0013 | Nothing Is Real Until It's On LinkedIn, and Nothing On LinkedIn Feels Real

I've been officially "self-employed" for roughly 5 weeks now, and I'm spending quite a bit of time working very hard on not being terribly hard on myself that I don't have the entire rest of my life figured out. I have launched both Inquisitive Human and Elemental Cupcake & Pickle. I'm pretty much flying by the seat of my pants, doing what feels right, and today it felt right to attend an introduction to krav maga class and then test out new grain-free chocolate chip cookie recipes and eat them... all. I also happen to be reading a stack of spiritual and personal development books in preparation for a workshop at the end of May.

Inquisitive Human is talking to me, letting me know I am still unprepared to equip other people with the tools they need to sustain joy. Elemental Cupcake is talking to me, letting me know that a bad-ass paleo coffee cake isn't all I need to make a successful go of it. I have a good deal of work to do.

So, while my ego has no interest in publicizing the fact that I am poised on the razor's edge of the possibility of epic failure, here it is: I'm starting out on new adventures. Everyone knows it's true and real because I just updated my LinkedIn profile, and everything on LinkedIn has the ring of truthiness to it, doesn't it? 

I haven't figured out why I feel compelled to look at or participate in LinkedIn, other than still not having a Facebook, Twitter, or SnapChat account (I did recently get an Instagram account! elemental_cupcake!). Perhaps it's the illusion of connection, or the idea that I can create my image to be anything I desire, more or less within the constraints of the reality of my work history. Maybe I want to feel and project that I have much more figured out than I actually do, but I do not. This is the scariest most exhilarating thing ever, and I'm trying my very most bestest to make it look reasonably well thought out on social media... except for here, of course, where we're just lettin' it all hang out.

I suppose I still want to feel as though I have a place to share my wins, to reinvent, to blossom into something that can carry the weight of 42 is Love into even the most corporate context. Maybe I have faith that I have enough love and enough soul to light a candle in the soul-suck instead of cursing the darkness. And there's this: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ragsmadison. Just when you think there is nothing for miles in the desert wasteland of corporate slag and entrepreneurial pretense, you run across a gem. Thank you, grain-free cupcakes, pickles, and holistic reality interrogation for making me whole again. And thank you Rags Madison, for infusing LinkedIn with some juicy reality.

0012 | There will be no sigh. My resignation is a truth grenade.

Okay, I know... it's been months. This terrible thing happens when you're lying to yourself about what's okay: you can't really tell the truth to anyone else either. And so being quiet while you figure it out is sometimes a better way to go. That was me. Quiet for a minute. But the good news is that I figured something out. Why does this keep happening to me over and over? It's like it will never be done already.

You know how they (whoever they are) say that people don't leave jobs, they leave bosses? Well, isn't that just the ever-loving truth? So last week I left my boss. Actually, last week I became my own boss. I have named myself Chief Cupcake Officer and Picklemeister at elemental cupcake & pickle. I also happen to be Senior Creative Director, Operations Manager, President, and everything else. So there's that keeping me busy.

I also gave myself the job of Holistic Reality Interrogation at Inquisitive Human (and everywhere else I happen to be). I was not entirely serious when I had business cards made a week before I quit XX, but Ben and my Bowenwork therapist (seriously, google this mysterious healing magic) and everyone else I've giggled to has been encouraging me shamelessly. You know who you are. What were you thinking? And thank you so much. I am available to take interrogation clients in April 2016.

And for anyone who wants to read it, here is the resignation letter I sent to my boss after realizing that there was no possible way to have a conversation with her, but that I just might be able to start one elsewhere. Lo and behold, I have had more real conversations with my co-workers and senior leadership since sending that email than I ever could for all my pleading. I hope this is the start of a bigger conversation within XX - one that reflects the real values of the people who work there, and not just the temperament and atrocious behavior of one boss. I really believe that people can be made better or worse by their leadership, and that sometimes there is too much at stake to continue being led poorly. Mmmmm... steak.

Here's to speaking your truth. May it set you free.

....................................

XXXXX,

Although I am declining tomorrow’s meeting, I am open to starting a new conversation next week if there is anything you would like to discuss.

While I would like to have contributed to a more human voice in how XX Services engages, both internally and externally, the kind of transformation that leadership professes to want for the team can only come from leadership itself. I have yet to be persuaded that there is a better engagement model than one that is customer-centric. The current internal resistance to inquisitive and respectful conversation leaves me with no context in which to exercise my strengths within XX Services.

       

An unspoken insistence on maintaining the status quo of consultative posturing and a XX-centric engagement model is evident in our wake of unsuccessful engagements and unhappy customers. We offer prescriptive solutions, and only when those go sideways do we begin to assess the problems—and then only because they have become our problems. We give away countless hours to make things right. Over half of our team sits on the bench while we are not invited back to re-engage.

The predominant culture is one of telling vs. asking and consulting to vs. partnering with. It is a culture that is uncomfortable with ambiguity and transparency. Rather than appearing to not know the things we cannot possibly know before engaging in a dialogue of discovery with each other and the customer, we come out swinging, often with leadership heading the charge. We are reactive and authoritative, rather than attentive, thoughtful, and inquisitive. Communication flows in one direction: down, and rarely in a manner that is well-received by the customer or each other. We tolerate entrenched bad behaviors at the expense of collaboration. We are unskilled at asking relevant, relationship-building questions. We are even worse at listening. Trust is expected but not given. And we wonder why everyone is so bloody difficult—our customers, our teammates, our sales team. We wonder why XX reports abysmal morale. We choose power over partnership.

I feel strongly that our current model is neither a sustainable business practice nor a healthy way to live.

Please accept my resignation from XX Services, effective immediately. I will work with XXXX and XXXX on the logistics of my exit.

JAMES-OLIVIA HILLMAN

XXXX PROFESSIONAL SERVICES | SOLUTION CONSULTANT

M+ 000.000.0000 | james-olivia@XX.com

0011 | The Boss's Boss (a warranted apology)

Once upon a time in another blog--www.billytakesthesouth.blogspot.com--I made a big fuss and ruckus about unwarranted apologies and how I was done with all that and was living my life and speaking my truth and yada yada blah blah blah.

It's not that the rant doesn't still hold, but this morning I have a fully warranted apology to work. Last night Ben and I had dinner with our boss's boss. And his lovely wife. And we stayed over at his guest house. And we're going hiking with him today. And we listened to each other's bands. And we talked for hours and hours about cool ideas and work and cool ideas about work. And I called a colleague a dick. And I woke up with a stone in my belly about it. 

True or not, that's not really the point. The point is that I used my powers for evil instead of good, and I woke up feeling in my gut that I have been unfair and graceless, neither of which are qualities I want to develop in myself. 

I will, of course, take this apology with me to breakfast, hopefully better crafted during a vigorous tooth-scrubbing and my daily morning chat with Ben. 

This is such a series of joys and embarrassments that is me growing up after a lifetime of childhood. Some people have parents for this. For the sake of the world at large, I sure hope your kids do. 

0010 | Dear Management (you know who you are)

The case for employee engagement is not in the hundreds of Gallup and Deloitte and Gartner’s polls that tells us with metric tons of data that your business will continue to suffer unless you make connections with your people. You already know that by building trust with the people who work for and with you increases productivity, sales, safety, retention, attractiveness to top talent, and everything else that makes winning 202% more likely. You already know that according to most human capital polls, employee disengagement is the number one issue facing global companies for the last four years running. The numbers are not the case for paying attention to employee engagement. The case for caring about whether or not your employees are engaged is standing right in front of you. Hi, my name is James. Don’t look behind you, because according to all those polls, I am one of the 75% of your people who are either beginning, or have already decided, to stop caring about your business. It’s not that we don’t care about your business. We just don't really care about you anymore. We didn’t start out that way. We started out ready to engage, ready to share ideas, ready to solve problems together.

And then after a few conversations a pattern emerged. When I leave a conversation with you, after being interrupted countless times, I feel as though you have asked few or no questions about what is important to me and you have spent your conversational efforts asserting your own value rather than collaborating to understand how I can help you in ways you may not have already thought of. You enter conversations with assumptions that you make no attempt to dispel, and so you leave conversations no more enriched than when you entered. It seems like a terrible waste of your time. Mine, too. In the time you have spent aggrandizing your own experience, your own expertise, your own credentials, I have been observing that you lack inquisitiveness, imagination, and the ability to connect. 

It is conversations like these that make me not want to work on your team. When I leave your team, it will not be because of the pay, the travel, the career path, the work, or employee satisfactions scores that can be measured or quantified. I will leave because of the gut feeling that my time is better spent working with people who care to understand what is important to me, just as I care about what is important to them. I will leave this job because the conversations I have with you are one-sided and ultimately unfulfilling.

I am enthusiastically engaged right now in spite of you, not because of you. Like most of your best and brightest, I will eventually take my brains, my energy, and my new-found experience elsewhere in search of an organization that is guided the basic business principle that people are almost any company’s greatest resource. No amount of focus on the numbers and metrics—the symptoms of organizational health or sickness—will change the core values and practices that drive those metrics. I will leave your team because I want to be on a winning team, and—among other things—winning teams have great conversations.

0009 | Forty-two. Forty-two. Forty-two.

It's a mantra for today. A reminder. I am working in a world in which the qualities of the creative are openly diminished. There is an explicit demand for talent, and creativity, for insight into what people will respond to, for an enhanced experience, and then an implicit demand for conformity, insensitivity, and relative disengagement. And corporate management wonders why their projects go sideways and people are so terribly unhappy and sick. It is a world full of lies and posturing, and for some reason, I have knocked on its door, it has invited me in, and I have strolled willingly into the the muck.

There is a lesson for me here. In a world of people with an authority that I can either recognize or not, I can choose not to believe their devaluing of the qualities that they desired in the first place. I am sensitive. I take things personally. I am very personal. I am actually extraordinarily sensitive. These traits are intrinsic to my intelligence, not in spite of it. This is a time for me to learn to articulate the value of what I bring and not let myself be convinced that somehow I am less for being a different kind of brilliant. This is a chance for me to learn a mindfulness that I have not had to learn yet. To be self-aware when I find myself morphing into something less myself, less beautiful, more base. I have to find kinder, clearer ways to communicate with people who function at a lower EQ. Those words I conjure cannot be simply words: calm, clear, kind, inquisitive. I have to live them, especially when the world is pressing on me to be otherwise. I'm going to find a punching bag now. (What? This shit doesn't just go away because I looked at it. I still have to do the work.)