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In this era of political discourse, rhetoric, grandstanding and social media hype, it is all the more important for each of us to understand issues that impact ourselves, our loved ones and our lives in general, and for us to render our own opinions and thoughts as we see fit. Opportunists will seize upon challenges of the day and whip us into a frenzy to create a want for change that benefits themselves in some way. Yet those same opportunists may not have thought through, and may not be aligned to care about, the impact and the consequences of that change upon us.
If we agree there is a need for change, I wonder if we are truly gravitating towards a valued concept or ideal or are we instead running away from an unwanted current state reality? This running away verses running towards is an important concept. Running away would seem to be dominated by a sense of fear, while running towards a desirable goal or end state would seem to create a feeling of elation, positivity or even joy. Research shows that people who retire away from their jobs are less satisfied in retirement than people who retire into a new life pattern that they designed and adopted. So as it relates to our roles in assessing change, how do we respond to change ideas that are thrust upon us? Do we embrace it, reject it, ponder it or ignore it? I think we would agree that innovation, change and creativity are often valued behaviors that we should at least selectively embrace even if they make us uncomfortable. Perhaps it takes courage to overcome our fears such that we at least believe we are gravitating to a more desired end state. Ideally, even if we are not certain, I contend that we should have at least considered the question of “why” when others recommend change. Why is this person recommending this change at this time in this way? Do I understand what is being recommended and why? Does it make sense to me? Too often group-think and fear enter into the equation: “I must be the only one that doesn’t understand.” “If I ask a question people will think I am dumb.” And so, like in the fable, “The Emperor Has No Clothes,” people listen, pretend to understand and choose not to ask the simple questions: why this, why now, why you? I contend that you should consider finding your voice in every aspect of your life as you see fit. Not every time on every issue, but selectively. And then in those circumstances, ask the why question. Be an educated consumer. Don’t be misled by people who may not have your best interest at heart. Whether this is about politics, healthcare, buying a car, employers, or just about another person, it would always seem reasonable to ask why. Loved ones will likely be willing to engage in the dialog, won’t they? So would trusted friends and colleagues, right? So why have a lower standard for others? Although he was talking about nearing the end of life, the words of poet Dylan Thomas seem relevant in a broader context and so as it relates to accepting change blindly I say to you, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Instead ask the why question, seek to understand and bring your voice to bear as you see fit. The virtue of America and the wisdom of our forefathers was captured in the first amendment around this very idea - freedom of speech. Be your own advocate and ask the relevant question – you may be very glad you did. Copyright © 2020 Bruce Flareau All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced without written permission from the owner.
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If you are reading this blog, my guess is that you are looking for ways to enhance your life and achieve a greater sense of happiness of one form or another. (Or you’ve just accidentally stumbled here.)
To that end you may have considered engaging a coach. Others of you may have turned to mentors. Conversely, some of you may have served as the mentor for one or more people in your lives and may even feel qualified to be coaching others. So why would I craft an article delineating between to two? In short, because I think the distinction matters. A mentor is someone who metaphorically walks with you, thus sharing how they have solved life’s dilemmas. The mentor helps people learn by sharing their own life experiences. It is a valuable asset and can help people in countless ways. Coaching, on the other hand, is related but very much different. Coaches don’t “tell” people how to live their lives or “share” the way they themselves solved a specific issue or dilemma. Instead, coaches help people “listen” to their inner voices and find solutions that work for them. It is the holding up of a large mirror to help people see blind spots, explore what is most important based upon their values and beliefs, and to ultimately decide a course of action for themselves. Clearly a coach can and will share experiences, but the primary consideration is always the coachee and helping them determine what is important, what they want to do and how they want to do it, regardless of the values or beliefs of the coach. So, let’s put this in practice. You are a rising star in your company and continue to be asked to do more and more. You accept each challenge happily as your career soars and you become professionally and financially successful. Yet your personal health, and your relationship with friend’s family and perhaps your significant other suffers. You approach a long-trusted friend and mentor who tells you how they have managed each of these issues in their own lives. You adopt their approach and continue to work hard as this is what your friend and mentor said worked for them. They compartmentalized their lives and set clear boundaries at home. It has worked for four decades and they appear happy and healthy. Yet despite trying this approach, you don’t feel any happier or more fulfilled after six months. You then engage a coach who sits with you and explores your life with you: your values, your core beliefs, your aspirations and goals. He or she learns that you are deeply committed to your family and that you feel bad when you cannot spend the time with them that you would like. You have two young children and your spouse is largely raising them without you. As you reflect on what is most important you decide to put some boundaries, not around your family, but instead around your work commitments. This is hard at first, but becomes easier with time. Your employer does not devalue you but instead finds this refreshing. You come to work energized, happy and fulfilled and your energy is infectious. Had you found a mentor who shared your values, your core beliefs, your life experiences and your life circumstances, perhaps mentoring alone would have done the job. But as each of these variables differ, so too does the outcome and therein lies the role of the coach. Be who you want to be. Each of us has the inherent right to live the lives we want to live and both mentors and coaches are tools in the toolbox that can assist us in that journey. Copyright © 2020 Bruce Flareau All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced without written permission from the owner. With the exponential growth of technology in our lives it seems even more difficult than ever to find time for ourselves. We are connected day and night, day in and day out. We once carried pagers, which gave way to text-based systems and ultimately to cell phones and now smart phones.
While this connectedness can certainly enhance our lives, it too can it detract. It would seem that anything to excess can have the opposite of the desired effect, and so it is with perpetual connectedness. Do you take your smart phone to bed with you? Does it sit proudly on the night stand in case someone needs you immediately while you sleep? Do you text and drive? Does the phone sit on the work surface during meetings? Is it face up for all to see? What does all this virtual availability do to your ability to be in the now with the person or persons who are in front of you at that moment? Does it steal you away for seconds or minutes and make the current experience of you less than idyllic for others? Is that what you intend? What about your own mental state? Are you more or less fatigued by making yourself available all the time and compartmentalizing your mindshare beyond the here and now? Does this resonate? Does the device allow work to be with you all of the time thus penetrating your home and personal life? Here is an interesting experiment: consider going a day without your cell phone. You can leave it with someone responsible who will notify you in the event of a true emergency. Beyond that, however, the idea is to be free of the device and allow yourself to be in the moment without distraction. Even as you read this experimental suggestion, notice what images your mind may be projecting to you. Does the thought of disconnecting make you uncomfortable? If so, why? Are your concerns grounded or are they little more than scary projections of unlikely events? For the majority of history humans have existed without smart phones or connected devices. If a full day is overwhelming, what about just separating from the device during dinner or some other segment of the day? Beyond the distractions of our technologies, what of the mental gymnastics of how we spend our waking days? How often are we carrying on conversations in our minds and disconnecting from the events in front of us? Do you ever “check out” of the now, and drift off into a conversation in your mind? If you are like most of us, not only do you do this, but you do it a lot. Our minds are busy places. I for one have gotten in my car, driven all the way home and had no real memory of the 15-mile drive. The entire time I was having conversations in my head and was ‘checked out’. Does this ever happen to you? Are there consequences of being checked out? Do co-workers of family and friends ever experience you as checked out when they want you checked in? I would contend that the ability to be in the now, when you choose to be is an important attribute of how people experience you. Being in the now allows you to fully experience the moment. It helps connect people, and ultimately it helps create joy. Imagine sitting outside on a warm summer day with a light breeze and birds chirping. How long can you sit in nature and experience this without “going in your mind” and carrying on an inner dialog about something else entirely? Some work item, a chore you intended to do but forgot, a conversation you had or are going to have. In this scenario going in your mind becomes a thief. It steals you away from experiencing the moment. People often tell me how difficult it is to disconnect from work even while on vacation. How it takes days or even weeks to ‘unplug’ and settle in. Increasingly people enjoy vacations where technology is unavailable, yet these technology dead zones or better stated nowness sanctuaries are difficult to find. Now please recognize that I am not suggesting that our inner voice is to be turned off or disregarded as some wholesale recommendation. Instead I am suggesting that we may spend more time in our minds than we currently recognize and that there may be consequences of that behavior. Furthermore, that developing awareness around our ability to be present in the now is an important skill that can enhance the experience of our own lives as well as the experience of us by others. Thus developing the ability to be in the now when you choose to be is an important and useful skill that is worth the effort in terms of leading a happy and fulfilled life. In addition, taking the time to decide not just when but what those conversations will be – call this authorship, are vital ingredients of happiness. So, give it a try - practice being in the moment, perhaps lose the device and better yet, listen, smell, feel and see with intent and be the boss of your thoughts! Do be careful though as mindfulness can be habit-forming and from this authors perspective, what a wonderful addiction to have. Copyright © 2020 Bruce Flareau All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced without written permission from the owner. In executive leadership it has often been said that the leadership decides what gets done, and the management gets to do it. Said differently, an essential ingredient in leadership is purposefully deciding what you or your company are going to do and not do.
This is perhaps the single best definition of being strategic. Many of us have deep, well thought-out strategic plans for our companies detailing how, why and what we intend to do. Imagine if we harnessed even a small portion of that discipline and focused it upon ourselves? I once heard a colleague describing their day as showing up for work and letting the horrors of their calendar reveal itself. What a negatively slanted and victimized way in which to view the world. Instead, imagine looking at your life as though you were managing a personal portfolio of meaningful realms of existence. Clearly there is your work and professional existence, but also that of your spiritual wellbeing, your health and physical wellbeing, your personal development away from work, your family and friends, your significant other and your financial wellbeing. Like any portfolio, this could be left to drift and for you to react to as the need arises, or it could be managed with purpose and deliberate intention. This portfolio approach dismisses the idea that each segment must be balanced with the others. We are far too complex to think that each element of our lives must fit neatly into a well formatted spreadsheet. Instead, I only mean to suggest that each aspect can be managed with purpose. In this way you get to choose how and where you spend your time. This dynamic set of choices will shift over time, but can always be done with intent. For example, you may choose to crank up on your personal development while your financial well-being slips all in service of funding additional training or education. Or your health may falter as you invest in your profession or vice versa. Alternatively, you may choose to put up guard rails around work and profession in order to regain time with family, friends or spouse. Each of these can be purposeful decisions that guide how we want to live. The last time I checked, the mortality rate was still one per person and there were still only sixty seconds in a minute so choose wisely. Research tells us that people have more remorse for NOT trying things they wish they had, than they do for trying something that did not work out. It harkens back to the old phrase, “I never met someone who in their last moments of life wished they had spent more time at work.” Regret is a powerful emotion. Wouldn’t it be amazing to live a life with little or no regret and to feel fully actualized and fulfilled as you choose? This is the idea of leading life by intention. Countless self-help books exist, as do articles and other resources. Of course, for those willing to engage a support person, executive coaching is a wonderful option as well. As an executive coach, I have seen people reinvigorated and reconnected with their core. It is a magical thing to see and brings as much joy to the coach perhaps as it does to the individual. So, if this article speaks to you, consider putting some of this intentionality into play in your own life. Be the change you want to see and start living the life you always wanted. Copyright © 2020 Bruce Flareau All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced without written permission from the owner. “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Albert Einstein.
Over the last few decades, computing has become the norm in modern society. Smart phones, Bluetooth connectivity, the internet of things, smart cars, and high-definition smart televisions are prevalent in our daily lives. We are rapidly converting all that we know into searchable discrete elements of knowledge and online opinion. Coincident with this reality, we see a shift in generational expectations. Immediate responsiveness, instant gratification, online purchasing with mass customization in color, size, and other options and ultimately a life perspective that sees work and employment as something to be managed inside of one’s life. During this time, we also see classic performance improvement methodologies, as were largely created for the manufacturing industries and pioneered by giants in history such as Edward Deming and Joseph Juran, now being applied to everything, including high touch service industries. Each of these factors (digitization, immediacy for answers, and extended use of performance improvement methodologies) in some way has led us into what I am terming “the Age of Accountability.” We are reducing the world to one in which we believe we can increasingly measure everything and one in which we can reduce the essence of everything into a series of zeros and ones immediately consumable on a desktop or mobile device. Digitizing everything into searchable bytes of information is a wonderful development of recent times and has massive implications to the good. We carry more computing power in our mobile devices than was available to place a man on the moon some 50 years ago. However, as with all things, when over applied or “over cooked” this idea of reducing everything to digitally consumable and therefore actionable data elements can have deleterious and unintended consequences. Nowhere is this more pressing than in high-touch and service professions such as teaching and healthcare. Teachers are leaving their fields of passion for a variety of reasons one of which we contend relates to this notion of overly applied accountability. Doctors and nurses are similarly hitting all-time highs for burnout and suicide. This push to hold everyone accountable to drive results, while inherently intended for good, is having a negative impact on the people doing the work. How do you measure empathy, kindness, inspiration, engagement, joy or love? Teachers are being held to ratios, statistics, and accountability metrics which may or may not be reflective of their educational effectiveness and which are felt by many to miss the human elements of dealing with people – in this case students and parents. In healthcare, a similarly high-touch industry, we are seeing the workforce deteriorate before our eyes as the well-intentioned industry slowly grinds the providers into a matrix of numerical accountability. Productivity, efficiencies, returns on investments, patient caseloads, relative value units, codified patient diagnoses, procedure volumes, patient experience surveys, ICD-10, MACRA, utilization rates, scorecards and digitizing care into the electronic medical record have had their impact upon the workforce. As a result of taking a high-touch industry and treating it like a manufacturing industry, we are seeing physicians leaving their chosen craft to retire early, change careers, or sadly, commit suicide. It is approaching and many argue has reached, crises proportions. Now please understand, we are not suggesting that measuring things is bad, nor that holding people accountable is wrong. Quite the contrary, the teachings of Demming and Juran are vital to success of contemporary industries. Nor are we suggesting that accountability alone is to blame for the state of mind of people in these industries – it is far more complex than that. Instead we are highlighting that most things taken to the extreme create tension, not all of which is healthy. Using the wrong tool for the wrong job is equally disastrous and so we contend that overcooking this idea of accountability on high-touch professions is fraught with unintended adverse consequences. In industries such as healthcare which are largely led by non-clinicians and one impacted by government regulations, legal maneuverings and misaligned incentives, it is an industry that is perilously transforming itself and not necessarily for the better as it relates to the foot soldiers who actually deliver the care. A November 11, 2019 article in Modern Healthcare quotes references Health and Human Services as collecting 2,300 different measures. It goes on to acknowledge the widespread dissatisfaction with the measures and the need to rethink those metric selection and collection efforts. We would agree. We are telling our providers to be safer, deliver greater value, do more, do it faster and do it better and keep everyone happy along the way. Is this possible? How does one become operationally efficient in caring for a dying patient and their family? Is that what we want for our loved ones? How about treating a child with cancer or any chronic condition? Do we want efficient, effective, measurable, statistically proven accountability or do we want compassion, consistency, and simply time spent? Can we have it all? Time will tell. Yet in these author’s opinions, compassion, empathy, deep personal understanding and love will never be digitized and will never be measurable in such a way as to make people accountable for these ingredients of caring. These are not manufacturing ingredients such as steel, or rubber or plastic. Teachers and providers are not manufacturing cars or gadgets or gizmos. Manufacturing analogies - and even traditional innovation techniques - seem to break down when applied to high-touch industries outside of their intended use. We wonder if we can ever truly measure the value of a priest, a rabbi, a clergy, a social worker, a grandmother, a parent, a son, a daughter, a teacher, a doctor, or a nurse in such a way as to hold them truly accountable using dashboards, or discrete data reports. No doubt there are, and will continue to be, metrics. What is apparent, however is that the healthcare industry and the teaching industries are both in the midst of this transformational clash of measuring “human doing” vs “human being”. We can measure doing with productivity and agreed upon metrics. But human being, the soft skills, the essence of being human seem far too complex and far too important to be reduced to a satisfaction score. Clearly, we are comparing dissimilar markets. Assembly line production has its place no doubt, but does it compare to something that is “hand crafted?” Is this a fair comparison? Simple economics would argue that not everyone can afford hand crafted items and that mass production is a valuable and necessary thing in today’s rapidly moving world. Planned obsolesce, use it and toss it, keep the cost down and the value high – all realities of the day. And yet in some circles what about craftsmanship? Do we want everything to be assembly line like? Shouldn’t high-touch industries have a different measure of success that takes this into account in some way? Whether you agree or disagree, the realities are that this experiment is playing out in front of us today. Like two grasses meeting each other in the backyard there is a silent battle happening. Each segment is working hard to prevail, to transform the lawn into one type of grass or the other. We may not notice the struggle, but it is there. Hand-to-hand combat as roots grow and extend into where others have been before, places where new grass blades grow and others die, and places where territories are being won and lost. Yes, healthcare is in an age of accountability. The accountable care organizations are held to be accountable for the money, for the patient outcomes and for the entire book of business. Yet clinicians are asking what of individual accountability. What of the patient who continues to smoke, to miss their appointments, to forget their medications, or do drugs, or any number of other personal behaviors. Where is their accountability? Can we regulate that? Should we? These are complex questions with no easy solutions. What is clear, however, is that we are in this age and there are ongoing struggles happening before our eyes. Similarly, what of children in abusive homes or with underfunded school systems. How do we hold the teacher accountable for the ills of society? Again, complex challenges to be sure. Certainly, from a societal perspective it would seem that we would want to see safe, effective healthcare for all. We would also want to see caring, compassionate and effective education and we would want those services delivered by people who care, who are happy, healthy, resilient and who themselves have a sense of fulfillment and meaning in their lives. While no one intentionally wishes to drive these attributes out of our high-touch industries this, at least in part, appears to be occurring. In some areas it may be getting replaced with fear, anger, depression, mistrust, and a variety of emotions contrary to the very fabric of the careers these people have chosen. Change will continue to occur, and change is good. However, we should at least take pause to examine the consequences of change and look for productive ways to get the desired outcomes. Let us not over manage with mathematical accountabilities and algorithmic predictions of performance haphazardly. Instead let’s exercise discretion in how we apply these tools. Let’s ask the difficult questions. Let’s not wake up one day to find our lawn has been overrun with crabgrass particularly when each replaced blade of grass was a person, a family, a story or a life! Let’s instead tend to that lawn, to judiciously apply the right levers and not overcook the concept of performance accountability just because we can. Let’s instead explore behavioral accountabilities and Involve the people who know their industry the best to create a sustainable future. Copyright © 2020 Bruce Flareau All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced without written permission from the owner. |
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