I’ve come a long way in my personal development, but still have a way to go. That’s why when I read this article by Bryce Christiansen, Tina Fey’s Rules For Improv…And Your Career, I knew I had to go to an improv class. In improv, there is no place to hide. There is no script, no director, no costumes, no lighting, no set – nothing but you, your partners, your wits, and an idea shouted from the audience. It sounds a lot like starting a business.

I have zero experience with theater or acting, so the thought of getting on stage wasn’t exactly comfortable for me. Fortunately, one of my coworkers is a theater grad and he said that he’d love to go. So we headed to class at the Onyx Theather, which by the way, has a fetish store as its lobby. Viva Las Vegas!

What I Took Away From the Experience

1. Changing your natural way of thinking and interacting with others requires purposeful effort and practice.
2. You can’t be judgmental and creative at the same time. Turn off the judgmental inner voice.
3. Improv requires openness, trust, cooperation, a sense of giving, and a complete lack of selfishness. Does this describe you or your workplace?
4. You have to go wherever the scene takes you. It might not be where you want to go, but go anyway. If it doesn’t work, it will be obvious. The point is to go there together and come to that conclusion together. You can review later and adjust the next time.
5. You help your partner and the scene by saying, “yes, and” to everything your partner says. When was the last time you saw this type of thinking in your workplace?
6. Asking questions or saying “no” brings the whole thing to a halt. It’s an inertia thing. You have to stop what you’re doing, come up with something new, and try to get the scene and your partners to go in that direction. Very tough to do on the fly. In business, saying “no” makes people shut down and stop participating.
7. Saying “yes and” would be a great way to improve brainstorming sessions.
8. Doing something new is good for your brain – try it!

While most of us aren’t actors or artists, our work requires an awful lot of creativity and cooperation. Imagine how powerful it would be to walk into your next meeting, presentation, or sales pitch with the improv mindset. Next time, change your goal from the perspective of winning and losing to one of cooperation and mutual benefit. And sign up for an improv class – it’s a lot of fun!

Thank you Bryce (and Tina) for your article and for giving me a new perpective and new hobby. I hope this article encourages others to try a new way of thinking and working together. Leave a comment or contact me on Twitter telling me what you are doing to help grow and adapt – I’d love to hear about it.

These are tough times, and only a fool would ignore high unemployment, mortgage defaults, tight credit, and the general uncertainty that surrounds us. Many if not most businesses are operating on tight budgets, putting even more pressure on employees. It’s tough to simply say, “Oh well, I’ll go get another job someplace else” because someplace else has most of the same problems your current employer has. Before jumping ship, take a look at your leadership team.

A good leader knows that fear is a destroyer. It closes down creativity and distracts from the solution. At times like these, a good leader will increase visibility to the company’s strategy, tactics and finances. A good leader will be visible, available and communicate, communicate, communicate. A good leader will stay on message and make sure the team stays on message. A good leader will answer tough questions openly, avoiding any trace of management speak.

Look around where you work. Is there a plan and are people focused on working the plan? Or are people sitting around, scared, keeping their heads down when management comes near and grumbling when they’re not around? The answer to that question clearly tells you the quality of your leadership team.

I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impel. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days. Franklin Roosevelt first inauguration speech

As early as my middle school years I’ve wondered when my generation would face its great challenge. We’re in the middle of it right now. This is more than an economic downturn. It’s more than a banking crisis. It’s more than an ill-defined war on terror. The ground under our feet has changed and we’re all trying to figure it out. The rules we were taught by our parents, family, and society have changed, but no one has told us how. I believe this is what the Occupy Wall Street protests are reacting to.

The Old Script

We were taught the script: go to school, do well, go to college, get a good job, do a good job, get married, buy a house, and save for your kids’ education and your retirement. Sure we had to borrow money for college and our mortgage, but we’d make it up over the years of employment with a good company. We’d need a lot of money for our retirement, but many good jobs had pensions and we could make up the difference with our 401Ks. We had hoped Social Security will be there, but we did not count on it.

That script might have worked for my parents’ generation, but it’s proven horribly wrong for mine, and many of us are so far down the road that we don’t have time to make up our financial losses. That’s downright scary for millions of people.

Learn the New Script

You’re an independent agent. You’re the product that you need to develop and market. Like an elite athlete you have to keep yourself in shape, keep your skills sharp, and be versatile doing whatever is needed to contribute to the success of your team. This isn’t easy and it isn’t passive.

You need to learn how to get things done, how to solve problems, and how to work with groups of people. Getting things done, things that show up on the scoreboard (the bottom line) is what gets you more salary. Will college degrees help you with that? If not, then don’t waste your time or money on them.

Find a job where you can learn and develop the skills you need to stay employed or to employ yourself. Keep learning and developing. Keep finding things you’re good at that people will pay you for. Learn how to market yourself and show your value.

Watch your debt. Debt is slavery. Cash gives you freedom to take a job at a lower salary, but one that will teach you valuable skills . Cash gives you the freedom to work the way you want or to walk away from a bad job. Cash gives you the freedom to start your own business.

What Are You Going to Do

That pain, that frustration, that confusion we’re feeling is because reality doesn’t match our frame of reference. It’s time to change our picture to match reality. It’s time to adapt. Those who adapt survive. That’s the way it’s always been.

The ability to work with others is critical to getting things accomplished. There aren’t many things you can do completely on your own. But working with others can be difficult, especially for those of us who are used to working with machines that do exactly what we tell them. So how do you work with others?

One way to improve your relationship with others is to transition from viewing the world in either or terms and start thinking both and.  Imagine how much more we can accomplish if we truly work together rather than acting out of perceived self interest. Learn to apply this technique and give yourself a competitive advantage. Get your organization to think this way, and you’ll be tops in your field.

Let me share a personal example. Recently, I was asked for help from a coworker. My first reaction was to see the request as a big inconvenience to me and my people; requiring us to rearrange our physical workspace and planned work for one day.  I could have responded in an us vs. them way, but that is very short term thinking. It doesn’t do anyone any good. It causes frustration, anger, resentment, and shows no concern for my coworker’s needs.

Instead, I looked at the bigger picture – the benefit to the company. I looked for a solution that met both her needs and my needs, and I found one that will work. The outcome is completely different than if I stayed with the either or mindset.

I realize this isn’t the natural way of thinking for most people. That’s why we see so much conflict and why we waste so much potential. The good news is this is a skill that can be learned. You can train yourself to think differently and act differently. I think you’ll find it a lot more fun and rewarding to work with others rather than competing with them.

See the links below for more information on how to change your thinking.

Related Links

• How to Free Your Mind to Envision the Power of Both – Scarcity vs Abundance
• Scarcity vs. Abundance in Tech – good chart
• Scarcity vs. Abundance Thinking – great examples and good chart

Here’s the first and perhaps most important thing you need to know about leadership: IT ISN’T ABOUT YOU!

If you want to lead people, they have to want to follow. Think for a moment about those bosses you enjoyed working for with. See what I did there? The best bosses are those who work with you, not those that want to be your boss in the bossy sense of the word.

Your Reactions Reveal Your Intentions

Think you can fool people into thinking that you really care about them when you don’t? You’re wrong. Your words and actions reveal your true intentions. Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you are having trouble with one of your folks. They seem unhappy and unmotivated. When you talk to them, you find that they think you don’t care about their career opportunities, and that you favor other people over them.

Your reaction might be to get angry and deny that you favor others. You might argue with this employee and tell them how wrong they are. But the person doesn’t believe what you are saying and they walk out even more unhappy and unmotivated. Why?

You didn’t listen to them. You didn’t attempt to see the situation from their point of view. You didn’t admit to yourself that maybe you don’t communicate very well and that you are afraid to have difficult conversations.

You try to pacify people rather than be honest with them. You are more concerned with your ego and feelings than you are about other people’s. See, you really don’t have them or their career goals in mind.

How to Make it About Them

In this case, you should have listened to the person. You should have apologized for failing to communicate with them. Yes, I said apologize. You are responsible for ensuring your team knows what is going on and what is expected of them, not the other way around.

You should calmly explain your reasons for your decisions. Heck, maybe the person lacks the skills needed for that 2-week boot camp, or maybe you can’t afford it, or maybe they do a lousy job and you don’t want to send them to an expensive training class. Whatever it is, be honest with them.

Demonstrate you care:

• Work with them on a training plan to help them get where they want to go. Do you even know their career goals?
• Follow through with them through regular sessions where you discuss their performance, their attitude and their technical abilities.
• Celebrate their successes.

Learn to look at things from the perspective of your people (see the links below) and you’ll learn a lot about yourself, or keep thinking it’s all about you and you’ll be the only one on your team.

Related Links

• Feedback is a Gift – One We Sometimes Want to Return
• The Power of Asking Why
• Stop the Weeds of Discontent Before They Ruin Your Workplace

If the most important skill we need in business is the ability to get along with others, it makes sense that we learn how to control ourselves and protect our relationships. I had a great conversation with a friend and coworker about this and she gave me a couple of great techniques you can use avoid making a mistake you might regret.

Decide if It’s Important

Decide if whatever you disagree about is going to be important tomorrow. Then decide if it’s going to be important next week, or next month or next year. If it’s not going to be important, why damage or lose your relationship over it?

What’s Your Desired Outcome

When you have a conflict with someone, you have to ask yourself what outcome you want to achieve. If your desired outcome isn’t reconciliation, then you should probably not have a discussion. If your purpose is to prove you’re right or to punish, hurt, or humiliate the other person, you are destroying your relationship with that person. You may get the result you are looking for in the short term, but you’ve harmed that relationship and you may never repair it.

It’s our relationships with others that allows us to get things done, so you have to work on growing those relationships. A cross or thoughtless word can harm or kill a relationship. You simply can’t afford to ruin your relationships, so learn how to control yourself.

Related Articles

• The Most Important Skill for Technology Professionals
• Having High Standards Can Hurt Teamwork

IT is a creative endeavor, and creativity requires interaction with others. Yet, in many if not most IT organizations, we build walls and put up barriers that prevent spontaneity, collaboration, interaction, debate, and productivity.

I’d like to tell you about my recent experience working in an environment without cubes or walls separating people.

Working in a Collaborative Workspace

I’ve been extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to start a new business division in a new office. Since I was starting from scratch I had the chance to avoid cubes. We were equally fortunate to find an office that was designed and occupied by an architecture firm, so it was open with clean lines, functional, and tons of storage space. All we had to do was bring in our people and our computers and network equipment.

We don’t have assigned seating and the offices are also unassigned. The offices are used for conference calls, small meetings, engineering discussions, or for quiet work. For those times when you want to work standing up, we take our laptops and work at one of the bookcases.

The offices and conference room have glass walls that we use as whiteboards. We also have movable, peel-and-stick dry erase board material (wall-pops.com) that we put up wherever we like. The engineers love having this much space to draw their designs. I love it for brainstorming and mind mapping.

This design allows our people to work together as work happens – not just during scheduled meetings. When anyone has a problem, they just ask for help and someone pulls up a chair next to them and helps. When there is a question about design choices, a group forms to debate the pros and cons of the choices.

Work happens very quickly without many of the usual barriers you see in typical IT groups. We work in a ROWE, so not everyone is in the office at the same time. In cases where someone is working from home or wherever, we just call them and bring them into the conversation. We can setup a secure web meeting and share information securely.

I’ve worked with most of my people at previous employers and I can say without a doubt that we are far more productive in this environment than we were for our previous employers. Part of that is due to other factors, but I believe most of it can be attributed to the way we work. ROWE and an open work environment have contributed greatly to our ability to quickly deliver for our customers.

How to Tear Down the Walls

I realize most places spend a considerable amount on their cube infrastructure, so they aren’t likely to just tear them out and replace them. Here are some small steps you can take until your company wises up.

• Interact and collaborate. Don’t let the walls stop you. Find an area you can break out to meet. This could be in the cafeteria, a meeting room, or even open space in your work area.
• Use something like wall-pops or whiteboard paint to share ideas
• Get facts on the impact workspace design has on productivity and how to reduce real estate and facilities costs (see related links below for a place to start)
• Talk to your management to get their help in opening your workspace. Get their help to at least get a collaboration space.

I’d love to hear how you’ve moved from cubes to a more collaborative environment so please leave a comment or chat with me @true62 on Twitter.

Related Links

• Cisco’s Office Design Case Study – requires Cisco login. They saved 37% on real estate and 50% on furniture.
• Cisco IT Case Study – PDF related to above link
• The Future Workspace – lots of good links at the end of the article
• Designing Collaborative for Productivity – includes a wishlist that you should read
• AgilQuest – Make Your Workplace as Agile as Your Workforce

There are a lot of Cisco related links, only because I couldn’t find many others. Please let me know if you have any links that I could add here.

Who are the important people where you work? How do you know they’re important? Is it because they have email boxes with hundreds of unread emails? Is it because they are in meetings 30 hours of every work week? Are they important because they’re busy? Does this describe you?

You’re busy doing the wrong things because that’s what is expected of you. Your boss expects you to go to these meetings and to instantly respond to your email, but what are you getting accomplished? How can any of us accomplish a full-time job in the 10 unscheduled hours we have per week?

I have a friend who works just like this. He goes to meetings 25-30 hours every week. He spends at least 2 hours answering email every night, and spends 4-8 hours every weekend working on things he should have gotten done during the week. His health is suffering because of it, and he’s not making the progress you might expect from someone working that much.

Stop being Busy and Start being Productive (and Important)

• Stop and think about the 2-3 most important things you need to work on
• Make a plan with daily and weekly goals
• Review your daily goals the night before
• Work toward your daily goals
• Reduce and eliminate distractions. Turn off email alerts on your computer and phone
• Set aside time to deal with emails in batches
• Sort your email into what you can deal with immediately and save the rest for a defined block of time when you can focus
• Decline to attend or delegate someone to attend meetings that don’t help you reach your goals
• Talk to your boss and let him or her know your plan so you can avoid any misunderstandings

You can go from being busy to productive. After all, we’re ultimately judged by what we get done and how much we contribute. That’s what makes us important to our employer – isn’t it?

See the related links to learn more ways to help make the shift, and please let me know if you have any tips to help.

Related Links

• Time Management Ninja’s Blog
• The Urgent is the Enemy of the Important – How to Win the Battle
• Time Shift to Manage Your Workday
• 10 Steps to Better Productivity & Less Stress
• “Time Out” on the Leadership Playing Field

I watched a couple of movies last night that got me thinking about a common failing of leadership – blind adherence to the rules.

In Billy Budd, England is at war with France. Billy is taken from a merchant ship and impressed into service of the King’s Navy.  The Navy suffered a couple of mutinies that were well known to outsiders, but completely unknown to the sailors on board. The officers are terrified that their own crew could mutiny.

They have good reason to fear a mutiny. Claggart, the Master-at-Arms, is a sadist. He uses fear, intimidation, and mistrust to control the men. He publicly flogs them for the most trivial violations. He hates that Billy is an innocent and trusting soul because it makes him examine his own soul.

Ultimately, Claggart falsely accuses Billy of conspiring to commit mutiny. The ship’s Captain knows that the accusation is false, and thinks he finally has the upper hand on Claggart. He calls Billy into his cabin to hear Claggart’s accusation. Billy, suffering from a stammer when he’s stressed has trouble responding verbally and he strikes Claggert. Claggart falls to the floor, hitting his head on something. He smiles knowing that he’s killed Billy, not realizing that he too is about to die.

Billy must face trial for striking and killing a superior officer; either is a capital offense. The captain convenes a court martial and tells the officers that there is only one outcome. Billy is guilty and must be hanged. He must be hanged not because it is just, but because that is the law. They must uphold the law to maintain discipline and avoid mutiny.

Have you seen this behavior? Leadership claims to be concerned with the morale of the troops, but every action they take just makes morale worse. They’re so afraid of the staff that they don’t talk to them. They don’t listen to their concerns. They don’t take any action to improve the situation. They value their own position and status more than they value those they work with. They would rather people leave than examine their own actions.

Being a leader means making tough choices and sometimes it means identifying a cancer and cutting it out before it metastasizes. Vere and the officers knew Claggart was a cancer, but Vere chose to wait rather than act. He abdicated too much of his authority to Claggart, and he took too little responsibility for the results.

Vere had every opportunity to fix the situation on his ship, but he lacked the courage to act outside the rules and conventions of the Navy. Instead, he decided to wait until he could catch Claggart in some act that would remove him from his duties when he could have assigned him to be the cook if he wanted.

Captain Vere was a decent, well intentioned man, but he forgot that his duty was to his ship. He failed his men, his officers, his King, and his country because he acted as if his duty was to the law. It doesn’t do much good to follow the law just to lose the ship.

Related Articles

• Stop the Weeds of Discontent Before They Ruin Your Workplace

Several years ago I read Stephen Ambrose’s book, D Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, and I’ve never forgotten it. I am amazed by these men.

While reading, I imagined myself approaching Omaha beach on those Higgins boats, bobbing around, exhausted and hungry, standing in puke and seawater. Jumping off in water that was too deep. Clawing my way back above the water, trying to get to shore, only to face concentrated gun fire in volumes that may have never been seen before or since.

The plan fell apart before dawn. The pill boxes were supposed to be knocked out by the preceding Allied bombing raid, but all the planes overflew their targets, as did the airborne drops. Those landing at Omaha landed a mile away from their target. The water was deeper than expected, the enemy fire heavier, so the Higgins boats didn’t go in shore far enough and many soldiers drowned.

No place was safe. Rommel and the Germans had years to prepare for the landing and they employed every manner of defense. Every inch of that beach was covered by multiple guns. The Allied soldiers had the sea at their back and machine guns in front of them. They lost most of their gear when they got off the boats.

Yet these guys moved forward. They moved forward under constant, overwhelming and accurate enemy fire. The enemy fire and resultant carnage must have been beyond what a human mind can process in real-time. One of Ambrose’s sources told him of a soldier being ordered to carry out a task and replied, “OK, but what do I do with this” as he held up his amputated arm.

They had no reason to think they would survive, but they moved forward knowing others depended on them. They adapted even though it looked hopeless. Some of the naval destroyers provided artillery cover. The soldiers found a way to establish a beachhead and break through enemy defenses. They turned a disaster into victory.

These were men who had hopes, dreams, desires, and flaws just like men today or men of any day. But how many people today are that unselfish? How many people do the right thing knowing that there’s a chance there will be a price to pay – even a little price? How many do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing and the next guy is depending on him?

Is it easier to give your life for your buddy than it is to speak up when you see something wrong?

I don’t think so. I think if you can’t do the right thing when it’s a little price, you can’t do the right thing when it’s a big price.

There are a whole lot of opportunities to do the right thing these days. There are a lot of people in need. There is injustice needing exposure. Heck, there are elections coming up that matter. Are you willing to pay at least a small price or will you walk on by?