Last week, I took a day off from work. There were many things that happened including rolling power outages and cancelled meetings that left my calendar uncharacteristically open. I realized as I put my out of office message up that it was the first day in months that I had stepped away from the “office.”

I put “office” in quotes because the shift to remote work has erased the boundaries between our personal and work lives. Unless we choose to go to the secluded backwoods where there is no cellular service, we literally can be connected from anywhere in the world and keep working.

More than ever, we must make a conscious choice to take a break and step away from our work and to support our teams and colleagues as they do the same.

There were two examples from last week that allowed me to step away:

I was asked to provide some key information for leadership that required someone who was on vacation. After talking with my boss, we chose to delay a meeting rather than disturbing that person on their vacation.

On my day off, I got some news that I needed to deal with. After calling one of my team members to share the news, he told me that he was going to send me some information but extracted a promise from me to not look at it until I got back to work and to enjoy my day off.

These are small examples but made a huge difference in allowing me to unplug and reminded me of how important it is to support each other in stepping away from work.

How do you support your colleagues when they take a break?

Last week, my leadership team joined the IT leadership team from the Wexner Medical Center to participate in the “Health Athlete” training program from the Ohio State School of Nursing. This is a program that was co-developed by Jim Loehr, whose work I have loved for many years and so I was very excited to attend the training.

The training was very focused on self-work and understanding our own values, habits and stories that drive energy. The goal at the end of the training was to find one small change that we could commit to in the next 90 days that would help us live more fully into our own values and priorities.

One of the sessions was very emotional for me as I uncovered a ton of negative stories that had been draining my energy and optimism. Making that visible to myself in a supportive and safe setting was both informative and empowering.

My “ah-ha” moment during the training was when the instructor talked about reframing the boatload of work that she had from “I have to…” to “I get to…” I realized that over the last several months, my perspective had changed from one of excitement and opportunity to one based on obligation and overwhelm.

My small change that I have committed to for the next 90 days is to use that reframe from “I have to” to “I get to.” My commitment to make that small change is helping me recognize how often I had been mentally shifting to “I have to” in all aspects of my life.

Just one example is that I have a goal to ride as many miles as I am years old on my birthday each year. Even though I love to cycle, I realized that I was NOT very excited when I thought about doing that this year because I was thinking of it as an obligation.

I did that ride last Saturday with so much joy! I got to ride 56 miles this year because I had the health, equipment, time and friends to do that ride with me.

What mental reframes have you found to be empowering and energizing in your life?

I have been feeling ungrounded lately. By that, I mean that I have been exhausted and grumpy, which is not normal for me. I went into scientist-mode and started experimenting to see what would help me feel better.

I started with physical things. I adjusted my CPAP settings, increased my exercise and focused on eating more healthy foods. Those things helped me feel less tired, but the grumpiness remained.

This meant that I needed to address my intentions and core motivations. I explored what might be happening with two trusted advisors—my executive coach and my husband. Both were helpful.

My executive coach gave me a summary of the Mastering Leadership model developed by Bob Anderson that has helped me immensely. You can learn more about this model at www.leadershipcircle.com.  The main point in the leadership model is that transformational leaders experience a profound shift of mind and character as they focus on outcomes rather than problems.

When we are problem-focused, our main goal is to reduce our anxiety when a problem occurs. This is fear-based and moves us away from our desired outcome. Being outcome-based involves being driven by a purpose, translating that purpose into a vision, and fully committing to that future. This means that because there is a gap between our current reality and our desired outcome, we need to EXPECT creative tension in ourselves and our teams.

The conversation with my husband was also illuminating.  He observed that I had stopped talking about my purpose to unleash the potential of every person and wondered why I had shifted my focus.

I am still working through this and am trying to figure out how to fully commit to my purpose but already feel more grounded and know that this is a lifelong journey, not a destination.

What helps you feel grounded?

Uninterrupted time to reflect and focus is hard to come by and absolutely necessary if we want to be innovative. I think of innovation as systematic improvements to any part of our processes, services or systems and want every person on our team to feel empowered to innovate.

Knowing we need uninterrupted time to do this, our leadership team has committed to each other to block meeting-free zones on our calendars that we will all respect so we can reflect and focus.

The times we have committed to are Meaningful Mondays from 8 to 11 a.m. and Fabulous Fridays from noon to 5 p.m. 

This is how I am planning on using the time.

On Meaningful Mondays, I will use the time to write this blog, which is a reflective exercise that helps me reground and reset for the week.  Then I will give myself space to think about the most strategic and important initiatives that I need to move forward. After doing that, I will usually, but not always, identify concrete work I need to do during the coming week.

On Fabulous Friday, I will use the time to complete commitments I have made during the week. Part of this will be evaluating whether I made progress on the most important items. I will also read articles that I have collected during the week that I want to explore. This time will set me up to be able to let ideas percolate over the weekend when I can start the process over again.

We will be checking in to see whether this practice is helpful through short surveys with our team. This is an experiment that we invite others to join if possible. If it is not possible, we invite you to block Wonderful Whenever on your calendar to make sure you have uninterrupted time for reflection and focused work so that you can innovate.

One of the joys of my move to Columbus for a new job has been an unexpected friendship with a young family who I met through my church. The friendship started when they invited my husband and me to the zoo with their two young children.

We loved being with them and their children and that trip blossomed into a deep friendship with many shared meals and outings. They both just graduated, and their beautiful family is leaving to go back home to Idaho. We will miss them so much.

It would have been so easy for any one of us to not take the energy or time to connect. We all have very busy lives and we all knew that they were leaving at the end of the school year. But the friendship enriched all of our lives and I am so grateful that our paths crossed and we took the opportunity to deeply connect.

My experience is that these deep connections are rare and wonderful and don’t happen very often because they require openness, authenticity and time.

We all crave deep connections. How do you invite them into your life? How do you create them at work?

One of the most difficult things for me is saying no. This is true both personally and professionally. The volume of work, the desire to please others, and the number of interesting and great ideas makes it difficult to decide what should be done first and what should not be done at all.

DevOps has a principle that has helped me understand the cost of doing too many things simultaneously. The principle states that to get things done faster and with higher quality, you must limit your work in progress (WIP).

To illustrate why this is true, it is useful to play a simple game. I have played this game with my team and at conferences and it is highly effective way to learn this concept.

The Name Game

Each person playing the game needs to have five crayons/markers in different colors and this worksheet with 5 customer names. The goal of the game is to write the five customer names as quickly as possible after the timekeeper starts the clock.

• Round 1
  • Each player estimates how long it will take to write the five names and records their estimate at the top of the page.
  • Before starting, gather requirements:
    • Each customer wants their name in a different color.
    • Mark the desired color next to each customer’s name.
    • You must handle all customers’ expectations to their satisfaction.
    • Never keep a customer waiting because that is bad business.
    • The earlier you start something, the earlier you finish.
  • In this round:
    • As soon as the stopwatch starts, begin all customers’ projects.
    • Write the first letter of the first customer in their desired color, then write the first letter of the second customer in their desired color, etc.
    • When the first letter of each customer is written, go back and start writing the second letter of each customer in their desired color, etc.
    • Keep writing all customers’ letters one at a time in the desired color until all customers have received their name.
    • Once you are finished, check your work! Fix any names that are incorrect.
    • If all names are complete and correct, look at the stopwatch and write down your time on your paper.
  • Round 2
    • Before starting, gather requirements:
      • Each customer wants their name in a different color.
      • Mark the desired color next to each customer’s name.
      • Your organization has implemented a DevOps practice and limited the WIP to 1.
      • You are only allowed to work on one customer name at a time.
    • In this round:
      • As soon as the clock starts, you start the first customer’s project.
      • Write the customers’ name in their desired color.
      • After writing the first customer’s name, check your work. Make corrections as necessary.
      • You can only start on the next customer’s name when the previous customer’s name is complete and correct.
      • Once all names are complete and correct, look at the stopwatch and write down your time on your paper.

• Reflection
  • After playing the game, talk about the experience and examine what you learned and how you can apply what you learned to your work environment.

Whenever I do this game, people acknowledge that the ground rules in Round 1 are much closer to our normal work environment, and it is very stressful. The biggest revelation is that no one has a better outcome in Round 1 over Round 2. Round 1 takes 4 to 5 times longer for every customer, produces sloppier outcomes, and stresses out the person doing the work.

The name game shows the effect of switching when performing a simple task. The projects we ask our teams to do are much more complex with high cognitive switching costs.

I would encourage you to do the exercise with your team and ask, “How can I limit the work in progress for me and my team?”

Technology has long promised to make our lives better. While in some ways it has, we can all relate to yelling at our computer or cell phone as we try to do something that we can’t figure out how to do it. I have certainly been there.

One of my favorite thought leaders in how we can work differently to deliver on the promise of technology is Richard Sheridan. He cofounded Menlo Innovations and wrote the book, Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love.His premise, which I completely agree with, is that how we work makes all the difference in the experience for our teams and outcomes for our customers. You can sign up for a virtual tour describing Menlo Innovations’ culture here.

One aspect of Menlo’s approach is something called High-Tech Anthropology where they go out into the world to study the people they intend to design and build software for, learn what their goals, habits and workflows are, and make sure that whatever they are designing will delight the people that one day will use the software they deliver.

I love this philosophy and would invite you to consider the following questions:

• What could you do to make the interactions with our team and technology delightful?
• How do we make it easy to use our systems?