Category: leadership

Wakelet from #LTHEchat 254: Hybrid working: new frontiers in professional practice

It was a great pleasure to return as a guest to the wonderful #LTHEchat for a conversation all about hybrid working.

For #LTHEChat 254 we shifted our focus from learning to work. We discussed ways in which learning and teaching practices can inspire a more sustainable and equitable hybrid workplace. If you haven’t yet seen it, read the original post on the #LTHEchat site.

I was very curious to hear different perspectives and see where this conversation would leads us, and it was a very fast paced, lively discussion on the evening. I found it hard to do more than read, and like or retweet during the live conversation, and I also wanted to give as much room as possible for everyone to express their views and share their experiences, instead of dominating the conversation.

It’s been such a pleasure to work together with the amazing people who organise and support this important community activity, and I am so grateful for their support and guidance before, during and after the chat.

The chat in action

Here are the questions we explored:

Q1: What is your experience of hybrid working? #LTHEchat
Q2: How has hybrid working made a positive impact in your institution? #LTHEchat
Q3: What can we learn from hybrid learning to develop effective hybrid working? #LTHEchat
Q4: What role should staff play in the hybrid learning/working skills development of students? #LTHEchat
Q5: What do you see as the biggest challenge for the future of hybrid working #LTHEchat
Q6: Share one hybrid working tip that you would recommend to others (and why). #LTHEchat
LTHEchat 254

There was a lot of rich conversation and I am still reflecting and delving back into various exchanges, which I hope to write about more in due course. For now, here are a few moments that jumped out at me on the day:

It was inspiring to see how many different answers everyone had in response to “What is your experience of hybrid working”. It’s easy to loose sense of how different contexts impact on our ways of working, both personal and institutional, and this opener to the chat provided a vivid reminder of the broad range of hybrid working models that are happening across this community.

Another aspect of hybrid working that came across strongly was the enduring importance of social connection. This is something many contributors mentioned in a number of ways, regardless of whether they had long term experience of working in remote and distributed team or whether they were relatively new to it.

The LTHE chat to me always feels like a valuable opportunity to connect with folk in and of itself, but this topic brought this to the forefront of my mind more than usual. It was amazing to glimpse a little of what folk feel is the reality of their home office life, office days and travel.

A lot of posts sounded very positive about hybrid work, with many contributors feeling more productive and seeing many upsides to the increased flexibility. But we also spoke about a lot of challenges: from equipment and connectivity to the lack of leadership, appropriate policies and lack of trust.

There is so much more to dive into.. have a look at the chat for yourself.

Explore the Wakelet

You can now explore the whole conversation on the Wakelet: https://wakelet.com/wake/hx_8tyRERoRoSUhq-AFyj

06/02/2023
Personal reporting in Asana

In my last post, I reflected on the benefits of a monthly newsletter as a tool for reflection and monitoring progress. For example, I shared how looking at my blog posts for the month gives me a chance to think about aspects of my work I have enjoyed and want to do more of, things I’d prefer to spend less time on, what I want to focus on in the coming month and what is going on the back burner or stopping all together.

This kind of approach, focusing on what to stop/start or do more/less of is generally helpful, but I find it particularly effective when I review what I have been working on and can use specific examples. Now, in my CEO role, my team and I have started to use Asana last year to support collaboration and reporting across the organisation. I found it extremely useful from the start, but transferring all of my personal to do lists and productivity habits into a new platform has taken some time. As I became more confident in the platform, I found new ways to manage my workload and to review my own progress.

One example of this, is that I have started to use Asana more for my weekly work planning, and I wanted to share some tips about how I do that:

1. Reporting

The reporting menu in Asana comes with a “My first dashboard” set up, and I have used this to set up a personal view of tasks by going into each one of the charts and adding a filter that selects only me as an assignee of the tasks being reported on. This way, I can see all of my tasks at a glance.

It’s the first time in my career that I can analyse my workload at this level of detail, and it’s fascinating to compare my own sense of how things are going and what I am spending time on with what the dashboard view captures. It’s a useful exercise for me to consider what’s not being captured and why.

Most of the time, I find leadership related activities are absent from the reporting. Although I have both shared and private plans that capture most of what I do “think about staffing problem” or “ruminate on difficult email response” type tasks are not always easy to quantify.

2. Unscheduled tasks

One of the key priorities for us as a team in order to make the most of Asana, is to ensure ALL tasks we add have a deadline and are assigned to someone. I get a lot of tasks assigned to me, and using the reporting feature helps me identify the proportion of tasks that are currently without a due date and thus falling off my radar.

I love the discipline and accountability a tool like Asana brings with it, particularly as it helps you capture what you are doing wrong (planning work without giving it a deadline or a lead) as well as what you are doing right. It’s fascinating for me to reflect on why this is happening in certain areas of the work we are doing, as it often points to a lack of communication or clarity elsewhere, which in turn helps me understand what I communicate effectively and what I need to do better to get across.

3. My Tasks

In Asana the Board view of My Tasks is starting to feel more helpful to me. I have set up a “To do this week” section, which I add tasks to at the start of my week. That helps me get a sense of whether my workload is reasonable or not.

I have also set up a CPD section for myself, in which I dump all CPD related stuff. I then have a recurring monthly task that reminds me to review this section. I intend to use this section as a short-cut to complete my CPD list during my next appraisal.

Here is a glimpse at my personal dashboard:

04/02/2023
The benefits of a monthly round-up
It’s long been my practice to regularly record what I am up to, and I update my personal archive with links to talks and podcasts and resources that I have contributed to or published elsewhere.

I find it useful to have a list that covers most of what I do for reflection, the annual appraisal process and professional development. It’s also a great short-cut for compiling my monthly newsletter, which in itself provides an opportunity to reflect on my practice.

Using my monthly newsletter for reflection

It’s useful to get into the habit of taking a monthly look back at what I have done, and review what I have worked on and published. Usually I have a lot of different things on the go at the same time, and it’s easy to forget something that’s happened all together.

Looking at my blog posts for the month gives me a chance to think about aspects of my work I have enjoyed and want to do more of, things I’d prefer to spend less time on, what I want to focus on in the coming month and what is going on the back burner or stopping all together.

This kind of approach, focusing on what to stop/start or do more/less of is generally helpful, but I find it particularly effective when I review what I have been working on and can use specific examples: for instance, in the past month I blogged a lot about two topics specifically related to my coaching practice, but posted five or six posts that are more reflective on a diverse range of topics.

It’s been useful to push myself to blog regularly, as it’s one of my intentions for the year to blog more regularly and strengthen my own voice on a range of topics, and that’s resulted in me writing more off the cuff reflective posts. Blog posts about coaching generally take more time to research, draft and edit and usually include links to resources or tools that I want to share, which means that I don’t produce them as frequently.

Another insight I gained from looking at my recent activity was an appreciation of work I have done with others, such as the LTHE chat a few days ago. In practice, much of my collaborations happened tightly packed in between meetings and deadlines and often I don’t get a lot of time to full appreciate these moments until afterwards.

Last year, I struggled to make time to blog regularly, and that’s a final benefit of compiling my monthly newsletter: it helps keep me accountable to myself 🙂

Here is a look at my February newsletter

Welcome to the February edition of my monthly newsletter. I hope you had a good start to the year so far. I for one am glad that the days are getting a little longer again and that there is more daylight for after work dog walks. January has been a productive month, and hopefully there is something in this month’s updates, blog posts and podcasts that is helpful or inspiring to you.

My own domain is where I blog about all things that interest me, recent projects, coaching resources, books I have read and what inspires my professional practice. Recent blog posts:
I am really excited to share a glimpse at my next project: How to… Lead Virtual Teams – a course in ten podcasts. The course is free to join and open to all. It is designed for emerging and established leaders and managers working in a hybrid or fully virtual setting. The course offers you opportunities to listen, reflect and explore. If you are curious about what’s in store, read the preview blog post How to… Lead Virtual Teams. and look out for a new podcast episode coming out soon.

Each week I share ideas and strategies for creative and fun approaches to help you succeed and lead in the hybrid workplace. Recent podcast episodes:
Listen on Anchor, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS Feed and Google Podcasts.

Subscribe if you’d like to get my monthly updates.
03/02/2023
#LTHEchat 254: Hybrid working: new frontiers in professional practice. Led by @MarenDeepwell

Image of a team leader doing a team review with his team virtually. (Source: iStock)

I am really looking forward to returning as a guest to the wonderful #LTHEchat for a conversation all about hybrid working. I’m curious to hear different perspectives and see where this conversation leads us. Below is a re-post of the original post on the #LTHEchat site:

For #LTHEChat 254 we are going to shift our focus from learning to work. We will explore ways in which learning and teaching practices can inspire a more sustainable and equitable hybrid workplace.

Digital technologies enable remote and hybrid working in new and more connected ways, but it is by no means a new practice. Many industries have depended on home working over the centuries. In the UK we are at the beginning of a new era of widespread homeworking, prompting urgent questions about the rights of hybrid workers, working conditions, and how new working practices may increase inequality. Some workers may now have more flexibility working from home, but the pressures of competing demands such as caring for children or other family members whilst earning an income remain constant. Other issues such as the increasing digital surveillance of employees and privacy concerns around hybrid working practices further highlight the need for a careful and considered approach to setting out policies for the future of working remotely.

One indicator of the changes in how we work is new laws and policies that seek to formally express how the relationship between employers and their digitally connected and increasingly distributed workforce is changing. For example, in the UK we have not yet seen an introduction of a code that would give employees a legal right to disconnect, whilst other countries, including France (2016), Italy (2017), Spain (2018), and Portugal (2021) have introduced such policies over the past five years and others including Ireland are working towards doing so.

We invite you to share your experiences of hybrid working and critically reflect on some of the downsides alongside the positives. What do we gain when we move beyond simply translating office-based practices and envisage a truly hybrid way of working? How can we help create welcoming and warm hybrid places to work that help sustain well-being and work/life balance? How can we empower ourselves and others in making hybrid working an equitable and engaging reality that benefits the organisation and the individual alike?

We are at a watershed moment for remote working in the sense that we have an opportunity to set out a vision for what is ahead that is informed by lessons from the past, as well as, the shift in perspective that the pandemic has brought about.

In 2017, I set out to find creative and fun ways to work and build meaningful relationships in the virtual workplace. The resulting Open Access book, Leading Virtual Teams, brings together case studies and practical advice to build on. This LTHEchat #254 offers an opportunity for a conversation about current practices and how things are changing.

Join us to share your own inspiration, questions, and prompts for reflection. From recruitment and induction to establishing effective and sustainable ways of working in the hybrid workplace we will explore the highs and lows of what it means to work in hybrid organisations in the long term.

30/01/2023
Fresh podcast listens: Brené Brown

I’ve recently embarked on a small podcast adventure, with the aim to explore at least 10 new shows this month. I’m curious to learn more about podcasting, and broaden my horizons, and I am also keen to expand the types of podcasts I am listening to, all the while looking out for ideas and resources that I could use or share with colleagues and clients.

It’s been fun so far, to listen to something completely different as I walk the dogs or do incline intervals on the treadmill. If you are looking for inspiration and are curious to find out more, this post is for you.

What criteria did I apply to select these?

I chose podcasts that I had never listened to before, and started with the most popular ones. I vaguely tried to choose episodes/topics that seemed relevant to my current interests, but also added some that were completely unknown to me.

Podcasts, ideas and resources

The first group of podcasts I listened to are by or about the work of Brené Brown.

Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston, where she holds the Huffington Foundation Endowed Chair at the Graduate College of Social Work. Brené is also a visiting professor in management at the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business.

She has spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy. She is the author of six #1 New York Times best sellers and is the host of two award-winning Spotify podcasts, Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead.
https://brenebrown.com/media-kit/

I keep coming across the Dare to Lead podcast, most recently a couple of episodes about adopting a digital mindset, which I was curious about as it related to my interest in leading virtual teams. However, up to recently I hadn’t made the time to really explore the podcast itself.

What I found particularly helpful is that you can search all of her podcasts by topic, so you can focus on a particular topic like work culture, leadership or midlife, and easily access related resources and references. There is also a handy guide for everyone who is just discovering Brené Brown, so if you are new to her work, head straight there.

Related podcasts

I also explored a couple of podcasts new to me that explore this topic from different perspectives:

A conversation about Trust from Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead

This is an episode from May 2021 of the Podcast series Write your OWN story, by Rebecca Fleetwood Hession, founder of the Badass Women’s Council, which is focused on Brené Brown‘s concept of BRAVING from the book Dare to Lead. Looking at what it means to set boundaries, how to lead with reliability and integrity from a business perspective provided an interesting contrast to my usual education/academic viewpoint.

Brené Brown: What to Say to Get What You Need

Dated March 2022, this episode of We Can Do Hard Things, with hosts Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach and Amanda Doyle features Brené Brown as a guest and dives into a wide-ranging discussion about connection, fear, navigating personal and professional relationships and the book/TV series Atlas of the Heart.

All the podcasts introduced me to new ideas for things to read, listen to and watch – so I headed to the library and got ordering.

28/01/2023
Taking a break was worth it.

Today is my first day back at work since 22nd December, and in between I had a complete break. It took quite some doing, but I actually managed to step back from all responsibilities in that period, including those outside my role as CEO, those related to family and friends, volunteering, CPD, goals I set myself and so forth.

Prior to the end of December, I had over-extended my energy. Usually, I am very good at judging my capacity to do things, both at work and in my life in general. My capacity to get things done is considerable, and I have a lot of experience of pushing through tiredness, managing overload and finding ways to maintain balance even when things are extremely stressful. But at the end of last year, I felt that I had come to the limit of my capacity to stretch, and I pushed myself far outside of my comfort for extended periods.

Looking back at that now, from the comfort that weeks of winding down and good sleep, I am glad that I took action to step back from things, delegated, shared, stopped and switched off.

It isn’t always easy to get the right kind of break when you find work stimulating, when you have a lot of interests, when you are high achieving, love your job and enjoy juggling a lot of things on a daily basis. Thriving on busy-ness and finding inspiration when a deadline looms can feel great. But – the past couple of years have been challenging enough to tip the balance.

For me, taking a break required switching off from all work-related communication channels completely, to log off and close down apps and to clear my schedule.

It took over a week for me to actually wind down properly, and I spent the week being as busy or as lazy as I wanted to be, doing festive things with family and friends, going on long walks with the dogs, reading and playing a lot of Pokémon.

After a week or so, I started to relax.

I slept a lot, rested more, found energy to do some exercise, head to the coast… and find joy in things. Energy started to return, as did my sense of compassion, fun and interest in engaging with people once again.

It feels great to return to work knowing that I did really get a break, and not whilst keeping half an eye on things. Sometimes, you really need to take a step back.

It’s been over a decade since I became a CEO in 2012, and one of the things I have learnt is how important it is to prioritise your own wellbeing at times, particularly as there will always be something else that demands attention.

So here’s to having a break, the break I really needed, and to returning to work with energy and a renewed commitment not to push to hard.

09/01/2023