An Introvert’s Lesson: Go Large To Recharge

When I facilitate large groups – especially around personality preferences – I usually mention the curious path that led me to a career designed for energetic extraverts. That curious path was, essentially, a very direct path.

I was happily plugging along in my communications job at Luck Stone – hammering out the employee magazine and videos and HR manuals – when my boss at the time, Tammy Cummings, popped into my office.

“We’ve been asked to roll out an intensive customer service training program to every employee this summer,” she said. Luck Stone at the time had about 800

employees.

“That’s nice,” I replied, as I typed away.

“Since we only have one person on staff that does training, you’re going to spend some time delivering the program in the field,” she continued.

“No, I’m not,” I opined, barely looking up. “I don’t do well with groups.”

“Do you want to have a job at the end of the summer?” she asked.

“I’d love to awkwardly stand in front of groups of truck drivers and mechanics and deliver this training program,” I said after a pause, “especially if it involves leading them through an activity called ‘Build Your Customer Service Superhero’ using construction paper and glue.”

That summer, I co-facilitated over 60 days of stand-up training, including one very bumpy session in western Virginia where those truck drivers and mechanics

went into open revolt as I passed out the construction paper. “I haven’t played with colored paper since kindergarten,” one employee said in a tone of voice that

suggested he didn’t have plans to break that particular streak.”

I learned a lesson in adaptability that day.

And over that summer more than a decade past, I began to discover how to facilitate large groups of people through a wide variety of activities and discussions. I learned how to listen, how to ask better questions, when small groups work better than large groups, and how to move difficult conversations forward.

Those first few months and years, I would come home exhausted after a full day of facilitating. An extreme introvert, I would expend all of my energy being in

the moment and engaged with a group – and then go home and almost literally watch the paint peel from the wall. My wife knew not to ask me how my day went, or tell me how hers went, or ask what I wanted for dinner, until I’d had several hours of severe, introverted quiet.

Over time, I learned to strengthen my ability to adapt my style, and to better understand how to facilitate in ways that actually recharged my battery. Working

with groups became a pleasure and a passion, not a task, and it has since become a career.

In early February, I facilitated six straight days of employee discussions, training and workshops at the Library of Virginia, the Virginia Credit Union and the Visual Arts Center of Richmond – 35 hours of group interaction with well over 100 people in total. When I came home from the last session, Nikole asked me how my day went, told me how hers was and asked me what I wanted for dinner. And I even had enough energy to play with Thea.

Thanks for the push, Tammy.

Making Maestros Out of Managers

What can your organization learn from a symphony orchestra?

Find out this March, when the Richmond Symphony and Floricane present The Music Paradigm – a unique experiential seminar that uses an orchestra to demonstrate key concepts for a highly effective business team.

In this interactive program, the Richmond Symphony will serve as a metaphor for a dynamic organization. Participants are seated among the orchestra players as they explore concepts like teamwork, leadership and communication.

Kathryn Bishop Pullam, Assistant Director of Business Development with the Richmond Symphony, said her own experience with The Music Paradigm was memorable.

“I was amazed by the different elements of business that were used – what The Music Paradigm is able to illustrate with an orchestra is really cool, and quite inspiring,” she said.

According to Pullam, the Music Paradigm is an important tool which Richmond area businesses should take advantage of.

“Right now, many businesses are reevaluating themselves and trying new things. This seminar allows businesses to think creatively … it is the perfect bridge between the arts and the business world,” she said.

The Music Paradigm, created by Roger Nierenberg, has gained worldwide notoriety since its start in 1995. Nierenberg’s clients have included Capital One, Bank of America, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Pfizer.

The Music Paradigm will be held on March 22 at the Carpenter Theatre in Richmond, Virginia.

Reserve your seat today!

Self-Awareness and Workplace Effectiveness: A HYPE Primer

Next Wednesday, February 16, I'll be facilitating an abbreviated self-awareness workshop for the Greater Richmond Chamber's yougn professionals organization. HYPE – Helping Young Professionals Engage – has regular education programs for its active, and growing, membership, and our introduction to the Insights Discovery assessment tool is on deck next week.

The workshop couldn't have been scheduled at a better time – we just finished facilitating more than 60 hours of Insights training to large groups at the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Credit Union, and have scheduled our next full-day public workshop for April 26.

During next week's HYPE-ED workshop, I'll introduce Insights Discovery, talk about the role our perceptions play in almost all of our workplace engagements, and take the group through some extremely interactive experiences to help each person gain a better sense of their personal style and how it impacts their effectiveness, their approach to teams and the way they communicate on the job.

The HYPE-ED workshop will be held at the Holiday Inn Express Downtown (on East Cary Street at 2nd Street) from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday, February 16. Advance registration is $15 and includes non-alcoholic drinks and snacks – and a great lesson in self-awareness. You can register here, and find out more about HYPE and its programs here.

Returning to the Scene of the Valentine

Nothing beats returning to the scene of the crime.

The management team at the Valentine Richmond History Center invited me back for a bit of a check-up in January. A year earlier, we had tied a bow on their

latest strategic plan and parted ways.

A lot has changed in a year.

The Valentine RHC has some new key staff, is making some major enhancements to their Sculpture Garden and has started to chip away at their ambitious plan; the management team meets several times a year with a strategic planning committee of their board to check on progress and talk about the future.

On the Floricane front – well, we actually know what we’re doing now. And we've learned a huge amount along the way, including during our six months with the Valentine RHC team. We’re fortunate to be able to fold those lessons into the work we’re doing right now.

Spending a few casual hours with the Valentine team discussing lessons learned, progress made and opportunities that still remain was a great use of my time. It’s the sort of conversation I hope to continue having with clients.

Taking My Cue From Creativity At Work

I’m not sure how many more times I can learn to defer my judgments. Hopefully at least as long as I walk into situations with my own somewhat self-absorbed sense of how things should go.

Fortunately, the Visual Arts Center of Richmond Creativity at Work program managed to shatter my preconceptions and judgments quickly. As a result, I actually learned a great deal – about myself, about other organizations in town, and about approaches to creativity and innovation that already have served me in good stead.

Just ask anyone who has gone through the six sticky notes activity I’ve been using in brainstorming sessions lately.

In session one, I found myself fascinated by ways in which simple activities with clay shaped my thinking about my own business. I quickly gravitated toward the concepts of divergence (expanding perspectives) and convergence (bringing them back into focus and prioritization).

Session two was equally illuminating, primarily because the pace shifted and I began to learn more about the other dozen participants in the three-month, three-session experience. (Including two senior leaders from my old employer, Luck Stone.) Nothing beats finding yourself among a group of blindfolded classmates, trying to create a box out of rope – well, nothing like succeeding because the group came together, listened and trusted ideas.

I was in and out of session three because of work, but I was happy to make it back briefly at the end of the day to get my official set of Creativity at Work clay blocks from the VisArts team. And I’ll be recommending the program far and wide when the Visual Arts Center schedules the next round.

Greater Fulton: Design Day In Action

Photographer Lauren Stewart captured dozens of photos during our two days at the Neighborhood Resource Center in the Greater Fulton community. Peter Fraser and I spent time with neighborhood leaders, residents and local experts sketching on maps as we began to shape a visual framework for a community vision for this slice of Richmond's East End. Watch the two-day session unfold, courtesy of Lauren and Gickr.com:

Make your own animation

Everyone Owns The Culture

I was quoted on Twitter – or “retweeted” in the vernacular of the popular social media platform – recently in reference to the launch Facebook’s email service.

In response to a discussion generally about the blurring lines between social and work, I suggested that the lines were about to become increasingly blurry.

Smart organizations are actively looking for ways to strengthen the commitment of their employees – when tim es were flush, they mostly did this with enhanced benefits and bigger 401(k) matches.

For several reasons, “employee engagement” has become the new coin of the realm.

A new generation of workers is entering the workforce, and the connectivity – what old people call the Internet – is their oxygen. They have been connected their entire lives, and foolish is the employer who thinks they’re going to stop this particular wave.

But we’ve also struck an interesting moment where multiple generations of workings are suddenly looking for meaning at work. The Baby Boomers are chasing meaning in some cases because they dropped the ball on their generational aspirations three decades ago. In other cases, unemployment has given them a bit more time to ponder their legacy.

Facebook sees opportunity here – obvious ways to make the connections between work and personal more pronounced and vital. It keeps Facebook relevent, because suddenly 500 million users are using it more openly the eight hours a day their corporation pays them to work. It gives corporations – particularly those with sluggish IT infrastructure – a quick way to connect to their workers, and to build their brand.

Onto my quote, which is a rather simple concept.

“Smart organizations OWN their culture. They don’t subcontract it,” I tweeted.

The Floricane team recently started working with one organization interested in regaining ownership of their culture, and is in discussions with two other large organization with eyes on the same prize. The senior leaders at all three places see the need, are open to the opportunity and are not blind to the challenges – in each instance, we start our work by listening to the employees and helping them identify their own opportunities to be more connected.

And while smart companies don’t subcontract their culture, they do know when to bring outside perspectives into the conversation. Our work – simply put – is to make organizational culture something everyone has a role in creating, and owning.

Greater Fulton: Drawing A Better Future

Putting a gigantic map on a wall – and giving people permission to study it, draw on it, talk about it – is a great way to create community visioning.

That’swhy designer Peter Fraser and the Floricane team hung a huge map of the East End’s Greater Fulton community on the wall of Fulton’s Neigborhood Resource Center (NRC) early in November.

We had already talked the community to tears – two community-wide visioning sessions, close to 100 door-to-door interviews, and visioning activities with area teens and elementary school kids. They told us in clear terms what they wanted in their neighborhood.

In November, we spent time sketching their hopes and aspirations onto onion skin overlays, and directly onto a four-foot-by-six-foot neighborhood map.

We envisioned the stretch of Williamsburg Road between the NRC and the Powhatan Community Center as a real Main Street. We redrew the traffic and pedestrian flow at the commercial intersection of Government and Williamsburg roads. We explored the hidden pathways and connections between Fulton, Fulton Hill and Montrose Heights.

Throughout our two full days – almost 24 hours total – of mapping, we chatted with dozens of residents who wandered into the NRC to see what we were doing, or to provide us with very specific guidance.

You see, they’ve been down this road before, some of them. They’ve heard promises of street lights and ball fields, of elementary schools and bus service. They’ve heard it since the densely populated neighborhood grid often referred to as “Fulton Bottom” (to everyone except residents, who know it as Fulton) were hammered by the one-two punch of flooding and “urban renewal” in the 1970s.

They’re still waiting for the renewal. We’re hoping that this process – driven by the neighborhood, funded by Virginia LISC and supported by Floricane – might be the beginning of a promise kept.