The Last Blog Post (by Carlee)

It finally happened.  I fulfilled the epitome of an intern duty and went on a coffee run. It only took me 13 weeks but I finally fetched coffee (it was enough coffee for a 50-person workshop, to be specific).

As I made this realization on the way to Starbucks, I laughed, and then realized how lucky I have been this summer. I walked into Floricane in May not knowing what to expect. I was eager to learn and ready to be challenged. 

I learned, I was challenged, but most unexpectedly, I was welcomed with open arms as a part of the team. I was given business cards, put on the website, and asked my opinion. I was trusted to go out on my own and represent Floricane to close clients and friends.  And every week, for better or worse, John let me voice my thoughts and reflections on this blog for the entire world to see (hello entire world, thanks for reading).

This quick and intentional integration into the Floricane family was a gift beyond what I expected.

As I journey back to Nashville to wrap up my degree, I will bring with me a vast knowledge of leadership development. I will bring a language to talk about self-awareness and other awareness (though it might be interesting when it’s a foreign language to all my friends and classmates).  I will bring a remembrance of the power of gratitude.  I’ll bring a connection to a group of people and a community.

I will bring all these things, but I will bring so much more. 

So John, Debra, Theran, and Caroline, thank you.  Thanks for accepting me and teaching me.  Thanks for treating me as an equal and valuing who I am.  And thanks for creating a space that was so much more than coffee-fetching and paper-copying. 

Building a framework

This summer I was tasked with illustrating Floricane’s leadership philosophy. Before I arrived, I honestly didn’t know what that meant or what it would look like. After a summer of conversations with clients, partners, and friends, conversations with all of the Floricane team, observations, research into Floricane materials, and personal “expertise,” I had a little bit better of an idea.   So off I went creating a Floricane leadership model with the Floricane team. Last week, I had the opportunity to test drive this model during my final leadership conversation of the summer. 

I’m so glad I did.

I received very insightful and important feedback from that conversation that culminated in two areas of clarification:

There is a lot to “leadership.”  It’s hard to summarize the extent of everything that goes into leadership development clearly and succinctly into one image or even onto one page.  There are a significant number of tools, behaviors, and techniques that are central to Floricane’s leadership practice that did not make the cut.  Though important, adding everything to the illustration would have resulted in an illustration that would have looked a little something like this:

The study of leadership has been around a long time. Creating a Floricane “model” did not mean creating a completely novel idea about leadership that didn’t already exist out there in the world. The Floricane practice of leadership was not developed in a vacuum.  It came from years of study, practice, and influence from other principles and approaches.

That being said, the Floricane framework is not a brand new way to understand leadership. Rather, it is the illustration of the values and ideals that Floricane works to cultivate in other people. The illustration is some part transformational leadership, some part emotional intelligence, all part of what makes Floricane, well, Floricane. 

It’s the place Floricane starts and the place Floricane comes back to.  The illustration is the very core of what Floricane believes in terms of leadership.

Tracking progress

Long ago, a manager of mine tried to help me see the importance of tracking results. Not tracking progress, or drawing lines through completed tasks, but seriously evaluating whether the work I was doing was having the impact it needed to have. "We do what we pay attention to," he'd tell me.

I’m a slow learner.

This summer, Floricane finally started tracking a set of business metrics. It’s an attempt to help our team focus on a small, manageable data set to better evaluate the progress of the business. After many conversations, we settled on five pieces of data – four are numbers, and one is a list:

Year-to-date revenue (over last year’s year-to-date revenue)

New clients to-date (over new clients to-date last year)

New projects to-date (over new clients to-date last year)

Business development activities (month over month)

Projects, activities and events on the calendar for the next 60 days

Getting started, it’s been exciting to see that 2013 is shaping up to be a banner year for Floricane. But it’s been more rewarding to engage in conversations as a team about what we each can do to help move the numbers in a positive direction – and why that is important for each of us.

We’re not convinced that these five measurements are the right yardsticks for our business, but they’re a good starting point. And they’re certainly helping us focus our time and attention on what it takes to run and grow a small business.

Breathing into art(180)

One of my favorite organizations in town – admittedly, I have quite a few favorites – is ART 180, which has been doing genius work at the intersection of art, youth and opportunity for 15 years. Interestingly enough, ART 180 and Floricane have been dating since before there was a Floricane – I spent some time talking about facilitating a board retreat with the organization when I was at Luck Stone six or seven years ago.

The longer we’ve dated, the more I’ve fallen in love. Last summer, I spent an evening with ART 180’s youth leaders – teenagers whose lives were impacted by ART 180, and now play an active role in shaping the organization’s work. We came together to dream about the look, the feel, the energy of ART 180’s planned new space on West Marshall Street.

I had an opportunity to see that space last month, and it is an amazing home. It feels like ART 180, and the attention to detail sings out as you explore the space.

We're getting together with the board and staff of ART 180 tonight to go through some organizational breathing exercises. ART 180 has accomplished a great deal in its 15 years, but the past two years have been a period of remarkable growth and progress for the arts organization.

Breathing into another 15 years of changing lives. That’s meditation with meaning. 

Letters of the Law (UR Law Library)

One of the first things we noticed about the University of Richmond Law Library staff was how relaxed and collegial they were! It’s not that we don’t encounterrelaxed and congenial people in our line of work, but it’s sometimes unusual to see a group of 20 people smiling at eight o’clock in the morning!

What really struck us about our day, however, is just how much the economics of the past several years has impacted everything – including if people even attend law school, and what their employment prospects are upon completion.

When you combine positive energy and change, you get great results. In addition to some solid strategic ideas of how the law library team should be thinking differently about its future, the group managed to surface some truly revolutionary ideas.

Taking the time to bring a team together to dream is often a useful and meaningful investment. When your team is ready to dream, the investment always has a better return.

Trust the process (by Carlee)

“Trust the process”

One of my life mottos these days is “trust the process.” It’s gained this esteemed status – even earning a spot as my phone’s background for a while – because, well, I’m no good at it.  I tend to be a jump-to-the-end kind of person. I want to know the outcome now and I want to have gotten there yesterday. The icky, frustrating, blurry unknown of a middle drives me crazy. 

Yet, the process is important.  It’s where collaboration happens.  It’s where clarity happens.  It’s where learning happens.

My life motto came and smacked me in the face last week as I was working to wrap up my summer internship project of illustrating Floricane’s leadership philosophy and model. I’ve spent the past few weeks chewing it over with John and team. Model #1 turned into model #2. Model #2 was long outdone by model #3, #4 and #5. As I brought the latest model to the team, the sharpies and blank paper came out to iterate yet another model. Even as we sat down with the graphic designer to turn the models over to him, we ended up scrapping model #6 and going back to model #4. 

I reminded myself to trust the process.

Do I wish we could have easily illustrated the model three weeks ago? Sure, but there’s a lot to leadership, and it’s hard to simplify a philosophy into a clear and concise visual. It would have been nice, but we wouldn’t have learned what’s really central to Floricane. I wouldn’t have been challenged to really thread out those core principles. Instead, there was a whole lot of learning, clarity, and collaboration. We may not quite be at the end, even now, but we’re close and the product is better for it.

To add a little more humor to the situation, as I looked down at my notebook, I saw the yellow post-it note with a reminder for my presentation glaring back up at me.  Sure enough, there it was:  “the process is the product.”

I’m so wise.

5 Lessons in 50 Days

The day has finally arrived: This is my first blog post since I started with Floricane last November. If your only interaction with Floricane is through our blog posts: Hi, I’m Caroline. It’s really nice to meet you.

Today I’m celebrating my fiftieth day-iversary of becoming Floricane’s first full-time employee. Here’s how I felt last month when I was offered my very first full-time job:

Over the past month a nd a half I’ve learned a handful of pretty important lessons. Let’s cut the small talk and dive right in to my top 5*:

Job titles are sometimes confusing.

I often forget my new job title. When I went from Project Coordinator/Administrative Assistant to Project Coordinator Plus/Client Experience Manager last month, I had way more important things to think about than how to describe my job to others (i.e. how to write 3 reports in a week, how to purchase enough ice cream for 200+ people, and how to make our Summer of Self-Discovery sessions feel comfortable and fun). Sometimes I just tell people, “I work at a consulting firm and do everything the consultants don’t do.”

Giant to-do lists are essential.

If at one point I ever thought I could do my job without a 2’x3’ to-do list taped to the wall next to my desk, I thought wrong.

40 hours/week is a LOT more than 20:

Some projects are more fun with friends!

I was the kid who dreaded group projects and partner-work in school*, but working at Floricane has taught me to step out of my isolationist mindset and collaborate more. Of all my projects over the last month, I think I might be most proud of the video that Carlee and I made together about the Summer of Self-Discovery series.

Floricane has the best clients.

Okay, so I’ve known this since last winter, but I decided to include it anyway. Though I technically work in an office—some might even say “RVA’s best office”—I love that I’m able to travel all around Richmond and interact with so many amazing people and organizations. As Carlee wrote in her last blog post, there’s nothing better than hearing people talk about their passions. I feel so lucky that my job allows me to do just that almost every day.

(Sorry, I had to add a bonus lesson) People in the Richmond Times-Dispatch love free food…

…and I started the twitter account RTDDonutWatch to prove it.

*Can you guess my Insights colors?

The Rookie (by Carlee)

This summer I made a rookie mistake.

I told my friend who, along with his wife, is letting me graciously live with them this summer, that I had never seen X-Men. He was shocked and dismayed to learn the full extent of the super hero movies that I had never seen. What followed was an extensive movie education – X-Men, Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, the Avengers, etc.

This week I made another rookie mistake.

When told that Wednesday is “comic book release day” by Sam, who works with us in 1E, I shared my cinematic deep dive experience with him. What followed was a 20-minute diatribe about all the reasons why the X-Men movies were wrong.

Like I said, rookie mistakes.

Although my passions do not lie in comic books – or should I say “graphic novels” as I am being corrected by enthusiasts – nor super heroes, there are fewer things I enjoy more than having these moments when you discover someone else’s passion.

Have you ever had that moment when you’re talking to someone and you hit that sweet spot of conversation? A moment when that person lights up and could talk for days about that particular topic of conversation? These have been some of my favorite moments this summer.

I’ve had many conversations this summer centered on leadership and Floricane. These conversations have been filled with these moments where people have lit up as they’ve told me about their organizations or personal leadership philosophies.

I’ve talked with Karen Legato at the Fan Free Clinic and been inspired by how she leads her team and the organization. I’ve met with Amy Howard at the University of Richmond’s Bonner Center for Civic engagement and been absorbed as I heard her vision for engagement amongst students and nonprofit organizations across the city. I’ve met people over and over again who are living their passions.

As I continue to immerse myself in the world of leadership, I can’t help but think of how passion and leadership are intertwined. Leadership can be about leading with your passion, but leadership can also be about taking the time to discover and unfold the passion of those around you. …even when that passion is X-Men.