As you may know, I’ve been working as a freelance communications consultant for the past year, while blogging about professional shifts and opportunities and my new appreciation for living a bit more organically.
One of my organic opportunities has been getting to know Gretchen DeVault, Eric Quigley, and Emily Butkus at DVQ Studio, a Grand Rapids-based brand and communications agency. After months of talking shop and partnering with them on a new project, I am excited to announce that I am officially joining their team!
A few ingredients have made this the right move:
A commitment to learning and sharing. I’ve started to believe the most telling question you can ask about a potential relationship is how (or whether) the other person or organization learns and shares that learning with others. They do not have to learn exactly like you do, but there is so much to be gained if you value learning in similar ways.
One of the first things Gretchen, Eric, and I discussed was an opportunity for non-profit organizations to learn more about their brands and new communications approaches. In one of the most fun and learning-friendly collaborations I’ve had the privilege to join, we’ve created and are now launching the Emerging Communications Series, a free six-part experience for local non-profits (still time to join us — registration deadline is July 24).
A genuine understanding of collaboration. I’m the fourth team member at DVQ Studio and the first non-designer. I wish I could really express how excited this makes me… too often, design is not fully recognized in strategy and designers are only viewed as implementers. DVQ is the right size and of the right mindset to value each communications discipline in an equitable and strategic way.
A focus on socially-driven organizations. We’ve talked a lot about focusing on non-profit organizations and small businesses that strive to be socially responsible. We believe the unique needs of mission-driven clients call for a special skill set, one that we’ve developed through our collective experiences as non-profit staff members, volunteers, and consultants. I’m eager to support the good work DVQ has already begun with many local non-profits and help them expand that work.
I’ll have more to share as this experience progresses. In the meantime, if you’re interested in communications insight and resources, please give DVQ a follow on Twitter. And if you’re connected to non-profits in West Michigan, we’d love to have your support in spreading the word about the Emerging Communications Series.
For the first time, I feel change and connections happening organically. I’m meeting people and talking about new ideas at a clip that I can almost feel but that I did not “push”.
The challenge with connections and ideas bubbling up like this is that too often, you notice it happening only through a passing glance or in complete retrospect, sometimes when it’s too late to take full advantage of an opportunity, or sometimes when it’s too early and you’re not ready to trust the potential.
In the past, this hasn’t set well with someone like me, who believes challenges should be anticipated, opportunities are everywhere, and personal expectations have to be high to be prepared. I’ve believed that a good plan is the only bridge from where I am now to those opportunities.
This was obvious in how I planned for this year. I said I wanted to have a more creative year. I shaped that goal into a stringent plan, believing the disconnect between my life and its creativity was a matter of structure. What I’ve learned is that my creativity was actually lacking space.
This year feels like it could be one of my most creative yet, despite having abandoned the rigorous system I established for myself, as well as my structured definition of creativity. I wanted to finish a book, write a lot of poetry, and be a creative writer. Instead, I’ve met a lot of new people, identified a lot of new opportunities, and discovered new questions to ask about myself and my community.
I didn’t wake up one morning and decide this would happen. I don’t know what clicked along the way that left me with this approach, but I can point to a few factors that must have been influential:
Space. Without a doubt, working on a mix of projects between my family businesses, consulting, and community groups has allowed me to explore opportunities freely. Time is my own currency now… my success is judged based on the results of my efforts rather than the number of hours invested (and when and where they were invested).
Experience. I’m starting to sense the difference experience makes, and now I want to reframe that word. The mistake we’ve made as it relates to experience is equating it to qualification. The power of my life and professional experiences is not that they make me more or less qualified… instead, they make me more steady and empathetic, help me gain exposure more easily to new people and networks, and in turn reduce some of the risk of living without a tight plan.
Trust. Planning is a great way to cover deficiencies in experience. You might plan more the first time you visit a city than the second time. This urgency to plan and anticipate is connected in some way to matters of trust. I didn’t trust my college advisor and her thoughts on my college journey, so I created a plan that showed her it’s possible to graduate in three years. Ok, impressive maybe. But it reinforced an unhealthy expectation/assumption: if you have a great plan, you’ll get to a great spot, and you’ll get there more efficiently than the next guy. Or, put another way, trust the plan more than the desired outcome.
This isn’t about regret, but it is about reflection. Regret undermines experience, which in turn would change where I am now. And I like where I’m at. Appreciating that one way of living (and planning) got me here helps me realize I’m in the midst of recreating that (or letting it recreate itself, I guess) to see where I land next.
As I’ve thought about this, I’ve mentioned it to some of my favorite older, wiser people locally. One person who essentially makes plans for a living told me she’s never had one for her life… I was probably unreasonably surprised by this. I’m really curious now about other people’s stories and their own process for planning or not planning, identifying new opportunities, etc. Especially as we lose some of the traditional structures for getting from point A to point B, will flexibility and space become the values, rather than structures, formulas, and plans?
I’m back from a blogging hiatus, caused by a combination of less-than-positive thinking and cheating on my blog with Twitter. While I’ve been away, I’ve been thinking a lot about learning, people who learn and innovate, and how that relates to the holy grail known as the knowledge economy.
The knowledge economy appears to be the next desired stop on our way out of this recession. It’s a nice concept – transition from a world where we make widgets and produce things in a linear fashion to a world that is more open and flat, with a focus on people, how they think, how they learn, and what that means in terms of what and how they exchange.
But we’re in a mushy spot on the road to this shift, and that’s where my frustration has been over the past few months.
Why should you or I care? Because how we approach an emerging economy has huge implications for how we build our communities and who is included in that effort. How we adapt at the most local level will determine how we transition on the larger scale… I guess I believe the knowledge economy is inherently a grassroots change. (Your thoughts?)
I’m noodling through how to express this constructively, but for now, here’s what I’m chewing on – you could call these missed opportunities or manageable factors on the way to a new kind of working:
A lot of emphasis is on pathways – but what about practices?
Particularly in Michigan, new efforts have focused on increasing the number of college graduates, connecting students with internships, and other initiatives that build a knowledge workforce. What about internal culture, business models, and practices? My sense is that small businesses will be more nimble in this regard, but I wonder how large organizations are making visible shifts or assessing their readiness for new ways of working.
Some companies hire for innovation but manage for status quo.
If organizations want to embrace new ways of working and a new economy, one of the easiest things to do is hire innovators and learners and explore how they think. Sometimes cultural shifts require individual champions. But in my experience, there’s a disconnect between hiring innovators and welcoming the change they bring.
You know your company is struggling with this if they talk about new ideas and bold projects with public stakeholders but internally scoff ideas for improving process, require exhaustive rationale whenever suggesting a different approach, or fail to understand the value of learning if it can’t be directly quantified or monetized. (Maybe this is a regional issue?)
Some choose short-term production over long-term progress.
Maybe we just can’t help ourselves — maybe we’re so darned used to building cars and furniture and parts. If we can build a functional chair and cut some corners along the way, why not? A chair is still a chair, right? And any time you can make a process more efficient, you’re helping the bottom line, right?
It seems knowledge-driven work requires a new kind of logic and new definitions of what makes process and products successful. Efficiency isn’t enough anymore, and it doesn’t mean the same thing. I imagine the organizations that add value to their process and articulate this sense of savvy to customers will be the winners… even if at face value they are selling a similar “end product”: a chair, a car, a website, etc. (For example, would consumer demand for green products be the same if consumers were still only interested in end products like hand soap, detergent, and clothing? We can’t underestimate or ignore the fact that consumers are changing, too, and are already ahead of some companies in terms of this thinking.)
- Again, these are initial thoughts based on personal experiences, conversations, and reading. What has been your experience? What are the hiccups on the way to a new kind of economy, and what does this mean at the local or individual level?
Earlier this week I read “The price of saying no at work”, hoping to find practical suggestions for how to say no and still be successful. Instead I discovered the suggestion that for women, career ladders are revealed only for those who say yes and keep saying yes.
The women interviewed agree: you can say no at any time. If you don’t like the consequences of the ambitious “yes” life (which the women say include everything from forgetting birthdays to unleashing “untold brutality” on their marriages) you can opt out. But know that “ you will have narrowed the opportunities,” according to one woman.
Not only do I not agree with this kind of thinking, but if this is the approach older professional women take to career development, then I’m starting to understand why I have observed disconnects around mentoring.
Women’s history can be a guide for why this is happening. From the perspective of my generation: Our great-grandmothers could not vote for part of their lives, and our grandmothers could not work except within strict stereotypes. Our mothers were the first generation of women for which opportunity opened up. It still was not easy or freely given, but it was more than earlier generations had enjoyed. Our mothers’ civic influence was enhanced in the 1970s, their personal development was encouraged by measures like Title IX, their careers were fostered thanks to higher attendance in college (and the social understanding that they would or should have a career at all).
Many of the women who now run companies and mastered the career ladders the article refers to arrived on the professional scene at a time when women could finally attempt to have it all, yet they still had to do it all to make that possible. So it’s not surprising they feel they had to say yes to everything – was there really another option?
But I don’t think this approach is relevant anymore or healthy. Besides the personal turmoil the “yes” life can create, my generation has seen consequences that undermine the supposed rewards of this approach. We’re watching companies crumble, taking the assets and benefits promised to their longstanding employees down with them.
Based on these realities and other factors, I think young women in my generation tend to be more holistic when it comes to decision-making, priority-setting, and to assessing consequences of both. In general, I think young professionals today are too entrepreneurial and open-minded to perceive “yes” and “no” opportunities. There is never truly a “narrowing” of opportunities. There is only a shifting of opportunities until we get to the life we want, and even the understanding of what we want may change over time.
And at least for me, that’s okay. I left a rewarding job with ample opportunity at a communications firm to work for my family business. I took a 50 percent cut in my pay to do it. Those yes-women would probably be ashamed of me and signed off on my career.
The problem was never the kind of work I was doing – it was how I was doing it and how it aligned with the life I wanted. So a year later, I’ve shifted again, working fewer hours at the family business and providing communications consulting to nonprofits. I’m financially consistent with where I was before despite working less, and I’m thinking of starting a business. These are not my most important indicators of success by any means, but they reassure me that I may have said no to one opportunity, but it was the most catalytic “no” decision I’ve ever made.
So I guess I’ll say what I expected the article to say:
- Knowing yourself well and identifying what you need to be personally happy and professionally fulfilled is a skill – develop it in that way. Self-knowledge will sharpen your intuition when decisions need to be made, and knowing your priorities will give you permission to say “no” when what seems like an opportunity is actually a misfit career or personal move.
- Identifying decision-making points and making intentional decisions is more important than whether your answer is yes or no. If you anticipate opportunities and evaluate them intentionally, you can’t make a bad decision. You can only make the decision that is best for you at that time.
- Our lives are more connected than we know, and our careers are more circular than we know. If you say no now, I believe there is still a chance that opportunity may return at a time when it is a better fit. What matters most are the relationships you keep. Opportunities don’t emerge from businesses or titles; they come from relationships and learning. Stay connected to those who relate to your career ambitions – chances are good they will be your conduits to knowledge or decisions affecting your career.
