Business Friends

One of the books we use a lot with teams and organizations is “Leadership and Self-Deception”. Like most books of its kind, it has problems with structure, flow, a tendency to beat readers over the head.

But it makes good, powerful points about the nature of relationships – and the simple fact that the way we see, and treat, others frequently (and not always consciously) sabotages our effectiveness, and our leadership.

One of L&SD’s core lessons invites us to explore our “way of being”, essentially our emotional attitude toward others. Do we see, experience and treat our boss, our coworker, our spouse in a responsive way – a way that truly values them as a person with unique needs and abilities? Or, do we see them in a resistant way, as problems or obstacles or challenges or annoyances? The simple point of the book is we often never stop to ask these questions – and our answers can change very quickly, very situationally.

I have a friend who I’ve known since I started Floricane who now runs a consulting business very similar to my own. We have many of the same connections, and periodically our work overlaps. I’ll call him Matthew, since that’s actually his name.

Matthew and I regularly catch up with each other, and have made a practice of being open and honest as we have shared stories about our work. We’ve also compared notes on how we price our work, and the types of work we’re chasing. It’s a far cry from collusion, but this level of transparency, I’ve found, is tough to maintain in business. Especially during a tight market, as both of our businesses start to grow and experience success.

Enter Leadership and Self-Deception.

Early last spring, Matthew called me to ask some questions about how we price conference talks or public speechifying. My first instinct was to be entirely honest – we usually hadn’t charged for such activities. That was my responsive impulse. It was immediately followed by my resistant impulse – What was Matthew really trying to find out? What sort of talk was he giving, and why wasn’t someone on our team giving it? He’s becoming a competitor, so I’d better play things close to the chest.

What a terrible feeling! After a few moments of hemming and hawing, I went back to my first impulse and we had a very good conversation. If I had stayed in that space of resistance, however, you can only imagine how much that would have damaged our relationship – and created the very thing about which I quickly became suspicious and fearful.

Now that Floricane is in the Richmond Times-Dispatch Building, our offices are just a block away from Matthew’s. Last week, we sat down and had a very open conversation about our business challenges, and opportunities. It was real, it was refreshing and it was a reminder that not only can you have friends in competitive places, but that rising tides are most likely to lift all boats if the crews are communicating.

It’s nice to be out of the box, and to be responsive to our friends – and competitors.

Add It Up

I started working with an old friend and former colleague early this summer. Jim Parker, the former chief financial officer for Luck Companies, has known me since 1996, and would probably joke that I haven’t learned a whole lot since he first since me out to train hourly quarry workers on company financial statements.

To say that I’m working with Jim is probably a misstatement. Jim is working me over.

Our meetings have been a series of conversations. The conversations have evolved from a series of scribbles (my scribbles) on scraps of paper and napkins to a series of charts and tables in Excel spreadsheets. As he has pushed me to reconstruct my business, Jim has pushed me to focus – and to deepen my focus.

Jim’s last statement as we finished our first conversation proved prescient. “I haven’t looked at any of your financials,” he said, “but my gut says that you’re probably losing money on every job.”

His point was simple. And he was right. My lack of attention on the financial structure, and long-term stability, of Floricane was a problem. And it was one that could be fixed – if I had the discipline to do the right work.

Through effective questions and consistent attention – and a push for accountability – Jim has started to steer me, and the business, in the right direction. We started with a hard look at the foundation – operating costs, expenses, job pricing, contractor costs – and have started to move into bigger questions around job costing and mix. It makes my head hurt. But it’s starting to make sense.

In many ways, Jim is doing the same work as Floricane does when it coaches managers and senior leaders. In our coaching role, our team asks hard questions, and keeps attention focused on the uncomfortable spaces, the spaces where development and growth need to happen.

Initially, it doesn’t feel as if it is ever going to add up – and, then, it does. And you wonder why you never approached work that way before now.

10 Lessons from Our Summer of Self-Discovery

We recently finished a fast sprint exercise – a real test for the Floricane team, which has a tendency to test the waters and plan each game. Our Summer of Self-Discovery series was conceived on-the-fly in late June, and launched five weeks later as a three-part series of workshops built on the Insights Discovery® assessment we use with clients.

The focus of the sessions was to help people deepen their understa nding of and appreciation for the many different ways we can leverage our unique personalities to develop personally, and to increase the effectiveness of our teams and our leadership. In the end, more than two dozen people took us up on the offer to spend at least one (and many spent three) evenings with us as we unpacked different elements of Insights at a fast clip.

I walked away with a small handful of lessons:

• People are hungry for understanding: We see it everywhere we go, whether it's a public workshop or in the workplace. There are just a lot of people in our community who just want to learn!

• My experience as facilitator is different from your experience as participant: My Insights profile actually suggests that I’m my own worst critic. Taking time at the end of sessions to chat with people helps me understand their experiences much better than packing up and bolting!

• Tablecloths make an impact: We really love our new space, but simple design gestures – orange table cloths, music – have a huge impact in big corporate rooms. We need to remember to do more to soften our environments.

• Get out of people’s way. They’ll do better work: Sometimes, it helps to get out of the way – whether your blocking your co-facilitators, or getting in the way of the participants.

• Planning is not underrated, but it is often overdone: It helps that we’ve been working with this material for more than a decade, but we pulled these sessions together pretty fast! Sure, they could have been tighter, but we found the loose flow to be conducive to the learning – and a bit contrary to our tendency these days to over-plan things.

• Interaction is always underrated, and often underdone: If over-planning is a disease in our organizations these days, so is under-interacting. Creating space for people to come together, connect and learn is a WIN. Seriously.

• Soft sell beats hard sell: Lord knows, I’m a terrible salesperson – at least in the traditional sense of the concept – but I continue to find that demonstrating the value of our work trumps packaging it. Creating opportunities to experience Floricane’s approach to change seems to be our most effective approach to selling.

• We care about what we do: Every time we conclude one of our money-losing, public workshops and step back to debrief how things went, I’m reminded that the biggest driver for the work we do is our passion for people, and for change. It’s such a great reminder for me, and for our team, that we get to live our Vision every single day.

A Day with PUNCH

We recently spent the day with the creative team at PUNCH – by which I mean we spent the day with the 20+ team members representing all aspects of the Richmond-based creative design firm. We've been guiding the team through a series of discussions about various ways the firm can grow and transform, building on its excellence in print production.

New Space: NBC 12

NBC12.com - Richmond, VA News, Weather, Traffic

In case you missed it, NBC12 did an extended piece on the new collaborative business space we’re co-creating with the team at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. TD Publisher Tom Silvestri and I spent a sliver of our afternoon trying not to give the same answers to a series of questions about the new space and the objectives behind it.

Check out the video, and keep your eyes peeled for information on the process for prospective small business tenants to put their name in the hat for one of the coveted office/work spaces. The goal is to fill the 4,000-square-foot space with another 6-8 small businesses by the end of the year.

New Space: Week Three, Energy

If I needed proof that our new collaborative space in the Richmond Times-Dispatch Building was a good thing, it arrived one day late last week.

That’s when the place came alive in the most natural of ways, as our team and a series of guests and visitors created real, utterly palatable energy.

I had an early morning meeting with a former coworker, and one-time Floricane contributor, Beth Coakley. While Beth and I were meeting in the shared work area, Sam and Tina both arrived for the day and settled into their desks. As Beth and I wrapped, she wandered over to catch up with Tina while I went to greet my next meeting – my financial Seal Team coach, Jim Parker. As Jim and I met, Debra arrived for a meeting. There was a palatable buzz in the space as people went about their day – an unplanned, unorchestrated energy began to flow through the space.

In short order, others came and went – Sarah and I met, and then I hung out with Matthew Freeman of TMI Consulting. Jacob from Work It Richmond and Brian from @RTDNews both dropped by the space to chat briefly, as did Tom Silvestri and his finance sidekick, Raymond McDowell. And as the long day of collaborative ballet drew to a close, we welcomed a dozen friends and clients into the space for the last of our Summer of Self-Discovery workshops.

Everyone commented on the vibe, but the truth is that I had the pleasure of experiencing 12 full hours of it. The last place I felt such a constant stream of unrehearsed engagement over an extended period may have been during one of my three-day (and night) college newspaper publishing binges.

That’s not to say there is a lot of similarity between Floricane and the Commonwealth Times (though it is a bit ironic that I’m back in a newspaper environment after two decades). No, Floricane is a serious business – and that long day last week was evidence of that, as several dozen people rolled through to add emphasis to our belief that “the conversation is the change”.

I can’t wait to feel this new space when a half-dozen other businesses are working on conversations in this space.

Playground Perspective: Wet Feet

It's sometimes hard to stay engaged with a child when their need for explanation exceeds either a) your knowledge or b) your patience.

Welcome toanother chapter in the Book of Why.

I say book because I'm pretty sure we're only on Chapter Two, and that the storyline will get progressively complicated (and perhaps frustrating) as it proceeds. After all, Thea's only four-and-a-half. Right now her questions are pretty basic and straightforward.

It's fascinating to watch her nimble mind navigate and grow. Six months ago, she would be horrified when a single drop of water "ruined" her clothes. This morning, she danced in the rain on our patio in her pajamas, and then took me on a "mud puddle adventure splashing walk". We came home soaked and happy.

Along the walk, I entertained dozens of questions that have popped up in recent weeks. "Why is it raining, Dad?" "But where does it come from?" "But where do the clouds come from?" "But why is it raining, Dad?"

It really is that circular.

But her curiosity isn't limited to questions, and her quest for knowledge isn't a one-way conversation. Not long after her rain dance, and our puddle walk, we headed to the back trails of Bryan Park with our dog, Rilo. Thea called it our "thirty and one mile adventure nature hike". (We're still working on numbers.)

Along the way she asked about hawks, about sticks, about snakes, about the interstate, about the effect of rain on creeks and about Rilo's ability to ride a bike. ("But what about the dog we saw in the wheelchair, Dad? Rilo could do a doggy wheelchair.") She explained why she was running out of energy, why Rilo needed to be on her leash and why it would be a bad idea for the dog to get stung by a bee on our walk -- "She's special to me, Dad. And she might be sad if she gets stung."

Quite a departure from the toddler whose endless litany of "why" two years ago was probably just an evolutionary quest to build vocabulary. And quite exhausting. When you fight it.

Rolling with my daughter's flow, and appreciating her endless need for context and understanding, can be exhausting, no doubt. But it is also stimulating and important. And it is not so different from one of the biggest two-way challenges of so many of the organizations Floricane encounters.

I continue to be surprised at the number of people in management roles whose curiosity is so limited, and who fight the need of their employees for context and understanding. The struggle is often reinforced by employees who are afraid to ask "why" or who struggle to articulate their need for information. What's worse? When the answers -- the information, the context, the clarity -- live within the organization, and no one is asking any questions.

We suck the life out of our organizations when we lose the capacity for curiosity. We suck the life out of our relationships the same way.

Imagine how empty my life as a parent would be if my child had no questions. Imagine how empty her life would be if I exhibited no interest in her questions. Imagine if all of our conversations were one-way, or even worse, that we had no conversations at all.

Now imagine that your workplace was as rich, stimulating, non-stop and amusing as my walks with Thea. Go ahead, feed your curiosity.

Letter from John: Sitting Still

The worst thing to do when you're running a new business is to sit still.

A story.

When I started Floricane in November of 2008, I had just joined a steady flow of newly unemployed Americans -- more than a million a month, you may recall -- looking for work. A convergenceof factors led Nikole and me to decide to throw the dice and join the entrepreneurial ranks.

As a planner and an organizer, my initial impulse was to spend three or four months mapping out a business strategy before fully committing. And then a little voice in my head said, "Run. Run like h ell."

I'd ignored that voice in the past. In 2008, I chose to listen to its urgent advice. I ran.

By the time my severance from my previous employer ran out in July of 2009, I had two paying projects. With blisters already forming on my entrepreneurial feet, I doubled down and continued the marathon. Two turned into four, turned into eight.

Three summers later, and the race has changed. My friends at The Hodges Partnership (who entered the race six years before I did) like to tell me that success doesn't erase worry. You just worry about different things as you move forward.

Like the worries I carried around this past summer.

It was 126 degrees in June, and getting hotter. The Floricane team began our summer with a lead consultant out on maternity leave, a project manager out on extended leave, a planned move stalled by corporate acquisition, and a major proposal nixed by a technicality. (Read: I dropped the ball. Think: Eggs in one basket.) Even our family summer vacation plans went awry. No, I was not such a relaxed camper as we rolled through the summer.

The nice thing about writing this monthly missive is having the opportunity to reflect on the challenges, opportunities and possibilities of running a business. Also, I get to skip the icky parts. Like all of July.

Because now that August has arrived, we're actually anticipating what comes next. We're at mile 20 of our fourth marathon/year, and not only is the finish line visible but we're making plans for our next race/year.

We've settled into our exciting new space at the heart of the Richmond Times-Dispatch's novel entrepreneurial business hub at 300 East Franklin Street, and our team has been spending some time anticipating what lies ahead for Floricane.

Even as we help the RTD team finalize the selection process for eight small businesses, and build a collaborative culture in this new community, we're going to be extra busy with a host of other collaborations.

We're partnering with the Richmond Symphony and Maestro Steven Smith to roll out their amazing FIRST CHAIR program. The creative team at PUNCH is busy blowing our minds with designs for a stellar new brochure and website. And we're going to be showing up all over town this fall -- on our way to Floricane's 4th anniversary celebration. (Keep your eyes peeled for an invite later in October!)

Best of all, we'll be running at a full sprint with our clients -- old and new, businesses and nonprofits, looking for strategic planning and organizational change support. If there's one thing we're not doing as we move into our fourth year of changing the world, it's sitting still.