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Have you ever been asked what your expertise is?  It is currently accepted wisdom among the personal branding cognoscenti to demonstrate you are an expert in something in order for your voice to be heard amid the competitive noise.  Being a generalist can appear anonymous (if that’s not a contradiction).   Let’s play devil’s advocate.

Specialists can have their downside too as Mark Babbitt of YouTern.com has observed in relation to career experts – “Is being perceived as an expert (and for some, self-promotion) more important than actually helping someone find a job?” http://nblo.gs/hlFMX

Generalists have had a hard time of it over the years.  A career path that takes someone to different organisations, roles and types of work can be seen by a future employer as uncertain, unclear, reactive and lacking in ambition.  Yet, it might purely be down to whatever work someone can get because of market conditions.

Alternatively, it may have been a conscious choice by the individual who has either transferred their skills and capabilities to a different setting or sought a new challenge and learned new capabilities.  This is still very common in the UK Civil Service where many staff with long service move every 2 or 3 years for variety or interest, personal development or to freshen things up in that area and to allow other people opportunities. 

In other words, their generalism is their specialism.  The obvious criticism is being the proverbial jack of all trades and master of none.  The reality in many cases is jack of all trades and master of many, building a breadth and depth of expertise that is built upon, re-visited or re-interpreted for the benefit of others in a virtuous spiral.

A parallel of sorts can be seen in the rise and rise (so they claimed) of the portfolio career in the private sector.  This was seen as a ‘good’ thing in terms of diversity and flexibility for both organisations and portfolio worker. 

At the same time, the rise of individualism has led to the mantra of ‘choice’ in society and less inhibition about deciding what work people want or are prepared to do.  The very notion of a ‘career’, in the sense of a pre-determined path, is being replaced with a changing set of mini-careers, or “riding the career carousel” (rather than climbing a ladder) as Ian Gooden of talent management consultancy Chiumento has identified, where you get on and off at various times of your life – http://www.chiumento.co.uk/web/content/links/Ridingthecareercarousel:AChiumentoGreenPaper

This is wonderfully exciting and stimulating for some people, deeply uncomfortable and uncertain for others.  Developing and sustaining one’s employability is hard and a lifetime’s activity.

The job for life mentality of the past is in intensive care and the career carousel can be a badge of honour for Generation Y.  The current funding cuts and consequent job losses are forcing people of all generations to think very differently about what they want in the future as well as what they can get in the present.

Many of the current generation have made a paradigm shift in relation to time which affects how they see careers and the world of work.  It is based much more on being in the present, living for now.  Previous generations have emphasised planning for the future (pensions) and valuing the past (tradition, stability).

In stark terms, our current experience is one of a suffocating economic environment pressing down on our freedom of choice leading to compromise and pragmatism increasingly driving our options and behaviours for being employable. Finding a job you like and that complements your strengths may be a longer term goal for some.  

Standing out ought not to be about trying to be something you’re not.  This is not an either/or debate – if you’re an expert, flaunt it.  You can still standout as a generalist simply by being yourself and promoting it.  As Anthony Townsend (Institute for the Future) says in his article, In Defense of Generalists (http://www.iftf.org/blog/20?page=1), we need “transdisciplinary thinking” to tackle the future and focusing on specialists is not the only way of fostering talent.

“If I’d known more about myself in advance … then I would have done some things differently,” so lamented a manager in research by OPP about not investing in their self-awareness earlier in life.  Is your career unfulfulled?  Many managers want someone to tell them what and how to do the people bit.  What does this imply?

It tells us something about how some people are brought up at home, the habits they pick up and take through life, the nature of our education system and the cultures of past and present workplaces.

Sir Ken Robinson is a strong critic of how our educational system operates.  “A degree is not a guarantee anymore particularly if the route to it marginalises most of the things that you think are important about yourself.”   www.theRSA.org

He believes that we are trying to meet the future by doing what we did in the past and has called for a new paradigm.  It is one based on divergent thinking – the ability to see multiple answers rather than one, thinking laterally in finding solutions and ways of interpreting a question.  We all have this capacity as children and it mostly deteriorates as we get older.  As he explains, you are told at school there is only one answer and it’s at the back of the book, don’t look or copy – “once outside of school it’s called collaboration.” 

There is a pressing need to move to a different way of educating the next generations.  As Einstein wryly observed, “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”

I’m with Ken on this one.  A proper balance between coaching and mentoring approaches, rather than instruction and limited freedom for independent thought, would be a step-change in the way we bring our children up at home and school. 

As a society, we need to move away from too often stepping in to ‘help’ when the result is it infantilises, being judgemental when the result is loss of self-esteem, deriding vulnerability when the result is an unhealthy facade, over-emphasising shortcomings or weaknesses when the result is being written off too soon or simply not valued as a person.

At an earlier age, we need to move towards encouraging people to think for themselves within clear boundaries, filling in the gaps where people ‘don’t know what they don’t know’ and believing in and nurturing every individual’s potential.

We could usefully equip people of all generations with the skills, knowledge and mindset of coaching and mentoring, whether in education, the workplace or the home.  As many a motivational guru has repeatedly stressed, what works is people being true to themselves, moving towards a goal or dream that is important to them, the right support in getting there and control over their lives. 

Too idealistic or a compelling aspiration?  What do you think?

Much has been made on Twitter about Osama’s and Adolf’s deaths being reported on the same day, 1st May, albeit 66 years apart.  No Damian-like connections so far, but give it time.  The desire to make meaning from coincidence seems embedded in the human psyche.  But this innumeracy (cf John Allen Paulos) can have troublesome consequences. 

Here are 11 relating to employability (you can read more in my book Learning to Leap http://www.bookdispensary.com/acatalog/David_Shindler.html):

1. Personalising: The number of people who die in airplanes v who die in car crashes – a common response to the former by the innumerate is to personalise (‘but what if you’re that one?’).  The number of people who will apply for this job v you getting an interview or the job itself (‘why would it be me?’).  Why not you?
2. Probabilities: The probability of getting two heads in two flips of a coin is 1 in 4. A 20% chance of rain implies an 80% chance of no rain.  If 2500 people apply for a graduate scheme with 12 spaces, you have a 1 in 191 chance of getting it (0.5%).  If 80 people are interviewed, it’s nearly 1 in 30 (3%) at the outset.  If 12 people are selected, it’s nearly a 1 in 7 chance (14%) at the interview stage.
3. Coincidences: Innumerate people tend to underestimate the frequency of coincidences and endlessly try to rationalise things that seem to correspond.  If you anticipate another person’s thoughts or have a dream that seems to come true, many would put this down to the mysterious workings of the universe.  The reality is that an unlikely event is likely to occur (the train gets cancelled), whereas there is much less chance that a particular one will (the 7.20 on the day of the interview).
4. Chance: The value or opportunity presented to you by the contacts you make on LinkedIn are based on the idea of  the number of degrees of separation between you and other people in a chain of connections.  So, you might have a modest 60 contacts which translates to a potential 7900 connections two degrees away (friends of friends) and 771,200 connections three degrees away (friends of their friends).  Therefore, the likelihood of you and a stranger meeting say at a business conference, and being linked via two intermediaries in between is unexpectedly high.
5. Significance: Statistical significance is not the same as how we use the word in everyday language.  Through calculating the standard deviation, significance means we are confident that something cannot be down to chance alone.  It doesn’t tell you why.  The most common error is for an organisation to say, for example, that their productivity or profits or the arrest rates for burglary have gone up by 10% this year without giving any context.  On the face of it, you think it is good news.  Then you discover that the year before it had gone up 40% and the year before that 2% and so on.  Without looking at the trend (and then the underlying causes), it is very difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions.  Yet, that’s what newspapers, politicians and companies do regularly.  Understanding significance is significant.
6. Magnitudes: The difference between a million and a billion (e.g. it takes 11.5 days for a million seconds to elapse v  32 years for a billion seconds to tick away).  Think bankers’ bonuses or the size of the national debt. One graduate chasing on average 100-120 posts (Association of Graduate Recruiters, 2011) v 20% of recent graduates actively seeking work (Office for National Statistics, 2011)
7. Scaling numbers up or down proportionally is often invalid.  If the number of available jobs goes up by 5%, it doesn’t mean 5% of unemployed people will apply or be able to apply.  If the size of a company doubles, it doesn’t mean the size of its departments will also double in size.
8. Regression to the mean: If you perform well for a period, it will be followed at some point by a drop in performance.  If you have great success for a number of years in your career, it will be followed by a dip at some point.  It doesn’t mean you’re no good any more.  Second books for authors and movie sequels are often not as good as the original.  They are just regression to the mean performance.
9. Filtering: Employers in many sectors usually focus upon winners and extremes.  They tend to put people down by comparing them with extraordinary cases (‘he’s not as good as Wayne Rooney’).  In baseball, both the Oakland A’s and The Boston Red Sox became highly successful teams by using this insight to their advantage by recruiting players who were perceived by other teams (and therefore overlooked) as average players at knockdown prices.  They identified what roles or contributions were inadequate or missing from the team and selected players who had those specific talents even if the rest of their game was ordinary. What particular hidden talent do you have employers need that might have been overlooked by you or others in the past?
10. Luck: The difference between the number of heads and the number of tails tends to get bigger as we continue to flip the coin and the changes in lead from head to tail and vice versa tend to become increasingly rare.  Unsurprisingly, some people feel like they are losers and others winners, although there is no real difference between them other than luck.  
11. Logic: Faulty logic is a kind of innumeracy.  Not being able to conclusively refute a claim does not constitute evidence for them.  Think Iraq and WMD.  Somewhere in here comes whatever you deem to be informal logic, better known as your common sense.  An employer might say you don’t have sufficient experience in a particular area.  Just because you don’t have it written down on your CV, doesn’t mean you don’t have other relevant experience.  One answer is to think more laterally and talk about transferrable skills with examples.

May Day may never be the same again for many people, but it’s still May 1^st.

Even geniuses have trouble getting up in the morning.  Just ask Mrs Mozart.  Something had to be done to get her errant son out of bed, a foolproof way of changing young Wolfgang Amadeus’s behaviour.  Music was always going to play a part, of course. She knew he wouldn’t be able to resist something so close to his heart.  

Mrs M decided to sing the first seven notes of a musical scale (there are 8 in total) and stop.  Her sleepy son could not resist awakening to complete the sequence on the piano.  It was an itch he just had to scratch. 

This phenomenon is familiar to musical students and is called an unresolved suspension.  Being tone deaf, it conjures up for me images of half-built bridges or lumpy custard from a carton that hadn’t first been shaken. 

Yet, there is something more profound about the happy resolution to this musical tale.  What if we could apply the principle to more meaningful situations in the workplace today?  What note do people want to sing or play because it’s an automatic response or a genuine preference to which they are attracted?  What tunes could leaders and managers play to encourage people to act through creating a relevant Pavlovian response?  What consequent reward would people get from scratching their itches?

An itch is an irritation that we feel compelled to act upon because it’s mildly uncomfortable and stops us from concentrating on our primary focus.  It’s a siren call to which we are irrevocably drawn.  We have the ability to do it (scratch, complete the scale), the resources (fingers, physical flexibility) and freedom to choose whether we act or not.  Are these conditions in place in your team?

American business coach, author and stand-up comedian, Shelle Rose Charvet, (a consultant with a sense of humour!) says that it takes six months to really change a habit – www.shellestoptips.com.  She suggests you place the new behaviour inside your existing ritual as a way of consistently encouraging you to practise until the change is second nature.  It’s like artificially creating your own itch which you then have to scratch.

An example might be someone who wants to reflect more so they give a more emotionally intelligent response than they do habitually.  A simple way of helping to achieve the behaviour change could be to wear or carry about them a physical item with reflective qualities, like a silver pendant or small mirror.  Every time they find themselves in a situation where the impulse is to respond in their usual way, a quick rub or feel of their reflector would be a way of reminding them to pause and think before answering.

What ways can you think of to prompt a desired new behaviour?  We already have these types of concepts in our lives such as pop-ups on computer screens and opt-out agreements.

So, if you want to help nudge people to change their behaviour or simply change your own habits, sample a bar or two from Mrs Mozart and:

• Identify the itch and do something to pull people or yourself towards it so they want to scratch
• Ensure capability, capacity and resources are in place to support them or you
• Allow people the freedom to choose

To do the above involves knowing people or yourself well enough, tapping into preference and desire with genuinely positive intent rather than manipulation.  Perhaps for this to work, like Mozart, people need to be driven in the first place and it’s about channelling that driving force in a mutually beneficial direction.  Even if you’re tone deaf, you can still unleash the musical talent in others.

When is making an assumption a good thing?  When is it unhelpful?  Why do we make them anyway?  The assumptive condition, like its cousin consumption, can burn up our energy sometimes for the good, the bad and the ugly.   

Take the Big Society.  I saw an excellent debate on TV recently about what an invited audience to the Royal Institution understood by the Big Society facilitated by Professor Michael Sandell of Harvard University.  The clash of competing assumptions was deafening.  In Myers-Briggs terms, it was the big picture, vision thing (Intuition) versus ‘give me the detail’, ‘I can’t see your picture’ or ‘my picture look likes this’ (Sensing).

The word comes from the Latin for ‘taken up’, hence Assumption Day (August 15) when believers said the Virgin Mary was ‘taken up’ to Heaven at the end of her bodily life. 

Assumptions can be the bane of your life or a healthy way of getting things done quicker.  It can help speed up our decision making.  For example, we assume things based on past evidence or our interpretation of facts as a kind of short-cut or when we don’t have all the information, have a Rumsfeld moment and need to anchor on the ‘known knowns or known unknowns’.

“In the absence of evidence, in business we have to make assumptions until we have evidence. Unless you make assumptions or what I call ‘guesstimates’ then you will stand still and you will be stuck” Coach/blogger, John Aspden, www.coachingacademyblog.com . 

It has some skills attached to it such as deductive reasoning – if A then B – and qualities like intuition and good judgement. 

What can be unhelpful is when our unconscious biases, prejudices or values kick in and we make automatic assumptions without mentally challenging ourselves in that split second before we suffer that other well known affliction ‘foot in mouth’.

The attitude we choose to bring with us influences the response of the other person. Take the simple act of smiling.  We tend to use phrases like ‘a smile costs you nothing’ or ‘what have you got to lose?’ based on negative assumptions about the threat of loss being a more important driver than gain.  You don’t often hear someone say ‘what have you got to gain?’

To assume a position or role can also lead to blindness where we take something for granted or we pretend or take it upon ourselves inappropriately.  So it seems making assumptions are a bit like the Who’s pinball wizard, Tommy – the deaf, dumb and blind kid (doesn’t listen to what is not being said, fails to ask the right questions and can’t see what others do).

It gets even worse when we talk about numbers and our collective innumeracy.  The consequences are not always obvious, yet innumeracy can result in horrendous misassumptions about the behaviour of other people, including miscarriages of justice (how juries vote).

So, what?  Effective dialogue is a core feature of collaborative working and includes checking out and testing the assumptions we make about each other or the issue in hand.  As we increase our use of remote communication via technology, the loss of nuance, tone and meaning that we get from face-to-face exchange increases the risk of misunderstandings and tensions. 

Being more employable means dialogue rather than monologue.  It means developing the skill and habit of testing each other’s assumptions.  An enhanced ability to genuinely listen is the basis for consciously entering into dialogue with an open mind about the other person or the issue in hand, and focusing hard and remaining in the present moment.  Real listening involves giving up some control or power, some certainty and assumptions. 

When we create and present a ‘resumé’, other people can see our achievements.  Perhaps we should develop and present our ‘assumé’ so other people can see our assumptions in all their glory.

Do you face dilemmas at work and struggle to reconcile them?  The nature of a dilemma is that you are torn between two positions and it can be a painful place to sit (think horns).  It can delay decision making and it’s often frustrating and stressful.   How do you go about reconciling a dilemma?  Let’s ask Nick Clegg (or maybe not).

The dilemma element comes in when you either respect the two propositions or both are unpalatable with negative consequences either way. Can you live with the opposite view or are you still being pulled towards your own position?  Which is the lesser of two evils?  What to do?   Here’s a fictitious example for you to chew on:

You work for a company in which you and your colleagues are shareholders.  It has just been discovered that a colleague, who is also a close friend, lied on their CV about having a degree (a requirement) and said they went to the Managing Director’s school when they did not.  The person has been making above average money for your company.

•  Would you fire them or keep them?  Why?
• What personal values underpin your decision?
• Where would you draw the line in creating your own CV?

 Here are some topical examples that create dilemmas:

• Personal values v organisational values
• Individual v team
• Direction v autonomy
• Raising fees v providing subsidies
• Reducing or freezing salaries v getting more discretionary effort for less or static pay
• Freedom v security
• Big Society v Big State

Inherent in the opposing propositions are often values and beliefs held dearly by their proponents.  It’s what is important to them, yet what tugs away is the pragmatism, realism or expediency of their position.   Some will argue that they have no choice but to support their proposition (e.g. budget deficit), yet what makes it still a dilemma?  I suspect it is something to do with values, previous positions or consequences and the price to be paid further down the line.

There are many ways to crack the proverbial nut including just telling people to put up or shut up, threatening sanctions, selling the benefits (why it’s in their interests and the organisation’s/Government’s), negotiating (what do you need to enable you?), compromising (a bit of give and take). 

Context is all, of course, as it may depend on your leadership or management style, the risks involved, the importance of the issue and the nature of the individual/group and their situation. 

Being in a dilemma might imply that your listening skills have been pretty good, some empathy may exist and there is some rational logic in the arguments on both sides.  So the basis for agreement is probably there.  Yet, getting your own way means winners and losers and a compromise never feels satisfactory for anybody.

One approach that has helped many organisations is from management thinker, researcher and consultant Dr Fons Trompenaars.  His company has captured, analysed and coded some 6,000 dilemmas that owe their origin to competing values, including from both national and organisation cultural differences  – www.thtconsulting.com .

At the heart of his approach to reconciling a dilemma is when both sides see they can learn something from each other.  It is the art of integrating seemingly opposite values that only works when both sides change.

Here’s an anedotal example he gave in a talk I once saw.  In Northern Ireland a few years ago, Catholics referred to their town as Londonderry and the Protestants called it Derry.  How could people refer to the town without offending somebody?  A local radio DJ started referring to the town as Stroke City (London/Derry) and it soon caught on.   It sounds like a compromise but it’s more like a third option which is ‘win-win’.

Trompenaars calls this process ‘synergising’ – achieving A through B whereby values act so that 2 + 2 = 5.  Some examples of A through B: how can we recentralise through decentralising?  How can we reward individuals through teams?  How can we get individuals to work through groups and vice versa?  Is the Government’s idea of ‘nudging’ to change the public’s behaviour an attempt at reconciling the dilemma of Big State v Libertarianism?

He has come up with a framework for HR professionals to deal with the dilemmas facing organisations and their management of people – the three Rs of Recognition, Respect and Reconciliation (see ‘Articles’ on his website):

1. Recognising there are differences in values and thus the meaning given to the same thing by different people.
2. Respecting these differences and accepting the right of employees and customers to interpret the world (and our products and services) in the way they choose.
3. Facilitating the reconciliation between these opposing differences in the area of their own function and to help build the wider reconciling organisation.

 Sounds like a healthy approach to the workplace to me.  What do you think?

When I was growing up, my dad was fond of the saying “today is the yesterday of tomorrow”.  It’s a variant of Eleanor Roosevelt’s quote “Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why we call it ‘The Present’.”

It got me thinking about what psychologists refer to as ‘cognitive dissonance’ – the clash between experience and expectations.  How far is tomorrow’s workplace already here?   What does that look like?  What kind of leadership is needed going forward?  How do we stay employable?

For me, tomorrow’s workplace is a people challenge at its core – how people lead, follow, decide and choose to engage with or respond to the external environment in all its guises.  I see this expressed in a set of wide-ranging paradoxes and dilemmas.  The challenge for the future is how these can be reconciled (if at all):

• Getting commitment from employees v staying agile and minimising liabilities to survive in a fast-changing fragmented world
• Learning new ways to motivate and retain employees (as loyalty diminishes) v new ways to communicate with networks of people without trying to tie them into hierarchical relationships
• Winners v losers (with and between organisations)
• Freedom/privacy v security/predictability
• Individual v team
• Loose structures v tight structures, networks v bureaucracy, autonomy v control, centralised v decentralised
• Expectations of an older workforce (majority) v younger people coming in (minority)
• Conformance v risk taking for innovation
• Empowerment v compliance with key business processes

 About five years ago, I presented a paper at the Civil Service College on what the futurologists were saying would be happening at work by 2010.  It seems about time to re-examine the accuracy of their crystal-ball gazing.  The key themes emerging were:

A more autonomous workplace, connectivity in society (not just the workplace), and the search for meaning and identity as the planet gets more fragmented, complex and insecure.  What we know (knowledge capital), how we use it (technology), what we believe in (values) and how we want to organise ourselves (networks) and, above all, relationships, would underpin this autonomy and connectivity.

The role of trust would be crucial as employees get more demanding and as the lines between work and non-work get blurred, greater freedom and flexibility arising from the ’anytime, anywhere’ social connectivity driven by technological advances. And there will be tensions – between ethics and values as a priority for some and the management or control and regulation of increasingly scarce resources (natural and physical). 

It seems like they got it about right but not in the timeframe predicted as it is still playing out. In stark terms, our current experience is one of a suffocating economic environment pressing down on our freedom of choice leading to compromise and pragmatism increasingly driving our options and behaviours for being employable.

Finding a job you like and that complements your strengths may be a longer term goal for some.  As an aspiration and a more sustainable route to being fulfilled, the pay offs make this approach still worthwhile. Standing out ought not to be about trying to be something you’re not.  Being authentic can make someone stand out in these reality show/celebrity culture driven times.  It remains to be seen how this clash with our expectations will play out over time.

There are numerous dependencies and interdependencies in the workplace that affect how people lead and manage – systemic constraints can stymie the most authentic leaders (look at the NHS).  For me, education (in its broadest sense) is the fundamental building block to creating and taking responsibility for our own future.

The most effective action that people can make today in the workplace that could make a positive difference is to start the dialogue about what kind of workplace we want tomorrow, taking the strategic, long-term view and ensuring that it is not thrown off course by tactical short-term responses. 

My hope is for a workplace of tomorrow that feels more adult and less paternalistic, where genuine conversations are taking place, more community than individual and more at ease with itself whatever the wider context brings.  

What is your vision of tomorrow’s workplace?  What do you think we need to do today to move towards that vision?

What kind of conversations did you have over Christmas?  Were they AC – assertive, amusing, arousing?  Or DC – destructive, depressing, dreary? Whatever your (alliterative) experience, the way in which we are conversing is changing.  What kind of close encounters of a third kind do we now need for healthy, productive relationships at work and play?

Our family received fewer Christmas cards in the post and more e-cards this year.  A sign of the times, rubbish postal service or are we just becoming Billy-no-mates (don’t answer that)?  On Christmas Day, my kids were on Facebook and texting with friends but made no telephone calls.  On Boxing Day I was caught conversing on Facebook using my Blackberry under the table to a mate in London on the merits of Leonardo di Caprio’s films while lunching in York with my family.  Guilty as charged.

AC or DC, of course, is something to do with electricity (those who know me well will give a wry grin at this point) or, more precisely, alternating current or direct current.  AC electricity feeds our homes and businesses and alternates its direction.  DC electricity is like water through a hose and it only goes in one direction. A (vaguely) interesting analogy, methinks. 

AC conversations imply a genuine two-way discourse, whereas DC conversations suggest a one-way monologue and a well aimed shock to the solar plexus.  Interestingly, Thomas Edison was involved in a heated exchange with his competitors as he was in favour of the AC route but, a bit like Betamax and VHS, DC became the favoured approach at the time. 

So, do we need more AC than DC or something else? Theodore Zeldin is a ‘multi-disciplinary’ thinker, and a hero to generalists everywhere,  who wrote a wonderful little book (literally, 6”x 4”) on ‘Conversation, How Talk Can Change Your Life’ based on six talks he gave on Radio 4.  (Why is it whenever you think of the word it seems to be prefaced with ‘the art of…’?  We might as well add, ‘the dark art of…’ while we’re at it). 

Anyway, Theo’s philosophy is about encouraging the meeting of minds:  “When minds meet, they don’t just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought.”  Have a look at his Facebook page – http://www.facebook.com/pages/Theodore-Zeldin/16214473908?v=wall#!/pages/Theodore-Zeldin/16214473908?v=wall

His book includes his own funny little abstract drawings to represent his ideas on conversation and a list of 36 questions to prompt conversations.  Here are a few about conversation in the workplace:

• Is a successful conversation one which goes exactly as planned?
• What place is there in conversation for the competitive instinct?
• Are you in the wrong job if you can’t share your personal worries with your colleagues?
• Can you tell from the way someone talks what their work is?
• What is the antidote for conversations that make one feel small?
• Is it possible to have a conversation with a customer, if the customer is always right?

Here are some about encouraging the meeting of minds (I’ve tweaked a couple):

• When is digression necessary?
• In conversations between individuals/teams/organisations/cultures, is it more fruitful to discuss similarities or differences?
• What can an email do that a conversation cannot?
• Do you like to have your opinion changed by conversation?
• What kind of space, or time, is best for conversations with oneself?

That lot should keep you going for the next year!

Last summer, Theo even started something called a Feast of Conversation – lunch in a cafe made from shipping containers in the middle of the Olympics site.  Complete strangers were provided with a menu of 25 conversations and invited to converse with the person sitting opposite to genuinely connect with someone they’ve never met before, learn about them and maybe something more about themselves.  “It is for people who want to have two hours to think about what is important to them.”

For me, the foundation for AC conversations (yes, I know that’s like saying ‘PIN number’) is self-awareness and genuinely listening to others at a deeper level.  Too many conversations end up in conflict when the rational and emotional minds conflict. 

These are what Eric Van Slyke, in his book ‘Listening to Conflict’, calls our “cognitive zones” and “hot zones”.  He sees people as “reaction machines that behave unconsciously and out of habit when confronted with difficult situations … it requires becoming aware of and in touch with the emotions, needs and thoughts that create the reactions (so) we can see things we have previously overlooked.”

Until he gets conclusive proof of a close encounter of another kind, this humanist is staying grounded (unless, of course, you can change his opinion by your response to this conversation).

New Year resolutions are for wimps!  If you’re serious about what you’re going to do differently in 2011, try going deeper and further by busting a personal paradigm.

What is a paradigm?  You may have come across the example involving the scientists, the monkeys and the bananas.  Check it out on this fun video – http://www.funonthenet.in/articles/Paradigm-Presentation.html#ixzz19tQ5WG9Y.

A dictionary definition describes it as the set of experiences, assumptions, beliefs and values that affect the way an individual perceives reality and responds to that perception. In plain English that means our prevailing world view.  We tend to cling on to this because it’s comforting, defines who we are and maintains our self-esteem.

Bob Proctor, University of Toronto, talks about personal paradigms as our multitude of habits based on our subconscious conditioning – “We are the product of someone else’s habitual thinking”.   So why don’t we change?  We’re easily led, we don’t always want to think for ourselves or challenge the prevailing view, it might cost or threaten us and we like to be told what to do. 

The trouble is, it can stop us seeing the proverbial wood from the trees or result in paradigm paralysis (the inability or refusal to see beyond the current model of thinking), especially, if we receive external messages (from our organisations, colleagues, friends and family) that reinforce or legitimise our world view.  So it seems healthy to question our personal paradigms as we enter a new year.

Making a personal paradigm shift involves effort, energy, will, commitment, risk and making decisions.  Sir Ken Robinson has a great passion for changing education paradigms http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=channel.   He believes strongly that we take for granted things about ourselves that turn out not to be true.

What do you take for granted about yourself?  That the competition for jobs is too great, you’re not good enough for that promotion, you’ll never earn the kind of money you really want or achieve the recognition for your talents you feel you deserve?  What is your personal paradigm based on?  So what?  What are you going to do?

Let me know how you get on.

‘I cried because I had no shoes and then I saw a child with no feet’ – seen in an art gallery in Ecuador where my eldest daughters have been doing voluntary work for the last ten weeks.  With the extraordinary Chilean miners still in our minds, what makes some of us more resilient than others and how can you develop it?

The value of being personally resilient is rising.  As organisations restructure more frequently, respond more flexibly to external demands and ‘do more with less’, this has created pressures on human relationships in the workplace.  

Mike Pedlar et al got it right a while ago: “The manager’s job involves a degree of emotional stress and strain, which arises as a natural consequence of working in situations involving authority, leadership, power, interpersonal conflict, meeting targets and deadlines, all within a framework of some uncertainty and ambiguity. The successful manager needs to be sufficiently resilient to cope with this. (A Manager’s Guide to Self Development, 5th Ed 2006).  

Resilience has a critical part to play in enabling people to deal with whatever is thrown at them and to remain emotionally and physically in control so that they can operate well under pressure. It’s about regaining balance, maintaining high level quality and proactivity, being physically and emotionally healthy, learning from change and emerging stronger, monitoring energy levels and learning to slow down.  It means that you feel the stress and are able to cope with it by maintaining self-control, but not so much that you become permanently disabled.  It doesn’t mean that you become thick-skinned and insensitive.

It has been seen as a component of emotional intelligence.  Daniel Goleman, the EI guru identified three elements:

• Emotional awareness:  Recognising one’s emotions and their effects.
• Optimism: Persistence in pursuing goals despite obstacles and setbacks.
• Drive and energy: Striving to improve or meet a standard of excellence.

 In defining the resilience of his football team in responding to a defeat, manager Iain Dowie invented the phrase bouncebackability! 

 TalentSmart reported on research by University of Florida Psychologist Tim Judge that showed people who take control over events in their lives rather than events controlling them and are confident in their abilities perform better in their jobs.  When hard times strike, their anxiety fuels passion, drive and tenacity rather than self-pity, despair and fear.  http://www.talentsmart.com/learn/turn-anxiety-into-performance-whitepaper_p_2.html

The prescription of Talent Smart’s Dr Travis Bradberry is “to anticipate and prepare for change, to focus on your freedoms rather than your limitations (from ‘life is not fair’ to ‘what I can change’) and to rewrite your script (from ‘hard luck story’ to ‘perseverance story’)”.

Other research suggests that self-management, including resilience, appears to increase with age – “Experience and maturity facilitate the mastery of one’s emotions” (http://www.talentsmart.com/learn/leadership-vaccum-whitepaper_p_4.html).  This seems to come from the ‘school of hard knocks’ perspective but may have implications given the demographic shift we’re now beginning to experience.  Will Generation Y buckle under the strain and how can Baby Boomers help?

Here are some other tips for developing resilience: 

 Also, check out the Emotional Resilience Toolkit (Business in the Community, May 2009) that provides practical guidance in promoting the resilience of individuals and teams in companies as part of an integrated health and wellbeing programme. http://www.bitc.org.uk/resources/publications/emotional_resilience.html

Part attribute and part skill, being resilient is going to be critical for us all as we face up to major economic changes and their impact on our well-being both at work and at home.  An Ecuadorian child or a Chilean miner may not have a choice about what happens to them, but they and we do have a choice in how we respond.