Taking Time

Floricane took Christmas week off. Our folks went their separate ways to recharge in unique and personal ways. We took the week after Christmas off, as well – off from our clients.

Rather than diving back into the fray, and trying to cram new work into the week, we decided to make New Year’s week a “client free” week. Instead, our team hung out together, and did some serious prep work to make 2014 a great year. We used that week to connect with one another in a more relaxed way, and to fine tune the business.

It was the smartest thing I did in 2013.

And so we're going to do it again in 2014. Several times.

We’ll close the week of July 4 for vacation, and close our doors to clients the following week to pause and take a breath. We’ll sharpen our saws, polish our processes and prepare for the second half of the year. (And we'll do it again next December.)

We’ll all take personal time throughout the year, as well, but we think blacking out four weeks a year where our team has to take its foot off the gas sends an important message or two.

Our people matter. Our clients matter. Recharging to do great work matters, too.

Five Lessons from Group Coaching

Our clients are fortunate. I do very little group coaching these days, relying on the skilled talent of Debra Saneda and Anne Chamberlain to fill that particular niche.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy sitting with groups and unpacking their challenges. It’s that I enjoy it alittle too much – I sometimes can spend too much time unpacking.

Now that the Floricane team is in the midst of one of its biggest projects – group leadership coaching for a large slate of managers in Richmond and Hampton Roads – we’re focused on coaching for impact. Anne and Debra are in the midst of an eight-month project involving 17 different groups of managers. Each group will have five coaching sessions, and participants will also do homework, attend several training sessions and develop plans for their teams.

Two of the biggest takeaways I’ve had from our ongoing coaching work? The value of creating space for managers and leaders simply to slow down – and the importance of facilitated opportunities for peers to share their struggles, solutions and best practices.

Listening to Debra and Anne discuss the flow and tenor of their first round of group coaching discussions – all 17 of them! – in December, I’m struck by how deeply they have to listen to each unique discussion. The volume of active listening they do in a week is amazing, and the act of that listening alone is of value to their coaching participants.

Five lessons I’ve drawn watching our team engage in group coaching work:

• Time and Space: Managers and leaders have a hard time creating space for themselves. Coaching forces a mental timeout, and an opportunity to reflect – and plan forward.

• Peer Discussions: There are circumstances in which we find group coaching (of peers from different teams without reporting relationships) creates amazing dialogue and value. Sometimes, it’s simply recognizing that other managers deal with the same chaos as you do that helps.

• Active Listening (and Questioning): Having someone listen deeply to your challenges, and your successes, and asking hard questions to focus your attention can be a game changer.

• Being Heard: Sandwiched between busy teams and even busier bosses, many mid-level managers have no one to hear them. That isolation can be paralyzing, and demoralizing.

• Lather, Rinse, Repeat: Sharing, setting a plan in place, making commitments – and then coming back in two or three weeks to be accountable (to your coach and your peers) can be a truly motivating set of habits. Do it often enough, and you develop new muscle memory.

In The Name of Dr. Martin Luther King, Sing!

Every January for four years, we've sent a simple postcard to hundreds of our friends in the community. It's a thank you note, and a reminder-- of the power of one voice, the power of community, and the power of dreams. On this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we'd like to thank each of you for your commitment to making our community a better place.

(And we'd like to thank Ben Dacus for his simple, powerful design.)

TILTED 2014

If you attended last February’s small business unconference, you know that Tilted is a great way to connect with and learn from other small business owners and entrepreneurs. More than 140 people crowded into our collaborative space in the Richmond Times-Dispatch building for a full day of learning and discovery.

It was one of our favorite events.

But it wasn’t our event. It was organized by 12 small business owners (including us), and it really came together because the 140+ participants were not afraid to build the content collaboratively, and in-the-moment. Hence the term “unconference”.

Well, I’m excited to announce that Tilted is coming back in 2014! Many of the original organizers have signed on, and we’re looking at another late February landing date. Last year, we organized the entire event on a shoestring, and it only took us 45 days. We hope to repeat our low-budget, high-impact success again this year.

Keep your eyes on Facebook, Twitter or the Floricane blog for more news as we start to put the pieces into place.

And mark your calendar for Saturday, March 1. Let's get Tilted.

New Project: PUNCH(ing) It

We’re big fans of collaboration. And we’re big fans of the creative team at PUNCH. They study the art of impact, and they create great design. (We like great design.)

Over the next few months, the team at PUNCH and the team atFloricane are playing a game of musical work. They’re helping us strengthen Floricane’s strategic brand presence – our design and print materials, our online presence, our use of social media – and we’re helping members of the PUNCH team strengthen their management and leadership skills, and their overall organizational effectiveness.

Our teams have been working together for more than a year, and we’ve grown to enjoy and respect their creative energy and insight. We suspect they might feel the same way.

Keep your eyes peeled as we move into 2014. We’ll be unveiling a fresh look that builds on the great logo design the team at Zeigler|Dacus dreamed up – way back in 2008. (We continue to lean heavily on Ben Dacus for great design, by the way. You can never have too many awesome designers in your corner.)

New Project: Visioning with the Richmond Symphony

Our team really enjoyed working with the musicians, staff and board of the Richmond Symphony on their strategic plan last year, and I absolutely love our collaboration with Maestro Steven Smith on the FIRST CHAIR program. So, it should come as no surprise that I'm happy to be hanging out with the Richmond Symphony team again -- this time, facilitating some longer range visioning work. Over a couple of sessions this winter, we'll explore the ways in which we anticipate Richmond will continue to grow and change as we move toward 2020. And we'll look at the ways in which cultural organizations around the world are transforming. Through those filters, we'll work to craft a vision (not a vision statement, but an asipration) for Richmond's symphony.

Same Motion, More Action

Twitter led me to something useful today. (Really, Andrea Goulet Ford did.)

Lately, I've been pondering (more on that later) some of the things that keep me from taking more action. There are many drivers -- habit and inclination among the stronger, but also too many choices or options, a dash of guilt and a need to look busy. What in the world am I talking about?

Well, there's my commitment to maintaining this blog, as an example. I have a list of about 40 potential blog posts that I recently revisited and revised. In the time I spent editing the list of blog posts, I could have written three posts. Or the new Excel spreadsheet I developed to track Floricane's cash f low, when what I really needed to do was build a budget for 2014.

This evening, Andrea retweeted a link to a blog post at Buffer by James Clear with the provocative title, "The Mistake Smart People Make: Being In Motion vs. Taking Action." Here's a snippet:

Motion is when you’re busy doing something, but that task will never produce an outcome by itself. Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will get you a result.

Here are some examples…

• If I outline 20 ideas for articles I want to write, that’s motion. If I actually write and publish an article, that’s action.
• If I email 10 new leads for my business and start conversations with them, that’s motion. If I actually ask for the sale and they turn into a customer, that’s action.
• If I search for a better diet plan and read a few books on the topic, that’s motion. If I actually eat a healthy meal, that’s action.

Sometimes motion is good because it allows you to prepare and strategize and learn. But motion will never — by itself — lead to the result you are looking to achieve.

It doesn’t matter how many times you go talk to the personal trainer, that motion will never get you in shape. Only the action of working out will get you the result you’re looking to achieve.

My first impulse after reading Clear's piece was, "Yeah! I need to do less motion, more action!" And then I settled down, and remembered how I am fundamentally wired (read: motion, not action). I need motion. Processing my way through my work is core to what I do. Abandoning the side of me that researches, studies and explores options would be a mistake.

No, I need the motion I have. But I also need more action.

And that's my new motto for 2014: Same Motion, More Action.

Go read the whole thing, and then decide if you're ready to act more. (Or, if you act too much, maybe you need to put some more motion in your life.)

The Cost of Efficiency

I like to think that I am an efficient person; or at least I try to be. For most routine tasks in my life I have created a standard way of completing them, I utilize various apps and software programs to stay on top of my ever-growing To Do list, and my desire to organize my life borders on obsessive compulsive behavior. In fact, now that I consider it, I spend a potentially inefficient amount of time thinking about how to be more efficient. But we’ll leave that for another blog post.

Earlier this week, Caroline and I attended an event where the guest speaker is a recognized e fficiency expert. He’s written books on the subject and specializes in email efficiency, which is the one area of my life that I have given up on trying to manage. Needless to say, I was eager to here him speak and went prepared to have my life transformed.

The majority of the tips and tricks he presented simply utilized many of the built-in features found in most email clients – rules, templates, shortcuts, etc. Some I had never considered using before and so I took note, but my life was not yet changed. Then he brought up the subject of returning to a massive inbox after being out of the office on vacation or a business trip. I slid closer to the edge of my seat with anticipation.

When leaving the office for an extended period, the speaker suggested creating a new rule that automatically places all new messages into a folder. A nice psychological trick I thought, you return to an empty inbox and can then sort through your emails at an appropriate time. But then the speaker threw a curve ball: ignore the folder with all of the emails from your absence. Completely. Just forget it even exists. In his opinion, the majority of the emails are junk and those that are important can be ignored until the sender contacts you again.

This notion of increasing your own efficiency at the expense of others’ efficiency didn’t sit well with me and I have thought about it a lot over the past few days. What I’ve come to realize is that I do this kind of thing all too often. I like to keep certain office supplies near our worktable, so I move them there without telling anyone else. Now everyone else has to spend time hunting them down. Or I schedule a doctor’s appointment for my sons, but put it on my personal calendar and not the family calendar shared with my wife and she in turn schedules a second appointment.

The realization I’ve come to is that my efficiency is not simply dependent on what I do and how I do it. Nor is the efficiency of those around me solely based on their actions and decisions. Efficiency, evidently, is a team effort. So, to the rest of the Floricane Team, where would you all like to keep the stapler?