Take Charge Resource Rules — Resources Rule #1

resources #1

Rule #1: Everything we ever accomplish, we accomplish by using resources.

In fact, we find it useful to think of  accomplishment as the effective use of resources.  Take the accomplishment of getting to work at 9 a.m. when you live 20 miles from your job. Here are just a few of the resources that people might use to make that happen:

  • alarm clock, shower, clothes, coffee, and keys
  • car, train, traffic reports, roads, and parking lot
  • arms, legs, eyes, ears, and hands

In so many cases where life has become routine, we take those resources for granted.  It’s only when we lose our keys, or the alarm doesn’t go off, or the car won’t start that we appreciate how important those resources are to our success.

What about situations that are not routine; things of a more creative nature that you are not sure how to accomplish?

Take the case of J.K Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, who 15 years ago was a single mom struggling to get by financially and now is one of the wealthiest women in the world.  What resources do you imagine she needed to use to accomplish that?

Certainly she needed writing equipment: paper, pen, computer, and printer. She also needed publishing  resources: an agent, editor, publisher, artist, bookstores, on line book sellers.  Of course, she needed all the resources related to the film industry. She needed her writing skills and  imagination.

She also needed her life experiences. By her own account, it was her reaction to her mother’s death that transformed the series from a simple child’s fantasy to a profound exploration of different characters’ relationships with death.

She also needed to call on important inner resources like persistence, courage, and creativity.

We often limit what we think is possible because we’ve lost sight of the scope and depth of the resources around us and within us.

Want to play with this idea?

  1. Identify one of your “routine” accomplishments (i.e. making breakfast, taking a shower, arriving at work on time) and try to see how many resources you actually need to get it done.
  2. Contemplate your deepest hopes and look to see what resources you need to realize them.

Please let us know what you discover.

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Posted in Personal Stories, Support, Talent Exercises, Uncategorized

Are You Getting a Good Exchange Rate for Your Talent?

Currency exchange

If you have recently traveled abroad, you are certainly aware that your currency has an exchange rate. Of course, you can look them up on line: One US Dollar = .76 Euro; One British Pound = 127 Japanese Yen; One Indian Rupee = 8.7 Chilean Pesos. When you’re traveling, you try hard to get a favorable rate.

But what’s the exchange rate for your talent? Foreign currency exchange rates change daily, but fortunately, when it comes to your talent, the exchange rate is constant.
Your talent = Your life

That’s right! It doesn’t matter whether you’re trading your talent at work, in the community, or with your family. When you exercise your talent, what you get in return is your life.

Fran felt impoverished. “I feel stuck in a staff job in the audit department,” she lamented. “The pay’s OK, but there’s so much more that I want to do in my career. I want to be a leader and know that I’m ready.” Fran didn’t settle for a lousy exchange rate on her talent. She explored options with a Talent Catalyst in a lively conversation. With a fresh perspective and focused action plan, Fran converted her hopes into results. She started acting like the leader she wanted to be. Within a year, she was a supervisor with five people on her team.

Are you getting a great exchange rate on your talent? Would you like something better? Think of a time in your life when you were exercising your talent. What were you doing? What parts of you were you using? Who was benefitting? What exactly were you feeling? Were you feeling fully alive?

You may notice that there is another very important aspect to your talent: it’s abundant. When you exchange it for your life, you still have plenty left.

So you’ve got choices to make with your talent: you can bury it and forget it’s even there, you can dole it out sparingly as though it were a rare commodity, or you can spend it freely know that it is a renewable resource with a great exchange rate.

Do you have an example of how you exchanged your talent and got your life in return?

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Posted in Overcoming Obstacles, Personal Stories, Uncategorized

Hop on Hope

talentcover

We begin our Talent Catalyst conversations with this simple question: “What are your hopes?”
Here are a few reasons why it’s a great question:

  1. It’s fresh. Although it might seem rather basic, it’s not a question we are asked very often. We remember asking one senior executive the question and his immediate response was, “Wow, you don’t mess around!”
  2. It’s expansive. We’re used to getting questions that are more targeted: what are your goals, what’s the deliverable, what’s the objective, when will you have that done. These are all useful questions when executing a plan, but the Hopes question takes a step back and asks you to wonder about the bigger picture. Initially, it is meant not to make final decisions, but to create possibilities.
  3. It’s forward looking. It is asking what you want to move towards, not what you want to move away from. It is asking about a future with an open canvas, not one that has been decided by the past. This kind of question stimulates the most creative parts of our brains.
  4. It’s a question that improves with time. In the Talent Catalyst Conversation we ask the Hope question twice. The first time you hear the question you give the best response that you can. As you explore the concerns, resources, and growth opportunities that naturally flow from the question, your response to the hope question becomes even clearer.

How it works
Asking people about their hopes and why they are important to them stimulates a cascade of positive dynamics. What we call the virtuous cycle of hope creates a sense of possibility. In turn, this sense of possibility opens our minds to the resources available to us. With a greater awareness of resources, we have more energy and confidence to act. The following diagram illustrates the cycle.

Virtuous Cycle of Hope

This cycle is also self-reinforcing. When we are hopeful, we see more opportunities and take more constructive actions, which create more of what we hoped would occur. This encourages us to pursue more resources and actions.
You can validate this cycle for yourself. Take a few minutes to answer the following questions.

Hopes in action for you
Describe what the following are like when you have a hopeful frame of mind:
Your thoughts:
Your feelings:
Your behaviors:
Your effectiveness with others:
Do you recognize the pattern for yourself? Do you see how having a hopeful frame of mind will make a difference for you?
So why not try it out? If you haven’t been asked the question recently, ask it of yourself. With or without the whole Talent Catalyst Conversation, it’s bound to stir up something interesting. Or ask someone you love. What could be a better expression of authentic care than posing this question to your kids, your spouse, your parents, or your friends?
Wellsprings of Talent will help you plumb the depths of your hopes and translate your aspirations into reality.

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Posted in Talent Exercises, Uncategorized

Engage your employees’ own motivation

Recently, a vice president at a Fortune 500 company was speaking with us about a meeting he had had with his executive team.
It was a good meeting.  We discussed the talent development opportunities for the up and comers, and I feel confident that we have a strong bench to back fill any important positions that might open up. 
Did you ask them and the rest of your organization about their hopes for talent development?
Maybe we’ll do that next time.

The meeting is not unusual.  The dominant theme at many talent development conferences and in the current literature is about how business objectives must drive talent development.  The model is top-down, command and control.  “The company needs the following results, and we design our talent development programs to deliver them.  Our throughput is ____ and our metrics show ____ level of retention and application.”  Purveyors of such programs have a mechanistic view of how people engage in the organizations.  It’s like Newtonian physics.  For each action, there is a reaction.

 

Are you trying to drive your people?

It would make complete sense, except that people aren’t machines and don’t like to be “driven” like cattle.  Certainly, such programs have a role for transferring knowledge and helping people learn how to complete routine tasks.  However, they aren’t likely to get the breakthroughs in new ideas and genuine engagement that we need for innovation and growth of both organizations and their human capital.

When companies pursue engagement from the perspective of how do we get employees to contribute more than what they are being paid for (i.e. discretionary effort), they have lost right out of gate.  This transactional view of engagement stimulates a shortsighted response from employees.  “OK, I’ve got my skills.  You’re my employer.  How are we going to barter?  What’s the deal?”

Wellsprings of Talent takes a different tack to move talent development from a transactional paradigm to a generative paradigm.  Based upon the near universal desire of people to tap more of their own talent and experience the resulting satisfaction, we provide ways to help them put their yearnings into action.  This generative view shifts the dynamic.  “I want to use my talents.  I want to expand what I can accomplish.  How can my employment be a forum for me to do that?  How can we make it work for both me and my employer?”

Here is a critical choice for organizations.  How much of a command-control structure do we need to insure that we can deliver outstanding results?  How much can we work with people and their generative nature and trust that things will work out…perhaps even better than we could have imagined?  How much of each of these paradigms is right for us?  The companies that give lip service to engagement but lean heavily on command and control are seen right through and the efforts flounder.  Firms wonder, “Why isn’t it working?”   It’s because the underlying ethos, and more importantly practices, don’t support self-generated engagement.

When people get into transactional mode, it triggers their fearful brain.  Everything is a negotiation.  “What are you going to give me for my extra effort?  Is it fair?  Who’s going to come out ahead?  Who’s in charge?  Do I like him or her?”  That line of thinking takes us to the wrong set of questions.  They won’t help us get to our best work.  But, organizations sure spend a lot of time on these issues and questions.

Even positive answers to the transactional questions won’t be fulfilling.  For example, so what if the deal is fair?  Lack of fairness can kill motivation, but fairness doesn’t inspire it.  The transactional view fixes attention on all of the wrong things.  The generative view focuses on what I am doing to identify, develop, apply, and celebrate what I can contribute.  How am I reaching and connecting with my coworkers and others to accomplish that?

Tap sustaining self-motivation

When we are in a generative place, we’re looking for how to make things better not only for ourselves but also for other people.  Our spirits are full.  “This is working for us, how is it working for our coworkers, our boss, and our organization?”  We can take this stand when we choose to come from a place of deep engagement and tap our best thinking.

The generative view has a strong foundation in the latest scientific understandings of how natural systems such as beehives and flowing streams adapt, shift, and organize themselves.  This alternative organizational paradigm emerging from the work of Margaret Wheatley [see, for example, Leadership and the New Science  (Berrett-Koehler, 1999)] and others invites us to unleash the human capacity for self-organization.

More recently, Daniel Pink has challenged the traditional transactional assumptions that incentives yield performance in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Riverhead, 2011)He notes that while piecework production responds to monetary incentives, today’s knowledge workers don’t.  They seek autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

When, organizations honestly embrace helping employees develop the talents that they are inspired to use, they gain a powerful, self-motivated workforce.

Posted in Uncategorized

Want to change your story… for good?

“We are unique because we tell stories — and live by the stories we tell.”

George Gerbner

Each of has a story about our aspirations and our talents.  Most of us have some story about how we have applied and enjoyed our talents.  Maybe, it was learning a musical instrument in grade school, developing key skills for a trade or profession, or leading a community organization.  A few people have seemingly magical stories about heroically overcoming obstacles and achieving great results.

Even if we are the top of our profession, however, there’s often a hitch or snag in our story—something that is holding us back now from even greater fulfillment.  It sounds like this:  “I would like to [aspiration], but [obstacles, limitations, challenges] are in my way and I can’t get past them.”  In fact, we often become attached to our stories and become vindicated by them.  They explain why we haven’t progressed as much as we’d like and get us off the hook for not gaining results.

 

Are you stuck in a limiting story?

Here are some real-life examples.

Margaret—I want to be a supervisor, but all of the openings require experience in managing others.  It’s a big “Catch 22.”  I guess I just need to make do with where I am.

Kevin—I want to take the company that I’ve built to the next level and enjoy my work again, but I’m bogged down in a myriad of details.  I want to escape (and often do) to outside activities and new sources of stimulation.  Meanwhile, the company stagnates and employees are nervous about our future.

Sheila—I’ve got a great idea for dramatically improving how our company implements teamwork and gets results.  Top management is so conservative, however, that I don’t think anyone even wants to hear about it.  It frustrates me because I want to grow professionally and have us get better results together.  Do I have to look for another job?

Jim—I have much more that I could contribute to the organization, but rising higher in the leadership would compromise time with my family and require me to be too political.  I’ll keep my head down and continue plugging away at my current role.  I guess it’s better to be a little bored.

Each of these stories is true, and the obstacles that the people mention are real.  But, the conclusions are only inevitable if they allow themselves to be victims of their circumstances.

Do you notice the sense of resignation imbedded in their stories?  Do you see how some have sought diversions elsewhere because they don’t see a path to what they really want?

Their stories beg the question: “Is that how you want your story to end?  Or, do you want your story to have new chapters filled with new opportunities and success in pursuing them?”

What’s your story like?  Is there a hope unfulfilled, a thirst unquenched for you?  Is your story stuck?  Would you like some fresh and exciting chapters in your story?  By looking at use of your talent as a story, you’ll gain some detachment and perspective to think about it differently and formulate new ways to write and live the next chapters of your life.

Or, maybe you know people in your organization, community, or family who’ve become stuck or stale and need refreshment.  Are you hearing stories from them that you’d wish would change for their benefit and yours?  Would you like to help them enjoy a better future?

The Wellsprings of Talent program unleashes your power to be the creator of your story rather than a victim of its limitations.  It’s about how you can use your talents to change your story now and for good.  If you are less than fully satisfied with your life at work you might try finding a new job; or you might try telling a new story.  The Talent Catalyst Conversation is actually an opportunity to tell a new story about yourself; and then begin to live by that story.

Posted in Uncategorized
Entrepreneur.com features “3 Keys to Unlocking Employee Talent”
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