⚡️ April 2024: Big News, Building Habits, Being Better

🗣️ BIG NEWS! I'm happy to report that I have been asked by Madecraft to create a video training series for them this spring on how to provide encouraging and empowering #leadership and #management to #GenZ employees! 🎉 I will keep you posted on when and where it will be released -- some time this summer. So excited for this new opportunity.

I don't know if it's Daylight Savings or a decrease in the heavy Southern California rains, but my energy level has picked up and I have encountered an absolute boatload (ton, oodles, slew, plethora, the whole enchilada, you name it!) of resources that I've used with clients, so this month's post is going to be a ⚡️ round of suggestions for you to check out. Here goes!

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🚼 Investing in the Development of Young, Remote Employees. I have started to develop the video course on managing Gen Z employees in the midst of teaching an internship course this semester for 20-22 year olds preparing to enter the workplace. Let's just say that #GenZ is #nojoke! I found this article practical and pertinent.

🧱 Building New Habits in Small Steps. Here’s a worksheet from PositivePsychology.com that reflects some of the coaching I often do with clients around implementing a needed change. What do you think?

🌎 The World Can Be Better. This came up during an #EqualPay zoom discussion with one of my clients. I really liked it - it compels me to reflect, accept reality, and work for more, all at the same time.

🪓 Task Chunking. Here's a great newsletter from my hero, Oliver Burkeman, about taking on HUGE, intimidating #projects in small increments. I refer to it by the highly technical term of “task chunking.” #15minutes **#timechunking **#anxiety #timemanagement

👀 How to Make Sure Your Resume Gets Seen. #fightthebots #keywords #cleardesign

🤖 Using AI to Prep for Job Interviews. YIKES: it is hard to keep up with how AI is changing the work landscape. But here are some KEY tips to using AI to prep for a job interview.

🔮 21st Century Workplace Predictions. I know, I know, everyone is making #predictions about the 21st century #workplace, but this conversation reflects what I am seeing in real time with my clients. Take 36 minutes to listen, especially if you’re considering a #careerpivot.

👍🏼 How to Engage & Retain Tenured Employees. What I liked about this article:

• It validates the importance of wellbeing, something organizations endorse but do not always implement in a consistent or strategic way;
• It validates the need for employee engagement and pulse surveys;
• However, it also endorses the importance of selecting the right questions for engagement surveys, and provides key categories that need to be covered;
• It confirms the value of a sabbatical program.

This article is a good jumpstart for companies who need to figure out how to hang on to their most experienced people. So much energy is put into recruiting and hiring and for some reason I tend to see far less investment in #retention. A big “front door” is no good if you have a big “back door” of turnover as well.

❝ ❞ Final Thoughts. I'm going for existential today as I finish up. The world is incredibly complicated and overwhelming. I found solace (and motivation) in these words:

“Today it is not nearly enough merely to be a saint; but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness.”  

Twentieth-century mystic and philosopher Simone Weil

August 2023: Blizzard in a Heat Wave?

I confess that I had big ambitions to send out a second post of recommendations in July because so many recommendations had piled up for me that I wanted to share with you. However, as often happens, my calendar got the best of me and well, here I am.

So this month will be a BLIZZARD 🌨️ of recommendations with little commentary. I hope the mental image of cold weather provides a few seconds of relief from the summer heat extremes so many of us are experiencing. Thanks to all of those I have met with this past month -- I've enjoyed so many wonderful conversations!

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🧐 35 ChatGPT prompts to prep for your next job interview. As I mentioned in my June 2023 post, I have several clients asking to meet for career coaching and I've given this link to more than one person and they have found it useful. Feel free to hit me up if you have questions.

📚 AI in Education -- The Homework Apocalyse. If you are a teacher or adjunct instructor like me, I found this article surprisingly hopeful, and incredibly helpful.

🏀 Sally Jenkins on ‘The Right Call: What Sports Teach Us About Work and Life’. I will be the first as a woman to acknowledge that I get weary of hearing sports analogies in a male-dominated workplace. NEVERTHELESS, I will happily acknowledge that this interview is right on. Don't miss it.

🤯 Leading with psychological safety AND cultural intelligence. This one got hundreds of looks when I posted it on LinkedIn. I have coached many teams on both of these topics, but I am challenged by realizing I could and should integrate the two more.

🧠 "I came out as autistic at work. Here's what happened." This is coming up so often with clients and companies I work with lately. This can be a fraught topic in some workplaces, especially those that lack awareness. We ALL need to keep learning about neurodivergence. Again, go back to my June 2023 post for some resources to get started.

📈 Leadership Scaling: "You can’t scale ahead of your people." This brief article has some good principles that are clear and worth thinking through with others.

📧 Your Email Does Not Constitute My Emergency. By #AdamGrant, a tremendous thought leader. Love this: “One of the silver linings of the Covid era is that people became more thoughtful about communicating digital boundaries — and more understanding about accepting them... We can’t let that boundary-setting vanish with the pandemic. We need it to become endemic.”

👶🏽 👵🏽 5 things to keep in mind when you hear about Gen Z, Millennials, Boomers and other generations. I have been guilty of over-generalizing about generations in my desire to make a point. Great reminders here.

💯 Tips for a Better Life. I posted this here in January 2021. But it still seems interesting to me! Tip 29: "You do not live in a video game. There are no pop-up warnings if you’re about to do something foolish, or if you’ve been going in the wrong direction for too long. You have to create your own warnings."

Thank you for reading -- feel free to share it with others. And you can reach me with feedback and questions at kelly.soifer@ksleadershipdevelop.me. Enjoy the rest of the summer ⛱️

Learning, Living, Listening: March 2020

February was a full month for me… It included trips to Chicago and Boise to work with clients, a garden-variety cold that just would not let go, another birthday (they just keep coming, dang it!), and three new clients.  In the balance, a great month ~ indeed, I am grateful!

Thus with gratitude in mind, I want to share three different resources I came across in the last month that reminded me of the things that really matter. Amidst the chaos of coronavirus and this election season, I am doing my best to focus on further horizons, on what it takes to make a difference over a lifetime. I hope they encourage and challenge you.

LEARNING. A Little Happier: Teacher Anne Sullivan Writes About Helen Keller’s Moment of Profound Realization. Ignore the first 57 seconds of this link and then listen undistracted for the next three minutes. I promise that you will be moved as you listen. Then take some time to recall which teachers had the greatest impact on you, and consider where you can do the same.

LIVING. Third Places. This is a concept that I only learned about a few years ago, but I really resonate with it. As the article says, "Your first place is your home; your second place is your work. Your third places are your regular haunts." He goes on to list the eight qualities of a Third Place. Politics and a potential pandemic will only serve to divide and isolate us further. In contrast, I hope more and more of us can seek to create third places, and also seek to reach into new locations outside of our safe bubbles. Working from home, I am certainly reminded that I need to be more intentional in cultivating third places, and in pursuing deeper and slower conversations wherever I am.

LISTENING. Wild Work Advice with Cheryl Strayed. This comes from one of my favorite podcasts, hosted by Adam Grant, called WorkLife. Grant is an organizational psychologist who studies motivation and meaning in the workplace. This particular episode revolves around whom we seek out for advice regarding work. It's a great conversation.

Bonus Content. The Era of Antisocial Social Media. I'm adding this one because I am so intrigued by it. Just when I thought I had finally figured out how to use social media, I came across this dandy curveball… Trends are showing that  younger people do not like social media as much as private messaging! Read this article for some really interesting new research around a rejection of social media. Which is probably good news for everyone, right?

Final thoughts...

"Hope does not need to silence the rumblings of crisis to be hope."

Walter Brueggemann

Thanks for reading. Please feel free to pass this along to others, and send feedback and questions to kelly.soifer@ksleadershipdevelop.me. You can also find lots of other resources for your work life at bit.ly/KSLDresources.  Ciao for now!

If You are Leading Anyone, Anywhere, You Should Read This

Whenever I run into an old friend (which happens often because I've lived in the same town since 1979...), I usually get "so-what-are-you-up-to?" question and I try to briefly explain this whole consulting and leadership development "thang" I've been doing for the last several years and more often than not I get a bit of a cocked-head look that says, "What exactly does that MEAN?"

If you are...

... an owner, executive, senior leader, supervisor of many;

... a (new?) manager leading a team of employees;

... a grad student / teacher / professor instructing and advising students;

... a coach guiding, training, coaxing, pushing athletes;

... a parent;

... a volunteer leading others at church, school, or non-profit...

Then YOU ARE A LEADER. And most leaders do not receive much training before they get thrown into the water to see if they can swim!

So I try to help with that process, mostly listening and empathizing a lot before I try to give any feedback to assist in their leadership development. Currently I'm working with college presidents, senior pastors, faculty, C-Suite executives, directors of non-profits, business owners, managers and really really nice people!

In the spirit of this glorious pursuit of leadership development, here are four useful articles. Bookmark this and read one each day this workweek. Share them with your colleagues. Discuss them around a table. Make it normal and transparent to talk about leadership development. There is ALWAYS more to learn. We can always get get better. Cheers!

HBR IdeaCast on Leading During a Time of Change. Harvard University's president, Drew Gilpin Faust, is moving on after being the president of Harvard for the past 11 years. This is a fascinating interview about how to get a whole bunch of moving parts in some sort of synchronization. (Pssst! The HBR IdeaCast is a good podcast to follow...)

How to Bring Out the Best in Your People and Company. Wow. Wow. Wow. This is a really good article. Take the time to work through it with your colleagues. The opening lines had me at "hello." (Perhaps because they quote Brene Brown!)

Connecting with others and belonging are basic human needs that are essential to being our best selves.

Social science researcher Brené Brown defines belonging as "the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us. Because this yearning is so primal, we often try to acquire it by fitting in and by seeking approval, which are not only hollow substitutes for belonging, but often barriers to it. Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance."

This is an outstanding how-to on the fundamentals of team-building and culture.

How to Recover from a Cultural Faux Pas. Admit it. We've all done it... either we're nervous or think we're funny or we're just CLUELESS and we put both feet and one of our hands into our mouth by saying something stupid (lame, insensitive, embarrassing, uninformed...). As our world grows and grows through technology, global economics, and ease of travel, we have even more chances to get it wrong. This is a good start. 

Using Multiple Trello Boards for a Super-Flexible Workflow. I know, I know, it feels OVERWHELMING to think AGAIN about how to manage your emails / projects / meetings / travel / appointments / etc etc. and you are so tired of all these productivity apps making promises they don't keep. All I can say is "I'm sorry" and "I understand." But a KEY PART of leadership development is keeping on top of all the crazy!! At least I can say that this article holds you gently by the hand and walks you into a possible plan for organizing all the details. That's all I'm saying...

Please let me know if one or all of these are helpful. I'm rooting for you!