This blog is usually a space where I write about work. But yesterday, September 11th, was not a day when I was able to do much besides check in with friends — those remembering a hard anniversary, those protesting against racial injustice for 100+ days, those threatened by west coast fires moving frighteningly close to the place I call home.

For the last few Fridays, I've been showing up for 90 minutes of guided writing practice. We get a prompt from our teacher, pick up our pens for 10-12 minutes, scribe in silence with a half-dozen other souls tucked into little video squares. Then we read aloud, we witness each other, we celebrate what we love about the words. Often we weep, or laugh. We see things big and small from new perspectives. It was a perfect way to spend part of yesterday morning. I'm sharing here what I wrote, in case it speaks to you where you are.  (Our prompt was "I can hear.")

"I can hear the birds and the squirrels listening to the smoke—feeling with their bodies for food and safety. I'm worried about the hummingbirds. Should I freshen the feeder? Or will nectar will become poison in the haze outside?

If I let my attention widen beyond the boundaries of this square inside a square inside a rectangle — my office, my home, the standard 50 x 100 Portland lot — the number of people already displaced is too big to hold. Half a million across the state, under evacuation orders, waiting with bated breath, "go" bags by the door. The size of the whole population of Portland, I heard someone say earlier today. Where will they all go? 

If I listen with my own body, the smoke enters. It brings tears to my eyes. If I listen, I hear hearts breaking everywhere. 

Deep breaths. Feel the air. Let it in. Let it in. Pray for rain.

Pray, feel, love.

Open the window to grief. Open up. Let it hurt. Let it heal. Let it be. "
____
Wherever you are, whatever you might be grieving at this time, I'm wishing you well. 
​
​Want to read some of my writing about work and work-life fit? Click here. 

Note: This blog is based, in part, on a July webinar series delivered for Susan Matlack Jones & Associates. 

​Do you lead a team, big or small? If yes, you probably spend at least part of your day thinking about how to keep people connected, engaged, and productive. 

Individuals and teams are under many different stresses right now, fueled by public health concerns, rising economic stress, and increased attention to systemic racism and racial justice. That can leave any leader feeling bewildered about how to balance competing priorities, and how to shift best practice for things like team-building or performance reviews into a virtual or physically-distanced environment.

There are plenty of timely tips, just a quick internet search away, about managing a newly virtual team or talking about race at work in ways that honor both history and current events. I've pasted some of my favorite recent reads at the end of this post. It's also worth remembering that some teams, both U.S. and global, have worked virtually for a long time; and there's solid pre-pandemic evidence and advice about effective working-from-home. But our times are calling for leaders to build the capacity to do both familiar and unfamiliar work in a new context.

No matter the topic, the principle that comes up for me is the headline for this post: Turn up the volume, turn down the noise. 

Anything that was a good practice pre-COVID, like frequent short check-ins with individuals? You probably need more of it. If you can't drop by someone's desk, try daily "office hours" via an open Zoom link or unscheduled phone calls just to say hello. Did you have tacit norms that operated in your weekly team meetings? Make them explicit, and video-meeting friendly. Did your team have a weekly Friday social hour in the summer? Maybe you can end the day early on Wednesdays and Fridays for shared socializing, a team yoga class, or a socially-distanced brown-bag picnic. Do you need to have a tough conversation about performance or money? Schedule it, plan for it, and give some space around it in the participants' schedules.

Then, be attentive to the "noise" in everyone's environment -- the hours of screen time, the laptop and papers on the dining room table, the national news, the protests down the street, the multi-age homeschooling or camp, the aging parent sheltering-in-place across town or across the country. What can you clear away? What can you give more time and space? How can you communicate expectations and information, prioritize what's truly urgent, and support your team to get things done in ways you can all be proud of today and tomorrow? 

Want to learn more on this topic? Here are a few things I recommend. 

• Read this 6-page Harvard Business Review article, How to Prepare Your Virtual Teams for the Long Haul, for a useful and timely framework.
  
• Subscribe to Harvard Business Review's Management Tip of the Day.
  
• Listen to recent episodes of Lindsey Pollack's Work Remix podcast.
  
• Read for empathy, "No, I Am Not Okay": A Black Journalist Addresses His White Friends.
• Read for tips, How to Manage When Things Are Not Okay -- and Haven't Been for Centuries.

If this post was helpful, please share it with a colleague. Have another great article, blog, podcast? Share in the comments. Want to offer a short webinar on this topic, re-design a regular meeting with your team, or schedule a coaching session? Reach out to me here. Thanks for reading. 

​

Note: This blog is based, in part, on a July webinar series delivered for Susan Matlack Jones & Associates. 

I had the pleasure of starting Monday mornings in July with a terrific group of women leaders interested in the idea of "sustainable work," during a time when many of us are working (and doing so much else) from home. Through three one-hour interactive webinars, we shared successes and struggles related to Managing Myself, Managing a Team, and Managing Meetings.

Two themes kept coming up, particularly related to managing teams and meetings in a virtual environment. First: reflect on what you already know. Second: it's not about the technology.

It's easy to blame video technology for meetings that feel dull, disconnected, and draining. It's easy to blame disengagement on the very real phenomenon of "Zoom fatigue." But if I asked you "what makes a meeting a good one?," you'd probably name some version of these four elements: the purpose, the people, the plan, and the prep. So before you pick up the phone or click on the meeting link, pause to consider these four Ps. 

• Purpose. Do you know why you're meeting? Are you bringing people together to inform, discuss, decide, connect? If you're the leader or convenor, have you clearly communicated the purpose(s)  to everyone who's attending? 
• People. Who's been invited? Will everyone who needs to be there be present? Has anyone been included who doesn't need to be in the meeting? (If yes, they'll probably appreciate taking the meeting off their calendar!) Particularly if your team is distributed across time zones, is the meeting happening at a time of day that enables participation? How are you making the meeting inclusive and accessible for participants? 
• Plan. What's the agenda? Are there clear goals? Is there time for the group to connect, to engage with each item, and to set next steps? If a decision needs to be made, is it clear how the group will arrive there?  Whose responsibility is it to facilitate, to take notes, and to attend to group norms like how people use time and get a chance to speak? 
• Prep. Make sure that participants know what's expected of them before and during the meeting. If people need to read or do something in order to be fully engaged, give plenty of notice -- or make time during the meeting to read and reflect. Finally, if you're the leader or facilitator, prepare yourself. Give yourself a few extra minutes to arrive, to welcome your colleagues, and to hold space for the group's work. 

We can all learn new skills. We can use the technology we have to its maximum creative capacity. (If you're using Zoom, the "help" videos are actually helpful.) And first, we need to practice what we already know about making meetings meaningful. We have to shift our focus to the meaning.

Want to learn more? Take a look at the embedded links in this post, consider the tips in Co-Creative's Virtual Meetings for Clarity and Momentum, and download the new Virtual Gathering Guide from Priya Parker, one of my favorite thinkers on the topic of bringing people together. 

​Was this useful? Please share with a colleague. Have a question? Want to exchange lessons-learned, brainstorm how to revitalize a meeting you're planning, or get a quick tutorial on building a great team-meeting agenda? Reach out to me here. Thanks for reading! 

​

NOTE: This blog is based, in part, on a July webinar delivered for Susan Matlack Jones and Associates. 
[Image: The Noun Project.]

My coaching and consulting practice serves social-sector leaders —people who spend their days focused on things like making sure young children have books at home, giving teens a safe place to learn after school, offering scholarships to first-generation college students, fighting climate change, raising money for community health centers.

I've worked at home for a dozen years, so in the early days of the pandemic my work didn't change much — except that I stopped getting on airplanes and started spending way more time on Zoom. Most of my clients, though, weren't so fortunate. Working parents were thrust into trying to do full-time jobs under new circumstances while organizing multi-age schooling and negotiating with their partners for an uninterrupted hour to write a memo or hold a meeting. People who lived alone started feeling lonely. People still leaving home for a work site had to navigate new safety measures. Nearly everyone felt unmoored from familiar structures and routines. And it's worth saying that all of this is against a backdrop of relative privilege and safety. My clients worked in offices, went to yoga or the gym, sent their children to school or to day care, planned for summer camp. 

At the beginning, all of us did the best we could. We let the house be messy. We worked a little less. We renegotiated deadlines. When George Floyd was murdered over Memorial Day weekend, we shifted our attention and our priorities again to have urgent conversations in public and in private. 

Four months after the initial stay-at-home orders, I've been thinking a lot about sustainable work. How will people doing jobs that matter so much to society keep doing them in a new way, for many more months than we ever imagined? Part of what will make that possible, I think, is to re-imagine three dimensions: when, where, and how we work during each day and each week. 

Here's an experiment. Take the worksheet at the bottom of this post. Reflect on each of these three dimensions. What does it look and feel like now? What's working? What's not? What would you like to change, and how could that happen? Do you need a conversation with a partner, a roommate, or an older child? What conversation might be necessary with your supervisor or your teammates? Can you create a new ritual for starting and ending your day, or for signaling that you need an hour of quiet?  

Over the next week, try to make just one or two small shifts. Evaluate. Check in again in ten days, or next time something shifts outside or inside your home. Try again. Let what you learn shape your next response, your next conversation. 

My regular yoga teacher often says, when she's offering us a new way into and out of a pose: "It will be wobbly." Everything is pretty wobbly right now. We have to keep re-balancing ourselves, our families, our work-life fit. Let yourself fall down, like a toddler learning to walk. Take one sure step, and then another. 

Finally, as I often say to anyone who's in a transition: Gather support. Whether it's a phone conversation with a friend, a regular walking date (wearing a mask!), a weekly virtual coffee with a colleague, ten good minutes with your partner while unloading the dishwasher, or a few moments with a podcast or a book you love while brushing your teeth, find some moments that offer joy and ease. 

Want to have a conversation with me about this? Interested in offering a one-hour virtual workshop to a group? Contact me here. Thanks for reading! 

Note: This blog started out as a talk for Pivot Journey's Career Roundtable series. 

Nearly everyone is managing a transition (or two or three) at work right now. This is true whether you've been furloughed, got laid off, graduated into the current economic downturn, are commuting to a workplace that requires strict new attention to safety, or had to trade your quiet commute and your ergonomic desk setup for working at the dining room table in odd moments between homeschooling sessions. 

In recent months, as those of us in the United States navigate changes related both to COVID-19 and persistent calls for racial justice, I've been returning to many of the ideas in adrienne marie brown's Emergent Strategy. She writes (on p. 69): "Many of us respond to change with fear, or see it as a crisis. Some of us anticipate change with an almost titillating sense of stress. We spend precious time thinking about what has changed that we didn't choose, or can't control, and/or thinking ahead to future stress. Often this is because we aren't clear or committed about our dream destination, so instead of moving towards anything in particular we are in nonstop reaction." 

Another author, ​William Bridges, has written extensively about the distinction between change and transition. We've all been thrust into an in-between space during these last few months by a particular change in our public health circumstances. Change is often sparked by an event, which might be within our control or not.  Transition, though, is the psychological process of dealing with the change. Transitions are a "liminal" space, a place between your departure and your destination. This space has its own qualities, its own shape, its own norms. Bridges calls this the Neutral Zone, and it's the place we all want to skip over because it's uncomfortable and uncharted. But to successfully realize the energy of something new, we have to spend time exploring the in-between-ness of the Neutral Zone. It's a space that can be creative and curious and opportunistic.

Imagine, for a moment, that you want to plant a garden. You’ve got a big weedy patch of ground. You measure out a rectangle and dig it up. Now you have a blank canvas. Does it look rich and fertile with lots of worms, or do you need to feed it compost for a few months? Do you want flowers or vegetables? At this point you can plan  for what the new garden will look like, maybe you can even plant seeds, but you won't all of a sudden be harvesting your next meal or cutting a gorgeous bouquet for your table. Getting from the bare earth to the bouquet takes time. You don’t have the weeds any more, but you don’t have what you want yet either. That in-between space, where you can see possibility, that’s transition. (If the garden image didn’t work for you: Airplanes, car rides, a train... your commute maybe used to be a space like this.) 

So what does this mean for you? Whether you get to plan for a transition at work or not, there's always grieving and letting go and re-envisioning what the next step will bring.  This is true even if you're leaving a job you hate and starting one you think you'll love. And if you've been thrust into a big change like getting laid off, or a smaller one like losing your commute and your ergonomic desk setup in your office, the sense of loss is heightened and it can be hard to find the bright spots or even a familiar way to say goodbye.

If you're in a job transition, particularly one you didn't get to plan for, you might be experiencing as a loss of security, a loss of identity, and a loss of familiar networks. Gathering support around you, both personal and professional, is critical. I used to advise that you should go out and print a business card, ASAP... but now that's not so useful. What I do recommend is that you refresh your LinkedIn profile so that it becomes an easy way to share who you are and what you're looking for with people who can help you. (Here's some great advice from another coach about how to do that.)

What's different about this transition is that we don't know how long the in-between will last, its shape keeps changing, and it's hard to envision the other side. The information we might use to shape our future at work, and what work-life fit will look like, is evolving. Whether we're job-hunting or not, we're also dealing with multiple kinds of change, each of which requires ending the old, dealing with the in-between, shaping the new. So it's a much slower, more iterative, process than it might be otherwise. Still, I think a lot of the same kinds of principles apply. Here are four things I recommend. 

1. Say goodbye. You might have to create your own way to say goodbye or thank you or I miss you. You might write a series of notes to people who were important colleagues, or throw yourself a party, or plan a year-end happy hour. 
2. Take time to consider what your Neutral Zone looks and feels like -- even if it's just a few minutes in the shower in the morning. Write in a journal. Think about it on a walk around the block. If you can, put an hour in your calendar every week that is only about being in-between.
3. Keep refining what you want your destination to look and feel like. Draw the shape of it. Write a story. Jot words on sticky notes. Imagine who else is with you. Make it tangible for yourself. That will make it easier for people to help you reach the place you want to end up.
4.  Reach out to your networks -- in the ways that our more physically distant present allows. Schedule virtual coffee dates. Spend a few minutes posting something thoughtful on LinkedIn. Send a thank-you note. People in your network will want to help you.
   
   

This may be a longer journey than we first imagined, but we will arrive in a new place.

Interested in a related topic or resource? Tell me in the comments. In a transition, and want some personalized support? Reach out for a conversation through my contact page. Thanks for reading!