drastically changed our world from open and social to closed and locked down. This change has affected people’s lives, finances, relationships, and even their children. New ideas because of this change are being thought of every day.
Therefore, we need to keep being creative and having ideas about how to change the world. Additionally, we need to be paying attention to changes happening around us and let them prompt ideas for positive change.
Day 💯 – Getting To Know People In A Different Way
Well, here we are; day 💯 of the Covid-19 Global Pandemic. During this time of discovering a new normal, I feel more connected than ever before. I have met the children, spouses, pets, and even a grandmother of people I never would have thought possible. I’ve even introduced some of our Jersey dairy cows to others while connecting virtually. Additionally, I’ve witnessed parents attending school events virtually, while at work, that never would have been able to attend before. My point? There are things that we need to consider becoming normal. I’m not saying replace necessarily, but supplement.
Having said that, I now begin to think about what else do we need to be thinking about? How do we leverage technology? How do we stay human? How do we get the right tools in the hands of everyone? How do we decide what the right tools are?
It’s interesting to me that before the WHO (I thought that was a rock band) named this a Global Pandemic we were talking about sustainability and the environment, health care, education, and many other things. While in the education realm we have been focused on connectivity and providing meaningful virtual education, and in healthcare our actions have been around caring for Coronavirus patients and stopping the spread of the disease, we will get back to talking about the major issues in the way we were before the pandemic took over. For example, we will, no doubt, be rethinking health care and how it is delivered. In education, I continue to argue that our conversation needs to shift to the idea that school is no longer a place.
Even though I served as moderator for an awesome global event last month that was virtual with 47 countries represented, I also wonder if our assumptions about globalization have been challenged. We had been talking about distance no longer being a factor, but in some ways I’ve seen us become more isolationist and seeing us care more about the locality we operate in and what we can touch and feel. But, we’ve also seen that we can hire the best talent from anywhere and bring them onto teams. The only remaining question related to that is how to do remote working well.
I don’t think I am alone with all of this thinking and pondering. We are now entering a time of needing to decide which practices still make sense and which need to change. We need to come together as families, businesses, schools, communities, cities, states, and nations to answer the question, “What can we create together?”
Byron's Babbles 
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