Mixed messages

It might come as somewhat of a shock to you, dear readers, but I have quite the outgoing, chatty personality. I am very loud and gregarious, and generally enjoy the company others. And based on a one-dimensional appraisal of the dominant side of my personality, people are quick to attach the party girl tag to me.

And while this tag is accurate to an extent, my true nature is that of a homebody, particularly as I get older, and especially as we head into winter. I like my own company and nothing more than being home, pottering around, with the cat following closely behind. In many respects, I’m a bit of a Nanna (and this is not to impugn Nannas in any way shape or form).

At work, I am often shushed (because I am loud*), or feel pressure to do so because of the culture. I remember one public sector workplace I landed in in the mid 2000s (it had an education/research focus) the culture was “no chit-chat on pain of death”. I went the whole day not talking much, because conversations that weren’t work-related were not encouraged. I would go home from work and talk non-stop for an hour. It was like the dam had broken and could not be plugged. Needless to say, I moved on quite quickly to a more conducive environment.

I read a wonderful post the other day from Ed Batista, an executive coach. He discusses the dichotomies and juxtapositions of his own personality. He struggles with integration and sways to an either/or approach and ends up feeling “forced” to hide aspects of himself. To quote Ed:

I’m not only a tender, affectionate, loving person–I’m also a snarky, competitive hard-ass.

I know how exactly how he feels.

While I am chatty and loud, I can also be quiet and introspective. I can be fierce and judgmental, but also compassionate and caring. I love trivia and soap operas, but then immerse myself in academic papers on brain science and social psychology. I can be incredibly bossy, but I yearn for great leadership.

People are never flat and one-dimensional, and I am no exception.

*When I was a high school teacher, one year my graduating Year 12 students gave me the “We Can Hear Her Before We Can See Her” Award. It was a proud moment in my teaching career!

The cult of running

I am the member of a cult. Oh, it out started innocently enough, as these things often do. Walking just wasn’t enough for me. It just didn’t give me the buzz I needed. I wanted more. I needed more. I had to run. At first it was a few metres here, a few metres there.

Before I knew it, I was running a kilometre, then three, then five, now 10. I didn’t know it would become such an obsession. I didn’t know that I would find it so satisfying. I didn’t know that it would get me out of bed in the dark, in freezing conditions in the middle of winter. I didn’t know that I could push my body to its limit and love it. I didn’t know.

But knowing what I know, I wouldn’t change a thing. Running is part of who I am now. It is my identity: I run, therefore I am.

My name is Diane. I am a runner.

“I’d like you to edit my book…”

“… and I want to know how much it will cost.”

I am receiving emails like this on an increasingly regular basis.

And I get it. Publishing your work has never been easier and it’s relatively cheap – if not free – to do so, especially if one goes down the eBook path. Amazon allows you to create your own eBook and distribute it. All you need is your text, a decent cover graphic and you are good to go. Blurb allows you to publish your own book and have it sitting right there on your coffee table for all to see…

And why wouldn’t you? Content is king. We love our eReaders, tablets and smart phones, and we are all hungry for content. And if you are an author, you can bypass those pesky publishers with their hurtful rejection letters (and who hasn’t had one of THOSE ?). That’s assuming you even GET a letter… (and who hasn’t been ignored by a publisher?)!

Even this blog is a testament to the joys of self-publishing. I write, therefore I am.

But.

I don’t know about you, I want my content to be quality. I want to read GOOD stuff. I want to know someone has so much pride in their work they care that their writing makes sense and it flows, is logical, obeys grammatical rules and is spelling error and typo free. Not everyone has skills in these areas. Hell, I have these skills, and I am my own worst editor! I cringe at the number of errors I spot after I’ve hit the publish button on this blog. I am forced to scramble quickly to correct them and hope to God no one notices…!

So it pains me that the first thing people ask about when they contact me is price. They don’t ask what VALUE I can add to their work, or how I can make it better and make them look totally awesome. No. Most don’t even have a budget. Most don’t even know what the editing process involves, or have researched (in general terms) what the likely cost is (often charged on a per hour basis, at 10 pages per hour at 350 words per page, depending on the standard of the original text – it’s not that hard to work out). Most are completely taken aback when I tell them the price… (but no one balks about paying a doctor, lawyer, IT specialist, mechanic… well, maybe the mechanic – but you get the picture…).

Oh, they say. Thought it would be much cheaper than that.

So from now on, if people send me emails asking how much it will cost for me to edit their book, I am simply going to say: If you have to ask, you can’t afford me, and if you can’t afford an editor, you definitely shouldn’t be thinking that you are a serious writer and send them the link to this post.

Call me snippy, but quality comes at a price.

Power poisons the weak

This is the next series of posts from hand-picked guest bloggers about power; they have also written about trust . The idea for this series was kicked off by me rewatching Game of Thrones and thinking about its twin themes of power and trust.

The first to write about power for this series is Cullen Habel, who I know personally, but first met via Twitter. If you haven’t read it, his first post about trust was a fabulous, enlightening read. I have great respect for Cullen because he is a straight shooter and tells it like it is, and this brilliant post is no exception (being a straight shooter myself, I know what a burden this can be!). Cullen has worked in academia, sales, hospitality, retail and a long time ago in a radio workshop. He has a habit of trying to look beyond the obvious. You can connect with him via Twitter or his blog.

On the face of it, we all might imagine that power and trust are somehow linked.

It’s certainly where I was headed when I first started thinking that trust to me means I don’t think you’re a deep down asshole and we got an insight of it when @naturalgrump posted that trust is about power – I give the electricity salesman the power over a half hour of my time in the expectation that he will give me the economic savings he promised.  No wonder I feel a sense of betrayal when lured into a mind numbing, unproductive meeting so that somebody can tick a KPI or a “consulted” box.

I started mentally writing this post three weeks ago and it’s taken some unravelling. My dear wife operates a leadership consultancy and is a practitioner in choice theory, and I feel like I’ve spent my entire working life in a trust/power spin cycle. The themes of power and decency are never far from the practice of our lives.

Power, to me, is the ability to have an effect on other people’s lives. It might be as small as putting too much sugar in your boss’s coffee, or taking everything that’s important away from a person.

Power may occur in a good way, such as building another person’s self-esteem or in a bad way, such as provoking a sense of dread when you enter the room.

Having an effect on other people – isn’t that a fundamental driver of human behaviour? Even if the effect is only that the other people leave you alone or don’t trash you. My experience is that everybody sees it that way.

In fact the abuse of power often becomes a bit of a “dad joke” when I play the caricature of a power poisoned boss.  Recently, as we walked up to the locked car I barked: “Come on Mia… get in the car… don’t waste my time!”.

Mia: “Dad, the car’s locked.”

Me: “I don’t want to hear your excuses.”

So, there are a few topics on my mind here:

1. Internal strength and power poisoning

I’m not sure it’s as simple as George Orwell’s “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely” but I think it’s a part of it.  I once saw a lovely young kid go crazy when I told him that as the oldest he was in charge. Bizarre. I’ve seen people of strength become almost embarrassed when given the responsibility of authority. The best of those are the ones who move past the embarrassment, and do the leadership stuff out of a sense of duty, not superiority.

2. Refusing to become toxic is not weakness

I have also seen weak people hold the stronger in contempt: “He hasn’t got the stomach for it”.  I knew a manager in retail who was dictated to terminate an employee that senior management didn’t like.  It ended up with this store manager losing his job.  He thought that it was better him than a person who didn’t deserve it.  Plenty more crappy jobs for bad companies out there, he mused.

3. Dark power is not strength

It is not a measure of your strength that people clam up when you enter the room.  If you believe that, then your lens is cracked.

4. The armour of goodwill

If you wield this dark power, then people seem to take any opportunity to take a shot at you. This forces you to continually defend. Compare that to the mountain of goodwill that – say – the Vinomofo guys command.

For over 40 years I have watched dark power and bright power at work.  It seems there’s a choice between the armour of goodwill and the illusion of strength.

I hope I have chosen the right path, and can walk it.

The challenge of being a knowledge worker

In the 21st century, the workforce of the western world is supposed to be forged around knowledge. You can see this trend very clearly, with the slow, strangled death of manufacturing (despite being propped up by handouts from the government) and the rise and rise of digital work. Who knew coding apps would have been a job five years ago? Ditto social media, and the multitudes of jobs that has been spawned around this hive of industry?

The “supply and demand” of knowledge has had a major effect on our workplaces, particularly ones I have found myself in. I think it’s fair to say that a major side effect of knowledge “production” is that workplaces have increased in complexity. We are forced to work together in increasingly complex environments on quite complex tasks. There are grey areas about who does what, which project management principles, Six Sigma, TQM and the like attempt to sort out. But in many respects, we don’t actually “produce” anything. Nothing overtly tangible anyway.

I have never worked in manufacturing, but I imagine that each person who works on building something, or producing something, has an overwhelming sense of achievement. Call me a romantic, but there is something honest about being able to say “I built that” or “I contributed to the building or making of that”. In my own working day, I might write a plan, a brief, some copy. I may do something semi-tangible like update a website, create a Prezi, or produce a booklet or a pamphlet, but these things are ephemeral, and the sense of achievement is only fleeting.

For the average knowledge worker, this also means that despite workplaces being underwritten with employer branding messages, workplace safety legislation, competency frameworks, continuous improvement, management training, team building initiatives, value statements, and performance management and development plans, the horse-trading of information, power games and office politicking are daily activities that have to be navigated with care. Being a knowledge worker is not unlike being back in court in 16th Century England. There are factions, sabotage and behind-the-scenes power plays that would chill even the Tudors. Manoeuvering through this quagmire is akin to walking through a swamp filled with landmines. A foot wrong, and the whole thing is likely to blow up in your face. And take your career with it.

Or maybe it’s just many of the workplaces I’ve been “lucky” enough to work in that are like this?