Learning on your feet

Oh, the things we can learn by listening to the stories of passionate people!

I spent a half-day of my vacation at the Martin Agency this week, engaged in a “Creative Practice at Work” workshop put together by The Alternative Speakers Bureau. The Bureau was founded by Richmond siblings Noah and Mica Scalin to introduce business leaders to creative thinkers, and approaches.

About 40 (mostly familiar) faces gathered downtown. After some post-breakfast sword swallowing, we quickly split into three groups. Each group was assigned a presenter. I landed, fabulously, in the tap dancing group!

Tap dancer Jenai West quickly dove into her own personal story of discovery, moving from Ohio to New York City and falling in love over several years with tap. As the English major with no dance experience developed basic taps skills, she found herself as a student-volunteer at an international tap convention – being shadowed by star Gregory Hines as she cleaned a convention room.

Her encounter with Hines is where she drew some major life lessons from her creative passion. As they began a tap “conversation “ – the dance master and the novice – Hines told her, “Don’t do what I do, do what you do!” Their brief “tap dialogue” inspired her to find her own voice in dance, and her decades-long dance career has given her a framework for life. Among her beliefs:

• Collaboration is a key aspect of dance, and of a creative life. In tap, Jenai says, there are two ways to collaborate. “You can trade,” she says, “which really is just having a conversation. You listen to what the first person has to say [in their dance] and then you respond in your own way.” Or, she continues, “you can steal. In tap dance, stealing is considered a compliment that can be done verbatim (as long as you give credit) or by putting your own spin on it.”

• Find freedom in limitations. This can be limitations that already exist, or limitations that you impose on yourself as a form of challenge or to force yourself to engage in new ways. “Create your own limitations to focus your voice, or to challenge yourself to find new ideas,” Janai says.

• Let go of preciousness, or the idea that you have to protect or hide your passions, or your dreams. “You never know how people will respond until you let go of preciousness and put it out there,” she concluded.

She then invited our small group to break into smaller teams and create our own rhythm – use beats to translate a familiar piece of music. (That was a lesson in itself for my partner and me!)

During the final hour, all of the groups reconvened as Noah and Caitlin Kilcoin of the Greater Richmond Chamber facilitated a debrief around lessons learned from all three workshops, and general lessons about creativity in the workplace.

Craft, discipline, passion and a willingness to invest yourself in tangible ways were all themes that threaded through the morning. And, I swear, my feet have been moving differently all day.

Coaching Corner: Staying in My Lane

In coaching our clients recently, role clarity is something that continues to pop up. Whether it's a result of external demands, a co-worker’s departure, new strategic direction for the company, increased responsibility – the list goes on and on it seems the need for clarity doesn’t stop. I suppose its something that is here to stay given the nature of work coming out of the latest recession.

Yet, we as humans need to feel some structure and some security – Millennials, Gen X’ers and Boomers all share this desire. It may show up differently for each generation, but the under-lying, human fundamental is the same.

A recent quote by Brené Brown sums it up nicely:

“I swim for many reasons but none more important than the constant reminder to stay in my own lane.” 

As I work with clients, I help them reach clarity about their lanes – what lives within their lane and what doesn’t. And, more importantly, we work on how they can be the best swimmer within their lane. How to recognize when they go out of bounds and the price they pay for it – both personally and professionally. 

Having lane clarity gives clients the chance to breathe and lean into their role. It helps create a rhythm for their day and their life that makes the stresses seem less overwhelming and a bit more manageable.

P-A-R-T-Y!

Our team had a blast at our client party yesterday! Our friends at One South Realty Group graciously allowed us to use their beautiful, wide-open office space in the Fan, and we were thrilled to see so many of our past client and friends-of-Floricane walk through the doors. We even discussed throwing parties like this more often-- it gives us such a great excuse to connect with Richmond's movers and shakers. 

Interning at Floricane!

Hi! My name is Madison Anderson and I am currently the summer intern at Floricane. I've been on the team since the beginning of June and have been enjoying every minute of my time here. The environment is warm and inviting and the people are awesome as well. I've learned a lot about myself already while being a part of the Floricane team, and am continuing to learn.  

Thanks to the Insights workshop that I was able to attend, I've been able to gain a more in-depth understanding of how I interact with the people around me both in the workplace and outside of it. Insights has been very helpful to me as a student, a person, and as a young professional. I'm excited to learn more about myself, others, and Floricane as a whole. I love being a part of the Floricane team! 

Co-working Spaces For Introverts

Click through to read the original article on Businessweek.com

Co-working. It's super trendy, but can make some people want to put on their headphones and hide under their big, collaborative shared desks.

Susan Cain, author of Quiet and presenter of the famed TED talk "The Power of Introverts," has partnered with Steelcase to create Quiet Spaces, a new line of co-working office spaces expressly designed to empower introverts to do their best work. 

As an introvert who works 9-5 in a shared, collaborative office space, I can't help but love this idea. The small, private spaces allow for a brief escape from the sometimes overwhelming environment of co-working, but the design still leaves the space feeling open. Check out the video to see more of the Quiet Spaces and to hear Susan Cain speak about the project:

Insights in Austin, TX

Here at Floricane, we're big fans of Insights® Discovery. It's one of several tools we use with clients, but it's my personal favorite. Aside from being more accurate than any other personality profile I have used, it is simple to understand, gives organizations and teams a common language, and is incredibly robust. Last week I spent four days in Austin, TX at the North American headquarters for Insights® and was able to see firsthand just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Now, for those of you who may not know; I am a pretty big nerd. I spent my plane ride to Austin perusing a 200+ page research document on the validity and reliability of Insights®.  So, I was admittedly geeking out when I got to learn about the equations that are used to create the Insights® charts and graphs. The staff got so tired of my questions that they put me in touch with their research team based in Scotland. And that was just on the first day.

As the week went on, we explored all of the possibilities of Insights®. There are dozens of workshops, hundreds of exercises, and thousands of conversations that you can engage in - all stemming from 24 simple word choices that comprise the Insights® Evaluator. Yet of all the interesting things I learned last week, none of them are top of mind for me when I think about my time in Austin. The first thing I think about are the relationships I formed. 

You see, at its core, Insights® is all about relationships. Sure, self-awareness is fun and thought provoking, but using that self-awareness to build and enhance meaningful, effective relationships is where true value is created. This point was really made clear to me as I made an intentional effort to adapt my default style to better connect with others I met. It was challenging and exhausting at times, but the resulting relationships I formed are well worth it. 

Make It Harder

We held our first Insights Discovery® Leadership Effectiveness workshop this week, and – feeling a bit brave – Theran and I asked the 28 participants for their feedback – in the moment.

We asked them to work in small groups to identify something about the day they felt was particularly effective or impactful, and something that was missing or could be improved.

In a more gentle fashion than we anticipated they gave us the feedback – with both barrels.

Debriefing with the Floricane team later in the evening, it struck us that the group was simply giving us the permission so many of our clients offer.

• Make it harder.
• Make it more authentic, real and concrete.
• Share stories.
• Make it harder, more authentic, real and concrete.

No, I’m not repeating myself.

All told, the workshop participants had a great time – they walked away with new perspectives, new skills and new relationships. The energy was strong all day, and individual light bulbs went off all day.

But it wasn’t enough. These folks invested time and money to go deeper, play harder, discover more.

It’s easy to forget sometimes that our clients don’t call us because they’re bored and looking for a little something to do on the organizational change front. They’re serious – either because they are struggling, or they see real opportunity that needs to be seized. It’s our job to work hard, and to challenge them appropriately.

Making it easy defeats the purpose, because change usually isn’t. Easy, I mean.

“Let’s Circle Back On This”: Thoughts on Corporate Jargon

Last weekend, my best friend and I went downtown to watch the Coalition Theater’s 2014 Battledecks competition. Ten Richmonders competed to improvise the best (read: funniest) Corporate-style PowerPoint presentation based on a deck of ridiculous slides they had never seen before. As you can imagine, the results were beyond hilarious. It seemed everyone in the audience found humor in the presentations, because we all recognize that over-used, stereotypical language of business jargon.

I like to think that Floricane is a little more raw and down-to-earth than your typical O.D. consultancy, but even we can fall into the habit of corporate-speak. When I first started here in 2012, I felt like I had to learn a whole new language. Around the office, in emails, and at client meetings, I was surrounded by words and phrases I had no context for: “core competencies,” “best practices,” “hijacked,” and “out of pocket.” [Confession: For a little while, I thought John had made up “out of pocket” to mean that he wasn’t going to have his phone in his pocket for the rest of the afternoon. That makes sense, right?].

After a few months, without really realizing it, I started to speak this language fluently, surprising myself by saying things like “Can I leverage your talents for a minute?” and “Let’s take this offline.” My excuse? It’s easy to adopt the insider-language when you’re one of the insiders, and it can be useful to have common company-wide vocabulary-- but there are downsides, too, like alienating the "outsiders," and causing confusion with fluffy, unclear language.

A lot of jokes are made about corporate jargon. It’s obvious from the comedy of Battledecks, Dilbert, and Office Space that these words can come across as vague, ridiculous and eye-roll-worthy, so why don’t more companies make an effort to side-step it altogether? It's simple: Changing your company's language means changing your company's culture, and culture change isn’t easy.

I’m no consultant, but I can tell you this much: Easing up on the corporate-speak and humanizing the way we communicate will bring more clarity to the workplace, and clarity is a good and empowering thing for everyone.