Tag Archives: work

Ability and Agility

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I love this quote, shared in a video on LinkedIn:

“It used to be about ability. And now, in a changing world, I think what we should be looking for is agility. I want to know how quickly do you change your mind? How fast are you to admit you’re wrong? Because what that means is you’re not just going to be reacting to a pandemic or to AI, you’re actually going to be anticipating those problems and seeing around corners, and then leading change as opposed to being a victim of it.” ~Adam Grant

It’s more than just anticipating problems, it’s about being agile, understanding challenges, and addressing them while they are small. It’s about understanding your strengths, and the strengths of your team… as well as weaknesses.

It’s about Agile Ability, which is why I titled this ‘Ability AND Agility’, rather than ‘Ability VERSUS Agility’. We need to embrace our failures and learn from them, recognize problems early, even predict them and be preemptive. This is so different than a culture of accountability and blame.

The desired student, employee, partner, colleague of the future will learn what they need to on the job. They’ll be exceptional because of their agility and willingness to learn, not just because of what they came to the table already knowing.

Breaking bread

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I’ve had a few opportunities to have lunch with, to break bread with, colleagues in the past several weeks. Having a meal together, outside of the usual staffroom with its comfortable banter is a treat. It is a good reminder of the fact that we all have lives outside of this thing called work.

I find that my connections to people can become fixed in a place-based kind of experience, and we all play the roles we are supposed to play… to leave that environment and break bread is an opportunity to find new connections, to be ourselves and not just our roles.

Meetings and spaces in between

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Have you ever gone to a meeting and wondered, “Why am I here?” Or questioned why the meeting wasn’t just a memo or an email? Are there ever times when your schedule can be filled with meetings such that there is almost no time to get anything done? Then one day you look at your schedule and you notice an entire day with no meetings.

If that happens to me, the first thing I think is, “I’m going to get so much done!” And that ends up being half true. Why only half true? Because the void in the calendar gets filled. Interruptions, distractions, and work getting done but stretching to fill the space faster than you imagined.

There is a sweet spot where the spaces between meetings is ideal. If the gap is too small, it’s hard to get anything meaningful done. If the gap is too big, it needs to be filled with intention… there needs to be a goal that is calendared in the space. Or the space gets inefficiently filled. That’s not to say I’m wasting time, but I’m not getting bigger, more ideal, tasks done unless they are planned.

It’s easy to fill time doing stuff that needs to get done, but not necessarily doing the things that really move me or my team forward. It’s easy to fill the in between spaces with tasks, not goals, with busywork not work that I want to do.

The things I must do crowd out the things I want and hope to do. My calendar fills, the spaces in between get filled. I stay on top of what needs to be done but struggle to get the things I hope to do done. Those items often get rushed or not done at all. Unless I fill the spaces in between with intention, they get filled with tasks. necessary tasks, but not the only tasks I want my day filled with. The key is to fill my calendar with intentions, not just meetings.

Special Events

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I was recently at a special event that was held in a venue it was never held in before. I had amazing seats that let me see not just the event up close but also the people who worked the event up close too. What I saw was an amazing community of people who all knew what their job was, and who did it with joy and camaraderie.

You don’t always see that in large organizations. You don’t always see that when a team needs to work in a totally new environment. It takes a special kind of organization that can make a large production work in a new environment, where stresses are different, and yet everyone still understands their role and can still create a really positive environment for themselves and their customers.

It’s hard to build a team where a positive culture permeates so well, and when you see it, you know you are seeing something special.

The right to disconnect

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I’ve already shared my vampire rule for email:

“After 6 PM staff only get emails from me if the email is invited in. In other words, if they have asked me a question and want an answer, then a response has been invited. But if that invitation for a response isn’t there, I delay email delivery until the next morning.

So like a vampire at the front door, I can’t enter (with email) if I have something to share that is not initiated (and therefore invited in) by my staff. New topics are set to be delivered early the next morning.”

Yesterday a parent wanted me to contact one of my online teachers, who is on her last week of summer holidays, to get her son started in a course. I said no. I told the parent that I would send a scheduled message to the teacher the first day back (and I did), but that I was not interrupting my teacher’s holidays.

The Australia government just protected employees “right to disconnect”. According to a CNN report, “As of Monday, people won’t have to answer out of hours calls, texts, or emails.”

Laws are one way to ensure it, but I don’t think we need laws to be thoughtful and respectful about work/life boundaries. I think we can choose thoughtfulness over convenience, and be respectful of people’s time and attention. Like I mentioned to the parent (who was very understanding), if I interrupt a teacher’s holiday for this, there is no specific line I can draw to respect the teacher’s rights to a holiday.

We can all probably draw better boundaries between work and the rest of our lives, but what’s more important is that no matter where we draw our own lines does not allow us to choose for others too. Regardless of where our lines are, we need to be respectful of other people’s rights to unplug and disconnect from work when they are away from work.

Restless relaxation

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I’m relaxing in a hammock, in the shade, at a campground, listening to a playlist titled ‘Writing 2’, and I’m restless. I dealt with a work issue earlier. Nothing challenging, just needed to give some quick guidance around an issue and all is well. Still, that put my head in a bit of ‘work mode’ and now I don’t feel like I’m relaxing, but rather that I’m being unproductive.

Stupid… I know.

But that’s where I go sometimes. I get into a mode where relaxing feels like ‘not doing anything useful’. And so, music on, blogging app open, and I can suddenly feel productive. I’m writing. The good news is that this actually feels relaxing. I’m still in the hammock, I’m comfortable, and my impulse to be productive will be a little more subdued after I hit the Publish button.

I think it’s time to head to the lake now, and switch to my audiobook. Again, a chance to feel like I’m doing something… useful. Because I don’t know how to relax doing nothing.

Work ethic

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I sent my daughters a meme recently on instagram. It’s a guy buckled into the driver’s seat of a parked car and he’s hitting the passenger seat headrest with a side-fist. The caption reads:

“When your parents gave you work ethic instead of generational wealth.”

Both my kids have it. They are praised at work for doing an excellent job. They have always been that kid who gets asked to train someone coming up even though others have been at the job longer than them. And they take pride in doing an excellent job. It’s great to see them excel both at work and in the things they love to do.

With respect to my own job, education certainly is one of those fields where many people come into the profession with a solid work ethic. I see it time and again. My team really has some dedicated educators and support staff who show what a good work ethic looks like, and that has an incredible impact on the work and learning environment. It shines through in the pride people take in their work, and the praise they get for what they do.

I don’t think a good work ethic is innate. I think it is fostered and developed. I think it can be learned. I also think it can be contagious. Equally so, laziness can also be contagious. Years ago I worked on a factory floor for a soft drink company. My job was to feed a conveyor belt with crates of 12 used 750ml glass bottles to be washed and refilled. (You need to be a certain age to remember these bottles that out-date the plastic 2-litre ones.) This was a labour intensive job, with a fork lift driver bringing pallets of crates for two of us to unload.

When it was break time, another worker would relieve us one at a time, but this one guy, whose name I no longer remember, would send us both on break at the same time. It was a 15 minute break and he’d say, “take 20”, then he’d do the job of two people. I did this a couple times for my partner to take a quick washroom break, but I’d be huffing and puffing if I had to do it for 20.

This guy relieved us like this for almost a week, then our boss saw him and told him to stop. Not because he was going to hurt himself, but rather because he didn’t want the higher-ups to see that one person could do the job. The whole culture in the factory was ‘do the minimum’, ‘don’t show off’, ‘don’t do anything extra’. It wasn’t an environment I would have wanted to stay in any longer than the summer between school semesters. In fact, I didn’t go back the next year.

A good work ethic is often overlooked. It’s only when you come up against a bad work ethic in comparison that you begin to value what a good work ethic means to the culture of an organization. Remember to show value and appreciation to those around you with a good work ethic.

Persistence and Patience

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I like images and graphics that make you think, and especially ones that are motivating. But sometimes for the sake of an image trying to tell a story, another narrative can either be missed or take over from the intended message. That’s something that immediately occurred to me when I saw this ‘inspirational’ image.

To me, the intended message is that we always need to keep learning, but it suggests a uniformity of practice and process that’s just plain wrong. To the person who posted it, Steven Bartlett, the message was about relentless consistency. He said,

For anyone frustrated with how long something is taking you right now…

Remind yourself of this.

Relentless consistency is usually the answer. I’m not talking about a sprint, I’m talking multi-decade.

What’s one thing you do to remain consistent?

But that uniformity between LEARN and APPLY in the image really bugs me no matter what the intended message. While other commenters mentioned positive interpretations like, ‘Consistency is key’, and ‘Focus on the long game’, I commented:

I think my greatest learning is that application always takes longer than you think. Persistence needs to be tempered with patience.

I wish learning was that easy. I wish I could apply everything I learned so consistently and effortlessly. I can’t. And I don’t think anyone can. There are hours of practice, there are mistakes made, detours and distractions. There is never the consistency and uniformity off application of learning seen in the image.

Is the message of relentless consistency over a long period of time important? Absolutely! But I really think this image misses the mark in sharing what relentless consistency looks like. The hardest part of relentless consistency is when application of learning does not go smoothly and application of what you’ve learned takes months to accomplish. And yes, sure that also often means more learning, but the grunt work of making things work can often be the times when consistency really matters, and isn’t so evenly worked through as suggested in the image.

Persistence needs to be tempered with patience. If constant results and application of learning are expected, this will lead to disappointment and frustration… neither of which inspires consistency.

Go, go, go

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The year has come to an end. Almost. Our grad is tonight night, I have a second grad to attend tomorrow night, as well as a couple luncheons… and the ‘To Do’ list seems endless.

There is always so much to do at the end of the year, but there are also celebrations and gatherings that need your full attention. That’s the trick, how do you squeeze everything in, and still give everything the time and commitment it all deserves?

You’d think I’d have it all figured out by now but I don’t. I’ll just put my head down and make the most of it. Friday afternoon will be here soon enough, and I’ll pick up all the pieces after the long weekend. The most important thing this week is fully committing to the task at hand and to the events I attend. Worrying about the next thing robs us of the joy and celebration of the end of the year. Go, go, go doesn’t work unless you spend time at each place you go to.

Second monitor

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At work I just updated and replaced computer monitors for my staff. It was time, especially for my online teachers and secretaries, who spend the vast majority of their day looking at screens. Two of my secretaries use 3 monitors, and many teachers and myself use 2. My setup is that I use my laptop as my keyboard and usually have my calendar on that screen, then my two monitors are on the raised platform of a desktop stand-up desk behind my laptop. A couple of my teachers have the same setup, while others put their laptop between the monitors on a flat desk.

No matter what the setup, all but two teachers see great value in having additional monitors. I like having additional monitors so much that I’m considering a second monitor at home. The reality is that more screen real estate means better productivity. Some people might think it means more distractions, but that’s not the case. If you are going to choose a distraction, more monitors won’t add to the distraction. If that’s what you are choosing, one screen is enough.

However, for productivity a second or third screen is invaluable. Almost nothing I end up doing requires just one screen. If I’m dealing with an email about a student, I have email open, and then I might also have our student management system open to see what courses they have with us, and I might also have the ministry data system up to see their transcript of courses. That’s just one of many examples where 3 screens are far better than either jumping from one online system to another or splitting your screen to see different tabs or systems that then require scrolling.

If you spend a lot of time on a screen, do yourself a favour and add at least one more monitor, then watch your speed at tasks and overall productivity increase… but a fair warning to you that once you do it, you can never go back.

PS. And even if it isn’t something that works for you, don’t let that stop you from providing it to others in your organization… it will increase productivity!