Leadership – inspirations

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Remote Work: Building Trust

A Texas couple was visiting Rome on vacation walking to a restaurant. They spent significant time with the hotel concierge, well known for his knowledge of the local restaurants before making their decision. He had made several outstanding recommendations for them this past week after spending some time determining what type of food they enjoyed. Struggling to find the restaurant in the maze of streets in Rome, they spot a family of four with the mom wearing a Texas hat. What a relief, someone they can talk with. Funny coincidence is they are from the same county back home. The couple relates their predicament of being unable to find this highly touted restaurant and wanted to see if they could help them?

Not being familiar with the restaurant or neighborhood the family is unable to provide directions. However, they were able to direct them to a “great” restaurant they just went to last night, their first night ever out of Texas. The couple thanked the family and headed off to the newly recommended restaurant.

Why did this Texas couple “trust” complete strangers who had very little expertise on Italian restaurants in Rome?

  • Common background
  • Friendly connection

There are all types of situations where complete strangers trust each other. Think of a flight crew on an airliner, emergency response personnel at the scene of a mishap, an operating room team. Why then is it so difficult to trust coworkers particularly when we are working remotely?

Let’s look at a remote work situation.

Brenda working remotely was struggling with a marketing project she was assigned after being on the job for two weeks. She was not feeling great about her team at this time due to limited interaction and a perception of ultra-competitiveness. She wanted to reach out for assistance outside of her boss and team but was not sure where she should look. After some thought, she contacted a mentor, Marie from her onboarding process. Marie happened to be an alumnus from the same MBA program. Brenda also made a friendly connection with her, having lunch with Brenda twice during onboarding, and was impressed by her experience.

What Brenda experienced is commonplace for the remote work environment. Isolated, not sure where to turn for assistance, and confessing to your team and boss you need help.

Her solution was also commonplace; reaching out to a colleague she came to trust after several short interactions.

What made Brenda willing to trust Marie, after limited interaction? Cognitive and emotional trust. Assumed reliability and a caring connection.

  • The friendly connection
  • The common MBA program
  • Assumed competence

Let’s continue the story. Marie recommended Brenda contact Robert, who has a background in the area she is struggling in an adjacent department. She does, has a productive meeting, and was able to move forward on her project.

Why is she trusting someone she has not even met?

  • Credibility based on a reputation from someone she trusted

In her book The Remote Work Revolution; Tsedal Neeley identifies two types of trust, cognitive and emotional. Cognitive trust is based on logic and thought. It usually occurs quickly and is based on your belief that the individual is reliable and dependable.

Emotional trust is built on an emotional connection, care, and concern about someone. It can take time to build emotional trust.

Both are important and are in my opinion additive. When you think of the above examples it is clear where the boundaries were.

  • The Texans had cognitive trust – determined quickly through a thought based on a belief of reliability.
  • The concierge had cognitive trust and emotional trust. Proven capability and a personal connection.
  • Marie had cognitive and emotional trust
  • Brenda’s teammate and the boss had neither

What is important in the workplace? Think of your best team experience and categorize the trust that permeated that team. Was it cognitive, emotional or both?

Probably, both.

To make your remote team effective you have to build both. These are built by knowing who you are working with, spending time working and interacting together. We generally trust coworkers immediately because of their position. As we learn more about their credentials, work habits, expertise, and ability to deliver, our trust grows or wanes. This is primarily cognitive trust. Is that enough to be a high-performance team?

The continued interactions, developing personal relationships, support for others, all build emotional bonds. That is where emotional trust is built. If you have no emotional bond or connection, that equals no emotional trust.

Building cognitive and emotional trust in your team requires creating opportunities for interactions that allow both to develop. The concept is simple, execution is challenging.

Currently many remote environments are an “all business” approach. Virtual video meetings, conference calls, and group chats are agenda driven. The time and ability to interact socially, as we often experienced in-person, is significantly reduced.

J. Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman from Harvard studied team performance for decades and developed what is now called the Six Conditions Model. Their research confirms that leaders who effectively establish the six conditions with their team remove 70% of the variability of team performance. Those six conditions help establish both emotional and cognitive trust.

Without going into the details of the entire model; here are three elements from the model that build cognitive and emotional trust.

  • Creating a high level of interdependence between team members
  • Assembling the right mix of skills on the team
  • Establishing norms of behavior that are modeled and enforced

To implement each of the above takes engagement and interaction between team members. Interdependence requires learning about each team member. The right mix of skills immediately builds cognitive trust. Establishing team behavioral norms that necessitate a wide range of engagements from social to “business only” has the potential to create trusting relationships.

The bottom line: Connect your team cognitively and emotionally. Reduce isolation and ensure each member of your team is connected and contributing.

As leaders, creating professional and social interaction may be the greatest method to bring trust to your team. Find ways to create meaningful interactions in the remote environment that fit with your team and its culture.

What do you need to do to connect your team cognitively and emotionally?

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Remote Leadership

“My boss is bringing everyone back to the office full time just because that is what he is comfortable with. I have been having an ongoing conversation with him on the benefits of working remotely at least part-time. He is having none of it.”

“He says he cannot trust everyone in the remote environment, we need the face-to-face time to ensure we continue to build camaraderie and sustain our culture, particularly for the new folks. Finally, he says we are not as productive. Which I totally disagreed and pushed back with the data on how well we did during the pandemic.”

Here is what I heard in that exchange by my client describing her boss. He wants everyone back in the office because:

  • He does not trust them
  • He believes culture is best built and maintained face-to-face
  • He believes high productivity is tied to being in-person

We can make all kinds of assumptions about this boss however, I see the bottom line for my client as; she needs to address his primary concerns of trust, culture, and productivity.

What about the team you are leading? Are you ready to allow more remote work or are you bringing everyone back into the office? The above three elements are applicable to every leader. In my opinion, if we as leaders adequately address all three considerations, remote and/or hybrid work is doable. Let’s look at an overview of each.

Trust

How do you build trust in the virtual or hybrid environment? My answer, the same way you do in the in-person environment. In a previous video, we talked about four elements a leader needs to build trust. Those are: setting the example, setting and enforcing the standard, building and sustaining morale, and exhibiting moral courage.

What do you think your team wants from you in terms of trust? What do you want from them? Research has found, leaders who want their people in the office to have a mindset of visibility equates to accountability. What does this mode of operation do for retention? Do you want to work for a boss who trusts you only when they see you?

Culture

What is the culture in an organization? It is how the team interacts and works together. Whether you are in person or virtual, your organization has a culture. Make it what you want it to be. A collaborative social culture is possible virtually. You have to be deliberate about how you cultivate your culture. Letting the culture evolve without your direction can be a recipe for something you really don’t like.

Productivity

Working virtually is not new, it has been around for about 20 years, mostly in the tech world. CISCO and Sun Micro System were one of the first to go mainstream with a large percentage of their workforce being virtual. It is certainly new for a lot of us. Remote meetings, less travel, less office space requirements, and less commute time have made us more productive. Does your team have to be in the office 100% of the time to be productive? Does your team want some remote work? Ask them for the productivity standards and solutions. You may be surprised at what your team tells you.

Remote work is here to stay. How are you leveraging it with your team? We’ll continue this exploration into the three areas: trust, culture, and productivity.

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Coaching Culture – In Practice

Pat has six direct reports who in turn manage another 40 people in the Marketing and Sales Department of a medical device company. The pandemic brought all kinds of challenges for her with employee engagement. To grow professionally she engaged an executive coach for one-on-one coaching for herself. After six months she engaged a coach for group coaching for her six direct reports.

She hatched the group coaching idea during one of her coaching sessions in which she was working on improving engagement and communication for her department. It took her about three months to put it in place and still considers it a work in progress. Here are the elements of the program.

Purpose: To create a culture where she would use coaching practices to inspire, motivate, and develop members at every level.

Specific Goals:

Improve employee engagement scores on the biannual survey by 15%

  • Increase the percentage of retained customers by 5%
  • Increase new accounts by 5%
  • Improve communication within the team
  • Improve retention

Key parts of the program

The first key to the program is setting the example. Pat is engaging in one-on-one coaching with an executive coach. She then engaged a coach to conduct a 6-month group coaching program for her six direct reports. She also has a once-a-month coaching session with her direct reports, who in turn have a once-a-month coaching session with their direct reports.

Group coaching

The six leaders meet biweekly for 60 minutes as a group facilitated by a coach. The purpose is for each individual to put in place a professional development plan for themselves. Some of the topics are planned, others are based on what the cohort brings to the session. One area of emphasis is developing coaching skills. This is to support the leaders in coaching their direct reports.

Pat spent a lot of time thinking about how to implement the group coaching. Her belief is by meeting regularly as a cohort they will build synergistic relationships while each individual develops their personal leadership capacity.

Monthly Coaching Sessions

The coaching sessions with direct reports have some parameters:

  • They must be scheduled for a minimum of 30 minutes once a month
  • The direct reports are responsible for scheduling the sessions with their supervisor
  • The topic is always the choice of a direct report.
  • The general focus is required to be on professional career development. This is to keep the coaching session from morphing into status updates on current issues.

Measuring Success

The team has developed some metrics as shown with the goals above. One area still being considered is a survey specifically directed at the coaching.

The Challenges

What challenges do you think they have or will encounter? Keeping the coaching as a priority and letting the daily fray override the coaching is the first.  A metric tied to meetings scheduled and conducted may be required.

Producing and using the professional development plan is a close second. Should this be standardized across the organization? Once complete how is the plan used? Turning the development plan into a list of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) could be counterproductive. Some thoughts on the requirements of the plan and its implementation are a must. It may be a good topic for a group coaching session.

Some training on coaching skills for leadership is also in order. The goal is not to make everyone a certified coach. However, providing every supervisor ongoing training on coaching skills is imperative. Clearly, it will be part of the group coaching sessions. Dedicated training would be beneficial and provide much-needed confidence.

This is one way to implement a coaching culture with some specifics and the thought process behind it. How could you implement a coaching culture in your organization? Contact me if you would like to bounce some ideas around.

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How Well Do You Understand the Team You Are On?

After celebrating Independence Day this past weekend, I took some time to reflect on the team that came together to write the Declaration of Independence. Assembled with varied backgrounds and views on the path forward. They disagreed, argued, compromised, and came up with a document that serves as the basis for the country we live in today.

By all accounts, at times the team was wholly dysfunctional and at others working fairly well. Two elements that were common amongst the team

  • All the players knew what brought them together
  • Every member understood the path that got them to that place in time

How about you? Ever been thrust onto a team with little knowledge of how the team came together and its history? I have, and it took significant time to build cohesion and synergy. If we ever did.

In your experience with teams what would have been the impact if the above two criteria were fulfilled at the very start.

In every team coaching engagement, I have several activities I use to focus on team members understanding the team. Here is the basic framework for one activity I call, “The Epic Story of ———”. I modify the activity based on the specific needs of each team.

The purpose is to ensure the team and each member understands how this team came to be. Learning how it started and who were the players that came and went. Understanding what the team accomplished and learned over time. And most importantly what brought the members of this team together and why they are here now.

Overview 

Using a LARGE whiteboard or multiple sheets of easel paper the team creates their “Epic Story”. They construct a timeline starting with the longest-tenured team member. For large teams, this could mean covering the walls of the room with the timeline.

Picture a timeline drawn horizontally across the middle of the paper. Each individual beginning with the longest-tenured member has 5 minutes to talk. Above the timeline they add data about people, below the timeline, they add info about events.

Specifics

The team decides on the information they would like to see. Typically, above the line topics are; team member’s arrival and departure, particularly team leaders, and what is it like to be on the team. The most interesting topic I have seen was each member chose a metaphor for the team at the time they joined.

Below the line captures events, milestones, defining moments, and lessons learned. Each member covers the time period from when they started to when the next member joined.

As you can imagine, the longer-tenured members cannot help themselves and make more contributions on the way. The only rule I impart is each member gets to make their contribution prior to additions from other team members. A time limit has also been a valuable tool.

My Experience

Picture a team of eight going through this exercise with a spread of tenure of 21 years to 6 months. What do you think this can do for the team?

I have seen this be an enlightening experience. It allows for genuine interest in the history and impact of particular events and people. Differing perspectives and interpretations of events produce rich exchanges between members. The sharing of the history and path traveled provides significant energy and understanding of the path forward.

What would be the impact on your team? Want to see a brief overview of this activity in action? Check it out HERE.

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Who is Lifting You Up? & Who are You Lifting Up?

If you could give trophies to the greatest supporters of your professional life, who would get them, and what would be the inscription on them? Here are some answers I got to that question:

  • For believing in me when I doubted myself.
  • Helping turn failure into education.
  • For pushing me to set big goals and holding me accountable to them.
  • For pushing me beyond what I thought was possible.
  • Helping me turn a long journey into many short trips.

Supporting relationships may be one of the most important elements of an individual’s success. We all received assistance to arrive where we are today.

As a leader I think it is important for us to:

  • assess those relationships we categorize as supportive to us
  • assess those relationships we categorize as supportive to others

What are the elements of supportive and detrimental relationships? My thinking has been influenced by personal experience and study, particularly Intentional Change Theory and Dr. Henry Cloud’s book, The Power of the Other.  What are the elements of those relationships that helped you thrive and those that held you back?

Let’s focus on the positive first. Before you read my list put the most positive supportive professional relationship in your head. Now make a list of 3-5 of those elements.

Here is my shortlist that comes from personal experience and client input:

  • The relationship was a source of positivity; attitude and energy
  • It fostered learning particularly from mistakes
  • It was an iterative process of continuous learning
  • It was forward-looking at challenging goals that were not easily achieved
  • I was completely comfortable with revealing my flaws, challenges, and shortcomings

 Take the same approach but for a leader who you had the most negative relational experience with. List 3-5 elements of that relationship.

Here is my list:

  • Being unable to be totally honest
  • The relationship did not feel like a partnership
  • Accountability was a measure and evaluation rather than learning tool
  • Disingenuous feedback, all positive, all negative, or with little depth or actionable content

Next step. Make a short inventory of some of your key professional relationships and assess them.

For your subordinates and colleagues, if they were rating you what elements would the individuals choose from the above lists? Are you providing a positive, resonant relationships that are fostering growth or are you holding someone back?

I think the simplest assessment of your relationships is to ask yourself two questions:

  • Am I guarded in how I give and receive feedback?
  • When I leave interactions with this individual how do I feel?

Now that you have an assessment, what are you going to do?

Please share your thoughts on what makes a supportive relationship.

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Leaders: You are Hurting Your Organization

“You are hurting your organization.”

“What are you kidding I am putting my heart and soul into this place and you are implying I am hurting the organization?”

“Yep.”

How you responded to this statement may be the indicator. Defensive and reluctant to hear feedback. Boil this down to a single essential question: How do you get your feedback?

This one question has a lot behind it. Here are several thoughts to guide you in analyzing the feedback you are getting:

What do I need to know?

Who is not talking to me?

What are they holding back?

Why are they not talking to me?

A cursory analysis usually turns up thoughts such as:  I have my regular meetings with my team for updates. Everyone is engaging and I don’t see my team holding back.

That’s my point, it is not easy for us to detect the feedback we need and are not receiving.

Folks are not avoiding you and not talking to you. They are physically there. However, they just are not willing to share everything they should with you. “The whole truth and nothing but the truth…”

How to get good feedback? My thoughts on this come from my personal experience and that of my clients. Make it easy for you team to give you feedback by considering these principles:

  • Ask for it.
  • Openly demonstrate you want by visibly participating.
  • Act on it.

A personal example, when I was a commanding officer of a Marine Corps aviation squadron my safety officer came to me talk about safety issues brought to him by aircrew. I asked what was going on? He said it’s about me. That set me back. A couple of aircrew went to him saying I was pushing the mission too hard at the expense of safety.  Whoa, did not see that coming.

My response; we called an all aircrew meeting that afternoon. In that meeting we had a “true confessions” session about aircrew safety. I led off the discussion talking about the concerns brought to me. Then we moved on to other safety issues that anyone had. That meeting brought to the forefront concerns I was totally unaware of. The result, we became a better and safer squadron that day.

Easy? Far from it. Beneficial, you bet. It reflected how I was leading and revealed some of my blind spots. The aircrew was reluctant to tell me what I needed to hear. I was hurting the squadron. Moving forward our aircrew talked more openly about how we were operating. Aviation squadrons are always pretty good at giving feedback, this took us to a new level and made me much more aware of how I was leading.

What about you?  What info do you need? I think there are three main areas all leaders need feedback on:

  • How you are leading?
  • What your team needs from you?
  • What they do not need from you?

In getting the feedback be an active participant. We hear a lot about vulnerability, particularly from Brene’ Brown. Be vulnerable. You don’t need to have all the answers. You need to help the organization get to the right answers. Act on the feedback. Feedback with no action is like a tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it.

I will leave you with an example of a very successful leader asking for feedback, actively participating in getting the feedback, and taking action based on the feedback.

Scott Cook, the Founder and CEO of Intuit, in this video talks about getting a 360-degree evaluation from his team.

Are you hurting your organization and don’t know it? What do you need to know?

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Creating a Leadership Development Crucible

What time in your career did you develop the most as a leader? Was it pressure filled and challenging or fairly easy? We all develop the most when put under the pressure to perform. One definition of a crucible is a place or situation in which concentrated forces interact to cause or influence change or development.

Crucibles have the greatest impact on our development because of the pressures forcing us to adapt. What were the elements of your crucible? How well prepared were you for it? Could you have even gained greater development if there had been some preparation, knew it was coming, or had a plan?

To plan your leadership growth, consider how to create a crucible for yourself, others, or your team. Why? To accelerate growth. Isn’t that why corporations send high potentials to courses such as the National Outdoor Leadership School or Outward Bound? To proactively put leaders into a crucible.

My experience has shown a successful crucible has the following conditions:

Education & Training / Experience. The education and training category provides background and opportunity to build and test skills in a non-threatening environment. The experience put the skills learned to the test. No experience – no leadership development.

Ever experience a situation with no education and training on what to expect in a situation? We all have and we learned and grew extensively from those experiences, although it was likely a painful process. Hence the recommendation; provide education and training prior to experience.

Under those two categories are three elements; Right Level and Timing, Right Challenge, and Feedback & Reflection. These conditions are required for both the Education & Training and Experience. Let’s look at each of them.

The Right Level/Timing means design both the education/training and experience to the appropriate level. New employees at the same level as veteran employees may need different levels of training and education. Where the person fits in the hierarchy dictates the level required. Directors get a level significantly different than this year’s crop of new college grads.

Timing is also critical. Fit the education/training into a business cycle that will allow for integration with the current workflow. Make it all work together. Education/Training during a slower time may allow putting the individual into the experience phase during a busier cycle.

Assigning the Right Challenge means to thoughtfully consider a number of factors such as longevity, experience, and career track. Is there a specific sequence to the challenges that makes the most sense? Think of this as developing a personalize leadership development curriculum. If assigned properly this is where the intense heat of the crucible will be felt. Application of what was learned is tested in the real world, adaptability, and perseverance are the typical skills that rise to the surface in this phase.

Simple challenges easily mastered provide limited growth. Nothing should be easily mastered – design rigor into the model by the choice of level, timing, and the specific challenge.

Feedback and Reflection is where the most learning occurs. Consider how to provide feedback with time to reflect. No reflection = minimal learning. The most dramatic change occurs when individuals are able to incorporate lessons they have internalized through reflection.

Final Thoughts  

The proposed model is a method to deliberately take control of leadership development in your organization. It can be for you personally, for other individuals, or a team you are leading. This model also works for teams. Being proactive and thoughtful allows you to extract the most from leadership development opportunities.

Action

Test the concept by building a prototype for yourself, a team, or a few select others. Test it evaluate it (feedback & reflection), tweak it, and do it again.

 

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Decisions: What’s Your Logic

In your position as a leader what was the best decision, you made this year and what was your worst?  Write them down.

Now write down the reason it was the best or the worst.

What criteria did you use to measure the quality of the decisions? My guess is you used the result. Most folks do. Is that truly the best measure of your decision quality?

How good are you at predicting the future? Isn’t that what we try to do with decisions? We are predicting an outcome.

  • Who should you hire?
  • Should you invest in a particular market?
  • Is it time to pivot your strategy?
  • What supplier to choose?

These are typical decisions made by leaders. All attempt to create a specific outcome in the future. If you did all you could to research, evaluate, and gain input and the result was not what you expected, was that a bad decision?

Annie Duke a former professional poker player and author on making decisions, believes there are best practices for decision making. She also believes the quality of a decision should be judged on the process not the outcome. Why, because we cannot predict the future and luck plays a factor in almost all decisions. We can however, reduce some of the uncertainty.

Let’s look the four factors I believe leaders should consider making better decisions.

  • Narrow the uncertainty
  • Make your assumptions known
  • Get independent input without creating bias
  • Have a strategy to change paths when new information becomes available

Let’s examine an example. We’ll use a decision for a new hire by a hiring committee.

Narrow the Uncertainty

Do all you can to take away the unknowns and define the desired end state. In hiring, that may look like; setting a clear position description, hiring criteria, and defining the hiring process..

Make Your Assumptions Known

Let people know what you are thinking. The hiring committee needs to know your assumptions such as: “I believe we should be able to hire someone for this position, in this salary range, with this level of expertise, and complete the process in 60 day.” This allows challenges to your assumptions by team members and they understand your position.

Get Independent Input Without Bias

Allow members of the hiring committee to commit to a decision and share their reason prior to debating the selection. This reduces groupthink and the most influential person in the room biasing the group. When the boss says, “I think candidate number 3 is our best option”, a large portion of the group’s independence just flew out the window.

Have a Strategy to Change Paths If New Information Becomes Available

Some would call this having a pivot strategy, based on specific criteria. In hiring it may be hiring the individual on a probationary period, to assess the candidate. You will have accurate and specific data to support your original decision or provide the criteria to pivot.

Go back to your choices of the best and worse decisions from last year and test them against the four elements. Was your best decision really a best decision or just a positive result of a poor decision process?

What is your process for making and evaluating decisions?

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What Will it Take for Your True Leadership Ability to Emerge?

Quiet, reserved, and very unassuming, she was hired for her technical expertise. We were pleasantly surprised that she emerged as one of the most effective leaders we ever had. She moved through the ranks quickly and now is one of our directors. I will not be surprised when she makes it to our C-Suite.

To me leadership is such a quandary. Why do some people emerge as leaders who totally surprise us? Conversely, why do others who seem to have everything needed to be an effective leader never take on the mantle of leadership?

What is leadership to you? If you had to draw a picture and use no words, what would that picture look like? This is an interesting exercise, particularly in a group. What do the similarities between individuals tell you about leadership in your organization? The differences may tell a more insightful story.

Having done this exercise many times, some typical drawings, using stick figures of course, have an individual in front of a group, providing some sort of direction. Many times, the sketches depict different levels with the leader higher or separated from the group. Not surprising is it?

What are some of the outliers I have seen?

  • An individual sitting by themselves thinking.
  • The leader immersed in a crowd without any special stature or visible difference.
  • The leader depicted at the bottom of the organization and serving others.

An important part of this exercise is to provide each participant the opportunity to explain their drawing, articulating what leadership means to them. This creates an interesting and rich discussion about what leadership really is. The hero or the story of the hero’s journey always emerges along with the great person, full of charisma who sits at the top of an organization. These are the images of leaders many of us have carried around for years. A list of character traits is also an inevitable product.

Hearing examples of how leadership is manifested by the non-traditional images has been enlightening. What emerges are stories of leaders who are followed because they made connections with followers. The image of the powerful charismatic CEO does not fit. What fits is the individual who connects with people in a particular environment. What have I learned? The environment, the context, and what the followers need may be the most important part of a leader’s success.

Ever see a successful leader get moved into a new area and struggle? Was the person’s previous success based on their character traits and skills or was it the match of traits, skills, environment, followers, and connection?

I am becoming a believer that leadership is about matching traits and skills of the leader with the environment and people that need and want the connection at that time.

How have you responded to general education leadership courses? What if you could have the general education, focus on what you need and want and assist you in discovering the type of organization and people you connect with?

Do you consider Mother Theresa of Calcutta a leader? Would she have been a leader in another context? She may have failed miserably in other contexts; we only know her as a leader in the streets of Calcutta serving a specific population. Environment and connecting with the right followers at the right time is extremely important to leadership development. President Lincoln is well known for his many failures. What impact did the timing and context have on his success? What impact would Martin Luther King have had in another time?

How would your leadership emerge if the focus of your growth was on developing the skills and traits to fit into a context you are comfortable with? How would the leadership of those you work with emerge if you developed them for a specific context?

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Creating a Vision by Reflecting on the Future

What does that title really mean? It sounds counter-intuitive doesn’t it? Let’s just do it.

The First Reflection: It’s your 95th birthday and you are surrounded by those most important to you. Can you see them? As part of this celebration, there will be six or seven people who talk about you. It starts with the youngest generation of your family, a great-grandchild. The next generation (grandchildren), and then your children. Your best friend has time, a coworker who spent years with you, a sibling, and finally your significant other.

  • What material have you given them to talk about you?
  • What impact have you made on their lives?
  • What was it like to be part of your inner circle?

If you took this seriously and did the exercise you created quite a vision. This is a significant destination. How are you feeling after this event? What is your legacy?

That is what reflecting on a future event looks like. Let’s continue and build the path to your 95th birthday by looking at two more events.

The Second Reflection: It is your retirement from the workforce. It is a celebration of your transition, your last day.  You are leaving a company, a nonprofit, maybe selling or closing the doors of your business. At this gathering, a number of folks will talk about what it was like to be closely associated with you. Three categories of individuals will talk, those you worked for or were mentors to you, your peers, and those that you led. What will they say?

  • What material have you given them to talk about you?
  • What impact have you made on their lives?
  • What was it like to be part of your inner circle?

The Final Reflection: This is your next transition. What will this next transition be; a promotion, career change, a move to a new city, getting married, having a child? You choose the event that makes the most sense. Thinking about this by itself can be enlightening, maybe you are not quite sure what the next event is. In this transition, three groups of people are going to come and talk to you. One will be someone you look up to, maybe a mentor. The second will be a peer, and the third is someone who looks up to you and your mentor. What do you want them to say to you?

  • What material have you given them to talk about you?
  • What impact have you made on their lives?
  • What was it like to be part of your inner circle?

You have just set a long-term vision with three definitive milestones. At each milestone, you are evaluating yourself from multiple perspectives, including your own. This sounds a bit like what Scrooge experienced in A Christmas Carol. You are creating a preview of future events to build the path to get you there.

Want to learn more about what vision is, check out a short video sharing more details.

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