I went to a facilitors workshop this morning and the one thing that the presenter just kept hammering away at was the need to "think outside the box." Can we bury this overused phrase now? Pretty Please? Seriously, if you find that it’s necessary to think outside the box, you better take a good look at the box itself. You may in fact have a circle and don’t know it.

Okay, short rant over. The reason for my lack of writing lately is that this week is Pre-Conference  Week. Next week, I’ll be traveling to Minneapolis for my organization’s Board Meeting and Annual Conference so hopefully that explains why postings will be very, very light until the first week of October. BTW, anyone living in Minneapolis who would like to meet up, let me know.

One of Marcus Buckingham’s central tenets of organizational management is that employees don’t leave companies, they leave bad managers. I can agree with this as I’ve been able to verify it in action. What about the other way around? What if you find yourself within a company that’s inundated by ineffective decisions, a lack of support from the top, and poor communication? Can someone work for a good leader within this type of organization and remain sane?

This was the question posed to me this week by a fellow association colleague. Turns out he revels in  the challenges of his work, enjoys the camaraderie of his peers and staff, and believes in the mission of the organization. I’m familiar with his executive director and we both respect him and his leadership abilities very much. He’s definitely one of the good guys, trying to look out for his staff and supporting them as much as he can.

Here’s the problem: the association’s Board of Directors consistently undercuts his authority and undermines his staff’s ability to make decisions and work toward achieving the organization’s strategic goals. As I probed deeper, I learned that there seems to be no clear understanding of roles for either staff or Board. There doesn’t seem to be a well-defined relationship.

Across the restaurant table, I heard my friend’s growing frustration and disillusionment; his face showed signs of both sadness and anger. As he finished his story, he asked me for advice: "What should I do? What can I do?"

I was presented with an actual case to run a recent blog post through. On Monday, I wrote about the experience of A.G. Lafley, Chairman and CEO of Proctor and Gamble. It’s a question of fight or flight. Is there anything in my friend’s case that suggests there are places to make a solid difference?

I offered three steps:

1. Make a short list of the areas where you think you can create a change for the better. Being as  specific as possible, start with the end result and then determine actions that are within your control to enact. Also, give yourself a clear timeframe for when it will be time to make a decision to leave.
2. Inspired by David St Lawrence’s ideas in Danger Quicksand – Have a Nice Day, create a list of things that you should have known or asked the organization before accepting the job. The key is to learn from the present challenges so you can make a better career decisions in the future.
3. Start prepping yourself to make your next job move NOW. Get the resume in order, start networking again, work on building an attractive personal marketing package. Don’t wait until all actions have been exhausted in point 1 above. Have this next step already mapped out and ready so the next career move is not done out of frustration (which often lands us in the exact same place), but done out of a passionate desire to fulfill your professional goals.

There is a time to stand and try to generate an organizational transformation from within. And there is a point where any further efforts are clearly futile. What’s important is having a crystal clear understanding of where that line is for each of us.

Jeremy at Lifestylism highlights an article arguing that Canadians are trying to hard to emulate their counterparts south of the border when it comes to how they relate to their jobs. The article’s foundation is a survey conducted by Ipsos-Reid Canada. Nothing terribly surprising here, but still it all points to some damaging trends.

Jeremy pulls this quote from the article and I think it bears mentioning again:

Benjamin Hunnicutt, a historian and professor at the University of Iowa, argues leisure time has become "trivialized" while work has been "elevated to the modern religion," a way for people to define themselves and find meaning in their lives. As a result, he says, time off can lead to a feeling of emptiness and boredom.

There is nothing wrong with including our work in the fullness of who we are. It’s all a part of an integrated livelihood. But when we allow ourselves to be consumed and allow one aspect of our lives to dominate, it can lead to the kind of hollowness that erodes the soul.

The aspect of the article I found most worrisome was the constant theme of FEAR. Unfortunately, it’s corroborated by my actual experience and observations. There are opportunities for change and growth, though. The point is that each of us are always at places for exercising choice. Once we understand that we have choices in how we live our full lives, the fear subsides.

This fear of loss…most notably, it’s the fear of losing our jobs, losing respect, losing our place on the career ladder. Our ambition can be a hungry ghost at best or a cruel master at its worst. This fear of loss is usually a room in our minds that we never visit. When we have an opportunity to walk down the hallway by the room, we usually run past never to even touch the doorknob. Why? We have no idea what will happen when we open the door. Will it be dark and horrifying? Will we get lost?

Our challenge: In our minds are many rooms that remain unexplored. What would happen if we just opened the door? What would happen if we take a step inside? What’s the worst that could possibly happen? Better yet, how might our lives be improved by taking the chance of inhabiting our darkest places for a little while? Once we choose not to fear those places, we cannot get lost.

David Batstone writes for Worthwhile Magazine and produces an e-newsletter called The WAG, Worthwhile and Gain. In an August issue of WAG, David plucked a particularly relevant story out of Fortune Magazine. It was the experience of A.G. Lafley, the Chairman and CEO of Proctor & Gamble, who nearly left P&G twenty years ago. There are days when some of the typical work BS becomes annoying and I think of chucking it for another organization. Then, I consider Lafley’s experience and think again:

I almost left P&G in my sixth year. It was 1982, and I decided to go to one of those boutique consulting firms in Connecticut. I was getting out of P&G because I thought the bureaucracy was so stifling…I was an associate – between a brand manager and a marketing director – and I was running a bunch of laundry brands. Steve Donovan was in charge of the soap business, and I handed him my resignation.

He tore it up. I said to him, ‘I made a copy.’ He said, ‘Go home. Call me tonight.’ Which was smart, not to negotiate with me right there. When I called him that night, he said, ‘Don’t come into the office for the next week. Come and see me every night.’ So every night, I went to his home, and we’d have a beer or two. He kept working me over until he got to the root of my problem with P&G…He said, ‘You’re running away. You don’t have the guts to stay and change it. You’ll run from your next job too.’

That really ticked me off. I stayed. And from then on, every time something didn’t work, I spoke up. I realized that you can make a difference if you speak up and set your mind to changing things.

I think it’s a natural instinct to want to run from trouble. The only question is whether we have the ‘guts’ to stay and change it.

I’ve been blessed to discover a new blog: 37 Days. A few weeks ago, Patti sent me an email saying that she found my blog through a mutual friend. Turns out we’re both Guilford College alums, have non-profit association experience, and she lives in one of the places that I would dearly love to migrate to: Asheville, NC.

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg. Her blog is one of my very favorite reads and I look forward to each post as if it was a Christmas present. Take this week’s entry, Fund Your Own Revolution. She reminds us that change usually doesn’t happen "out there" by "them" so don’t wait around for it. It happens within us, by own desire to transform our offices, our lives, our world.

Here’s my personal challenge. Her post mentions the seemingly inherent tension between employees and their managers. I am working to create the space necessary for my staff to generate change while maintaining the kinds of boundaries that they need. It comes down to sharing both responsibility and authority for making things happen and then sharing the outcome regardless of whether it’s positive or negative. As I assume a greater leadership position in my organization, I try very hard to not be a "them" in the most derogatory of terms.

My second challenge is to not give in to the temptation of scapegoating "them." No matter where you are within the organization, there’s always going to be a them. But who loses if I give in and forfeit my drive to transform my staff’s relationship to their work, my volunteer’s connection to their organization, my own desire to build a lasting legacy in all parts of my life? Here’s Patti’s idea: We give up our power to the very people who took it away from us in the first place. Ah, but giving it up is always our decision in the first place. It’s time to take it all back.

Finally, what I love is her 37 Days Do It Now Challenge at the end of each entry. This week it’s an appeal for us to stop saying "they;" find the change we can make and must make.

Take some time and visit Patti and her 37 Days blog. You’ll be giving yourself a gift.

Ah, football season approaches so you’ll likely see a lot of metaphors popping up on this blog and her sister blogs. By the way…Go Steelers. Okay, now I’m better.

It’s not untypical for players to get all enthusiastic during practice and keep the aggression of the play going after the whistle blows. There may be pushing and even some punches exchanged. Hey, football is an aggressive sport. Shortly, the coach will intervene and tell the players to “save it for gameday.”

Let’s be honest, business can be an aggressive sport, too. Particularly when you have two heavyweights going at it like Microsoft and Google. The problem is that they don’t have a coach who tells them to save their fight for game day.

Okay, my metaphor breaks down since they clearly don’t play for the same team. Yet, they should share a singular goal: to provide the best product and service for their customer. That’s why all of this posturing and legalistic BS makes such little sense. I’d like for Microsoft to take just a little of the money they are going to spend to sue Google and put it into some OS software that is reliable and not prone to constant virus attacks.

Why is there such fear of the competition? The best players don’t hope that the other team is full of injured guys playing at levels less than their best. The best players pray that the other team is going to test them by giving them their absolute best effort. It’s how you grow. It’s the only way you know how good you really are.

Unfortunately for us customers, if our companies continue to try to weaken the opponent off the playing field, we’ll never know who is the best and who is just a pretender.

Joy Des Jardins at The Joy of Six blog and I have noticed something similar…there are no new movies available at Blockbuster anymore. Ever since they freed us from horrors of late fees, it seems that no one is returning their rentals on time. When I was there last weekend, the guys behind the counter were giving away more rainchecks for movies than they were actually renting them.

So it all begs a question: in order to compete with such things as video-on-demand and Netflix, did the folks at Blockbuster make a critical error in judgment? I mean who wants to make the trip to the video store only to find it depleted of decent movies yet still full of the latest Rob Schneider escapades?

What’s really interesting is how there seems to have been a lack of anticipation to this issue. A quick google produced this quote from the Motley Fool dated December 14, 2004, half a month before the policy went into effect:

Inventory control is another concern. If rentals are allowed to collect
dust on the coffee table for an extra week before they need to be
returned, then out-of-stock titles are bound to become more frequent.
Furthermore, if the company occasionally encountered problems
collecting delinquent late fees of a few bucks, will it be any easier
to track down $20 for a new release?

Okay, sometimes we don’t anticipate the outcomes of our decisions very well. Still time to learn from them. Except there doesn’t seem to be any changes in the works after nine months. I’ll admit that I’m not very current or informed on this, but I approach it from a casual customer’s perspective. If I can’t find the movie I want (particularly when it comes to quality kids movies), am I going to roll the dice and walk away disappointed or just sign up for Netflix?

It would seem that this is one business decision that might actually be backfiring and creating an opposite outcome from the one which was intended.

A year ago this month, I started this blog with a couple of objectives in mind: to drive traffic to my startup coaching practice and to offer a platform for my ideas. Little did I know it would be the answer to a much greater need in my life: to increase my sense of community. I’ve met some incredible people just because I put myself out here through Alchemy and have been blessed by their presence in my life. And the best part is that I continue to meet fantastic folks with new ideas and perspectives on our world.

There have been hard parts about the blogging experience. Most of these have been the ’shoulds’ of doing this that seem to plague us bloggers at times. Jennifer Rice most recently wrote about blog depression, that unfortunate state where everything is viewed through the limited lens of whether it is blog-worthy. She’s now come to some very soulful and healthy attitudes about her blogging that resonate with me.

Why do I continue to blog after nearly a year? Well, it has a lot to do with that whole community thing I mentioned earlier. And there’s more…I truly enjoy writing and sharing ideas. I really like the feedback and debate from readers (and do find that I get depressed when I don’t get any comments so for goodness sake stop worrying whether what you want to say is ‘good enough’ and just put something out there, okay It does mean a lot to me). It’s deeply meaningful to know that my words and thoughts have an impact on the lives of others. I get a giddy feeling when I tell people that I’m a blogger. The bottom line is that I do this for me, but that "selfishness" is all about fulfilling a desire to be an activist in helping others see their work, leadership, and rest of their lives in a different way.

Thanks for being here in the journey with me. There’s still much to see and do.

How dead-on is this? Steve Yastrow at the Tom Peters blog and I hold a similar opinion of Sprint and its feeble attempts to make an custo/member feel like a human being. Guess Sprint finally figured out it needs some help with its service (if you want to call it that). But why bother fixing something when a snappy catchphrase is all you need? Here’s Steve’s take:

The Sprint stores (the places I could never get good service or a “Yes, you can” answer) are being “rebranded,” which probably means a superficial facelift and no change to the customer experience. My prediction: Sprint will still suck. You can’t buy great marketing, no matter how big you are. You have to do great marketing. You can’t say “Yes, you can” if your employees and customers think “No, we can’t.” Marketing can’t be a big game of fakeout, no matter how big your checkbook is.

Kinda harks back to the fact that creating a passionate experience must be an inside job.

As my CEO often proudly tells me, "Our work is a gift we give to others." It’s in that spirit that I wish each of you a Happy Labor Day.

What happens when we consider our own work as an act of giving? For those of us employed within an organization, how does our attitude change when we view our work as an offering to others? Because, in many ways it is. There is hardly any job that doesn’t have the potential for positive impact on someone else.

If you are a manager, consider your employees. Your leadership is a gift to them. Your caring and respect and mentoring are gifts. When you help an individual grow in their skills and capabilities, you offer gifts that last much longer than their tenure at your organization.

The act of giving has a unique power to it. Openly giving in the form of a gift takes away much of the helplessness we might experience in our work. Ultimately, it offers a choice: to whom do I want to give my work today? Hopefully, the answer involves your present employer or staff. If not, that’s okay…it’s your gift, your decision, your life. Give with your heart.