Category: personal reflections

In Order to Advance, Sometimes You Have to Retreat

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE
Water - Water resources

Next week will mark one year in business for Spark Consulting. Thanks to the advice of several wise friends who’ve been down this road before me, I scheduled my first “get outta Dodge” corporate retreat, and spent the early part of this week in Berkeley Springs, WV, reflecting on the past year, planning and dreaming for the coming year, and thinking about the larger “why” of doing this. The picture to the right is of my view from my retreat location.

Driving out, I was worried: would I be successful in shutting out the day-to-day work of actually running the business long enough to focus on assessment and planning and visioning? Would I really get what I wanted and needed out of my retreat?

When I arrived, I shut off my email synch to both my smartphone and my tablet, set my phone on vibrate, and got to work.

And it worked. I was able to keep my attention on the larger issues I needed to think about, and stay away from email and phone calls and social media, at least for two days. The amount of deep focus and perspective and learning I enjoyed was remarkable.

On the drive back to DC, I got thinking about the concept of a retreat. It has (at least) two connotations: one being a military retreat that signals that your battle plan may be in trouble, and the second being the idea of withdrawing into safety, privacy, or seclusion for purposes of reflection.

I think they’re related, though. Sometimes, in order to progress, we have to take a step to the side and regroup. And that deviation from the planned route can give us a different view of the whole landscape around us, and our place in it.

Which is hard to do. Small businesses face a lot of pressures on our time and resources. Associations face a lot of pressures on our time and resources. We tend to experience the cycle of business and the fiscal year and events and renewals and campaigns speeding up and speeding up and speeding up, with no way to get off or even slow down.

But that’s a lie. Even if it feels hard and painful and maybe impossible, we need quiet time to reflect periodically, to back up and see the whole picture not just the details in one tiny little corner, to lift our eyes from the problems right in front of us that seem insurmountable and get the perspective that comes from seeing the entire horizon.

What are you doing to secure that vital introspective time for yourself? For your association?

 

Learning to Take Critcism

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

This is a tough one, right?

Criticism happens to all of us, whether it’s in the form of evaluations after a presentation, the official annual review, unofficial feedback from a boss or colleagues, or editorial comments on something we’ve written.

First, we feel shock: “You didn’t love it?”

Next comes the hurt: “You just said you think my baby is UGLY?!?”

And then, generally, the outrage: “How dare YOU criticize ME?!”

If you’re able to respond with equanimity immediately, going straight to “maybe my critic has a point – I should assess this rationally,” check your pulse. You might be dead.

But then what?

Usually, responding to criticism is something we do less well early in life and our careers, and, hopefully, is something we learn to do better as we mature as people and professionals.

Let me offer a brief example from my own career. Early on, a boss told me that I make decisions rashly and without doing research or considering the data or other options.

I was young, and I didn’t particularly like or respect this guy. In my mind, he was so risk-averse, he was probably afraid to change his socks. So I dismissed his comments with a “Whatever, Poky. I’m decisive, and you just can’t handle it.”

However, the issue of perceived (too?) rapid decision making came up again later in my career, when I was more experienced and able to think about it rationally.

Here comes the advice part.

The first thing I did was unpack what he was really saying.

“Rashly” is a judgement, and a fairly harsh one at that. Let’s try putting it more neutrally.

“You make decisions too quickly.”

Better, but that’s still a subjective opinion.

“You make decisions more quickly than I am comfortable with.”

Ah ha! That’s truth, it’s accurate, and it doesn’t put either party in the place of necessarily being right or wrong. That I could work with.

What about the second part? “Without doing research or considering the data or other options”?

That’s an attribution of cause that may or may not be correct, but it’s what he was perceiving from the outside.

OK, now I had a neutrally-phrased critical observation attributed to a cause that might or might not be correct, which is a good starting place.

The second thing I did was to ask people I trust for some insight on this. “We both know I tend to be pretty decisive, but I’ve been given feedback that I make decisions too quickly and maybe without considering all the data. What do you think?”

At that point, I got some really useful feedback from people who knew me well. They helped me see that because I process information quickly and play it pretty close to the vest while I’m doing so (in Sally Hogshead‘s schema, I’m a “secret weapon”), from the outside it can look hasty. All others see is that I made a decision quickly, and they don’t know how I chose. So what I need to do is let key stakeholders into my process a little more, so they’ll be more comfortable.

What did I learn about taking criticism?

  1. What’s the source? Does this person have my best interests at heart? Do I trust him? Is she being objective? Some people are just ill-intentioned or have an axe to grind, and over-reacting to their feedback doesn’t help you.
  2. Have I heard this more than once? The more frequently you hear something and the more people you hear it from, the more likely it is to have some degree of truth.
  3. How can I reframe this in a neutral/objective way? Try to take the judgement out and concentrate only on what’s at the root of the critique. And remember that the critique is always from a particular perspective.
  4. What’s the critique versus the purported cause? Try to separate the feedback itself from any attribution of cause, since your critic might have correctly identified a symptom, but might very well be misattributing what’s driving it.
  5. Who can help me? Ask people who know you well and where you can trust what they think. The people around us often see us more clearly than we see ourselves.
  6. Finally, take everything you learned from this process and apply it to how you can improve in the future.

I’ll admit, it’s a lot easier to brush off criticism with a, “What an asshole! What does SHE know?” And it’s totally acceptable to START there. The key is what happens next.

The Consultant and the Association Exec Should Be Friends

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Eons ago (actual time: four years), I wrote two  blog posts on the topic of consulting and RFPs. They’re still among my most popular posts ever.

I got thinking about this topic again recently for a few reasons:

  • I just got my shiny new ASAE Buyers’ Guide, which includes an article on the RFP process.
  • There’s been some chatter lately on some of the Collaborate communities about the RFP process.
  • I just submitted a proposal in response to an RFP that asked for my “project management methodology,” aka, my approach to managing the consultant/client relationship (which I thought was a damn fine question).

As the title of this post states, the consultant and the association executive should be friends (bonus points if you get the Oklahoma! reference). One side has expertise to offer, the other side needs that expertise periodically (but not continuously, which is why you’re hiring a consultant rather than another staff person), what’s the problem?

The problem, often, is that we fail to follow the golden rule. Rather than treating each other as we ourselves would want to be treated, we behave badly.

Consultants can be overly aggressive and too “sales-y.” We are sometimes guilty of hounding execs, acting boorish, discounting organizational culture, and being far too convinced of our own brilliance.

Association execs have been known to issue “spray & pray” RFPs to everyone under the sun, a huge waste of time and energy on both sides. They waffle. They refuse to talk to consultants and withhold information. Some of them have been known to steal consultants’ intellectual property, or give (higher priced) Consultant A’s (perhaps overly detailed) proposal to (lower priced) Consultant B to implement.

People! We have to work together here!

And that’s that point: the consulting relationship is just that – a relationship. A partnership. The proposal process is like getting dating. Signing the contract is like getting married. And you both want your marriage to work, right?

Consultants provide a lot of the intellectual capital in association management, some of it for free, some of it for pay. Association execs are our clients, and our partners in creating change. And both sides are vital members of the community we all love. Because, as Jamie Notter is fond of reminding us, it’s all about love.

Or to quote myself, from that ancient RFP blog post:

What’s the common theme? Relationship. We’re about to enter into a relationship. You don’t start a dating relationship by refusing to talk to the other party, withholding information, and putting them through a lot of silly, unnecessary tests (and if you do, odds are you’re single), and you don’t want to start a consulting relationship that way, either.

 

 

What Is Your Real Mission?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Last fall, I had the opportunity to participate in The Boondoggle. Organized by Joe Gerstandt and Jason Lauritsen, it provided an opportunity for 10 people who didn’t know each other to sit in a cabin outside Omaha for 2 1/2 days and think and talk deeply about the future of work.

By the afternoon of day two, we’d pretty much all gotten past the posturing, and we were finally getting real. We had grouped all the previous day and half’s work into key themes, then we did an exercise where teams were assigned to facilitate a discussion around each of the key themes.

My partner and I were assigned to facilitate a discussion around finding meaning in your work, which led us into talking about organizational mission, and how that aligns – or doesn’t align – with personal values.

Now I’m not saying that everyone has to find deep meaning in her work. I think it’s completely acceptable to “just” a job that pays your bills, and find your meaning in your family and friends or your religious community or your volunteer work or your avocation.

But I do think that if you want to find meaning in your work, that option should be available to you. And everyone doesn’t have to find the same meaning. If your meaning is saving puppies or teaching kids to read, that’s great. But your meaning could be a fat title and a fatter paycheck. It could be amassing personal power. You should’ve have to “greenwash” what’s really important to you.

The problem is, every organization – for profit or otherwise – has a mission statement. But most of them are so much sunny bullshit.

If you want to know what an organization really values, look at what they reward.

Do they say they value customer service, but their default answer to everything is “that’s against policy”?

Do they claim to value teamwork, but reward kingdom building and territoriality?

Do they say they provide quality products and services at competitive prices…and don’t?

Do they say they want innovation, then automatically shoot down every new idea anyone proposes?

And even when what the organization actually values isn’t in direct conflict with what the organization claims to value, mission statements are often nothing more than empty platitudes that sound nice and mean nothing.

Why not be honest?

If your organization will do ANYTHING – exploit low-skilled workers, pollute the environment, skirt taxes and regulations – to make your widget 5 cents cheaper than the other guy’s, admit it.

If you really do value excellent customer service above all, live it, and tell people.

If what your organization really wants is to never, under any circumstances, rock the boat in your industry or profession, say so.

If you aim to change the world in some tangible way no matter what the cost to the people involved, let people know.

Brand authenticity drives brand loyalty. If you’re open and authentic about what life is really like inside your organization, you’ll find yourself doing business with staff and customers who are truly of a like mind and can align themselves with what your organization is truly values, not some nice, sappy-sounding thing that’s on your website that is patently false.

There really are people who would love to work at a place where the profit motive is the most important thing. There really are people who want to change things so badly, they will not count the personal cost. It’s not everyone, but if, as an organization, you can be honest about what you really value, the people who do choose to do business with you will be choosing that from an authentic place and will, ultimately, be happier.

Be authentic, warts and all. Someone will still love you and want exactly what you’re offering.

 

“Just Do The Next Right Thing”

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

January means resolution time, and whether you go the traditional self improvement route or follow my advice and take the “fun resolutions only” path, there’s a good chance you’ve set yourself some big goals for 2013.

Which is awesome. And really daunting.

Where do you start?

At this time of year, I’m always reminded of my good friend Vinay Kumar‘s advice: “Just do the next right thing.”

Your resolution may involve 100 steps. You don’t have to know step 99 right now. All you have to know is step 1.

To quote Neo:

I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin.

What step will you take today to start your journey?

A Year in Photos

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

My resolution in 2012 was to do Photo365.

I started a little before January 1, 2012 and took at least one photo nearly every day for the entire year. I know I did miss a handful of days (likely about 5, without going back to confirm), but many days I took more than one photo, resulting in 688 posts to the blog

Most of the photos were taken in and around DC, although there are also photos from New Orleans, rural Virginia, the Philadelphia area, the Jersey shore, rural Maryland, Indianapolis, Omaha, St. Louis, San Diego, Kansas City, Portland, Fort Lauderdale, Dallas, etc.

I tried not to take pictures of myself (two, neither of my face) or people in general (very few), my meals (although there are food photos), or my cat (less successful there).

So what did I learn?

I’m not much better as a photographer. But that wasn’t really the point. If it had been, I wouldn’t have been taking all the photos with the camera on my iPhone.

The point was to be the see-er, not the seen, and to document the world around me.

What I mostly learned was to notice things. A pretty flower. An interesting line. A great shadow. Beautiful light. Scenes from my neighborhood. The passage of time. Outlaw art. Big things. Small things. A fallen leaf. Great architecture. Stunning gardens. A funky tree. A bee. A spider. Holiday decorations. Funny signs. Sunsets. Clouds. House projects in process (everyone takes pictures when they’re done). Snow. Hurricanes. Birds. Doors. Interesting things on walls and sidewalks and streets.

Mostly, it made me SLOW DOWN and PAY ATTENTION.

What will you do to remind yourself to SEE in 2013?

Book Review: The Back of the Napkin

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Yes, I know this book was published in 2008, and it’s been sitting on my “to read” pile almost that long.

Fortunately, the Association Chat book club got me to bump it to the top of the pile, and I finally read it last month.

The book’s subtitle is: solving problems and selling ideas with pictures, and teaching you to do that is author Dan Roam’s ostensible goal.

Short version: it’s a great concept, but I’m not quite sure how to implement it.

Longer take:

According to Roam, there are three types of people: black pen types (who LOVE to draw ideas), yellow pen types (who are quick to jump in to edit and add), and red pen types (“I can’t draw”). Confession: I am definitely a red pen type.

On the other hand, I also LOVE visual representations of information. I love infographics. I’m always the one urging colleagues to use fewer words and more pictures to share information with senior leadership. I think every organization’s board status report should be a series of 5-10 key metrics that are tracked over time and shared in graphs or charts. I’m the person who infamously talked a panel  for the 2009 ASAE Annual Meeting into doing a presentation with NO words on the slides (that didn’t go over all that well).

So what I’m saying is that, while I am a red pen, I’m also someone eager to be persuaded that representing problems visually can help us solve them and to learn how to do it.

I’m just not sure that this book can get most of us there.

It’s not that Roam doesn’t provide plenty of information and explanation. He spends almost 150 pages explaining six key ways of seeing and five key ways of showing, then placing all that into a grid (page 141 if you have the book handy) that can tell you, based on the type of framework you need and a short series of either/or questions, which type of picture you’re going to need to explain what’s going on and spot a solution.

The second half of the book uses a single case study to work readers through the ways of seeing and showing, the framework, and the questions to get to, in chapter 15, a not-immediately-obvious solution and description of how one would present that solution to a team of executives.

But I still don’t feel like I would be able to apply the techniques he describes successfully the next time I’m faced with what looks like an intractable problem at the office.

Maybe I just need more practice. I have, in my last two positions and since hearing Roam speak at ASAE’s Great Ideas Conference a few years ago, insisted on having a white board in my workspace. I even use it sometimes. And once in a while, it doesn’t even feel forced.

The book does, however, make a GREAT case for hiring Roam to help your organization solve big, hairy problems, assuming you can afford him. And maybe that’s really the point.

Examining One’s Habits

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Although I celebrate Mardi Gras every year with gusto, I’ve never taken the next step: making a Lenten resolution. No doubt, the fact that I’m not Catholic has something to do with that.

But I do like the idea of a defined annual period of time in which to consciously examine and focus on one’s habits.

So this year, I am giving up swearing for Lent. Those of you who know me personally will realize this is not a simple challenge I’ve set for myself. But the point isn’t perfection – or at least, again, not being Catholic the point *for me* is not achieving perfection. So, no, I don’t plan to keep a “swear jar” or anything like that.

My goal in doing this is to become more conscious of how I use words and express myself and the impact that, in turn, has on the people around me.

Is there a habit in your personal or work life you’d like to examine more closely? Is there something you do out of habit that no longer serves you? Or something you’d like to become more conscious of? Is there something you’d benefit from adding? Can you take the next 40 (OK, technically 39 at this point) days to focus on it?

Although it’s traditional, I don’t think that a Lenten resolution would necessarily have to be about giving something up. It could just as easily be about adding something positive.

Maybe at the end of 40 days, I’ll resume my regular speech patterns. But maybe I won’t. Either way, I’ll have thought about it, which is saying something.

“PR by Ostrich”

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on “PR by Ostrich”

Two major scandals have been ALL OVER the news media recently: the Herman Cain sexual harassment allegations and the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia accusations.

What do the two have to do with each other?

Cover up.

This is not a screed against Herman Cain, even though I do happen to think he’s an idiot – why do people persist in thinking that President of the United States is a good entry-level job in politics? – or against JoePa, even though I think he’s morally culpable for knowing what was going on and not doing more to stop it.

What it IS a screed against is the idea that paying people hush money and/or doing the minimum that is “legally required” is EVER a good idea.

The other thing that both of these scandals have in common is that they occurred when the Internet was still relatively in its infancy and social media wasn’t even a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.

So maybe the parties in question – the leadership at the National Restaurant Association and at Penn State – could at least be understood for thinking, “Well, these are, in fact, CRIMES we’re talking about here, but we should be able to sweep it far enough under the rug that it will NEVER come to light.”

OK, probably not, but you get my point.

How about, instead of lying and denying and spinning and trying to shut people up, both organizations chose to be open, honest, and transparent, and let the chips fall where they may?

Sure, Jerry Sandusky would likely be in jail, and the Nittany Lions would’ve lost a great linebackers coach. Which is probably a good thing, because the way it’s falling out now, it looks like the leadership of the school decided that winning football games was more important than children’s safety. Think on that for a minute. Result? The entire leadership of Penn State has completely lost everyone’s respect and their own credibility and integrity. And, shortly, their jobs. And JoePa’s previously sterling reputation has been irredeemably tarnished.

The National Restaurant Association might have gone through an ugly court case – although realistically, it would’ve been settled out of court, since that’s what almost always happens in sexual harassment cases – and they would’ve fired Cain and moved on to their next CEO. AFTER THE FIRST GO-ROUND. And then, when all this came out as part of his presidential bid, as it inevitably would, they wouldn’t be giving a black eye to the entire association community. They could’ve pointed back and said: “One woman made allegations. We went before a judge. The case was settled. We fired Cain. End of story.” And Cain could’ve gone on to harass women someplace else, most likely, but the NRA would’ve been O-U-T.

Look, if burying your head in the sand was EVER a good idea, it’s not anymore. Now this kind of behavior, besides being wrong, is just dumb.

Thanks to Shelly Alcorn for the title of this post, derived from an exchange we had on Twitter.

 

Are Some More Equal Than Others?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 2 Comments on Are Some More Equal Than Others?

Yep, it’s another post about Joe Gerstandt’s awesome How to Fly Your Freak Flag session as #ASAE11.

One of the exercises consisted of Joe reading a variety of statements and asking us to stand up, purely voluntarily and only if we wanted to share that information about ourselves, when any statement that was true about us was read.

Some of them were fairly obvious, about gender and race/ethnicity. Some were less obvious, like being raised in a rural community or by a single parent.

One of the statements he read was: “I have a disability.”

I thought about it for a few seconds, and stood up.

No, this is not going to turn into some heart-warming “coming out” story. I’m a GenXer – I don’t do heart-warming.

I don’t have depth perception, which people who know me well tend to be aware of. Thing is, I never had it in the first place, due to some serious eye problems I had as a baby/toddler. So although people who lose their depth perception later in life, particularly if it was *after* they learned to drive, tend to see themselves as disabled, that’s not an identity I generally claim. But in fact, I do have a non-apparent disability. And it felt a little scary to stand up in a crowded break out session room and claim that.

And it got me thinking: are some types of diversity easier to own in our world?

Example: in the association world, there are lots of fabulous – and fabulously out – gay men in prominent positions, both paid and volunteer. But how many out lesbians can you think of in power positions in associations? I can’t think of many. Doesn’t that seem odd, given that association work is largely female-dominated?

What about people with disabilities that aren’t visible? Hell, what about people with disabilities that *are* visible? I’ve worked in plenty of ADA-compliant buildings in the past 14 years, but I’ve never, to the best of my knowledge, worked with a person who had a disability that required ADA-covered accommodations. Several years ago, I worked on the floor *above* a disability rights organization, so I shared plenty of elevator rides with people in wheelchairs, but none of them were coming up to my floor to work for my organization.

Or think about religious minorities for a minute. Many organizations are open to our Jewish colleagues taking vacation days to celebrate their holidays, but what about other religious minorities (or at least minorities in the US)? We’re within the last few days of Ramadan this year, and summer is a tough time for Ramadan, because that sunrise to sunset fast lasts a LONG time. Are our associations open to making accommodations in work schedules or responsibilities for people whose energy levels might be low by late afternoon because of religious observance?

I quote my esteemed colleague Jeffrey Cufaude: “We have got to start walking the talk on diversity.” Also: “You won’t get different results for diversity & inclusion if you don’t even ask the question as a part of your regular work.”

Are you asking the question yet? If not now, when?