Virtual Opportunities: Women & Work-Life Balance

As a 27-year-old woman about to embark upon my career, I am faced with how I might best approach that age-old and ever-complicated problem of achieving a work-life balance. Thankfully, today’s workplace offers more opportunities than ever before to work from home and to work on the go. In many ways, this has created new opportunities for women to achieve a flexible work plan alongside efforts to start and raise a family. But does this technology, including telecommuting and telecommunication, impact women differently?

Italian MEP Licia Ronzulli often comes to work with her daughter.

In Timothy Franz’s book, Group Dynamics and Team Interventions, the author point to studies that suggest women benefit from teleworking because, “Women feel more included in predominantly male virtual teams than they do in predominately male face-to-face teams” (Franz, 268). While I haven’t had the experience of feeling excluded in a mostly-male team, I could see how the reduced social pressures of a face-to-face meeting setting, especially in fields that still cling to “an old boys club” culture, could be a refreshing change for women.

In another study published by Pepperdine University, researchers found that women reported a higher sense of satisfaction in virtual work teams than their male counterparts. While reporting high satisfaction, women did largely agree upon one major problem – poor sharing of information. Researchers hypothesis that this could be linked to the idea that “women value relationships based on communication and understanding,” whereas, “men’s roles tend to be defined by role and status.” Two thirds of women in the study thought more face-to-face contact would be beneficial, whereas only one third of men wanted more face time with their fellow teammates.

So can women tread the fine line of valuing and excelling in virtual teams, while also achieving satisfaction with their place on and contributions on the virtual team? I think so. (The Ivey Business Journal outlines some best practices here, regardless of gender.) Perhaps we women will be the first to realize that communication is not where it should be, or the one to suggest a face to face meeting or video conference. Simply being aware of the pitfalls and possibilities of virtual teams allows us to enter into a virtual team with greater preparedness, balancing the flexibility of off-sight work without sacrificing the opportunity to build strong professional relationships.

 

 

Creativity… inside the box.

In recent years, I feel as though I’ve gained a lot of ground in the area of self-awareness. I’m sure this is fairly common for mid-twenty somethings, feeling as though you’re starting to figure out your strength and weaknesses, especially when it comes to considering your future professional life. When I was a kid, I was always told that I was very creative. I was artistic – I like to draw and paint, and these artistic talents were somehow always labeled as “creative.” As time went on, however, I started to have difficulty seeing myself as creative. I loved other artists’ work – especially modern, abstract art. The problem was that I never felt drawn to create that type of art. I loved painting still-life scenes of flowers in glass vases, fruit, and landscapes. New ideas came easy to me, and the felt creative, but they were never completely outrageous. The outcomes of my efforts were often boring to me, but the process of drawing definite shapes and focusing on tiny details was incredibly satisfying.

According to the ever-trusty Wikipedia, Michael Kirton’s theory of Adaption-Innovation “claims that an individual’s preferred approach to problem solving, can be placed on a continuum ranging from high adaptation to high innovation… Kirton suggests that while adaptors prefer to do well within a given paradigm, innovators would rather do differently, thereby striving to transcend existing paradigms.” Given this proposed continuum, it would seem that the way one approaches problem solving is likely intricately intertwined with one’s creativity. That innovators are naturally more creative than adaptors. But thankfully, as Isakensen and Dorval point out in their 1993 publication, “Toward an improved understanding of creativity within people: The level-style distinction,” both innovators and adaptors can have either high or low levels of creativity.

Their diagram (shown here) put a great deal into perspective as to where I fall in the grand scheme of things. At no point did I somehow lose my creativity. Instead, I now understand that I’ve always been an adaptor, and that this style (combined with fairly high creativity) allows me to demonstrate qualities like being resourceful, efficient, and consistent. I find creative solutions within the confines of my surroundings, and while the outcomes aren’t always mind-blowing, they are often things that work and create more efficient systems.

As Architect Frank Gehry points out in this article about creativity being spurred on my constraints, sometimes new ideas are most challenging when you have to keep them “in the box.” While we need both innovators and adaptors, I like to think that we creative adaptors bring something special to the table, albeit perhaps being overshadowed by the more “spontaneous” and “unconventional” types. In many way, creativity within the confines of our existing structure could be seen as increasingly beneficial talent in a world where businesses and other organizations are consistently challenged to work with fewer resources.

Empathy & Emotional Intelligence

      Last semester, I was happy to complete Strengths Finders 2.0, an approach to embracing your strengths instead of trying to overcome things that do come as naturally to you. There was one key finding in this exercise that has changed my outlook on my personal leadership philosophy and my general philosophy about how I interact with others. The finding was that I have empathy as one of my top five strengths. In the explanation of what empathy is, the book stated: “You do not necessarily condone the choices each person makes, but you do understand. This instinctive ability to understand is powerful. You hear the unvoiced questions. You anticipate the need. Where others grapple for words, you seem to find the right words and the right tone. You help people find the right phrases to express their feelings — to themselves as well as to others. You help them give voice to their emotional life. For all these reasons other people are drawn to you.” This information, as well as supplemental information from the book, has helped me to get a better grasp on the way I feel and understand what is happening around me. I no longer think about taking on the emotions of others as something that limits me from being a leader; instead, I now embrace these strength and think about how it can help to set my leadership apart.

These emotion-centered themes came to mind again as I was reading Chang, Sy, and Choi’s 2012 Article from Small Group Research, entitled “Team Emotional Intelligence and Performance: Interactive Dynamics between Leaders and Members.” This article examined how the emotional intelligence (EI) of leaders and team members influences team outcomes. The authors posit that leaders with high EI may be able to foster an emotionally intelligent environments for their teams, minimize process loss, develop trusting relationships, communicate a compelling vision, and create supportive team environments. Likewise, on The Sales Blog, Anthony Iannarino makes connections between empathy to emotional intelligence, citing that they are both centered around your ability to connect to those around you. As it turns out, empathy is a core part of emotional intelligence. When one is empathetic, you are able to experience the emotions of another person. If you have high emotional intelligence, you are able to then take these emotions and manage them to create positive results. Iannarino suggests, “You see the twin attributes of empathy and emotional intelligence in the salesperson’s ability to lead and orchestrate their own team to create a positive outcome for their clients, paying attention others’ needs. In broader leadership terms, empathy and emotional intelligence allows for greater opportunity to accurately assess the emotional needs of your followers and fellow team members, at which point you can orchestrate a strategy for creating a positive atmosphere. This type of atmosphere makes positive outcomes all the more likely.

Learning about empathy gave me a lot of consider, but coupling it with a broader look at the other facets of emotional intelligence gives me even more to think about. As Daniel Goleman points out, “all leadership is relational” and, “The best leaders help other people get and stay in the best emotional state to work at their best.” For me, it is no longer enough to learn to embrace my natural strength of empathy. I must also keep in mind that managing my emotions and the emotions of those who look to me as a fellow team member or as a leader will be key to overall success.

From the Mouths of Babes

Last week, I was fortunate to be able to spend some time at a local elementary school working with kindergarten and first grade students in an after-school gardening club. When the students first arrived to the classroom we would be using, they were pretty well behaved. They sat in their chairs, listened to my directions, and began working with me to plant seeds. I was so impressed by how well they were doing that I encouraged the aide who usually sits in on the class to go to another classroom that was short staffed. As the afternoon progressed and we moved on to a craft, things began to break down. One student made his way to the teacher’s desk and started fiddling with her person items, one child climbed onto a tall stack of chairs, and two others decided that the newly planted seeds needed more water. As I was scurrying around the room trying to collect the children, the aide return and realized I needed help. She spoke loudly to the kids, pointed to a poster on the wall, and read these directions: “Legs! Laps! Lips! Look! Listen!” Quickly, the students snapped back to the attentive listeners they had been when they’d first arrived. We were able to wrap up the crafts without much problem, and I was thankful to have gotten the inside scoop on good listening. (As it turns out, there’s a plethora of information out there about teaching children to listen, like this great website from Disney family.)

In chapter six of Timothy Franz’s book Group Dynamics and Team Interventions, the author stresses the importance of being an active listener as a way of helping your team communication function as effectively as possible. Too often in our group settings, we are just like the kids in my program – so distracted by other things around us that we often quickly forget to monitor ourselves for active listening. Whether cell phones, emails, or just the laundry list of to-dos in our minds, we forget to focus on the moment and give our full attention to those who are trying to communicate with us. We miss important ideas, concerns, and so many other messages that are being conveyed through facial expressions and body posture.

Keeping a simple memory tool like “Legs! Laps! Lips! Look! Listen!” in the forefront of our minds may seem a little childish, but I would encourage you to give it a try. The next time a coworker or fellow team member tries to talk with you, take just a moment and stop your legs, put your hands in your lap (not on your phone), close your lips, turn and look at the speaker, and really focus on listening to what they have to say. You might be amazed at how much more you’ll take away from the interaction.

 

Service… to self?

     When I was a child, I had a baby book that my mom and I would complete each year. It chronicled changes in my height, major life milestones, and changing answers to questions such as, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” If you look back at my answers to that question, early on, the answers varied but were usually either “nurse” or “teacher.” For one of the last entries, however, I simply wrote, “I want to help people.”

I have always been someone interested in service. In high school, I ran for offices in clubs that allowed me to get my fellow students more engaged in community service opportunities. After college, I spent a year in AmeriCorps, a national service program in which adults (usually young adults) dedicate one year to “intensive service to meet community needs in education, the environment, public safety, health, and homeland security.” After finishing my AmeriCorps service, I was happy to accept a placement in the inaugural cohort to serve in the Child Hunger Corps, “a two-year national service program designed to increase the capacity and capability of Feeding America’s member food banks to execute programs targeted towards the alleviation of child hunger.” I entered Virginia Tech’s Master of Public Health program because I have a desire to use my career to serve those living in Appalachian communities and assist with finding solutions to an array of health problems that persist in this region.

Throughout all of my experiences, I’ve had to learn how to balance my work with my own well-being. Being a highly empathetic person (see my previous post), this is not away easy. While in AmeriCorps, I worked as a client service coordinator, meeting with patients who had HIV/AIDS and cancer. I often grew to care very much for these people, only to lose them to their illnesses, learning of their death and then spending time talking to their grieving loved ones. While working in food banks and pantries, there were many days I left the office, only to spend the drive home fighting back tears over all the things I couldn’t make better. The desire to serve leads to fulfilling experiences, but it can also be extraordinarily draining.

On the website for Robert Greenleaf’s Center for Servant Leadership, he is quoted as saying of servant leadership, “The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?“

The desire to serve others can motivate us, as individuals, to take leadership positions that we might not have otherwise felt the need to seek out for ourselves. What I have come to understand, however, is that servant leadership cannot totally mean selfless leadership. As servant leaders, we find motivation and inspiration in the giving of ourselves to others, but this approach cannot continuously occur without the servant leader taking stock of what he or she needs, in their own journey, in order to continue to be the best leader possible. Servant leaders, perhaps more than any other type of leader, need to be supported and given the tools they need to not burn out.

The Community Tool Box website, a project of the University of Kansas, gives some ideas of how to address the challenges of servant leadership. Some of these include taking time for you, reading, looking to others to help sustain you, challenging yourself, looking at the whole picture, and celebrating the small wins. Servant leaders need to help others grow, be healthier and more free, but servant leaders should not assume that we are any less deserving of taking time to grow and maintain ourselves. Servant leaders, perhaps more than any other style of leader, needs to take time for reflection and self-preservation if we are to make the greatest impact possible within the communities where we live and work. Losing sight of this does injustice to both ourselves and those who to look to us for leadership.

Wanted: Empathetic Leader with Little Influence

This week, I revisited StrengthsFinder 2.0 after having completed the assessment for the first time about three years ago. My top five strengths are Learner, Achiever, Strategic, Empathy, and Connectedness. When I initially took the test, I enjoyed reading about my results and was happy to take a second look at them once again. This time, however, I noticed something that I had missed before. According to my assessment, my top five strengths all fall within “relationship,” “strategic,” and “executing” – apparently “influencing” is just not my thing.

Though I found this somewhat irritating at first (perhaps the Learner in me wanting to understand what I was missing), I tried to take heed and focus on the positives, reflecting on my strengths in an effort to better craft my personal leadership philosophy. One of my strengths is something that I previously had not commonly associated with traditional notions of leadership – empathy. My first impression of empathy, while not negative, is that it’s a “soft” strength and perhaps something that would cause someone to slow down… quite contradictory to the sharp, fast-paced image of a leader that we so often look for! With a little digging, however, I was happy to find others who have considered empathy in leadership. Just this past May, Forbes published an article on the subject, arguing that “Though the concept of empathy might contradict the modern concept of a traditional workplace—competitive, cutthroat, and with employees climbing over each other to reach the top— the reality is that for business leaders to experience success, they need to not just see or hear the activity around them, but also relate to the people they serve.”

In my StrengthsFinder report, the description of empathy advises, “It’s very likely that you may be capable of stepping into a person’s feelings, thoughts, or experiences. Chances are good that you occasionally interpret the moods of people. Perhaps you sense what they are thinking or feeling at the moment that they experience an event, overhear a comment, reach a goal, or make a mistake.” Reading that passage was like a light bulb going off for me. There have been so many times in my life, both personal and professional, that I witness an off-the-cuff comment or gesture derail an entire interaction between two people. One example of this was in a previous job where the leader of the organization would speak to her subordinates, seemingly without thinking, and I would watch the look on the face of the employee, fading into total defeat. Those moments really bothered me and have been much of the catalyst for my desire to understand how to be a good leader.

In thinking about those who might not naturally have empathy as a strength, I found one piece of good advice, both for leadership and everyday life alike. In this video, Roman Krznaric argues that we can all enhance our ability to be more empathetic “by strengthening our curiosity about others (2:56)” and that in doing this, we can open ourselves to even more valuable learning and networking experiences.

This sort of openness, I hope, may ultimately reinforce our capabilities to be effective leaders who work for positive change.

(X)po-nential Opportunities

I was fortunate this pass weekend to gain access to the City Works (X)po, “a gathering to share big ideas for better cities.” The (X)po was started as an annual event three years ago by Roanoke developer Ed Walker, as a small part of his larger effort to revitalize Roanoke and bring people from across the country and around the world to think about ways to make small and medium sized cities even better. Topics include public health and safety, urban design, arts, music, and much of the conference is underpinned by the leadership, community activism, and civic education.

Nicco Mele was the last speaker on Friday, talking about his new book “The End of Big: How The Internet Makes David the New Goliath.” The book focuses on business leadership in the Internet age, emphasizing that individuals are now far more connected through technology and have a vastly greater ability to use their voices to instantly impact businesses, such as writing product or service reviews, as well as greater flexibility in creating start up companies that frequently pose serious competition and act as alternatives to larger-scale traditional businesses.

Throughout his presentation and thoughts on the importance of media and connectivity, I couldn’t stop thinking about how his theories highlight the importance of better understanding follower-centered perspectives on leadership. In particular, I recalled several comments put forth by Brad Jackson and Ken Parry’s thoughts on “the romance of leadership.” In their book, Jackson and Parry point out:

” Followers construct their opinions about the leader by interacting with other followers… The media are important contributors… Media accounts influence and shape the attributions that followers might give to a particular leader.” (pg. 52)

Mele made similar points in a Forbes article from April of this year, reminding business leaders, “You have to start to recognize that everyone you’re dealing with has the same power you do, a tremendous amount of power.” While this comment might sound somewhat threatening, the bulk of Mele’s presentation on Friday emphasized that it was an exciting time to be a follower, an exciting time to exercise the power of being able to rise up against leadership that you might not support, or in many instances to take on leadership roles that might not have previously been as accessible. Technology, perhaps more than any other element of modern society, seems to be a very interesting tool for reevaluating what it means to be both a leader and follower.

While the influence of technology is important (and perhaps somewhat daunting) for today’s business leaders, I would stress the value of considering Jackson & Parry’s closing remarks on the positive nature of follower-centered perspectives, which is “encouraging everybody to take an interest in and play an active role on producing the highest for of leadership we can.” (pg. 66)

Whether being lead by David or Goliath, I am hopeful that more participation and efforts toward keeping leaders honest, open, accountable, and flexible to the needs of their followers, as well as followers continuously engaged in whatever mission they are working for, should ultimately lead to more productive outcomes for everyone.

First Thoughts on Leadership

Being a leader is a lot like riding a bike… Wait, what?

I attended a meeting this week for Healthy Roanoke Valley, a community coalition working to address health and wellness in the Roanoke Valley. There has been a great deal of planning and exploration in this group over the past year, but during this particular meeting, the Wellness Action group broke out into a smaller discussion with the aim of identifying concrete next steps.

In our search for tangible ways to get people moving more and eating better, a representative from Ride Solutions was questioned about what he thought might encourage more people to engage in active transportation, such as walking and biking, especially to work. He noted that employers often come to him and want to know how to encourage their employees to become more active. Should they install bike racks in the parking lot? Implement an internal marketing campaign? Offer incentives? But he said that none of these things were as important as what he recommends – “If you, as their boss, want your employees to bike to work, YOU need to bike to work.”

The notion of leading by example isn’t a new one. You can probably think of a number of common everyday examples when this might happen, such as a parent opting for a healthier food choice when eating in front of their child or a teacher saying “please” and “thank you” when working with his or her students. In both cases, the parent and teacher are using example to act as a leader to their followers, hoping that by exhibiting the desirable actions, the followers will immolate these behaviors.

In Jackson & Perry‘s exploration of why studying leadership is important, the authors reference a quote from a leading leadership scholar, James McGregor Burns, who says:

” The key distinctive role of leadership at the outset is that leaders take the initiative. They address their creative insights to potential followers, seize their attention, spark further interaction. The first act is decisive because it breaks up the static situation and establishes a relationship. It is, in every sense, a creative act.”

Just as was suggested in my meeting, the leader needs to take the first step.

I wanted to learn more about how this type of leadership might be exhibited in other areas of health promotion and I found another great example – Walk With A Doc – a program meant to encourage patient walking groups with doctors. As doctors are often community leaders, these group offer an opportunity for doctors to lead by example, instead of merely directing patients to be more active.

Health can be a deeply sensitive and personal issue. People may feel shame over their struggles with weight or have fear of illnesses experienced in their families. In such cases, it strikes me how important the correct approach to leadership needs to be. I imagine employees or patients would react quite poorly to a directive from their employer or doctor to change their habits and behaviors, only enhancing fear, stress, and shame for the followers, especially when they see that the leader isn’t trying to achieve those goals in their own life. Leading by example, however, seems a far more approachable way to tackle health challenges and create positive and sustainable changes.