Viewing entries tagged
tlpnyc.com

Comment

Culture Shift: How to #OptOutside

Are you thinking about how to #OptOutside? Check that, have you even heard of REI’s #OptOutside statement/campaign/movement?

When every other retailer is scrambling to open as early as possible on Black Friday, while simultaneously redefining “early Friday” to “earlier and earlier Thursday” (aka Thanksgiving), REI just announced that they will be closing all 143 their stores, and paying their employees to “head outside” rather than work arguably the most heinous retail day in the calendar (spoken from personal experience).

Talk about giving a WOW moment.

They’re encouraging their employees to take adventure. A paid adventure. They also open it up to the rest of us, to tell the world, explore the outdoors, or check out the #OptOutside gallery.

Here’s why, in an excerpt from a message put out by REI’s CEO and President, Jerry Strizke.

“For 76 years, our co-op has been dedicated to one thing and one thing only: a life outdoors. We believe that being outside makes our lives better. And Black Friday is the perfect time to remind ourselves of this essential truth.

“We’re a different kind of company—and while the rest of the world is fighting it out in the aisles, we’ll be spending our day a little differently. We’re choosing to opt outside, and want you to come with us.”

Well then.

While everyone else is jumping on the open-early or at least open-all-day bandwagon, REI created a brand new wagon and invites us all along for the ride. A lot is happening here:

  1. Mission: REI is holding true to its true north/noble cause (a life outdoors), the heck with what the rest of the industry is doing
  2. Community: REI is taking care of its people; not only giving them the day off, but paying them for it (close to unheard of with a primarily retail part-time staff).
  3. Inclusivity: REI is inviting the rest of us to do the same.

REI has a reputation for taking care of its own and sticking to its values. It hires employees who love the outdoors and is found year after year on top-companies-to-work-for lists. How does #OptOutside play into this? What can we learn from it?

We are so often stuck in our own whirlwind that it becomes hard to notice when we’re out of whack. How often do you take the time to examine your company’s efforts, and see how they align with its values? How reliant are you on your true north in moving forward? It can be easy to get off track. The Cranberries’ Everybody Else Is Doing It So Why Can’t We? speaks to this age of #FOMO. But just because everybody else is doing it, doesn’t mean you want to. It doesn’t mean you’re missing out. It might not be right for your business or your staff. What’s the impact of realignment? Power-packed strength in your community, and bold statement, and a compelling moment for your existing clientele.

Take a note from REI. Check your #FOMO and redefine it to what you’d rather be doing. And, for bonus points, follow REI’s model:

Invite the world along for the ride.

What do you think about the #OptOutside movement? Share in the comments section below, or tweet me @AliMercier.

Originally posted at The Leadership Program. Check that amazing company out at tlpnyc.com. #StepIntoYourLeadership

Comment

Comment

Digital Citizenship: Initiating a Values Conversation with Students

When I was in 11th grade, I was cyber-bullied: almost fifteen years ago, in 2001, when The Internet was still referred to as the World Wide Web, MySpace was still two years away, and TheFacebook.com was still waiting for Mark Zuckerberg to graduate from high school.

But we did have AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM. Through this (now stone-age feeling) tool, friends and classmates would leave away messages up for hours on end, with angsty pop lyrics, teen-founded wisdom, and, invariably, jokes. Everyone would race their siblings home to hop online, where invariably fights came up over access to the one home computer. Those fights didn’t stop ; rather, they came alive, and more vicious, with the added protection of indifference that talking to a screen enabled. When you can’t see the hurt in the eyes of those you’re talking to, are they even hurt? Well, when a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, it most assuredly makes a sound.

Back in 2001, we were only at the precipice of what the internet and social media would become. Fast forward to 2016 and I can’t imagine what kids growing up now go through. If one person over a rudimentary two-way conversation tool could hurt me so badly, what must our kids be going through with the myriad of sites that abound today?

October is Bullying Awareness month, and I am thrilled that one week (October 16-22) is being further designated as Digital Citizenship week and will be dedicated to Digital Citizenship efforts. Digital Citizenship is defined as the norms of appropriate, responsible behavior while online. At Leadership, our model for approaching Digital Citizenship can be described as a preventative intervention.

Digital Citizenship Activity

Do you want to try this with the kids in your community? First, hold a conversation about values. What are the values that they identify with? Have the students discuss and identify the values that they come up, and encourage them to continue to refine them. For example, my personal values were originally excellence, authenticity, honesty, erudition, and kindness; when I revisited them this summer, I realized they were in need of refining and settled on curiosity, earnestness, transparency, erudition, and kindness. Notice that erudition and kindness stayed the same, but excellence, authenticity, and honesty all had to be tweaked (to, respectively, curiosity, earnestness, and transparency).

Facilitate a conversation around the values your students landed on. Find out why they picked each one. What about the value seemed core to who they are? Get from them all the reasons why the values are important. When you can connect a student’s previous, positive behavior to one of the values they share, be sure to point that out. Show them the different ways in which they are already living these values, and that the point of the exercise is to make sure that they are doing it all the time. Point out how you, as a teacher or parent, have used your own value pillars—great examples include on cover letters and resumes, in interviews and meetings, and while teaching or parenting. Ask them to identify how they might have seen your values come up before. For even greater impact, give them an example of when you didn’t live up to your values, and let them know the fall out, both internal and external, of compromising yourself.

Explain that these values should guide their behavior in life, which includes the lives we live online. Every post or comment or photo that they engage with should be in line with their values. For example, I might have a bad day in traffic, but am I posting about the jerk that cut me off? No, because it undermines my more important message of kindness. Have them apply a value filter to their current activity on social media—does it pass the value test? Encourage them to use these values to guide their online activities going forward. Does it pass all five values? No? Might want to rethink, retool, or just delete the post in question. Deleting is always the safest bet—and that goes for already existing posts as well.

At this point, bring the conversation back to values. Highlight what values you heard and what values you saw throughout the experience together. Close with a whip around asking each student to share 3 or more of their value pillars.

As one final step, ask them to consider finding an accountability partner for when they lose their way.

They’re still kids after all.

Thoughts about Digital Citizenship? Questions? Please let me know all about it in the comments below, or tweet @alimercier.

Originally posted at The Leadership Program. Check that post out here: http://tlpnyc.com/digital-citizenship/

Comment

Comment

Changing Your Hiring Process: What Works Today might not Tomorrow

At Leadership, our first core value is Forge the Path, Enjoy the Journey. Lucky for me, as you’ll find out below, our second is Lead, Learn, Lead Again.

I started coordinating the hiring process here in May 2009, just shy of 10 months on the job. Since then, I’ve moved from coordinating to managing the process, bringing hundreds of talented artists, evaluators, athletes, social workers, musicians—even magicians—into our fold and on to our team.

We have never had a perfect hire. I don’t expect we ever will.

Like many organizations, we were searching for a hiring process that would allow us to effectively evaluate candidates, ensure we were meetings the candidates needs as well as our own, and efficiently use our staff’s (and company’s) valuable time.

For the sake of this article, I want to hone in on our hiring of Leadership Trainers, who make up the vast majority of our staff. At least once yearly (sometimes more—this school year, we’ve held five hirings), we onboard from 5 to 45 people to provide direct services in the schools we serve.

Original Process

Here was the breakdown of our hiring process when I first started. It had been in place for several years, and was gifted to me as such:

  • Resume Review
  • Phone Interview
  • Face-to-Face Interview
  • Audition
  • Orientation
  • Reference Checks

After a couple of years, when I was moving to manage the process more, I realized the breakdown needed to evolve. We were spending too much time—cost hours—on the process:

  • The Face-to-Face Interview, previously conducted with (ideally) one candidate and two Leadershippers, was proving to be a poor use of company time. We also realized we weren’t having a chance to see how candidates interacted with and engaged with others until the Orientation, which is a paid training (although still a part of the hiring process). In addition, candidates weren’t seeing how we define facilitation until the Orientation. This was much too late. Bringing in Teambuilding element solved both of these problems.
  • At the same time, we were finding that the Audition, which required a pool of staffers to watch the candidates facilitate and partake in a follow up deliberation that took just as much time as the observing, was also not an effective use of company time. I created a system for including everyone’s voice, complete with form, rubric, and grading, streamlining the deliberation process. I also sent the candidates some of our own exercises, complete with basic instructions for facilitation. Along with instructions, we sent them some sample videos of some of our stars facilitating these activities. Seeking clarity, we re-titled this step the Sample Lesson.
  • Finally, we weren’t getting the results we were looking for in the time-consuming Reference Checks.

First Revision of Process

So, we did an overhaul:

  • Resume Review
  • Phone Interview
  • Face-to-Face Interview
  • Group Interview with Teambuilding
  • Audition
  • Sample Lesson
  • Orientation
  • Reference Checks

Then, a couple more years later, things were feeling off again. The Resume Review and Phone Interview seemed to be working. But:

  • The Group Interview with Teambuilding (where we start the interview by putting the candidates into teams and facilitating an exercise that we do with kids to see how they do together) was taking up a lot of time. The candidates seemed to be getting more out of it than we were (Leadership does a mean teambuilding), and although they were leaving smiling with new friends, we were spending a lot of (wo)man-hours with very little pay off. After much deliberation, we found a question for the Group Interview to test their agility working with others, and cut the teambuilding.
  • With the Sample Lesson, we were getting closer, but now the candidates were being hand-fed instructions to show them how to do the facilitation, so candidates that were particularly adept at copying others watched the videos and did just that—which we found didn’t translate in helping us find strong facilitators—though we did find strong copy-cats (a skill in itself). We needed to go back and move forward at once. We went back to having the candidates bring their own exercise to the team, and renamed this step the Facilitation Demonstration to provide further clarity to the candidates on what we were hoping to see. We continued to use the system I created last time, but deliberation was cut to two people, who worked to decide on candidates based on the entire team’s notes and rankings.
  • We brought back a re-imagined Reference Check. It took a lot of research and team work, but after two years of witnessing fibbers come in through the cracks, proved necessary.

Second Revision of Process

With a couple minor tweaks, we found ourselves here:

  • Resume Review
  • Phone Interview
  • Group Interview with Teambuilding
  • Group Interview
  • Sample Lesson
  • Facilitation Demonstration
  • Orientation
  • Reference Checks

This system was mostly working. Until this years’ multiple hires, that is. This year was like no year I had experienced before, due to increases in city funding from the de Blasio administration. We hired 30 or so people in September, and by November we needed 10, which by December increased to 15. Then in January, we needed another 10. Then in April, we needed 5. Efficiency and adaptability became paramount. I started seeing where in the process we could cut—saving both company-time/cost-hours and candidate-time—a lucky win-win.

  • The Phone Interview became much more basic—something anyone on staff could do, crucial in a time where nearly half of our Programming team of experts were either working in schools or on maternity/paternity leave.
  • In a pinch in August, we tried doing the Group Interview and Facilitation Demonstration in one session, and it worked better than I could have imagined.
  • We kept the Orientation, but a shortened version in the school-year with bolster trainings,
  • And conducted Reference Checks on an as needed basis.

Final Revision of Process…For Now

This year, our hirings looked like this:

  • Resume Review
  • Phone Interview
  • Abridged Phone Interview
  • Group Interview
  • Facilitation Demonstration
  • Group Interview and Facilitation Demonstration
  • Orientation
  • Reference Checks
  • Reference Checks (as needed)

Going into my seventh summer hiring for Leadership, we’re keeping much of the same structure of this year’s hires, which freed me and the team up to conduct our ideal hire: a rolling one. Now, throughout the year, we are constantly going through steps of the hiring process. No matter the month, we could be Resume Reviewing or conducting the abridged Phone Interview. We are holding Group Interviews and Facilitation Demonstrations once weekly over the summer, as Resume Reviews and Phone Interviews continue to take place. With the national teacher shortage and our dedication to bringing on team members committed to excellence, this was another opportunity to meet our stakeholders where they are at: now, candidates aren’t out of the running if they happen to be away for the couple weeks that we have saved in the past for these steps. Throughout, Reference Checks are taking place.

Important Note: The focus of this piece is on the breakdown of our hiring by steps, but it is essential to note that at every single hire, we change the content of some part of the process—as big a total overhaul of the phone interview and in-person interview questions in one hire to a slight tweak of the wording in another. In our five hires this year, there’s been at least a tweak in each.

Times change. Needs change. Expectations change. We must change with it.

Questions? Comments? Best practices? Share them below.

Originally posted at The Leadership Program. Check it out, here: http://tlpnyc.com/changing-your-hiring-process/

Comment

Comment

Turning Joy into Injoy

A few weeks ago I was meandering my way down my long walk home from the subway, getting some good pondering time in. While wandering through my ponderings, I stumbled upon the word enjoy in a different way than I had ever previously thought of it, and it struck me.

Going through life we all have moments of enjoyment. Sitting in the sun reading a book with coffee in hand on a Saturday morning? I’m enjoying myself. Cuddling with my lovely cat, The Kit, while she purrs like a motor boat? I’m enjoying myself. Laughing with coworkers as a spontaneous dance break out takes over? I’m enjoying myself. Hanging out with my hubs, sister, friends, family and discussing literature or politics or the newest SNL skit? I’m enjoying myself. Being at the front of a boat (or motorcycle… or skidoo…) going really fast, I’m really enjoying myself.

I do get to enjoy all these things and a whole lot more. Which is awesome.

But.

What struck me on my meandering was the actual etymology, or word origin, of enjoy—specifically, the “en” in enjoy. Following a hunch, I looked up what “en” means and found two definitions: 1. Near, at, or on; 2. In, into, within. With the first, it implies a separation from joy. With the second, a possession of it.

My hunch was for the second definition.

I’m a little bit of a language geek (Writing and Literature graduate that I am), and often think about the limits of language and how that effects our ability to understand everything around us. If we have one word for, let’s say, reindeer, but the Sami people, who live in the northern tips of Russia and Scandinavia have as many as 1,000 words for reindeer, there are potentially 999 other ways in which I can understand reindeer that my English speaking brain doesn’t know—and, therefore, those other 999 reindeer don’t really exist for me.

Do you see what I mean?

So thinking about enjoy, I started to think about how a one letter switch could make a big change. I started thinking about injoy.

That small difference ignited a spark in me. It feels different, to injoy something, because you’re in the joy of it. You’re joy embodied. In that moment, joy is in you, and you have all of joy’s power.

I don’t know about you, but that bowled me over. Since then, when I find myself enjoying a moment, I’ve been taking time to switch the letters to injoy. With the shift I’ve noticed a difference in presence, in availability to the moment, and in personal power: joy is powerful. While I’m injoying myself, I hold that power. And that power for positivity and happiness and JOY… well… it’s quite remarkable.

How can you injoy?

Challenge: the next time you’re feeling joyful, take a moment to think about injoying it. How do you feel possessing joy? How is it different from enjoying? Please share in the comments below or tweet me @AliMercier (I’m sure Erika would like to hear it to! Catch her @ErikaPetrelli1.)

Originally posted at The Leadership Program On Wings & Whimsy. Check out more posts, most by the magical Erika herself, On Wings & Whimsy here: http://tlpnyc.com/author/erika/

Comment