Operationalizing Strategy with Super Radiator Coils

Let’s get one thing out of the way. Super Radiator Coils?You may call it a strange fit. I think it’s a perfect fit.

Super Radiator, as they call themselves, is a manufacturing business with a strong research bent. They have stand-along divisions in Arizona, Minnesota and Virginia. Their Virginia division is run by the husband of a past client. That’s the connection.

When I worked at Luck Stone, we had a corporate office, a team of engineers and process analysts, and folks in production. Super Radiator doesn’t specialize in rocks – rather in heat transfer systems, and coils for cooling systems – but many of the principles are the same.

That’s how Caroline and I found ourselves hanging out with a small group of engineers, sales managers and operational leaders from Super Radiator talking about strategic focus and leadership. As usual, we learned more from the team we were facilitating than they could possibly have learned from us! But we provided them with clarity and a pathway along which they could begin to map a growth strategy.

It’s what we try to do for all of our clients. Even if their work doesn’t make any sense to us at first. (Seriously. Check out this video of their test lab here in Richmond.)

Insights Discovery: Making an Investment in Your Team’s Development

One of our favorite conversations goes something like this:

What if I train and develop people in my organization and they leave?

What if you don't and they stay?

Your personal development -- or that of the people on your team, or in your organization -- is an investment that will pay life-long dividends. Today's environment asks each of us to stretch, grow and discover new ways to bring our best selves to our work.

People -- by which we mean well-trained, forward-thinking, engaged people -- are truly your organization's biggest investment. But there's a difference between having employees and cultivating their best potential.

That's where Insights Discovery® comes in. Insights Discovery is an in-depth personality profile built around a simple eight color model to help individuals strengthen their self-awareness, and maximize their ability to create and lead change.

The Floricane team has facilitated hundreds of Insights Discovery for Personal Effectiveness workshops for well over 2,000 individuals. Our last Insights session for 2012 promises to be one of our best. It's happening on Thursday, December 6, and we'd like to invite you and members of our organization to join us.

Find out more at Floricane, or register now. (Want to know what an Insights profile looks like? Download mine and see – and learn more about me than you want to know!)

Commonwealth Parenting: Starting With Alignment

Commonwealth Parenting asked me to drop by last week.It was an opportunity I couldn’t refuse – after all, I dedicate an entire sectionof Floricane’s monthly newsletter to lessons I’m learning from my daughter.

The two decade old organization that serves as a parenting resource was facing a challenge we see all-too-often these days: Managing organizational transition at a time when the economy and social changes have made everything tumultuous. It’s like changing kayaks in the middle of Class IV rapids.

Obviously, the past five years have created huge economic challenges for families across Central Virginia. And the composition and nature of families has changed more in the past several decades than many of us can imagine. For an organization like Commonwealth Parenting, the simplicity of mission – helping parents parent better – has never been more complex!

Add to the mix a new executive director, new board leadership and new approaches to funding, and you’ve got an opportunity for some new conversations.

So, last week, I sat down with a small group of staff and board members, and we walked through some of Commonwealth Parenting’s opportunities and strategic choices. It was a fast-paced discussion, but the team at the table seemed eager to wrestle with big questions about scope, direction and vision.

In the end, we reaffirmed the organization’s primary commitment to serving parents, explored ways to better execute on two core “products” and began mapping out a process to better engage a staff and board in the midst of continued change and transition.

Like good parenting, the strategic work of Commonwealth Parenting is starting by getting everyone on the same page.

Hitting The Right Notes During Challenging Times

Timing is everything, right? Not if you can’t control the timing. The show, as they say, must go on.That turned out to be the case recently when we met with the board and staff of the Richmond Symphony to begin a series of strategic planning conversations – right in the middle of difficult labor negotiations with the Symphony’s musicians.

And so, bright and early on an October morning, we begin a series of creative conversations with the Symphony’s leadership about “re” – reengaging, reinventing, reigniting a centuries-old concept for a changing world. The Symphony’s strategic planning process has a nice organic quality to it – the first phase has included a series of staff conversations, focus groups led by a team from Genworth, benchmarking reports on peer symphonies around the country, a board conversation about core values, and a retreat centered around opportunities and strategic outcomes.

I like to imagine it’s like composing a new piece of music – bringing disparate elements together, writing and rewriting, all in service to a strong and passionate vision.

On Stage With My Favorite Punk Rock Artist

Artist Ed Trask is probably tired of hearing me talk about the possibility that he is a reincarnation of my grandfather, who studied fine art at what isnow Virginia Commonwealth University and spent most of his artistic career painting signs, billboards and water towers (photo, above).

I remember when I met Ed. It was a Sunday afternoon, and we were both students at VCU. One of his first bands was playing at a club on Laurel Street. (I wrote about that in 2011 in the Floricane newsletter.)

He’s been a friend and inspiration ever since.

In October, I somehow managed to (finally) share a stage with Ed. We were making art, not music.

A brilliant idea hatched by Ed and Hands On Richmond’s Vanessa Diamond needed some facilitated set-up during the Collaborative Leadership Conference hatched by the Partnership for Nonprofit Excellence, Greater Richmond Chamber and Leadership Metro Richmond.

The idea: Take 1,200 metal birds, have community leaders at the conference and visitors to the Richmond Folk Festival write inspiring messages, and create an art installation – a physical, community murmuration.

And so Ed talked about his artistic vision, and I worked to connect the dots between the idea and the individual passions and commitments of the 300+ conference participants. Following our joint appearance, the group migrated into an adjoining room to pen their messages and hang their birds on a temporary installation.

It only takes a couple of birds to inspire a flock, as Vanessa and Ed discovered.

Great Art is Built (and Curated) by Great Organizations

There are days in our work when we sit down with an organization that has fundamentally changed the way our community looks and feels -- organizations like 1708 Gallery.

For 34 years, 1708 Gallery has paved the way for modern art in Richmond, and changed the way many Richmonders have considered art. Through big public exhibitions -- the Go Fish! Project in 2001, the edgy Wearable Art show, the annual InLight installation -- and through small, but dynamic, installations in its West Broad Street gallery, 1708 has moved the needle on art in Richmond.

As #RVA settles into a new arts-centric groove -- the expanded VMFA, the pending arrival of VCU's Institute for Contemporary Art, an arts district on Broad Street, a new chapter for the popular First Fridays art walk -- the team at 1708 is preparing for 34 more years of challenging the status quo.

We began our strategic engagement with 1708's staff and board at the end of September with a full-day exploration at the Linden Row Inn. We'll regroup with a small project team in October to build a strategic framework for the gallery, and position the board to finalize the work over the next several months.

Letter from John: Having Good Partners

Having a baby? Starting a business? It helps to have a good partner in the mix.

Four years into this business of Floricane -- and almost five since Thea was born -- I can make an easy argument that Nikole has played seriously large role in my successes as a businessperson and a parent.As a partner and as a wife, she's been solidly invested from the start.

Like the life of a newborn, the first year of business at Floricane was a heady mixture of having no clue, soaking it all in and constantly waiting for the next meal. Nikole thought and celebrated and worried through all of 2009 with me.

There were no terrible twos -- at Floricane, anyway. The second year of business was a lot of fun. The toddler stage of the business was busy, and growing, and good. Nikole celebrated every success we hit in 2010.

Year three was bumpy -- more growth, along with a handful of mistakes and more than a bit of unwarranted cockiness. All of which conspired to make this fourth year of consulting challenging beyond belief. Having a partner at home to help hold things together, and push me at the right moments, hasn't made the work easier, but there's something reassuring about having someone alongside me in the boat.

If Nikole has been at my side through the thick and thin of Floricane's emerging adolescence, I've also been fortunate to be surrounded by a great community of coworkers and supporters.

Bill Martin (of Valentine Richmond History Center fame) and I had drinks earlier this summer to discuss the challenges of these entrepreneurial preschool years. He suggested that I didn't know enough to do anything different in the first year, was too busy to do anything different the second year, and too stubborn to change course during the third year. He also advised me not to wait until year five to adjust course.

And so 2012 was the year I finally stopped screaming, "I can do it by myself!" (see Playground Perspective, below), and started allowing the excellence of others to really shine. (Admittedly, not until I hit a wall.)

Leap forward sixty days, and Floricane faces its 4th birthday (and enters its fifth year) with a new home, a solid team of star players and a steady pipeline of fun, meaningful work. We're busier than ever, and optimistic about the future. Did I mention fun?

As Floricane moves into its fifth year, I find myself saying "Thank you" to a lot of people. Friends, family, clients, business partners, community supporters -- there's been no end to the steady stream of caring, supportive people who have helped us thrive. My commitment for year five is simple: Give Nikole more successes to celebrate, and help the team turn Floricane into the business we all want it to be.

Happy anniversary, Nikole and Thea. Happy anniversary, Sarah and Tina and Debra and Caroline. And thank you, friend, for being a part of this fun, fantastic, stress-inducing journey!

Playground Perspectives: The Dance of Days

Parenting gets more interesting every day, especially when I'm able to spend less time supervising Thea and more time just being with her, and with her and Nikole.

When we're wandering around town these days, we tend to find ourselves straddling that great divide betweenkeeping the parenting ball in motion and giving our daughter space to breath, explore, grow.

It's a hard balance. But it has been getting easier as she's been getting older. Funny how that works.

In recent months, we've tried to be aware that she's getting older, and deserves opportunities to stretch her proverbial wings, to explore the boundaries, to discover safe places in the world absent the shadows Nikole and I cast. It's fun to watch (though occasionally unnerving).

Thea, her Omie (my mom) and I took a bus to the Folk Festival last month. The weather was gorgeous, and Thea was dressed in her finest mismatched ensemble. The minute we stepped off the bus, she was a bolt of lightning -- running nonstop and pell-mell, and dancing up a storm. But she also listened well. The combination of the environment, her energy and her good listening (and the attentive eyes of her Omie and myself) made it easy to let her stretch the boundaries and explore on her own.

A similar routine plays out in smaller venues. Our small family hits the town most Saturday mornings -- breakfast at Perly's, a swing by the Lakeside Farmers Market, a visit to the library. She regularly walks the tip back to our waitress, and selects flowers for her mom with Miss Terry at the market. She checks out her own books. Seeing her confidence grow and her sense of self expand into the world is such fun -- and very reassuring!

It helps that her assertiveness has increased, consternating as it can be. "I can do it myself!" is her latest indignant refrain -- along with a sassy, "You are annoying me so much right now, Dad!"

Not only can she do more for herself, but she's not shy about letting us know it.

What is it allows that combination of love, attention and assertiveness evaporate from our relationships? It's a rare tension, especially in those moments when it feels healthy and affirming. I find myself wondering if I could somehow bottle this unique dynamic we have with our daughter -- I'm pretty sure we're going to need it when she's 13!

I also wonder how different our teams and organizations might be if managers did a better job of letting employees dance up a storm, and if employees had less passive-aggressive ways of telling their supervisors that they are annoying. What would those conversations look like if they could happen with more love and less judgment?

I think it's a perfect question to ask my team at our next meeting. And maybe a good question to explore in other corners of my life. Lord knows, we all could stand a little more dancing.