[Opinion] 3 Things We Need Now

As many events become revealed that were once hidden; as information becomes freer and freer, and as people have more access to more entertainment, distraction, and dopamine hits via the communication objects in our pockets, audiences need three things now:

Wisdom: There is a dearth of wisdom. You can’t get wisdom from a Google search. You can’t stream wisdom to your mobile device. The only way that wisdom comes (folksy or otherwise) is through relationships with people. When there is a wealth of access to information (Google, anyone?) but there is a dearth of true insight, humanity has really only managed to wrest a sliver from the great artifice of this thing that we call “reality.”

Connection: There is a dearth of connection. Sure, we can connect with an old friend, email an organization and get personalized service, or even instant message a fellow professional in another vertical space far away from ours and harass and/or troll them. But such acts are shorthand for real connection; and, they rely too much on the tool (Facebook, IM, email, etc.) rather than focusing on the act of connecting. Connection with a person, face-to-face, unambiguously, is the only way that conflicts between human beings, and within human groups, will be solved.

Trust: There is a dearth of trust. Sure there is wisdom. And yes, there is connection. But, as has often been said in this space, there isn’t a lack of information, but there is a lack of trust. Not only is there a lack of meaningful connection, there is also a lack of trust. Organizations and individuals rely on this lack of trust to establish their authority long enough in your mind to get you to make a purchase. But trust established for less time than it takes to make a neocortical electrical leap from impulse to emotion to judgment, to justification, to purchase, isn’t really trust at all. That’s just effective marketing.

Showing up every day and being willing to learn, rather than to teach.

Giving people the benefit of the doubt.

Creating an environment of humility.

Do these three things and you’ll be well on your way to building trust, wisdom, and connection for yourself and for others.

[Advice] Entrepreneurs Disrupted

We are at the end of about a ten to fifteen-year cycle of entrepreneurship being sexy. And now is a good time for disruption.

This is evidenced by current exits, acquisitions, and even the folding of companies. And while some VC dollars are drying up a little bit in traditional geographic locations, other dollars are moving to non-traditional geographic locations.

Like Pittsburgh.

Or Cleveland.

In those places though, where the culture of Silicon Valley (“fail fast, fail hard”) has yet to completely penetrate, two distinct phenomena are going to bump up against each other over the next few years. And this friction will occur even as breathless articles—and blog posts—will be written about the death of entrepreneurship in the major media, political, and social centers of the United States.

The first phenomena will be the mismatch between a traditional VCs perception of what the culture of investment should be, and the perception of culture in places geographically, (and culturally as well as ideologically) removed from that culture of investment. There have been a few businesses built like this in the Midwest (Basecamp, formerly 37 Signals, comes to mind) but there will be more friction in the coming years.

The second phenomena will be the mismatch between a “small business” mentality, and a “entrepreneurs” mentality. This will manifest in all kinds of ways, including work ethic, employee education level, and other localized influences. Many of these are unquestioned and “in the air” in Silicon Valley, and the mismatch is already acute outside of Silicon Valley.

Both of these mismatches can be overcome, managed, or eliminated completely through the effects of numerous, gossamer like transactions, but they all represent disruption.

That is, disruption for both the end of entrepreneurship being “sexy”, and the beginning of something else, even greater taking root in unexpected places.

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Four, Episode # 4 – Halelly Azulay

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Four, Episode # 4 – Halelly Azulay, Leadership Coach, Facilitator, Consultant, Speaker and Upgrader of Sustainable Leader Development

podcast-earbud_u-season-four-episode-4-halelly-azulay

[powerpress]

So, I talk and write about this stuff all the time.

Growing talent in the workplace cannot happen with considering work in a different way.

Talent is something that everyone believes that they have, but very few people can target and develop in a meaningful and demonstrative way.

Trust, follow-through, belief, and a standard of work and an understanding of labor, is changing in the world of work.

But this should be nothing new for you, because you’re listening to this podcast on your way home from work, on your way to work, or while you’re sitting in your cubicle, trying to avoid doing work.

Our guest today Hallely Azulay knows about all of this and is going beyond just exploring the changing world of work, she is actively trying to mold it into something better for everybody.

So what’s the solution?

Well, I argue for more training, as you would assume. I also argue for more transparency and authenticity around emotional labor. But I know that could be something that you may not be comfortable with.

But what about your manager?

The chasm between our comfort zones at work and the growth that we need to do at work to remain relevant is staggering. We need guidance, shepherding, diligence, and respect to cross that chasm successfully.

Without this, we won’t cross the chasm and truly develop our talents, skills and abilities in ways that allow us to become true stewards of the workplace.

Such guidance can come from the outside of your organization from folks like myself and Hallely. But more often than not, it’s going to have to come from the manager or supervisor who you actively do work to avoid during the day.

To paraphrase from Juvenal: Who trains the watchmen to watch in the first place?

Listen to Halelly and take the time to connect with her via the links below:

The Talent Grow Podcast: http://www.talentgrow.com/podcast

Talent Grow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TalentGrowLLC

Talent Grow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/talentgrow

Talent Grow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HalellyAzulay

The Talent Grow website: http://www.talentgrow.com/

[Opinion] On Crossing the Chasm

The biggest gap in organizational culture today is the chasm between the ideals and values on the wall and the actual lived reality of hourly work life.

This gap used to not matter at the height of the Industrial Revolution, but as the papering over of the gap has become less and less effective over time, the presence of the gap has become more and more evident.

Unfortunately, many organizational leaders are deciding to expand that gap through behaviors and conflict choices that reflect a nostalgia for a command and control past, rather than seeking to cross the chasm with a bridge to the future.

Either an employee is on one side of the chasm—or the gap—or they are on another.

Unfortunately, the inherent conflicts based in organizational identity fester and grow (they go fungal, rather than viral) in the darkness of that chasm.

Crossing the chasm of conflict between the ideals on the wall, and the daily workplace reality, is the hardest confrontation for leaders, founders, managers, and supervisors to engage in.

But the journey across that chasm is the only journey that matters.

HIT Piece 9.13.2016: Facebook-as-the-Internet

You are probably going to read this post by clicking on a link from Facebook, if you read this at all.

More likely than not, you won’t read this if you see it posted on LinkedIn (it seems too arduous to click on an article, thus the increase of click-bait recently on the platform).

If you happen to see the link to the blog post on Twitter (I didn’t pay for it to trend, nor do I have enough heft to cut through the constant firehose of information on the platform) you most likely won’t read it either.

These three platforms (along with Google) have created an environment of ease of access, shareability of information, and have grown through social proofing (“Everybody else is there, so I must be there as well”) that their influence as media companies is now being seriously discussed by media companies still around from the 20^th century.

This leads to three problems, beyond the obvious ones though:

There are biases evident in both the algorithms that run these platforms (as usual, computer models and programs are created by human beings, and human beings have biases) but that phenomenon is compounded by the fact that the people using the platform the most have their own biases. The real struggle is not to get more human curators to do the work of curating that an algorithm is programmed to do. The real struggle for both human curators and the human programmed algorithms running in the background of these platforms, is to educate and inform the audience using the platforms in spite of their biases.
Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pintrest, Snapchat, and on and on, are not the Internet. They are applications built atop the Internet. By only accessing information through these silos (the search engine Duck Duck Go actually gives better results than Google) the “lock-in” effect gets deeper and deeper in the person doing the search. This can be a positive. But it can also create myopia, willful ignorance, and a lack of curiosity about the world outside of these platforms.
In the future, the social media and information communication platforms built on top of the Internet will become more fractured, not less. This is the reaction/response to the first two problems, and to solving the problem inherent in the sentence that opened this post. Eventually, more and more niche audiences, being less and less served by the platforms built at “mass” (i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, et.al) will seek information out on the long-tail of options. There will be some reverting back to what came before social media (i.e. chatrooms, discussion boards, email listservs (I’m on two or three) and other tools) but eventually, niche audiences will seek access to their own silos outside the megaphone of established social media platforms.

Note, I did not say that these platforms would be profitable, popular to the masses, or easy for outsiders to integrate to and use. Reddit is already like this to some degree in its resistance to monetization, its relative openness, and its vain efforts to curtail its core users’ language and political preferences.

But as every woman seeks the promise behind being her own information queen, the seduction inherent in getting away from Facebook-as-the-Internet will grow in popularity and promise.

[Strategy] Average in the Future

There have always been people in societies, cultures, and among populations all over the world and throughout history who have committed an average level of effort to the work of building their lives.

They lived. They died. And they didn’t make a ripple or a dent in the universe.

It’s only in the last 100 years or so that the protection for being average was codified at a mass level through the direct efforts of the Industrial Revolution and the aftereffects of that same revolution.

Another way of saying this is “C’s get degrees.”

Yes, they do.

But, over the next 100 years, they may have to get a different set of skills in order to maintain that “C” status, both in life, and in their careers.

It’s always been demanding to be average; to stay in your lane; to follow directions without critically thinking; to not be the nail that sticks up; to protect the status quo by not engaging in conflicts that matter.

And it’s just going to get even harder.

[Advice] Nostalgia and Disposable Income

When a town economy runs on the fuel of nostalgia for an imagined past, and relies on a pool of people with disposable income who are willing to spend money to remember the past, the town is in trouble when either the nostalgia or income run out.

This is not anything new in the culture of towns away from bustling city centers globally, but the phenomenon will become more acutely noticed in the coming years, as nostalgia is abandoned in favor of the new and the shiny (you can’t compete with that) and as disposable income becomes less evenly distributed and less disposable.

And if you don’t think that it can happen in the 21st century, well, there are gold and silver “rush” mining towns throughout the American West that do a brisk business in seasonal tourism as ghost towns.

And it only took them 100 years to get there.

[Opinion] When Do You Pay The Piper?

The person who pays the piper calls the tune. Except when payment doesn’t come, then the piper takes revenge.

The legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin is about a politician reneging on a promise to pay a vendor who rendered a service. In essence, the politician broke a verbal contract and then forgot about it. The vendor returns to the town sometime later and takes his payment (in the form of luring the town’s children away).

The legend is so deep and enduring, it has become almost a myth, its lessons enshrined in our language and even our proverbs.

When we call the tune of responses and behaviors in our conflicts, the questions for us are the same ones there have always been:

When do we pay the piper?

and

How much will the payment cost?

We only ask (or think) about these two critical questions when the cost of doing nothing to resolve the conflict in a way that benefits both parties, seems to be the only way for us to risk nothing and gain everything. Then, when the answers to these two critical questions don’t work in our favor, our behavior in a conflict situation begins to resemble that of the politician in the town of Hamelin long ago: We attempt to avoid paying the piper.

Going back on promises, risk avoidance, ignoring the impact of emotional residue, finding reasons to not put in the work to get to a resolution, and withholding reconciliation (or even forgiveness) are all ways we attempt to avoid paying the piper of conflict.

And eventually, if we keep it up long enough, the things of emotional value—relationships, trust, respect, accountability—begin to leave our own internal emotional towns.

Be sure the tune you’re calling in your conflict is a price that you are willing to pay to the piper.

[Strategy] The Deep End

The deep end of the swimming pool is the best place to be in order to change through conflict.

The deep end is where no one wants to go. It’s at the edge of the conflict universe, far away from the shallow center and a place for pioneers, adventurers and a place where safety is not a primary concern.

The deep end as an idiom describes all the ways that people used to respond emotionally to being put in situations that didn’t conform to the status quo, and that required a level of rebellion and non-conformity to confront and overcome. The idiom comes directly out of the last century, a time when personally, professionally, academically, and in every other way that mattered, challenging the safe, right, and easy path wasn’t as profitable as it is now.

We use the phrase “off the deep end” to mean that we have been involved in a situation, or trapped in a behavior, that we have no previous experience in handling, and that we feel so uncomfortable in, that it feels like death.

Of course, out on the edge of the universe, out in the deep end of the pool, we might drown. Or we might just decide to suck it up and persevere, gaining grit and resilience in the end.

Bringing up the importance of swimming in the deep end is somewhat problematic these days, in a public culture that’s built around filing down the rough edges and hammering down the nails that insist on not being hammered down. This is an interesting phenomenon, because there have never been more opportunities to be weird, to stand out, to go to the end of the emotional universe, and to jump willingly into the deep end of the pool of emotional experience.

There are few strategies for managing getting into the deep end:

Realize that you won’t die—the pool of conflict is deep on purpose, so confronting your boss, your co-worker, you parents, or someone else who you think has power over you about their conflict behavior and choices, won’t result in death. Just you being uncomfortable for a while.

Realize that the deep end is where real changes happen—getting excited about the new Iphone or Samsung phone is not a change. Going to the deep end with another person on their behavioral choices that have impacted you negatively is a change. And change always happens at the edges of confrontation and away from the safe, chunky middle.

Realize that, of course you can’t handle it, that’s why you’re doing it—just responding to a conflict (i.e. with accommodation, avoidance, confrontation, collaboration, or compromise) in the ways that you’ve always been comfortable responding is what you’ve always been able to handle. Moving away from that safety emotionally and behaviorally will feel scary, uncomfortable, and will yield results that you couldn’t have imagined. Because you had no basis from which to imagine them in the first place.

If you’re not doing something every day, to change how you address conflict behaviors in your life, you are placing yourself in the shallows of life. And when a real storm comes, and it always does, the deep end of life will come and visit you, instead of the other way around.

HIT Piece 9.6.2016

Every day of the week, the month, and the year, is Labor Day when you’re in conflict.

Conflict with family, friends, enemies, co-workers; the bandwidth to actually deal with each scenario and relationship in a healthy way, diminishes with each passing moment.

But then, sometimes, through mixing and applying a heady cocktail of avoidance, accommodation, and collaboration, the labor becomes less, well, laborious.

The emotional high that goes along with establishing this sort of safety in the group (thanks to a calmed fear response deep in your amygdala) can last for many days…sometimes for many months.

Until you forget and the next conflict flares up.

Because it’s scary to deal with the problem underneath, and drinking heady cocktails (metaphorically), can always be used as a substitute for the real action of confrontation.