Fourteen years of coaching professional women have taught me some of the most prevalent patterns of imbalance and the interventions that can restore a sense of well-being and sanity.  

I don’t mean to sound facile about these solutions.  The details are always unique to the individual and difficult for her to see from within the experience.  Moving forward generally happens very slowly.  I don’t believe in a happily-ever-after kind of unconscious happiness, but I passionately believe that some kinds of suffering can be alleviated. 

Here are two patterns of imbalance — experienced as unhappiness — I’ve witnessed with my clients, my friends, and myself, and the course corrections that can make a difference.

1. Feeling out of control, overwhelmed, powerless.  The solution for this  generally involves:  

·     naming it as such, and thereby differentiating it from the feelings of despair, failure, and self-loathing that often accompany it

·     taking back control, increment by increment, wherever possible, by renegotiating agreements, selectively jettisoning obligations, re-prioritizing, and whatever else it takes

As a result, the individual regains firmer ground and some level of control in her life, and feels back in her own power again.  

2. Feeling drained, exhausted, depleted, even sick. 

·     Here too, the place to start is with awareness: name it for what it is, and separate it out from the sense of shame, emptiness, and failure that people often feel as a result of no longer having enthusiasm or passion FOR ANYTHING.  The no-enthusiasm-for-anything syndrome often shows up in people who are very drained and exhausted.

·     Generally what’s also called for is serious rest, recovery, and replenishment which often means cutting back somewhere in order to make room for this. 

In my experience, once people GET that this is what’s going on, that it’s not about personal failure but rather about personal depletion, the reframe is very empowering and they quickly figure out what to do.  They often need support thinking through the pragmatics of it and then implementing it.  Cutting back is particularly difficult for women with a habitual pattern of pleasing others.

As the depletion and exhaustion are replaced with a sense of being nourished and re-charged, at least some of the unhappiness recedes, leaving a generally happier camper.   And a more effective one.

Adequate self-care often results in greater effectiveness, across the board.  This ripple-out effect often surprises the individual, who may feel ”selfish” in administering the self care (often as a last resort).  But it does make sense.  Who’s likely to be the more effective manager, parent, or creative problem-solver: the person who’s exhausted, frazzled, and running on empty or the one whose batteries are charged and whose focus is unambivalent?

If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for your work or your kids.

It’s a no-brainer, but we all forget sometimes.  The nagging, unresolved, unfinished stuff rolling around in our heads saps our energy.   It keeps us from being as effective as we could be because we’re not fully focused on what we’re doing.   For the same reason, it keeps us from enjoying our lives as fully as we could — we’re just not all there for the good stuff. 

Recent findings in brain research reveal that multi-tasking is not an efficient way to work.    Being preoccupied with one thing while doing another is a kind of  multi-tasking.  

While I’m writing this blog post, I’m also thinking about an extended conversation I’m having with my husband.   The background noise of the conversation clogs my writing process and slows me down.  I would be well served to either finish the conversation with him or table it until some specific future time.   If I were to do that, all the energy currently tied up in it would become available to me.  I certainly could use it.

Since finishing the conversation is not an option right NOW, I’m going to plan to do so (or at least resume it ) this evening when we’ll both be home and not working.   Making this decision should open up some bandwidth for me.  I’ll report in at the end of writing this post.

Meanwhile, I want to offer some anecdotal evidence for the point I’m making.  

The nagging, unfinished business under the surface for an accounting consultant I know was that three people on her team were not performing their jobs to the standard she thought was appropriate.  She wasn’t addressing it in any way other than fretting about it. 

Once she articulated it as a problem, she could address it proactively. For each of these employees, she drafted the specifics of what needed to change and initiated conversations with them in which she made it very clear to them what she expected and that this was not optional in any way. 

While she had had prior conversations with them about performance, she felt she had been too vague and general.  This time around, she was absolutely clear. 

The result was that two of the employees immediately started performing to the standard and have been doing so ever since: problem solved.   The third one required training and supervision to perform to the standard, and this training and supervision is currently underway in a structured, scheduled, and monitored configuration.

The secondary results are that the consultant: 
1. no longer feels preoccupied with this issue and has more focus and energy to do her work
2. is pleased with the work she did as a manager
3. is thrilled with the better work that her two employees are doing
4. will have an easier time doing this the next time it comes up in her professional life (and alas, it will)

My bottom line advice is to NOTICE what’s sapping your energy, what’s rolling around under the surface, what’s stressing you.  And then deal with it. 

And yes, I have to say that my own experience of writing this post improved once I decided I would resume my extended conversation tonight.  That allowed me to essentially drop it for now, and that was a good move.

It seems to be Annual Review Season in the lives of several of my clients, so I’m thinking a lot about this subject.

I’m a huge believer in self-acknowledgement in general.  But at annual review season, even moreso. 

Even if you work for an organization that does annual reviews REALLY, REALLY well (and that’s maybe 1% of organizations), and even if you get a REALLY, REALLY great review this year — it’s just not enough acknowledgment.  Why? Because other people don’t know HALF of what you do. 

They’re not there with you on ordinary Tuesday mornings when you navigate a treacherous conversation with an extremely disgruntled client and you somehow manage to turn things around through your listening skills, your relational skills, your technical skills, your integrity, and your sheer endurance.  No one but you even KNOWS what a great save that was and what it required of you!  

But YOU do, and if you were writing your own annual review, you’d get something into it that acknowledged this contribution: the net result, and all that went into it.

No one knows that when you reviewed your notes “one last time” the night before your meeting last week, you came up with a strategy change that would make it a much better meeting.  You went with it, staying up til all hours to make all the other changes your change would require.  And what happened?  To all your staff, it appeared to be just another one of your usual good meetings.  No one knows the degree to which you go the distance. 

But you do.  And if you were writing your own review . . .

So here’s the drill.  Write your own review, for your eyes only.  Acknowledge not only your results, which is the only thing that most people  (including you?) see, but also your behaviors and your personal qualities that are part of the way you work.  

Here are some examples of behaviors that deserve to get acknowledged and rarely do:
You take the time to write a carefully worded email when called for.
You realized you were working inefficiently and took steps to clean it up.
You got timely advice from HR (and followed it) regarding a direct report with performance issues.

Here are examaples of personal qualities to be acknowledged:
You’re reliable, dependable, diligent, and hardworking.
You have high standards and you know when not to be a perfectionist.
You have a great sense of humor.

When you write your own review, be sure to ackowledge your results, behaviors, and personal qualities.  You might consider writing one for work and one for outside of work.   And you don’t have to wait for once a year.

I’ve had the privilege over the last few years of working with some fabulous women who were living the transition from management to leadership.  I say “living the transition” rather than “moving” because it’s much more of a process than a singular event.   It’s a paradigm shift that happens over time. 

Here are a few of its elements:

1. You laser-sharpen what you say and write.  In E.B. White’s words: “When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.”  More succinct communication is often the result of :
     a) better grasp of the bigger picture, fuller understanding of exactly what to communicate and why
   b) greater courage and power to speak the truth and stand behind it
   c) less time/tolerance for fuzziness.

2. You replace your old M/O of “I have to do it all myself” with the understanding that you have to have more help.  Doing it all yourself is not a model for leadership; it’s a model for burnout.  

3. You delegate day-to-day management in order to regularly take yourself to 80,000 feet to see the big picture.   This is particularly true if you are coming from an operations function.  You can’t re-think strategic mission at the same time as worrying about whether there will be enough chairs in the room for the Big Meeting (and wondering who’s on that?).

4. You start contributing at a higher, stronger, more strategic level because you stop wasting time feeling “less than,” second guessing yourself, and feeling like you have to justify your seat at the table.  You ARE at the table.  You start knowing you belong there. 

5. You ask for what you need, knowing that what supports you also supports others and the work you are all doing. 

6. You stop tolerating bad behavior; you redress it.

7.  You get more help. 

8. You start trusting our own questions.   You get them answered, either by finding them out or by convening the conversations that will create them.

9. You become willing to see yourself as a more powerful person. It just stops being a big deal.  You grow into it.

What have I left out?

Would you like to take a look at one company’s bold and effective response to employees’ changing needs for flexibility over the course of a working lifetime?  I have a fascinating book to recommend: Mass Career Customization, by Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg. 

Benko and Weisberg write about how their company, Deloitte, has implemented a very new approach to flex.   

Deloitte has long been a standout leader in creating policies and practices that accommodate people’s needs for myriad forms of flexible work.  They started down this path many years ago as a means of stemming their costly turnover rates, particularly for their most talented women.  They were losing highly talented women from the partnership track at an alarming rate, mostly during the years when these women had young children.    Deloitte became the poster child company for family-friendly policies, and they reaped phenomenal savings in dollars and morale by dramatically increasing retention across the board. 

Now they’re taking it to the next level by implementing a broad system of customizing employees’ schedules and workloads a year at a time, based on the employee’s needs.  They call this dynamic “mass career customization” (MCC) , and this is the book that tells the story. 

Deloitte is normalizing the need for flexibility: it’s no longer seen as an accommodation or a one-time need that will evaporate at some point (and the sooner the better!).   Rather, Deloitte is acting as if anyone could need an  unconventional schedule or workload during any or all of their working years, so better to be nimble enough to roll with these needs rather than lose the employee.   The result is a robust and committed workforce with extraordinary capacity.   Because the company benefits, I think we’ll see a lot more of this in the future.

According the Professor Myra Hart of Harvard Business School, ”With an MCC approach, corporations are not saying, ‘I want only your good years or the years in which you can make a maximum contribution.’  Instead, corporations are saying to  employees, ‘We really want a lifetime contract with you.’  This is a very new approach to employee retention.”

Shelly Lazarus, Chairman & CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, writes, “Finally, a book recognizing that the needs of today’s knowledge workers are far from a women-only issue. Mass Career Customization provides an incisive analysis of what’s really happening on the talent front and a comprehensive approach of what to do about it.”

I can’t say it reads as fast as fiction, but it’s a great read.  You may think you’re reading fiction when you see what’s going on at Deloitte.   Check it out.

Something very curious is happening in my business.  I am being contacted more frequently these days to consult or present to a variety of organizations regarding flexible scheduling:

• how individuals can most successfully propose it to their managers
• how managers can have effective conversations about it
• the degree to which flexible scheduling helps retain talented individuals
• how an individual can figure out whether/how his job can be flexed
• how an individual can know whether flex is “the answer” for her/him.

I come to this topic from the perspective of the individual; most of my work since 1995 has been coaching individual professionals on work-life and career-related dynamics.  Since many of my clients are managers, I also know the perspective of the individual manager regarding her own work-life balance and flex options as well as those of her direct reports. 

Why am I seeing a sudden uptick in inquiries about the policy side of things?  Have we reached some tipping point and now organizations in many more industries have to offer flexible scheduling policies in order to attract and retain the talent they need?  As distinct from just a few years ago, when only the most progressive industries and companies had such policies?  Is this only happening in companies experiencing growth?  In fact, all of the organizations I’ve heard from are doing well.

But I know some companies are scaling back on flex policies, siting the recession as the cause.  And I know that some individuals who would love to flex their jobs are not even thinking about bringing it up right now, they are so afraid of making waves, so afraid of losing their jobs.

What’s happening in your industry and in your organization?  Are policies for flexible scheduling part of your landscape?  Who uses them? 

In some organizations, they’re only available to the most senior and talented people with the best track records, and only then because these people make it clear they won’t stay at the company without them. 

In other companies, flex policies are used mostly by people who are not ambitious and not on the leadership track; working a reduced or non-standard schedule can be both an indicator and cause of being off the leadership track at places where this is the culture.

Still other companies have flex policies that are used by their executive leadership, who not only support it, they also model it.  These tend to be the companies where flexing thrives, and so does the business.   

I suspect that the increase I am seeing in work-life policy work indicates that a tipping point has been reached and many more organizations are scrambling to institute these policies.  Just the way I imagine at some point many years ago, another tipping point was reached and organizations realized they needed to offer health insurance. 

Either that or some recent change to the SEO strategy on my website  has just made me findable in a new way.  Or both.   

I attended an excellent panel presentation on 10/15/09  at a meeting of the Career Counselors’ Consortium Northeast.   The panelists represented three industries: Life Sciences, the Green Sector, and Human Services, and they discussed the emerging trends in their fields, particularly related to employment and career opportunities.

The panelists were articulate, informed, and quick.  Here are the trends they reported.

Life Sciences and the Green Sector are growth industries in MA and in the US generally.   These industries are seeing a great shortage down the road of professionals with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) training and experience.   If you have a STEM background and wish to move into one of these fields, start your engines, and start talking to people.

And, not all the growth opportunities in these fields require STEM background.  Many of the opportunites in these industries are similar to what’s needed in any industry:  expertise in marketing communications, finance, HR, accounting, training and development, and so on. 

If you are interested in moving into either of these growth fields (Life Sciences or the Green Sector) and you have skills and experience outside of STEM, the way to start is to first identify your particular interest — is it the environment?  cancer research?  medical devices?  renewable energy? 

Once you know that, find out who the players are in that field, in your part of the country.  Find out everything you can about these organizations.  Use your network to talk to people who work there, and find out what you can about how they staff the the kind of work that you do.  

Essentially you want to find out what it would take for you to make a move into that organization.  Are you marketable to them as you are?  Is there particular experience you could obtain that would make you a more compelling hire?  And so on, as you would with any other job campaign.

Regarding Human Services . . . I’ve been reading for the last few years that the human services field is also growing.   I always found this very puzzling, since it appears that funding for these kinds of services is always getting cut.   During the Q & A with the presenters, I got an answer to this seeming contradiction.  Yes, there is a growing NEED for human services providers and practitioners, but no, there are no corresponding policy changes to support more jobs in the field.  The trend reports seem to ignore this critical detail. 

Certainly the news about emerging job trends in Life Sciences and the Green Sector is good.  These fields offer opportunities to technical and non-technical people alike, as well as to professional and non-professional contributors.