How Do You Think About Socks?

One of the best pieces of advice I got when I first got married was:  “Treat socks as disposable.”

This advice worked well for years for me. I did not get upset when our socks wore out or got lost and it gave me permission to purge orphaned socks on a regular basis.

Then my youngest daughter became obsessed with high quality socks and the obsession spread to the rest of the family. I am now willing to spend more for a good pair of socks than almost any other article of clothing. This is because I am extremely frugal and buy most of my clothes at consignment shops or on clearance.

As the cost of our socks increased, I became less willing to treat them as disposable and became frustrated when expensive socks would wear out quickly or get lost. I have had a couple pair of Darn Tough socks that are over a decade old that I wear several times a week. And Darn Tough offers a life-time warranty on their socks. Now, I only buy Darn Tough socks.

This was a complete shift from how I thought about socks. I am willing to pay a lot of money for comfortable, long-lasting socks.

As our socks have become more permanent, I am now faced with the dilemma of what to do when a single sock goes missing. I just realized that I could easily get rid of my frustration if I gave up on the idea that our socks need to match.

When our attitude about something changes, a behavioral shift is imminent. It’s harder to “live and let go” when you are putting more time, effort or money into something. Rather than dwelling on a problem you can’t fix (like finding a missing sock), get creative with how you face the dilemma and allow yourself grace in the process.

How do you think about socks?

Stressed is being in the weeds. Overwhelmed is being blown. 

One of the best things about working at a university is feeling the energy and excitement of the students at the start of a new school year. Seeing all the students back on campus made me reminisce about my time in college. I remember it as such an incredible time of fun and growth, but also stress. I remember crashing at the end of each semester in utter exhaustion. The natural cadence of the semester with the breaks in between allowed a respite from stress and time to recharge. 

In some cases, we used to have a more natural ebb and flow to our work based on the academic calendar, but we have all seen the pace of change has become more constant and at time it can feel unrelenting, which can lead to burnout. 

I recently read Brene Brown’s book Atlas of the Heart where she talks about the difference between being stressed and overwhelmed. She used the example of working in a restaurant, which really resonated with me.  

“Stressed and overwhelmed remind me of two restaurant terms that my teams and I often use today: ‘in the weeds’ and ‘blown.’ Back in the day, if I walked into the kitchen and told another waiter ‘I’m in the weeds’ – the response would be, ‘What do you need?’ I might say, ‘Can you take bread to tables 2 and 4, re-tea tables 3 and 5, please?’ Being in the weeds and pulling out of the weeds happened to everyone on almost every shift. It was just part of the job, and you learned to manage it. Walking into the kitchen and saying ‘I’m blown’ – well, that’s completely different. The kitchen gets real quiet. No one asks what you need. Normally, someone runs to the hostess stand to find out what tables you’re running that shift – they don’t even assume you know at that point…When you’re blown, you can either step outside or into the cooler or go to the bathroom (and cry). Whatever you need. You’re expected to be back in ten minutes, ready to go, but for those ten minutes, there’s a complete takeover…Stressed is being in the weeds. Overwhelmed is being blown.” (Brown, 5) 

Being “in the weeds” and “blown” has happened to all of us. As leaders, and as a team, our responsibility to each other is twofold – to feel safe saying when we are in one of these states, and to be there to support our teammates when it happens, knowing they will do the same for us. 

I think it would be valuable for our individual and team health to be able to normalize this straightforward way of acknowledging that you need help. Do these resonate with you?  

Discomfort Helps Us Grow

Woman gardening

Examining the stories we tell ourselves has been one of the themes that I have found in many of the most effective leadership tools. As humans, we instinctively create explanations (stories) that reconcile what we are seeing (facts) to what we are feeling (emotions).  This happens so instantaneously, that it is unclear whether the stories create our emotions or if our emotions create our stories.

For many years, I avoided talking about emotions, thinking that they just needed to be managed or ignored. I am coming to see emotions as clues that can help me know when I need to examine my stories, assumptions and core beliefs. This is especially important when I am uncomfortable and feel ungrounded in some way.

When I am uncomfortable, I often find myself looking for someone to blame for my feelings of discomfort, and often I blame myself. My experience is that this is untrue, unhelpful, ineffective, and completely normal and human.

What I know is that my feelings of discomfort are about me, not about the situation that I am facing; I create my own suffering. Recognizing that gives me back my power and points me to doing my own work to understand myself. This is the deep work that each of us must do ourselves if we want to transform and grow.

For me, discomfort can mean many things. It might mean that I am avoiding a conversation that I need to have with someone on my team. It may mean that I am hangry and need to get some healthy food. It may mean that I am tired and need better sleep. It may mean that I am feeling self-doubt and fear of my own failure and need to focus on serving others.

Instead of viewing discomfort as something bad that I need to end as soon as possible, I know that it is temporary and a clue to helping me figure out the best path forward. How do you deal with discomfort?

Finding The Right Tool

Image of tools hanging on a wall

I love tools and am constantly looking for resources that help me do things more efficiently in every part of my life. My husband teases me that I have used the chop saw I bought him as a gift more than he has. At work, my quest has been for tools to help me manage change. This ultimately led me to tools that helped me grow as a leader because I learned that WHO I AM is my most powerful organizational change tool.

I believe that all of us are leaders if we choose to be. At a minimum, we are the leaders of our own lives. You choose to be a leader when you step up to improve the world around you.

I am just starting to dig into a tool that I am really excited about because I have found that in my new role, I don’t have the right tool right now for the level of complexity and ambiguity. The tool is a book called Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization by Kegan  and Lahey. The adult development model described in the book has already helped me. I am planning on doing all the exercises in the book for my own development and growth.

 

Here is the short list of other tools and why they have been so instrumental in my own leadership journey.

What tools have you found to be helpful in your leadership journey?

The Power of Meditation

I recently took part in a leadership panel with three fellow CIOs and the last question we received was, “What is something you wish you would have known when you were younger?” My answer was different than the others and probably unexpected. I said that I wish I had practiced meditation earlier in my life because it has made me a better leader and person.

I started meditation about ten years ago when a friend sent me a link to a 21-day meditation by Oprah and Deepak and asked me to do it with her. I didn’t imagine how important committing to a 21-day program would be fulfilling my dreams personally and professionally.

Both of us really enjoyed the messages and the practice and noticed an immediate difference in how much better our days went when we did meditation. I have meditated almost every day for more than a decade.

The 20 minutes I dedicate each day to guided meditation helps me practice being fully present in the moment and helps stop my racing mind. Each day is different, and some days are better than others. But the consistency and focus on improving have remained over the years. Meditation has helped me to better examine my narrative, generate insights, and recenter myself for the purpose of developing positive leaders and organizations. It has changed my brain, my life, and the energy that I bring to the world.

Because meditation has been so helpful for me, I serve on the board of Inner Strength Education, a non-profit organization in Philadelphia that has taught mindfulness to more than 16,000 high school students. I would challenge you to try it. Inner Strength developed a mobile app, VIBE, that might be helpful to you to learn about mindfulness and try different types of meditations.

What has been your experience with mediation?

Embrace Discomfort, Discover Joy

Person performing yoga in front of a sunset

It took my best friend almost two years to convince me to try yoga. My standard response when she would suggest it was that I wasn’t flexible, so I couldn’t do yoga. She would not so gently remind me that the entire reason I should do yoga was to increase my flexibility. Her persistence and my stiff neck eventually prevailed, and I signed up for a beginner Iyengar Yoga (link is external)class. That was almost 15 years ago.

One of the things that I love about Iyengar Yoga is its emphasis on proper technique and the extensive use of props to ensure that you safely support your body as you try the different postures. Taking that beginner class was foundational to giving me the knowledge, skill, and confidence to shape my practice in ways that work for me.

I have done in-person classes, online classes, yoga apps, and personal practice. Yoga is now one of my most valued tools for being the person and leader I aspire to be. The following mantras that I have learned and practiced doing yoga help me every day when I am working.

  • Your breath is the primary tool to release tension.
  • Practice being uncomfortable and managing yourself when things are really hard.
  • Focus on your own experience, and don’t compare yourself to anyone else in the room.

I went on an educator trip to China a few summers ago with several other faculty and colleagues from Temple. One of the faculty members who was traveling with us was a yoga instructor, and he generously offered to lead us in yoga each morning. One of my favorite memories of that trip is doing yoga in the hotel hallway at 6 am with my friends.

While I initially resisted trying yoga, it now brings me joy daily.

What are you resisting? What could happen if you stopped resisting and stepped into the discomfort of trying something new?

Shift Your Mindset, Keep Your Focus

night light on a bed stand

Sleep: Photo by Beazy on Unsplash

 

I think of sleep as one of my superpowers. I can typically fall asleep within a couple of minutes after climbing into bed and rarely have insomnia. Unfortunately, as I have been moving and changing jobs, my sleeping superpower has gone on hiatus, and I have been waking up several times each night and unable to go easily fall back asleep.

Because this has been happening for several weeks, I have had a chance to try many different techniques and remedies, and none of them have been particularly effective. I found that as the weeks went by, when I woke up in the middle of the night, my anxiety about not being able to go back to sleep was increasing and compounding my insomnia.

After several weeks of the same approach, I shifted my mindset. I decided that I was not going to think of this as a problem but started paying close attention to what my body was saying that it needed and doing what it was saying it needed without added internal commentary.

The first night after I decided to shift my thinking, I woke up at 1:30 am and immediately started thinking about a couple of things I needed to do, so I got up and started doing the tasks. After I completed the tasks, I felt sleepy and went back to bed and slept for a few more hours. Finally, I woke up feeling refreshed and not tired.

The next night, I woke up around 2 am and felt tired, so I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Every night has been different. I have started to pay attention to when I feel sleepy at night, and instead of finishing watching a show or writing an email, I stop and go to bed.

This mindset shift has been helping me get the rest I need, even if it is in a different pattern than I have in the past.

Accepting what has changed turns out to be the most effective way forward. Resistance only shifts our focus and energy to what we don’t want, making it more likely to happen. This is especially difficult to do when we lose one of our superpowers.

Supporting team members who have ideas for improvement

“Dreaming and Doing” by Sam Howzit is licensed under CC BY 2.0


One of the foundational practices in DevOps and Agile is to support team members who have ideas for improvement. This is difficult to do because we have a lot of work to get done and trying out new ideas creates more work. When the idea crosses organizational lines and normal job duties, it is even more difficult to take action. We have implemented Wonderful Wednesdays as a way to give time to explore ideas and practice creating self-organizing teams. A recent example reaffirmed to me why this practice is so important, especially when you are trying to transform the way that your team works.
Like most organizations, we have a help desk with software that we use to track all of the requests for support. This software is managed by the help desk team. One of our new help desk team members, Dominic (Dom) Malfara, was looking for ways to be more efficient in updating the software. He wanted to be able to upgrade the software in the middle of the day and be able to quickly recover if any part of the system went down. He reached out to our infrastructure engineering team, who were investigating how to use Kubernetes containers to automate and modernize our server environment.
That team embraced Dom, recognizing that if they could containerize our Remedy environment, which consisted of many servers with a vendor that didn’t support containers, it would be an ideal environment to learn for the entire team. The team leader invited Dom to the team’s daily stand-ups, Trello board, and Teams channel. Throughout the project the entire team was inclusive and accommodating. Despite org chart lines, Dom felt like he was part of their team and it was exciting working towards a goal with them. The infrastructure team reprioritized their work and helped Dom identify all of the layers of systems and management tools needed to fully automate and containerize the Remedy servers. 
This took several months and required full support from the leaders on the help desk and the infrastructure engineering team. Doing this required more time and more people than a traditional upgrade of the Remedy servers. It required making the time to experiment. 
Dom was successful in containerizing the Remedy environment. It did not go perfectly.  We had a bit of user interruption throughout the day as we made the transition. Through the problems, the help desk leadership team didn’t yell or blame anyone, but instead asked what they could do to help. Various team members posted screenshots or descriptions of things that were broken, allowing Dom space to focus on calmly fixing things so they would not happen again.
The results have been everything that we hoped for and worth the investment of time. We halved the needed hardware. Upgrades are now done by building parallel environments which mean we can fully test the new production environment and roll over and back between the old and new environments in seconds. All the hard work now occurs up front, and not during a maintenance window where people are prone to rush/make mistakes. Because the work is now automated and reproducible, bringing up a new test environment takes minutes instead of days. We can monitor the system load and scale instantly when needed. 
A couple of weeks after the transition was done, Dom did a presentation during Wonderful Wednesday teaching others across ITS. I went to the presentation and was in awe of the amount of learning and technical knowledge that was required to make the transition. It was one of the highlights of my year.
Thanks to Dom raising his hand and the infrastructure team fully supporting him, we have a roadmap on how to make the rest of our infrastructure more efficient, modern, and scalable. As a leader, it reinforced to me how important it is to support those individuals and teams who raise their hand and give them the time and resources to learn and make your organization better.
Here are my questions for you this week.

  • How do you support individuals who raise their hands with an idea? 
  • How do you treat others who come to you with an idea that requires you to change what you are doing? 
  • Is there a project you are working on currently that someone could collaborate with you for mutual benefits if they only had some way of knowing about it?

===============================================================
Epilogue: As part of the process of writing these blogs, I always ask for feedback from the people who are mentioned in the blog. I wanted to include this email from Dominic to me about his view of the experience.
Hello Cindy,
Thanks for sharing, I just wanted to share some quick notes on the overall experience because it was really special to me. Our self-formed team was definitely influenced by all of the changes made to the culture and how ITS members are reacting to that: 

  • Wonderful Wednesday allowed me the freedom and time to invest in pursuing something innovative instead of doing things how we always have, WW got me quick buy-in from Jim and Paul because instead of battling with scheduling time to prove value in something and how it prioritized with our other work, I was able to use that reserved WW time to learn skills and proof of concept this project. I was excited to work on new technologies and make life better for us and that energy didn’t go to waste having to meet and debate and formalize things. Natural experimentation took its course and we got to follow an informal guideline of what we wanted to accomplish and how we were going to do it
  • Slack/Teams promotes open communication across the organization so it is now commonplace to talk to others in ITS, I get to interact with members of IT that I might not even meet otherwise. Help or knowledge with something is a message away, and with group chats I get visibility into what people are working on, instead of knowledge being hidden in email chains that I wasn’t CCed on or meetings I wasn’t a part of (the all-staff meetings, summits, and What’s New newsletter all influence this as well). I heard that Infrastructure Engineering was already exploring Kubernetes and we got to learn that together.
  • Leaders like Jorj, who doesn’t have a reporting relationship with me, but acted as a strong mentor and helped break down any barriers I faced along the way anyway. People like him that are genuinely interested in the technology and making Temple a better place are really inspiring and I hope I can pay that forward and influence those around me

Thanks again to Jorj for all his help and mentorship, and to you for the culture you are creating in Temple ITS! This project wouldn’t have been possible without it. I have learned a lot of valuable career skills and the failures/mishaps along the way that gave me real world lessons and I honestly had fun doing it! 😄
Thanks again, 
Dominic Malfara

Give Yourself Permission

https://www.pxfuel.com/en/free-photo-eoltg


One of the nicest things about the holiday break is that you can take time off and not have emails and work pile up while you are out of the office. So many of my colleagues talk about how much they appreciate having this pause at the end of the year.
All of my kids and their significant others were able to come to our house for Christmas this year. My husband and I decided that our gift to our family was a shared experience. We did a quick road trip to New York City where we watched the Harry Potter plays, walked all over the city, and ate some amazing food. Then we settled in at home, playing board games, solving puzzles and enjoying being with each other. We had so much fun. 
For me, it was an exercise in being in the moment and really relaxing into the joy of having my family around me. I noticed that a few times during the break, I started to get upset as I worried about a specific concern about one of our kids. Each time that happened, I was able to catch myself and stop. I knew that my ability to stay out of worry and cherish the person in front of me was key to making the vacation positive for our entire family.
Our time together was everything that I hoped it would be. It was wonderful.
My return to work has been hard. Since starting back at work, falling asleep has been difficult, which is unusual for me. I have been lying in bed, ruminating about a number of things and feeling anxious that I am not able to sleep. This means that it is difficult to get out of bed in the morning. I find myself choosing to turn off my alarm instead of getting up to head to the gym. The combination of lack of sleep and exercise has left me feeling exhausted and unfocused.
As I was lying in bed this morning, after ignoring my alarm for the second time, I found myself mentally berating myself for my lack of discipline.
When I realized what I was doing, I was able to stop. 
I chose to enjoy that moment, instead of trying to figure out what was wrong with me for not wanting to get up. I reveled in my warm bed, knowing it was my work from home day and I could use my commute time to sleep in. This was my gift to myself. 
I felt so much better after that small shift in mindset. 
One of the most transformational lessons that I have learned in my leadership journey is the power of our own stories. The question I always ask is “What story am I telling myself?” When I take the time to do this and investigate, I find that most of my stories are not true. I fundamentally believe that everyone is doing the best that they can and my job as a leader is to create an environment where everyone thrives. This means that I need to stay out of judgement and blame in order to look for ways to improve the situation. Extending that philosophy to myself is what I have been working on for many years.
I know that my ability to stay out of worry and cherish myself and the person in front of me is key to making the positive transformation happen. Doing this requires stamina, energy, focus and consistency. Sometimes I get tired and need to give myself permission to rest.
How do you rest physically, socially and mentally? How do you find respite from your recurring worries?

Be kinder than necessary

Picture of sad girl with Plato quote, "Be kind to everyone you meet for everyone is fighting a hard fight."n

Original image by Axel here, www.flickr.com/photos/zaxl4/99863335


I caught a nasty cold that laid me out for the entire weekend and continues to linger as I head into the week. The cold has sapped my energy and left me too much time for rumination and limited ability to do the things that bring me joy, like exercising and connecting with friends and family.
In my leadership class last week, we talked about the optimal positivity ratio where most people, relationships and teams thrive. It turns out that in order to thrive, you need to experience between 3-6 positive emotions for every negative emotion. Being ill has reinforced to me how critical it is to have that same level of positivity personally and how easily it can be lost.
When I am feeling well, my days start with exercise at the Y with supportive workout buddies and meditation with my husband before I head to work. As I drive, I listen to an engrossing novel or uplifting business audio book, or just sing along to some of my favorite songs. Those habits before I get to work help me to arrive filled with positive energy.
This has not been possible in the past week and the absence of these positive rituals combined with my illness has left me tired and down. 
Whenever I get ill, I am reminded of my mother. Multiple sclerosis (MS) took my mother’s energy, mobility, and personality. The cost on the rest of our family was high, especially for my father and youngest brother and sister who cared for her for 15 years while she was bed-ridden. For many years, I was really angry with my mother for not fighting her disease. My compassion for my mother has grown over the years as I have faced my own challenges. But when I am knocked down by a simple cold, I am reminded that I have not really gone through anything close to what she experienced with her MS.
Most of what another person is dealing with is hidden and unknowable to us. So when we are dealing with others at work or home, the mantra, “Be kinder than necessary” is wise. It will help to increase the positivity ratio for both you and the person receiving your kindness. 
Today happens to be World Kindness Day. My challenge to you this week is to increase the positivity ratio in your life and workplace with small acts of kindness.