Ladders… bridges… symbolism today.

Many of us act as different forms of structure throughout a given day.  Whether it’s a ladder, a bridge, an electrical conduit, the list is endless.  Whatever I do, whether it’s Executive Coaching, Team Development, Organizational Consulting or Workshops, I am an instrument in some way, a bridge for the participants to get them somewhere, somehow.

I recently had a dear friend in from Los Angeles and somehow we got to talking about traveling (he’d stopped in NYC on the way back from Europe) and the variety of bridges you see throughout the world.  I was immediately jarred by the thought of my experience earlier in the year crossing the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa, the 5.5 mile length bridge.  Then I got busy online and found the Arsenal Bridge in Rock Island, Illinois that can rotate 360?.  Wow, there is such a variety. 

As someone who’s often referred to as a ‘bridge’ for companies and their employees, I loved the conversation and emphasis on details and the ways in which the details of architecture, structure, and usability are relevant to the landscape of the specific environment.  The same is true of both large and small businesses.  Employee development and strategy need to be built according to the environment in which they exist.  In thinking about the type of bridge you need, understand what types of elements contribute to your company environment:

• Company culture, mission, and goals
• Playing to employee’s skills & strengths
• Action steps that improve business functions

This year I participated in a Success Academy program in New York where a variety of speakers dispelled their unique ability at being a bridge in a particular way.  I spoke about utilizing unique skills and focused on how maximizing your strengths and the strength of your company impacts those around you and ultimately impacts success.  Building relationships is essential to success and how we build relationships is very much relevant to who we are building them with, and thus, what we need to build.  The particular road followed, the particular bridge, the process taken.  Check out a segment of my presentation on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEMQmgmxkrs&feature=channel

Want more?  Let me know:  erivera@linesofexcellence.com

The best mother I can be… that’s what I strive for ultimately, above all else.  People often ask me if it was really difficult to get a doctorate degree and redirect my career later in life.  Really, the degree and my work is the easy part, it’s doing all of that in the context of life as a wife and parent that’s really the challenge.  It’s the maternal guilt and always feeling as though I’m being pulled in a million directions, never doing anything 100% (by my standards!).  So how do I manage that?

• I remind myself that my children benefit from seeing me do work that I love
• I take vacations and stop for even a moment to savor the simplest moments (just got back from a trip to Puerto Rico where I snorkeled with my kids & watched tropical fish swim past us!)
• I focus on family on the weekends and rarely check email
• I remember that every move I make is an example to my children
• I look for other examples to show my children how one’s work can be fulfilling and rewarding and point these out from a variety of age groups
• I include my children in on my work when possible, so they can understand what I do and how it affects people’s lives and business (sometimes this is an ‘off the hook’ experience for my kids… photo explanations included), which helps them understand that my role as ‘mom’ and worker are both important

While my success is business is an incredible accomplishment, my greatest accomplishment in life is truly the work I do for and with my children.  On Mother’s Day I am reminded that I am one of the luckiest women in the world.  This Sunday, savor the Moms in your life and savor yourself, for we are all  Moms in some way, to someone & more often, to many.

Happy Mother’s Day.

As a boss, your focus needs to be not on what an employee isn’t doing to make you look good, but on what you can do to help your employee succeed, shine, and consequently, positively affect the entire team and hence, the bottom line.  As managers, it’s often easy to get into the stronghold of feeling the pressure from above and taking that frustration out on your direct reports that you wish were different, in some way.  Yet, none of that chatter is productive to anyone.  The alternative? – simply put: collaboration.  If the department is viewed as a collaborative whole, then no single person can take the blame, but rather, there is an understanding that the growth and output of the department is a result of the greater whole with contribution from all members.  I began my own lesson in this process in the early 90’s when living in Japan and working for a company that coached Japanese nationals on interpersonal and verbal communication with the European employees of the European company they worked for.  With Japanese teams, responsibility is not on the individual, but instead on the group.  Thus, it is the goal of the entire team to create an environment where each team member is maximizing their potential and utilizing their unique skills as a compliment to those of the rest of the team.  This may seem esoteric and insurmountable at times, but with simple steps and a specific focus of corporate culture, it’s rather simple.  Think about the following concepts for your team members:

• Does the structure of the team highlight the employee’s skills
• Are there opportunities to grow skills & have those opportunities been discussed and offered (for example, at performance reviews)
• How do team member’s skills relate to their job requirements
• In what specific ways do team members add value to the team & the company
• How do team members envision adding greater value to the team & the company
• How does the manager envision adding greater value to their team & the company

If you’re having difficulty imagining specific ways to enable your team to be more cohesive and the daily practice it takes to get there, contact me about our Team Development Consulting.  With a focused program of assessment, coaching, seminars, and team building groups – cohesiveness becomes corporate culture in a matter of weeks.  We’ve got profound examples and experience in seeing this goal come to fruition.

After my recent newsletter, The Time is Now, I’ve had a nagging feeling.   I realize that the years I spent in entertainment publicity pulled daily at my creative inspiration, but the weekly evening sculpture course I took was the sanity and savior to the hectic life in an ever whirling arena of business and image.    It was that one evening a week, no networking, no film screenings, and certainly no internet surfing – that I spent quietly molding clay.  Lately I rely on my creativity for the entertainment industry interview series (due out via webcast in the next couple of months), research papers, team development & debriefing, and newsletters I write.  But, what I realize now is that the quiet weekly evening was the fuel for the rest.  It’s taken over a decade for me to get back to sculpting and although I’m thrilled to be back, I regret the delay.

What’s your fuel?

What has been most profound in my research interviews recently in Los Angeles is the simple notion that creativity cannot be micro-managed.  Now this may not seem like revolutionary information, but what is key here is the ability to know how and in what ways the process is being micro-managed, most often inadvertently.  The key to progress in managing creative and innovative teams is to understand the ways in which the process impedes the goal.  Now, that’s not all that different from the general knowledge we have of organizations and teams, the reality that the process often (unfortunately) impedes the goal.  But what was reiterated to me over and over in my incredible week of interviews was how that affect is more detrimental to success than ever.  In our lightening speed age of technology and the dissemination of information, this decade could not be a more important time to get information processes and communication right.  Not only is the economics of business reliant on getting it right, but because of how quickly information is communicated, the ability to ‘correct’ communication has become increasingly challenging. 

Back to my first point on ‘waiting for the time…’  The time, simply, for everything is now.  The time to research ideas, the time to create ideas, the time to brainstorm and, the time to bring ideas to fruition is simply now.  Because if you don’t do it now, someone else will, another company will come up with a similar concept, or even worse, your company will fail waiting for the right time to make things happen, creatively and innovatively.

Then, there’s the contestants. Young, creative, innovative, energetic and truly inspirational. They are the stuff that dreams are made of and the future of creative arts. They are the youth that aspire, inspire, focus, and hold on to a dream, despite the uphill struggle. What a fun and warm group of youngsters, which I completely realize are our future. As I move forward in my current project that focuses on evaluating creative teamwork, their management, and effective decision making processes, I will be sure to keep these young Idols on my mind. Simply stated, it is crucial that decision makers and leaders in creative industries utilize innovative team creation and team building ideas to maximize profitability and speak to our generations of current Idols and future Idols.

With that said – one of the questions we’ll ask in our interviews here in Los Angeles is:  How will we bridge the gap in generational approaches to creativity and innovation?

Let me know if you’ve got your own questions on your mind.
Warm & sunny regards,
Erica

Fact: according to entrepreneur.com “8.7 percent of job seekers gained employment by starting their own businesses in second quarter 2009.”

Entrepreneurs in residence are springing up on both coasts (and in the middle), paying innovative thinkers to do just that, sit and think, with the hopes of cashing in on creative and innovative ideas that can change the world (really, think Google). And in the not so different world of film, a bicoastal and international production, The Hurt Locker, seems to have taken some folks by surprise as the winner for Oscar’s Best Picture – in comparison to the more obvious modern template for creativity, Avatar, which seemed to be the likely contender. But the win shows that creativity is multi-faceted, and flexibility with innovation is not necessarily in the form of modern creation, but sometimes grounded emphatically in the use of traditional art. The Hollywood Reporter’s Elizabeth Guider writes: “In the end, and despite opening the competition to 10 contenders, the Academy’s decision might have come down to that reflex preference for art over commerce or to its sense of purpose in rewarding art in an increasingly corporate, commercially driven film industry.”

At the 2009 TED Conference when talking about creativity and educating our youth to embrace and develop such, Sir Ken Robinson said “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” Yet, in our risk adverse economy, being ‘wrong’ sounds like a scary proposition. So then, how do we get it right? How do we make it okay to be wrong, yet be creative? To begin with, we use past knowledge and experience as a springboard for understanding ways in which we need to replicate or change where we’re going. And then, we research, evaluate, and apply.

As I head to Los Angeles next week to begin filming a podcast series on successfully innovative and creative teams, I will keep aversion out of my mind and mistakes on my radar.

“Experience is the name that everyone gives to their mistakes.” – Oscar Wilde

• Attract teams that want to collaborate
• Encourage creativity within yourself and others
• Identify team members who are flexible and think outside the box
• Problem solve effectively instead of in a reactionary manner
• Encourage people to want to be on your team and help you work towards goals
• Harness the entrepreneurial spirit that anything is possible as long as you work at it
• Work as hard as possible, knowing that eventually your investments of time, energy, and money will pay off

And if you’re still having a hard time imagining it all in a positive light, do some soul searching with the following examples:

Success is being a Google executive and despite a ruling sentencing a few of them to 6 months in prison for violating Italian privacy laws, knowing it’s an unfair and unjust ruling and actually serving the sentence will never come to fruition, and instead using your team to review global standards on privacy is a much more effective use of 6 months.

Success is being Mark Burnett & Mike Darnell and believing in your product so strongly that you know that despite an FCC investigation, your idea for a game show that highlights smartness and acquired knowledge in children is a great contribution to family programming and, with successful team development, will eventually be able to shine as a wonderful example of a successful game show idea.

Success is being Tachi Yamada, M.D., President of the Global Health Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and acknowledging that the incredibly difficult journey of arriving from Japan to attend boarding school in the US is what has shaped him as a person and made him flexible and ‘open to challenges’ in ways he approaches life and business, and has contributed to the model of how he hires successful members of his team.

Success is believing in success, even if it takes a little longer than originally planned.

I don’t know about you, but at the end of the day, Tiger is still the golf genius child-protégé he was to me a few months before all the scandal. Really, how many of us actually care about his ‘issues’ with remaining loyal to his wife. I know, many of you are probably aghast at what I (a woman!) am saying right now. However, the truth is the truth. We’re not mad at his recent apology because we think he hasn’t suffered enough for his wrongdoing, we’re mad because deep in the depths of our psyche we know that once he gets back to focusing on the game, we will all, once again, be enthralled with this genius of a player. End of story, enough said, hope all that personal life stuff of his works out. So why all the hoopla?

It’s a simple distraction, and an entertaining one at that. It’s also the tale of a mistake, maybe a big one, maybe a small one, time will tell (I err on the side of the later). We think that in order to succeed, we need to avoid making mistakes. This could not be farther from the truth. In fact, mistakes are a wonderful thing. They cause pause. They encourage us to reevaluate and rethink. They enable us to review what might be missing and how we can fill in and improve the next time around. Mistakes bring us back to our motivational behavior that encouraged the activity or venture in the first place.

And in some cases, we learn exponentially from the mistakes of others. The Olympics are the most awesome example of exactly that – motivation that spurs from mistakes. If anyone saw Apolo Ohno take home a bronze medal in the men’s 1,000 meter short track over the weekend you know just what I mean. Oh the sight, with Ohno whipping into 3rd position seconds before the finish and the announcer most appropriately stating “you’ve got to wait for the mistake and then make your move.”

Make your moves, learn from your mistakes, and certainly learn from the mistakes of others.

How many times have you been ready to watch real entertainment, get involved in a something grand, create a new product, accomplish a new goal, and wound up with a blank screen? We can certainly use that metaphor in a variety of ways and scenarios. The reality is we’ve all come upon our own blank screen from time to time. The problem, in essence, is not the blank screen at all. Instead, the problem is what you will do with that blank screen. You can sit and wait, or you can try to problem solve. What did I do? In the case of the broadcast, I checked other channels to see if the problem was unique to PBS, then I went online and in searching around was able to find highlight clips from the evening, and then I waited. And I waited. But, while waiting, I assured myself that if the problem were not solved by PBS, I would be able to catch aspects of the show later online. I used alternative media to make my determination, I utilized the time reading related information instead, I productively wrote on my blog, and I remained calm. Now, we’re talking about an entertaining program that did not exactly change the course of much of the immediate, nor distant, future. But, sometimes, in fact, often times, ‘the blank screen’ has a more resounding affect on our lives. These are the times when you want to be certain that you’ve got a strong team together to ‘fix’ things, by problem solving, evaluating alternatives, effectively analyzing the consequences and options, and by having the right resources in place to make things happen – quickly, if need be.

Truly an awful moment in broadcasting history. The program “In Performance at The White House” was interrupted for about 30 minutes, that’s 50% of the broadcast. The sound continued to fade in and out. I had to remind myself that this was 2010! But, I also had to remind myself that anything is possible, and the ‘sometimes’-type events seem to happen more often than sometimes, if we really think about it. The answer is not really about the actual ‘blank screen’ at all, instead, the answers lie in our ability to have the right team together to deal with the ‘blank screen.’

What would you do with a blank screen?
Who would you rely on?
Who’s on your team to help you manage the situation?

Moral:  always be ready to take on a blank screen.