If Adam Grant were here, he’d tell us it’s better to be a giver than a taker, and I’d agree — except I’m going to spend the next five blog entries encouraging you to take. Stay tuned for five detailed prompts that will help you navigate transition and reimagine your next chapter, organizationally and/or personally.
The first is “take stock.” Be honest about where you find yourself.
Continue reading “Take Stock”One of the things that can make a transition difficult is when it wasn’t chosen—even more so when it follows a disappointment or perceived failure. It’s not hard to imagine that adjusting to the death of a loved one or an unexpected job loss is deeply challenging.
Which is why it can be surprising to people when a change that is voluntary, or at least comes as the result of a healthy evolution, is often very jarring too. When I was navigating the ‘emptying nest’ stage of our family (which lasted almost a decade for us—who knew??!), I remember saying to a friend, “I feel ridiculous struggling with this. It’s all good news! My kids are launching exactly as we all hoped they would—this is a happy story, not a tragic one. So why am I such a mess?”
Continue reading “Hard Good News”Last week I had a quick turnaround between arriving home from Costa Rica and departing again to deliver a keynote and two workshops on adaptability in Calgary, Alberta. I won’t bore you with the details, but I can assure you that a series of travel glitches put my own adaptability skills to the test. I arrived to deliver the keynote with 15 minutes to spare (rather than 24 hours ahead as originally scheduled), wearing an airline-issued men’s XL white T-shirt and working on two hours of sleep. I told the group that it’s reassuring to know the speaker has experience in that of which she speaks!
Continue reading “Adapt or Adopt?”I had the privilege of running a session with the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Science last week. It was called “Lead like a Scientist,” and we explored skills that most scientists possess that also serve them well as leaders. One is experimentation.
My favourite go-to for this topic is Adam Grant’s Think Again, but I’d also point you to Adam Alter’s chapter on experimentation in Anatomy of a Breakthrough.
Continue reading “Curated Content on Experimentation”Old narratives about change are themselves slow to change. Although we might rationally acknowledge that change is constant, emotionally we continue to resist and resent it, subconsciously waiting for things to settle down and ‘get back to normal.’
Have a look at Nadya Zhexembayeva’s recent piece in the Harvard Business Review. It describes both the pace of change and workers’ unhappiness with it. A couple of elements jumped off the page at me:
Continue reading ” Curated Content on Adaptability”
