Month: August 2023

It’s a big vacation week around the globe and a bank holiday in the UK today.  August Bank Holiday means Notting Hill Carnival where I once experimented with my Fish Eye lens.  Notting Hill Carnival is the largest community celebration of Caribbean heritage in the world and it is designed to be a lot of fun. But it was too crowded for me and I wasn’t prepared to push my way through to get to the steel drum bands, dancers, and colorful parade. So why did I go? Everyone has a different definition of fun and for me being around other people who are having fun is a lot of fun. We also have our own ideas of what vacation should look like. For some it is action-packed; for others it is rest. For some it is exploring the world; for others it is going back to the same place again and again. For some it is completely disconnecting from work; for others it is boxing work into short check-ins instead of day long meetings. I was just speaking to a senior executive who loves her job and just came back from 2 weeks of holiday and she said, “for the first time in my career I thought to myself — I could get used to this.” Enter the discussion of unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO). How much time would you take off if you had unlimited PTO?  Six weeks? Eight weeks? Three months? Six months? At which point did you start to get itchy and roll your eyes at me? How much time off is too much time off? Most people answer this question by referencing the constraints of their role or the culture of their firm which is influenced by how people work and how leadership role models time away. Unlimited PTO has become controversial because companies are using it as a tool to save costs by not accruing vacation expense.  It also means that if an employee leaves they aren’t paid out for accrued but unused vacation. (Personally I think this should be a non-issue because employees should take vacation.) Studies show employees need breaks (not just short ones like I showed in the last issue of Executive Maven) but time truly away from the office and work. In his autobiography “Let My People Go Surfing”, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard talks about how he set up his business to take six-months off to go rock climbing every year. Six months! The title of the book is based on the culture of the company which overlooked the Pacific Ocean — if the waves started looking good it was fine to grab your surfboard to go catch one in the middle of the day. Yvon’s formula is “hire self-motivated, very intelligent people who know their job and then you leave them alone.” An organizational psychologist once told him that his employees were so independent that they were unemployable anywhere else! Can your workplace create a culture of prioritizing results over hours worked? Of balancing work-life integration over trade-offs? Of delivering service over setting faux deadlines?Can you? If you can create a team environment and a workplace where people support each other with time off and your company decides to implement an unlimited PTO policy, on your next vacation you may need to ask yourself, “could I get used to this?” From the Executive Maven Toolkit In each issue I share a simple tool from our library and today I am sharing my framework for thinking about Employee Engagement. Compensation and recognition are the foundational elements of a transactional relationship between employers and employees — but more money and promotions doesn’t drive engagement. There are great tools out there to more robustly measure employee engagement from companies like CultureAmp, but it starts with understanding what matters to your employees. From Elizabeth on LinkedIn Every issue I spotlight a post that most resonated with my network and this time it was about the phases of my family holiday photos (I suppose that makes this the vacation issue!) You can read the full post here.  Did you know that you drive which posts get the most visibility and that commenting more than 5 words on someone’s post increasing the chances their posts will be seen by others in their network?  (Hint-hint!) Research and Expert Resources Since it’s vacation week I won’t share a full research report but rather a quick hit survey just released by Gallup. Their survey of 135 leaders at Gallup’s CHRO Roundtable showed that 66% of HR leaders don’t think AI will replace jobs over the next 12 months but 72% think it will in the next 3 years. In our last issue I talked about the “future time fallacy” which is the belief that time to day is more valuable than time in the future.  It is very possible that this is an example of that fallacy. It would be challenging, maybe even scary, to imagine AI replacing people in the next year, but 3 years seems much further away.  Or maybe these HR leaders are actively working on replacing jobs and they have detailed project plans?  I’ll start asking around. You may read the full article here. Links and Resources If you’re looking for some additional personal development before summer is official over please check out my free resources and links page here.

I am currently on vacation, writing to you from The Pacific Coast Highway. This is a road you used to be able to drive from San Francisco all the way to Los Angeles. But no longer. A mudslide has made the highway impassable and there is a possibility that it never reopens.  Thirty years ago my best friend and I were driving from Yosemite to Los Angeles and we talked about driving the PCH.  There was no google maps back then so using a paper map we determinated it would be an extra 4 hours of driving. I don’t know why two twenty-something women were in such a hurry nor why we couldn’t have just left Yosemite a little earlier, but we took the 5 instead (that’s California speak for Interstate Highway 5.) Now, if you want to drive the PCH from top to bottom the only way to do it is to double back and spend 4 plus hours driving around the mudslide. Thirty years later and my decision is the same – I am not spending 4 hours to do that on this trip. It would be non-sensical, and all those hours on the 101 would make my family revolt.  But for me it’s still the same 4 hours and I now wish I had done it back then so I could have checked it off my bucket list. I call this the “future time fallacy” and it is the belief that time today is more valuable than time in the future.  Many have tried to create antidotes to this such as “carpe diem”, “YOLO”, or “curing the somedays”, but these don’t exactly fit. When it comes to life fulfillment the solution isn’t to maximize this moment because tomorrow may not come.  The solution is to slow down time so that you have more time than you need. It has taken me some time (no pun intended) to learn how to slow time, but I can now do it. I know this because I have plenty of moments where I have felt that a lot of time has passed, but then I look at the clock and it has barely moved. Keep in mind that our perception of time is driven by three factors – Memory, Attention, and Anticipation or as Dickens called them — the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. Anyone who has ever experienced flow, as operationalized by the late Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his seminal book by the same name, knows what the slowing of time feels like.   If you’d like to get back more time in your life here are my 3 steps to building a foundation for slowing time on an on-going basis, not just when you’re in flow. First, stop black hole behaviors including multi-tasking, task-switching, and building days that have no breathing room in them. Learn to consciously control time absorbers like binge watching or scrolling. You don’t have to be 100% disciplined at this, but you have to create the control and ability to be if you wanted to.  If you can’t do this then stop reading now and come back when you can (sorry, that’s the parent in me talking!)  Second, learn how to connect with yourself mind, body, and spirit. I suggest 20 minutes a day of either meditation, body scans, stretching, mindful yoga, journaling, or any other contemplative practice that breaks up your busy life routine. YouTube has plenty of free resources to help you get started. The Zen proverb below shares my perspective on skipping this step! Finally, reframe your thinking from memory recall to memory recognition.  That means in the moment recognize that you are creating a memory and log exactly the feelings that accompany it.  If you have learned the first two steps this third step becomes second nature.  Watch out for the impacts of awareness inhibitors like excessive volume, distractions, fear, or alcohol. This took me a lot less time than I had allocated to write this issue so now I have an extra hour to enjoy this small section of the PCH (we are turning around in Big Sur). Thankfully, there is a Pacific Coast Highway in Oregon, Washington and New Zealand that I can still find the time to drive. From the Executive Maven Toolkit In each issue I share a simple tool from our library and today I am sharing my framework for Mindset De-railers and Re-railers. Once you have learned how to do a body scan you may notice that something isn’t feeling just right.  If you can pinpoint where in the body you might be feeling off then it can provide a clue as to what is getting in your way. These three simple re-railers are a great first step to getting you back on track. From Elizabeth on LinkedIn Every issue I spotlight a post that most resonated with my network and this time it’s this personal reflection about memories after the unexpected loss of a friend.   You can read the full post here and I hope it resonates with you as well.  Research and Expert Resources While I usually like to share the latest research, with summer ending I am reaching back into the archives to remind you that one or two weeks of holiday is not the most important break you can take for your health and productivity. Frequent, short breaks, particularly to break up a day of meetings helps you manage stress in a busy day. This 2021 Work Trend Index Special Report from Microsoft Worklab shows that breaks not only reduce exhaustion, but they improve our ability to focus and engage throughout the day. These EEG images show one example of where the research supported this conclusion. Back to school and the busy year-end at work is only a few weeks away, so I invite you to keep these breaks in mind for the coming months. Links and Resources The Executive Maven has been added to the Juliette Works blog, which has other blog posts