The Corporate Picnic!

A few years back, the Floricane team and our families gathered together at a Lebanese restaurant on Broad Street for a year-end celebration. There were five of us, and assorted partners and kids. That event was followed by a lot of transition and change.

Which brings us to June of 2015. Our new team -- Anne, Debra, John, Julie, Lesley and Theran -- is on the ground and running, and we've seen the benefit of new energy. We've also recognized the value of celebrating our successes more often.

It took our new team members -- Lesley and Julie -- to initiate and to organize our second Floricane family event. This time we had a picnic, and managed to pick the night after the heat wave broke. It was a perfect evening to hang out with 10 adults, 10 kids and a turtle. (We were at Maymont, after all.)

Our next big party? Stay tuned for news. It's going to be in October, on a roof, and there will be aerial drones.

New Project: Building Industry Leaders

We are always, and I mean always, excited about our work with the Virginia Beer Wholesalers Association. Between the knowledge Theran is accruing about arcane ABC laws and the changing nature of the beer industry, and the relationships we've developed with a group of business people who are serious about their future, every engagement we have is energetic and positive.

This summer should be no different, as we welcome almost 30 young leaders from more than a dozen companies across Virginia to be part of the VBWA Next Generation program. Theran and I will spend seven months with this cohort, exploring elements of leadership and growing their understanding of and ability to lead within the beer industry in Virginia.

New Project: Onboarding New Leaders at ChildFund

We've become big fans of the team at ChildFund, International -- partly because their mission-driven work to impact the lives of young people around the world, and partly because they're an amazingly likable team of change makers.

This summer, we continue our journey with ChildFund's leadership as we work with their global fundraising and global human resource teams to "onboard" new leadership.

In our experience, onboarding often means an orientation class for a new employee, and maybe a week of scheduled meetings with key people. ChildFund felt that it was really important for their new leaders to land in their new roles with teams who had spent some serious time preparing for their arrival. The overall goal is to accelerate integration between the new executives and their teams; to maintain focus on key organizational goals; and to ensure a fast, effective and positive initiation into ChildFund's culture and work.

New Client: Friends of the Lower Appomattox River

We're spending our summer on the shores of the mighty Appomattox. Okay, not so much.

But we are excited to be working with the Friends of the Lower Appomattox River, a 157-mile river that stretches from the town of Appomattox near Farmville to the James River at City Point in Hopewell. Our work with FOLAR is part of a larger collaborative organizational assessment project with five nonprofits in the Tri-Cities being conducted by Organizational Solutions and the Cameron Foundation.

Over the span of two months, we'll work to assess FOLAR's opportunities to strengthen their capacity to make a positive impact on the Appomattox River. We're excited to be able to help the team at FOLAR explore their future.

Deploying our “found insight” at Floricane

Sometimes you stumble across a phrase the makes the complicated simple.

Twitter introduced me to a recent post by VCU Brandcenter professor Mark Fenske about something he calls “found insight.”

Fenske was writing about what separates agencies that make ads from those that make great ads. It’s not the snappy office layout, or age, or the quality of their Keurig coffee.

It’s simpler than any of those things.

It’s whether the agency’s processes help to leverage and amplify found insight, or kills found insight.

“Found insight is what one gets once one has started on a project.

It is not the map with which one starts a reconnaissance of an area but the redrawn map one returns with from having been there to look and smell and measure.

Found insight is something you discover that you wish you’d known when you started.”

I think it’s a pretty beautiful concept. It’s also how the team at Floricane approaches our work.

This spring, I exploded several strategic plans mid-process simply because the shape of the plans (the content and structure of the written document) could not effectively hold the idea that was emerging from each plan. In both cases, the client breathed a sigh of relief when the dramatically revised plan emerged – because it felt more aligned with our shared found insights into their organization.

The longest portion of our strategic planning process is what we call discovery. (Or what we should start calling found insight.) It involves gathering anecdotes, chatting with key stakeholders, reading through white papers and old planning documents – and then synthesizing, and then re-synthesizing with the client, until strategic ideas begin to emerge, solidify and develop energy.

We can spend weeks in discovery, and it drives some clients to the point of despair – because they think they already know what the plan should look like! Truth be told, they probably do. But our shared knowledge is deeper, and the plan’s content is richer, after we engage in discovery together.

Integrating new ideas into existing constructs is what the human brain was designed to do. Found insight is simply inviting new perspective to have weight and impact. It’s allowing your strategic process to inform your strategic plan.

"We have met the enemy, and he is us!"

A recent article in Forbes by leadership consultant Joseph Folkman recently caught my attention. Folkman observed that the vast majority of the thousands of leaders he’s worked with over the years do not value self-development. “Practicing self-development is the gateway for improving every competency, and it should not be ignored,” he writes. “Why do leaders avoid it? And why do they fail?”

His observation – which mirrors my own, albeit less experienced, take – that too many people (and not just leaders) too often put their own professional and personal development on the back burner is disconcerting. And not just because my business relies on people investing in themselves. 

Folkman identifies several reasons why people fail at self-development – they don’t know how to listen; they aren’t open to the ideas of others; they aren’t honest with themselves; they don’t take time to develop others; they don’t take the initiative.

I’ve seen all of these in action. I’ve probably exhibited each of them countless times in my own leadership journey. But I’ve also seen, and experienced, a deeper problem – leaders who simply lack the awareness that they represent the tip of a bigger development opportunity.

In our work at Floricane, we’re often brought into organizations with the best of intentions. Our clients see a real developmental need in the organization, and want us to work with senior leadership to make adjustments. Those adjustments usually involve other people.

Too often, I am reminded of Walt Kelly’s pointed cartoon strip Pogo of long ago – “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”

It’s sometimes painfully amusing to listen to leaders who talk a great talk about the importance of self-awareness and leadership development – for everyone below them. They believe that the fact that they’ve brought us into the organization for a serious engagement, that they’re making an investment in their people, is evidence that they’re good leaders. A mirror is one leadership tool remarkably absent from their professional toolkit.

“We’ve worked with dozens of consultants over the years,” groused one leader we met, “and nothing’s ever changed. Why should we think that you’ll be any different? 

My immediate thought was that he should expect exactly the same results. After all, he and his fellow leadership team members were the only common denominator across all of those engagements.

Before you can truly fail at self-development, you’ve got to engage in self-development. Once you engage in self-development, you can apply Folkman’s key behaviors:

·      Active listening for content, meaning and emotion in every conversation.

·      Being open to others’ ideas, and soliciting their input and feedback regularly.

·      Being honest with yourself, and regularly looking in the mirror for opportunities to improve.

·      Develop others, and model self-development through your own actions.

·      Take the initiative and get started.

Even GWAR wrestles with organizational change

They say you can’t go home again. Well, Thomas Wolfe said they said it. He was probably right – by the time you make it back, home has changed and you have changed. Or, as one of my favorite bands, Fugazi, asserts in song, “You can’t be what you were, so you’d better start being just what you are.”

That’s a long, meandering way of saying that I recently had coffee and talked organizational change with GWAR.

If you’re from Richmond, you may know GWAR as a schlock-metal performance band whose lead singer, Dave Brockie, died last year.

You probably didn't realize that GWAR is the performance arm of a thriving artistic collective known as Slave Pit Inc. Dozens of musicians, artists and performers have been employed by the organization over the years, including my college friend Bob Gorman.

The vast majority of my early college evenings were spent hanging out with Bob in the GWAR space on Laurel Street, where he first volunteered/apprenticed and then was employed creating costumes for the band. Twenty-five years later, Bob’s still making costumes and performing on stage – and has just completed a massive coffee table book chronicling the band’s sordid history.

It doesn’t take a degree in psychology to think a punk rock collective of artists and musicians might have organizational challenges. Particularly when the group is in the midst of major transition and change.

Which is what Bob and I discussed over coffee. We talked at length about ways organizations can both lose their orientation and develop a clearer sense of their future after a key leader moves on. In the case of GWAR, Brockie would probably be better described as a creative force of nature who often moved the band, and Slave Pit, by frantically out-thinking and out-working everyone around him. Hyperactivity is not the best leadership tool out there, but it seemed to work pretty well for Dave.

Like many organizations entering their second generation, GWAR struggles with reconciling its rich and messy legacy of creativity with the individual visions of key shareholders, the inevitable politics of an artist collective, and a shared commitment to a yet-undetermined vision of the future. As a bystander at GWAR’s birth, I can attest that the band was born of an era that needed the band’s raw, unfiltered take on the world – Brockie’s nimble evisceration of virtually every political and social construct is not applauded enough.

Listening to Bobby’s perspectives on the changes in his organization made me think about just how hard it is for organizations to reinvent themselves – especially creative organizations, ironically. It becomes even harder when your creativity is oriented in opposition to things that are no longer relevant.

While I might not have been able to “go home again” – relative to my punk rock roots – it sure was nice to reconnect with an amazing friend, and to see our lives once again intersect during a time of change and transition.

The view from week 3

Hello, I’m Julie and I’m new here.

Actually, I’m not just new here at Floricane, but new in a broader sense to the 9-5, vacation-taking, happy-hour attending world of full time employment. When I sat down for my first interview with Floricane a few weeks ago, I was working part time at both the VMFA and the Virginia Center for Architecture and interning at 1708 Gallery. The VMFA is where I unknowingly met John for the first time, about a week prior to my interview, when I had to ask him if he would “please keep a foot away from the paintings." Maybe the universe was trying to prep me for the thousand and one moments I would have to ask him for clarification in Floricane related tasks a few weeks later. Maybe I’m stretching it. Either way, it made for the most disarming interview I’ve ever been a part of.

After I recovered from the revelation that I had chastised my potential boss, I composed myself enough to answer the interview question that I’ve kept thinking back on during my first few weeks here at Floricane. Debra asked me what the top three things I was looking for in a job were. In what I’m sure was a rambling waterfall of words, I said that I was looking for an amiable, welcoming work environment, a job that challenged me and offered me a chance to gain new skills, and a company whose work I could believe in and rally behind.

Although I've only been at Floricane for a little over two weeks, all three of those qualifications have been met and surpassed. On my very first day Caroline and Lesley convinced me to leave my packed lunch in the fridge and head out to lunch. No one made fun of my music choices on the office stereo. I’m already getting all of Theran’s sarcastic texts. I have felt included, heard, and know that any help I need figuring out this whole young professional world is only a desk away.

Being a young professional (emphasis on the former), there is a lot to figure out. In my first day alone I think I downloaded 7 different kinds of office software and organizational apps. There are many moving parts to this job, and like everyone told me in the interview; there is no such thing as a “typical day” at Floricane. The opportunities to learn here are seemingly endless. I’ve got event calendars to finalize, marketing skills to hone, and a whole lot of fancy consulting lingo to catch up on (do people still say lingo?). The likelihood that I’ll get bored is hovering around zero percent.

The most exciting thing for me about working with Floricane is the chance to be a part of a team that truly cares about helping people grow and succeed. Everyone here is not only invested in their own clients, but in seeing the Richmond community thrive. That’s a passion that I share, which is good because all we ever really talk about is Richmond. If you’re reading this, you probably share our pride and borderline obsession with this little city and it’s potential to be great.  I hope to meet you and trade ideas at our next workshop soon.