STORIES FROM THE FIELD
We're leaping into 2024 with six organizational resolutions designed to help your organization act strategically, build cultural resiliency and capacity, and engage with teammates, clients and community partners.
The Finale: Engaging your community -- clients and customers, neighbors and business partners, competitors and peers -- is the best way to ensure you truly understand how well you're doing at delivering on your organizational promises. Take time to engage, and to listen, and to learn.
We're leaping into 2024 with six organizational resolutions designed to help your organization act strategically, build cultural resiliency and capacity, and engage with teammates, clients and community partners.
Day Five: New employees often show up engaged. No employee stays engaged -- not without the right mix of ingredients to create a sense of purpose, autonomy and growth at work. Resolve to create a culture of engagement in 2024.
Schedule a team-building workshop with Floricane using Insights® Discovery’s team effectiveness framework
Launch an integrated coaching and skill development program for groups of managers or other peer level employees.
We're leaping into 2024 with six organizational resolutions designed to help your organization act strategically, build cultural resiliency and capacity, and engage with teammates, clients and community partners.
Day Four: The only thing you control is you. Grow your awareness -- about your behaviors, the ways others experience you, and what shapes the ways you engage with the world. Remember, the more you know...
Register your employees (and yourself!) for one of this year's six Insights® Discovery personal effectiveness workshops
Stay tuned for details on our new, three-part Summer of Efflorescence behaviors, values and beliefs workshop series coming this June.
We're leaping into 2024 with six organizational resolutions designed to help your organization act strategically, build cultural resiliency and capacity, and engage with teammates, clients and community partners.
Day Two: Make a commitment to developing your managers and leaders. Their competence and commitment is what makes (or breaks) your organization.
Partner with Floricane to develop the right strategic planning process for your organization. Possibilities range from the development of a multi-year strategic plan with robust engagement to a one-day offsite with your team to assess and revise an existing plan. And everything in between. Let us help you scope your strategic planning process.
Strategic planning is not a core strength for new and emerging leaders. That's why Floricane is hosting a full-day Strategic Planning 101 workshop for your nonprofit's next generation of leaders (staff and board) to learn about best practices and map out an ideal process for your organization. Contact Julia for details on this new, interactive and practical March 19 workshop.
We're leaping into 2024 with six organizational resolutions designed to help your organization act strategically, build cultural resiliency and capacity, and engage with teammates, clients and community partners.
Day Two: Make a commitment to developing your managers and leaders. Their competence and commitment is what makes (or breaks) your organization.
Get on the information wait list for Floricane's new Leadership Circle, a small group, peer-based coaching program launching this spring. Participants are senior level leaders from a cross section of organizations who meet regularly as a group with Floricane's expert coaches. Email Julia to receive details on the new Leadership Circle later this winter.
Plan a leadership offsite for key employees to reorient around a shared set of behaviors and actions that support your organization, the skills they need, and an accountability framework to ensure adoption.
Explore individual or small group coaching for your managers and leaders to help them grow and develop.
We're leaping into 2024 with six organizational resolutions designed to help your organization act strategically, build cultural resiliency and capacity, and engage with teammates, clients and community partners.
First up: Resolve to invest time and attention to your organization's mission, vision and values. Culture happens. Healthy culture is cultivated.
Take the time to refine your organization's mission, vision and values; to ensure they reflect the best aspirations of your employees; and to put processes in place that provide the clarity and support that allow every employee to model your new culture.
Conduct an organizational culture assessment -- asking employees, board members, clients and partners, and other stakeholders to identify meaningful ways to strengthen your culture -- and develop an actionable plan for communication, training and engagement.
By Rick Jarvis
I've been in the real estate business for 30 years –– besides myself, it is all I really know.
Real estate, residential or commercial, is the tangible manifestation of human behavior. Real estate is a lagging indicator, but it always represents the preferences of the humans it shelters.
And if you want to really see the case where real estate has become a manifestation of humanity, look no further than the ‘Work From Home’ movement spawned by Covid.
In March of 2020, my team held an emergency meeting at the One South office to talk about this strangely named sickness that suddenly had markets in convulsing. As the calendar turned from January to February, I had watched the stock market tank, Twitter explode, travel bans spike, and politicians argue (even more than normal.)
Little did I know how much, and how quickly, our world would change.
So when I heard Capital One had sent its workers home as a test to see if they could, as an organization, function without everyone coming into the office, I figured it was time for us to do the same. If Capital One, with their thousands of employees and multiple campuses saw the need to shut everything down, we should probably do the same.
Fast forward to 2024. The whole issue of returning to the office is still up for debate. Jamie Dimon of Citibank (as an example) has been an outspoken critic of remote work –– and has on multiple occasions demanded employees return to their cubicles. Many other employers, large and small, have mandated the same.
Their views are largely based on the perception that working remotely and/or in a distributed arrangement is somehow less productive than when everyone sits elbow to elbow and interacts face to face.
But is forcing everyone back to the office in an attempt to regain the pre-Covid office culture the correct decision? I’d argue it falls short.
Every organization has a leader, and it is not a stretch to say that a company or a team tends to take on the personality of those who call the shots.
My hypothesis: Show me an extroverted leader, and I will show you an extroverted company.
Ever since the ‘end’ of Covid, I have been asking my peers how they are handling the ‘work from home’ vs. the ‘work from the office’ debate and what their stance is –– and while this admittedly is a wholly unscientific poll, I have found that leadership’s opinion of remote work is nearly 100% predictable by their personality.
If you work retail, the job dictates the arrangement. You can’t help someone try on a new pair of shoes from your home office, and you definitely can’t install a granite countertop over Zoom.
But excluding the jobs that require someone to be physically present, what is the right balance of remote work for your organization?
Look no further than Insights® (or the personality assessment of your choice).
If you are reading the Floricane newsletter, you should have a passing familiarity with the Insights® wheel and its colors, as well as the continuums of thinking/feeling and introversion/extraversion.
As a reference, I lead with a blend of Red and Blue energies, which makes me a bit of a data-driven ambivert.
I need time in the office to help implement some form of process and order, but I also need a lot of time away from unstructured interaction to write, plan, and think.
When I first started One South, I spent nearly all of my time at the office -- because that is what leadership is supposed to do, right? Over time, I became increasingly frustrated at my inability to accomplish concentration-based tasks in a busy, growing work environment.
The gotta-minutes nearly killed me. They are necessary for anyone in a growing business, but I did not realize how poorly suited my personality was to the interruptions that are inherent in management.
If I am being intellectually honest, I struggled in my role because I didn’t understand my own personality. It took several years and a lot of help from Insights® and Floricane’s team to help me find my optimal environment.
But I’m lucky –– I have the flexibility and the resources to craft my own environment. Many don’t have that option, and right now, are sitting somewhere they would rather not be.
I cannot think of any industry whose need for space hasn’t shrunk since 2019. (Okay, maybe the medical profession, but that’s about it.)
Take a drive through any office park. You will see a bevy of ‘for lease’ signs, or a new apartment building going up where an office used to be.
The market is de-officing as we speak.
Why?
Because there are a lot of folks who are both far happier and far more effective working from their extra bedroom, coffee shop, or from their sofa from 11pm to the wee hours of the morning –– and forcing those folks back to the office is the wrong decision.
So if you are struggling with finding the correct amount of space for your team as we exit the credit contraction of 2023, I would challenge you to examine the personalities of the people behind the tasks.
As I said earlier, look to Insights®.
If your team has a strong Blue energy preference, I guarantee you could use a lot less space –– like a LOT less.
If your team leans more into Yellow energy, you probably still need every bit of space you used to need.
And if your team lives closer to the middle, you can probably decrease your footprint by a third, if not a half.
‘Right-sizing’ your footprint is always important. When you are incorrectly ‘officed,’ it is a net negative to the bottom line –– AND it detracts from performance.
Including your team’s personality in your analysis (not just leadership’s personality) will lead you to a much more accurate version of space for both you and your team. When you can spend less on space yet enhance your team’s performance, you win on all levels.
Rick Jarvis is the co-founder of One South Realty, one of the Richmond regions largest residential and commercial real estate companies. A longtime friend and client of Floricane’s, Rick is more than slightly obsessed with using Insights® Discovery to better understand his behaviors, his team and his clients.
This is the first guest newsletter post celebrating Floricane’s 16th orbit around the sun in 2024. Future posts will feature former Floricane employees and interns, clients and community leaders, and other interesting, smart humans.
An article in the New York Times last week threw me into a brief existential funk.
The article –- “Robert Sapolsky Doesn’t Believe in Free Will. (But Feel Free to Disagree.” –- is a discussion with a Stanford neuroscientist and Macarthur Foundation “genius” grant recipient. In it, Sapolsky presents a provocative argument (because he has no choice in the matter, perhaps) that humans do not have free will, or agency. Our feeling of independent decision making, he suggests, is connected to actions actions that are determined by a mix of biology, hormones, and life experiences and circumstances.
So much for self-awareness and growth, right?
My first impulse -– as Sapolsky predicts in the interview –- was to dismiss his argument. As he says, it “completely strikes at our sense of identity and autonomy and where we get meaning from.”
For free will to exist, he continues, “you would be able to identify the neurons that caused a particular behavior, and it wouldn’t matter what any other neuron in the brain was doing, what the environment was, what the person’s hormone levels were, what culture they were brought up in. Show me that those neurons would do the exact same thing with all these other things changed, and you’ve proven free will to me.”
Walking the dog this weekend, I found myself second guessing everything. Did I take this particular route through this Northside neighborhood because I noticed the maple leaves were turning and independently chose to turn left? Or was it because my life experiences had imprinted in my cortex a predilection for autumn leaves? Or did the dog, whose free will is even harder to discern, pull me that way?
But then, there I was, walking down a quiet side street beneath a brilliant canopy of red and gold maple leaves listening to the quiet tap of Addie’s nails on the sidewalk, the cry of a hawk circling in search of a squirrel, and smiling at a memory of my old friend Michelle kicking leaves as we walked along a Fan sidewalk one October afternoon.
Did it matter why I chose the path I did, or whether the pleasant sense of solitude and memory were manufactured by biology and chemistry? The answer appears to be “sort of.” Or, “sometimes.”
“Every living organism is just a biological machine,” Sapolsky continues. “But we’re the only ones that know that we’re biological machines; we are trying to make sense of the fact that we feel as if our feelings are real. At some point, it doesn’t make a difference whether your feelings are real or whether your feeling of feelings being real is the case… Meaning feels real. Purpose feels real.”
In the self-awareness workshops I facilitate, I often end up discussing the whole “nature versus nurture” business. Sometimes I draw the infamous iceberg -– where our actions, and the experiences others have of us in the world are visible, describable, while beneath the water lies the other 90% of who we are, and why we do what we do. This, I think, is the stuff Sapolsky is trying to unpack. Our biology, the hormonal and chemical bubbling that goes on at a molecular level, the ways in which millions of moments over our lifetime –- a sudden burst of lightning, the death of a friend, a leaf floating to the ground, a memorable meal, a broken shoelace -– trigger synapses in our brain to form connections to other moments, other memories, and to shape everything that follows.
We are, in the end, marvelous constructs. And we have within us the ability to create new memories, fire new synapses, form new chemical connections that create new ways for us to be and to act and to grow in the world. Our daily decisions about how we want to be in our lives, with others, may be informed (or guided, or even determined) by chemistry or biology, but they remain wonderfully, uniquely ours.
On a second walk this weekend, Jack decided -– or did he? –- that we should collect leaves, berries and mushrooms. We stopped to evaluate neighborhood Halloween decorations. We stood and watched a particularly vibrant maple leaf spin down from above and settle at our feet.
In that moment, meaning felt real. Purpose felt real.
Kick some leaves this week, and find new ways to fire the synapses connected to curiosity, joy, connection and love. (You're going to do it anyway, so you might as well pretend it's on purpose.)
