UpLevel My Leadership

Is The Great Resignation, Really The Great Transformation in Disguise?

elan Bailey — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 14:00:00 +0000

The last 20 months have challenged many of the things we thought we knew about our lives, careers, and leadership. Faced with new levels of complexity, change and uncertainty, many people are questioning their career and life choices and taking a deeper look at where and how they invest their finite time and energy.

Anthony Klotz, the Texas A&M University professor, who predicted this tsunami of change, dubbed it “the great resignation.” But for me, the term “resignation” conjures the notion of a contraction, giving up, or even hopelessness, which obscures the richer systems insights and opportunities revealed in the patterns and perspectives of this movement.

From a systems perspective, these changes point to a time of growth–an awakening, an expansion, and the evolution of life towards that which brings greater vitality and “thrival.” Through the lens of human development, the Great Resignation could equally be dubbed, The Great Transformation–a modern day hero/ine’s journey of personal and social change.

Organizations that embrace these systems shifts in progress, have a huge opportunity to better support your people and foster your own transformative learning in the process. Meaning, ping pong tables, free lunches or work from home policies won’t suffice. This is an opportunity to invest in the adaptive growth and development of your people, your people leaders, and your organization.

Transformational Learning at Work

“The CFO asks the CEO, “What happens if we invest in developing our people and they leave us?” The CEO responds, “What happens if we don’t, and they stay?”

Trish Bertuzzi Tweet

“The CFO asks the CEO, “What happens if we invest in developing our people and they leave us?” The CEO responds, “What happens if we don’t, and they stay?” – Trish Bertuzzi

The ways and means of transformation can vary widely, depending on the context or situation, and the needs and experiences of your people. As detailed by Jack Mezirow, one view into the transformational learning process offers cues for how your organization can better support your employees through this enriching time of growth, as well as undertake your own transformational work.

According to Mezirow, perspective transformation is “the process of becoming critically aware of how and why our assumptions have come to constrain the way we perceive, understand, and feel about our world; changing these structures of habitual expectation to make possible a more inclusive, discriminating and integrative perspective; and, finally, making choices or otherwise acting upon these new understandings.”

Taking a deeper dive into Mezirow’s process of transformative learning, which focuses on the individual’s personal journey, we discover that transformation often begins with:

A Disorienting Dilemma

The introduction of a transformative learning experience is often marked by a challenging surprise or an unexpected event. If we don’t feel adequately prepared for these unfamiliar conditions, it can lead to feelings of disconnection and discontent.

Looking back, many of us can remember where we were in early 2020, when we got the news that life as we knew it would be shuttered–for what we thought would be about two weeks. As the pandemic swept across the globe, and our home-bound attempts to flatten the curve persisted long beyond the original estimates, we felt the rug being pulled out from under our relationships, our routines, our plans, and any form of “certainty” we had about how our lives and careers worked.

Two months later, we watched the horrific scene as George Floyd’s life was extinguished by a group of men adorned in the armour of authority, having sworn an oath to serve and protect. For those who needed proof that oppression, dehumanization, and racism were and are still running rampant through our institutions, this was another intensely disorienting experience.

Self-examination

When confronted with the unexpected, there can be a period of denial, or refusal to accept the change that has been foisted upon us. But over time, the outward disruption can lead to a time of reflection and self-examination.

With so many of our daily routines disrupted, and constant reminders of the inequities, abuses, and biases rife within our systems–many people began to look inwards to reflect on what matters most. Considering that one’s career requires such a significant investment of time and energy, and for some has an inverse relationship with the things that fulfill them and bring them joy–many folks began to take a deeper look at their career choices.

The hero/ine awakens to realize that they are no longer in the ordinary world:

A. The status quo no longer exists.

B. They are no longer satisfied with the status quo, or

C. Their current operating system is no longer sufficient for the conditions they face.

A Critical Assessment of Assumptions

With the appropriate support, this time of self-examination can lay the foundation for questioning previously unconscious and untested assumptions about what is possible for our life and careers. “What matters to me?” “Is my work bringing me a sense of fulfillment and growth?” “I love my work but am feeling burned out or out of balance. How much longer can I keep this up?” “Am I truly happy?”

For some it’s a deeper questioning of the systems, practices, and policies within the organizations they work for and patronize. “Is all that talk of “culture fit,” “meritocracy” and “diversity, equity and inclusion” really coded language for perpetuating inequitable policies and practices, or is the organization committed to real social change?”

The hero/ine feels that something needs to change. But what? Out of the options available, the first instinct is often to change circumstances, such as our roles, our company, our career, or our geographical location. What hasn’t yet been realized is that for us to reach our desired destination, the journey requires deeper development and even transformation within oneself.

What if organizations became the place where that deeper development could happen as part of one’s growth on the job?

Pioneers in the adult development space, and authors of An Everyone Culture: Becoming A Deliberately Developmental Organization, Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey note that “As human beings we’re set up to protect ourselves—but it is just as true that we’re set up to grow psychologically, to evolve, to develop.” They go on to note, that lack of personal development, and not work overload, is the primary contributor to work burnout.

Leveraging Transformational Learning

This is where it gets interesting. The remaining stages of Mezirow’s transformational journey listed below offer insights into how you can create the conditions for your people and culture to adapt and flourish through this time of great transformation. As the hero/ine’s journey continues they…

Recognize that one’s discontent and the process of transformation are shared, and that others have negotiated a similar change.
Explore options for new roles, relationships, and actions.
Plan a course of action.
Acquire knowledge and skills for implementing one’s plans.
Experiment with new roles.
Build competence and self-confidence within new roles and relationships.
Reintegrate new perspectives into one’s life.

In Mastering Leadership, An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results, authors Anderson and Adams eloquently describe this stage of the hero/ine’s journey. “At the start of the journey, heroes/heroines may not be aware of the relationship between [the team’s, organization’s, community’s or society’s] need and their aspiration. They respond to the call of the soul from a deep place of longing without fully understanding why. The movement from the known to the unknown makes no sense. […] What makes this passage so disorienting is that the hero is shedding all the known and familiar ways of knowing that have worked well. […] It feels like death, and when the hero/heroine goes through this transition, they are not gifted with the certainty that it will all work out. There are no guarantees. There is only the pull of the unknown longing to contribute.”

In other words, the discontent that one feels on the job can be the key to unlocking one’s full potential. If only our organizations were adequately equipped and invested to bring people through the process.

What Companies Can Do to Adapt?

While this trend of mass resignations has been amplified by the pandemic, it has more accurately shed light on a systems gap that was already there. As author, Dr. Marilyn Taylor, wrote over a decade ago in her book, Emergent Learning for Wisdom, “This is a twenty-first century learning challenge […] we do not know enough about our learning challenge yet to be able to plan detailed learning activities, or even set specific objectives to be accomplished through our actions. Instead, learning about the challenge emerges as we move through the experience.”

Companies can use this time of awakening to re-evaluate their policies, practices, systems, and cultures, remove any barriers to personal and professional development and adequately equip their employees to adapt, grow and thrive in the process.

If we are to foster the kind of transformational learning that builds trust, deepens relationships, strengthens culture, and adequately prepares your employees to lead themselves and others through complexity, it’s vitally important to facilitate developmental programs that “help people uncover, engage, and ultimately transcend the limiting assumptions and defensive routines that prevent us from developing our capabilities beyond our own expectations.” – Kegan and Lahey

I call this an Adaptive Learning and Leadership (ALL In) Curric(YOU)lum, which offers folks a generative, rather than prescriptive approach to prioritize their personal growth and embrace complexity, change and challenges rather than feel threatened by them. This gives employees the space and support they need to leverage the learning in their on-the-job and life experiences and take responsibility for their next stage of development.

Here are a handful of recommendations on how your organization can lean into and leverage the transformational and adaptive learning cycle.

Focus on the Whole Being

Create career and professional development programs and opportunities that focus on an individual's "whole being," not just their value to you as an employee in their current or next role.
Put Them in The Driver's Seat

Provide tools and resources that enable people to explore their interests, values and purpose, own their strengths, accomplishments and opportunities, and step into the driver’s seat of their career.
Create Brave and Safe Spaces

Create brave and safe spaces where individuals can connect with others who are navigating similar experiences. Help them understand that questioning, confusion, and uncertainty are an organic part of the adaptive process. Encourage employees to explore the twists and turns of their careers and life from a place of responsibility and accountability where they can also gain peer and professional support.
Build Systems-Thinking Competencies

Help your people to develop the essential skills and competencies of systems-thinking. Employees who experience insufficient challenge and support, who lack the visibility and understanding necessary to navigate the complexity of your organizational system, or are unable to leverage their contributions within it, are more likely to feel like their potential is thwarted and eventually leave.
Make the Invisible, Visible

Give your employees access to new, and perhaps previously "invisible" or "out of reach" stretch opportunities across the organization by investing in talent enablement and mobility programs that intentionally help them:

- - - - Explore new roles, relationships, and actions.
      - Plan a course of action.
      - Acquire knowledge and skills for implementing one’s plans.
      - Provisionally try new roles.
      - Build competence and self-confidence in new roles and relationships.
      - Reintegrate new perspectives into one’s life.

This may also require development support for your people managers and transformation within your culture, to regard talent mobility, not as a threat, but as a welcomed opportunity and important investment for the entire organization.

Prioritize Vertical Growth Within

Prioritize self-leadership or vertical growth within the individual alongside people leadership or vertical growth within the organization. Promotions are not the only way to support the growth of your employees. In adult development, vertical growth is an inside job. It's about being able to adapt and respond to greater levels of complexity. Often when your employees are chomping at the bit for the next promotion, what they're really striving for is more freedom and power. But they're not necessarily ready for that next level of complexity and responsibility. Premature promotions or people managers that are inadequately developed can limit their own growth, the growth of others and the overall health of your organization.

- - - - Check that your peoples’ potential is not unnecessarily or artificially being constrained by rigid structures or policies, under-developed leaders, or unhealthy cultural practices.
      - Offer challenge and support to help employees become competent self-leaders and take more responsibility for their on-the-job effectiveness, growth, relationships, and results.

An additional benefit of this approach is that people who continually develop their own self-leadership, have greater capacity and ability to lead and invest in the growth and development of others when they do take on greater responsibility.

Go ALL In on growing your people.

Invest in Adaptive Learning and Leadership development for all your employees and people leaders. Understand that adaptive leadership development isn’t only for high potentials, managers, or executives anymore. Take the time to weigh the long-term investment and benefits of an ALL In development approach, against the long-term costs and impact of a disengaged workforce and high employee turnover.

For the skeptical reader, yes, there is still a chance that some of your employees may choose to leave, even after you invest in their development. There’s a percentage of folks who will take that path no matter what.

When employees are going through a major life transformation and feel unsupported in the process, the likelihood of them staying and being a positive contributor to your culture decreases. They tend to experience one or more of the three B’s. That is boredom, burn out, or breakdowns in their productivity, mental health, and well-being. This can be extremely costly to your organization and culture in the long term. Having peer and organizational support in the process instead of trying to navigate on their own will make a huge difference.

It’s a rare opportunity when so many people are experiencing a similar transformation process all at once. Companies that get ahead of it for the health and well-being of your people, your culture, and your organization will be well positioned to retain their people and sustain their growth objectives into the future.

Go ALL in for your people

Learn more about our Adaptive Learning and Leadership (ALL in) Development Programs

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Surprisingly Valuable Lessons from an Unconventional Career Journey

elan Bailey — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 06:11:38 +0000

With so many people initiating or contemplating major life and career changes, I’ve been reflecting lately on my own unconventional path and how I went from surviving to thriving through the many twists and turns of my career.

Back in my 20’s, I found myself cycling through a pattern of landing a great job, feeling excited and engaged with the prospect of making a difference and having an impact. And then 6 -12 months in feeling overworked, underutilized, undervalued or simply unappreciated. At that time, few organizations were measuring employee engagement (or disengagement as the case may be) but I can recall many of my colleagues were on that dreaded roller coaster ride of disillusionment with me.

That first decade of my career was focused outward on things like how challenged or fulfilled I felt in my role, whether I felt seen, heard and understood by my manager or how likely I was to earn a promotion or raise in the foreseeable future.

Those factors continued to influence my choices throughout the latter part of my time as an employee. But it’s the following emergent insights that taught me the most and helped me break out of the survival cycle once and for all:

Almost every career experience can be used to teach you something about yourself, and point you toward your greater purpose. Learn to tune in to your inner wisdom. Take time for deeper self-reflection and learning about yourself through your unique experiences.
Each of us brings our past–in the form of assumptions, biases, narratives and worldviews–into our new experiences. So even when you change jobs, careers or start your own business, you may find yourself caught in a familiar narrative or repeating loop of dissatisfaction. There’s an old saying that goes, “Wherever you go, there you are.” In other words, you may think that changing circumstances is the answer, without realizing that it’s actually your self-limiting narrative that’s holding you back. Carve out the time and space for critical reflection and dialogue to help surface and adapt limiting narratives.
Your career can become a platform for your deepest learning, highest evolution and greatest expression. One of the things that has served me well in developing my career as a platform of purpose, is the time I’ve spent working as an employee, an executive and an entrepreneur. As well as working across different organizational roles from accounting, marketing and technology to operations, sales and now people, leadership and culture development. It took me 25 years to realize that the seeds of my greater purpose were germinating in that first “dissatisfying” career experience back in my early 20’s. Learning how to adapt, grow and thrive through your experiences, can help UpLevel your career in ways that few other types of learning can.
We often leave jobs or careers too soon–just before we enter the adaptive learning zone–that liminal space of heightened development that helps us break through our self-imposed limitations and unleash our next stage potential. If your team or organization doesn’t offer coaching support, seek out an adaptive career or leadership coach that can help you navigate this experience.
Even when you have a dedicated and supportive boss, they don’t always have the time, skill or resources needed to adequately challenge and support you in your adaptive career and leadership development. You have to be in the driver’s seat of your career and may have to look beyond your immediate manager, team or organization to get what you really need.
You don’t always have to leave your current job or career to find the fulfillment you’re after. When you deepen your self understanding, it changes how you show up in the world, and can bring new career opportunities and alter your career trajectory. The great thing about investing in your own adaptive growth and development is that it’s not employer-specific. Those new opportunities may arise in surprising places either with your current employer or elsewhere. But one way or another you’ll be ready.
Everybody has something magnificent to express through their work, you just need to know how to unlock it. By the time we leave high school or university, most of us have been conditioned to lock away and protect our authentic greatness. With the right guidance, we can learn to release and cultivate those seeds so we can express more of our authentic selves in the world.
Don’t compare your success to others. Our fixation with strategizing our success and accomplishing certain career goals according to made up societal narratives and unspoken agreements can lead us away from the adaptive learning work that will generate our greatest impact and fulfillment. Some of our most important career competencies and assets come from within and can only be developed by “learning to learn” from your experiences and trusting your inner guidance system.
Knowing when it’s time to go is an art and science. Yes there will be times when you outgrow your current role, employer, certain clients or business venture. When you invest in adaptive leadership work first you’ll have more clarity, confidence and even creativity to your times of transition, creating new possibilities and greater potential along the way.
Regardless of your role, responsibility, or career path, most people on the job are facing greater levels of complexity and change than they’re adequately prepared for. Adaptive career and leadership development is a critical competency for the future of work. It can help you grow and thrive in the face of life’s twists and turns, and significantly boost your level of fulfillment and impact at work, in your family and for the planet.

If you’re looking for more purpose and fulfillment in your work or contemplating a career change, join us on November 16, 2021 for a career roadmapping night where we’ll:

explore these and other insights of the adaptive career journey
how to use your career as a platform to grow and express your higher potential and greater contributions,
get clear on your commitments and core values, and
set you up with a co-creation guide and structure to kick-start the next stage of your career journey.

You can also learn more about our adaptive leadership and career development offerings16

Self-leadership and the Future of Work

elan Bailey — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 14:03:30 +0000

After decades of investment in emotional intelligence, communications and conflict training, unconscious bias training, performance incentives and people perks in the name of leadership development and culture building we haven’t had the breakthroughs we’d hoped for.

The retention, engagement and burnout data shows that something is eroding the happiness, health and high potential of your people and along with it your investments. But what, exactly? And what to do about it?

Deeper still, ideological division and conflict is more pervasive now. The many public uprisings over the last four years reflect our struggle with and in some cases complete inability to integrate, live and work effectively with those whose perspectives we don’t understand, share or care about.

So where and how to invest in the development of your people, leadership and culture? How can you generate the greatest impact and see the greatest return on your investment?

Many of the methods we’ve tried and the investments we’ve made, worthy as they were, have been like applying deluxe paint over those outdated, bright blue walls without using any primer. Or spending 80% of our home reno budget on fancy fixtures and furniture when our foundation is cracked and leaking.

Generating Greater Impact and Returns

In this article I share some of my assumptions and opinions about what it takes to create the greatest impact and return on investment in people and leadership development.

Assumption #1: Our leadership notions and approaches of the past have been insufficient for adapting to and thriving in the diversity, complexity and uncertainty of the world today. Without a hard pivot and change in how we develop leaders and leadership, they’ll be even less effective tomorrow.

Assumption #2: In the future of work, leadership is an essential skill for everyone. (Actually it always was). You may not be leading others, but knowing how to lead yourself in every aspect of your life, education and work is the foundation for everything else.

Assumption #3: Survival of the fittest will be replaced with “thrival of the fittest” — where “thrival” equals work that generates vitality and fittest defines those who have the ability and capacity to adapt, grow and lead with agility, vulnerability, vitality, empathy, and clarity (i.e. continually updating your map to match the territory).

Assumption #4: We are born with the capacity and ability for self-leadership. Although we’re not given much guidance on how to harness that ability throughout our formative years and education, it’s never too late.

Assumption #5: Self-leadership is the primer before the paint. Or the foundation before the fixtures and furniture. When we apply leadership strategies and tactics without first knowing ourselves as leaders, and how our way of being impacts everything we do, our efforts can be ineffective and even harmful.

Conversely, what we do as self-leaders has a knock on impact on others and the planet. When we step up as the author, director and lead actor of our own lives and co-creators with others, small shifts that we make in our way of being and relating have significant impact on the health, well-being and thrivability of our companies, our families, our communities and our planet.

In a future article and podcast series, I’ll share more on the three pillars of self-leadership. But for now I’ll offer this brief introduction:

Self-leadership Pillar #1 — Power: Operating with a sense of agency. Integrating our drive as individuals to self-realize with full responsibility for creating and leading, despite setbacks and circumstances.

Self-leadership Pillar #2 — Purpose: Having an appreciation for and connection to something greater than ourselves. Operating with a sense of gratitude for what is, empathy for what others experience, and full accountability for what we create and the impact we have.

Self-leadership Pillar #3 — Presence: The ability and capacity to suspend our fixed and often limiting scripts and show up fully present and practiced, ready to co-create with a range of diverse people, perspectives and possibilities.

These three pillars when developed together help us become adaptable and integrative leaders who create teams and cultures where people thrive. And they can exponentially increase your return on investment in leadership development.

What impact would it have on your culture, your business, your customer relationships and your bottom line, if everyone in your organization was operating from a foundation of self-leadership and thriving at work?

elan Bailey is a transformational leadership coach and organization development consultant. And the founder of UpLevel Leadership Academy an experiential leadership development community offering coach-designed and led programs, resources and support to help individuals and organizations adapt, integrate and thrive at work.

WRITTEN BYElan Bailey

Founder of UpLevel Leadership Academy helping individuals and organizations develop the competency, capacity and community to adapt, grow and thrive.

Are we feeling more connected or divided?

elan Bailey — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 08:21:02 +0000

As a 50 year black woman, single mother, entrepreneur and leader who has worked in predominantly male industries for the last 25 years, I could walk around being offended every day, all day. But I don’t.

I’ve been quietly watching as we flood our social, emotional and physical spaces with an ever-growing set of rules for how to be together as human beings, and I’m left with the experience in many ways of feeling more separate and alone than I ever did before.

Losing the ability to hug in an effort to save lives is one thing. But having to do an extensive google search on the latest terms and symbols, what they mean and who they may or may not offend by there use, can take a toll on my ability to live a heart-centered existence.

So my apologies if I’ve offended you. It’s not from laziness or lack of caring about you or what matters to you.

I stand in my desire to live a heart-centered life and to see you as the magnificent being that you are, even though I’ve been conditioned to see you as either a threat or opportunity as it relates to my own self-interest.

Like me, you are someone who has the right to self-realize and to experience love, unity and connection just by nature of being born (not because you’ve earned it, had to protest for it and demand it, or because a member of your family, community or people had to die for it).

As well, you’ve had experiences that I have not, and you have a way of interpreting your experiences that I do not. I’m curious about you. I’m willing to listen with you, to learn from you and to share my story if you’re willing to listen too.

But I’m watching as so many good people give away their power, energy and love in the minutiae of second-guessing and double-checking every word they say or write.

There is so much judgment and criticism to go around; so much emphasis on having to get it right, that many good people who were already a part of the solution are sitting on the sidelines in fear that they will inadvertently be seen as part of the problem. I have to wonder, what the long term impact will be.

During the #metoo movement, I watched many of the amazing heart-centered men that I worked with at the time start to get smaller and more self-conscious so as not to offend. And I’m watching it play out again now.

I agree we’re not so great at loving and relating to ourselves and each other. But that tendency extends far beyond race. I wonder if we’ve gone too far down the rabbit hole of judging and chastising each other.

My reality check is always, How does it makes us feel as humans, a community, a society? How does it impact the way we relate to ourselves and each other?

Do you feel more authentic, connected, powerful and loving? Or do you feel smaller, more self-conscious and separate, or more angry, afraid or exhausted?

Before we rush to judge each other, to accuse and assume, can we take the time and create the spaces to get to know each other’s intentions and values? Can we start by assuming positive intent, and if someone has really stepped in it have the courage to call them out with respect and grace, in the same way you would want to receive that feedback?

For the record, there are a lot of things I am opposed to, but I’m not interested in being anti-anything. The mind responds to the clear pictures we create in our imagination. For example, what happens, if I tell you not to think of a pink elephant?

What is the picture that you create in your mind, when you hear the word anti-racist? Does it give you an indicator of how to be a more loving human being, and to live in a way that doesn’t just take care of your own self-interest but also honors and respects all life on the planet?

Tell me, better yet, show me who you are and what you stand for. If you’ve been walking around unconscious and are just now waking up, I’ll give you the grace to know that it’s not always going to come out right. You’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to fail.

In the effort to fight for the rights and equality of my people, I may have given you the impression that I have a right to be righteous in pointing out the error of your ways. But I’m human just like you. I make mistakes all the time. I’m perfectly imperfect.

Failing is that part of our human experience that we don’t give enough space for or credit to. It’s not an excuse for continuing in our self-centered, unconscious march through life. But we can’t let it stop us from taking action.

More than anything I want to live in harmony with you my fellow being. I don’t have perfect answers for how to navigate this movement in a way that helps us feel more alive, powerful, loving, authentic, equal and connected. But I’m willing to learn and fail with you. Will you join me?

UpLevel My Leadership

Is The Great Resignation, Really The Great Transformation in Disguise?

Transformational Learning at Work

A Disorienting Dilemma

Self-examination

A Critical Assessment of Assumptions

Leveraging Transformational Learning

What Companies Can Do to Adapt?

Focus on the Whole Being

Put Them in The Driver's Seat

Create Brave and Safe Spaces

Build Systems-Thinking Competencies

Make the Invisible, Visible