Positivity

The Power of Meditation

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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?

Take Control of Your Response

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My husband and I have been really looking forward to our trip to Florida for a family reunion. Because of COVID, we have not been able to go for the last two years, so we were especially looking forward to reconnecting with our family and spending time in the sun.

Our expectations were quickly altered when we looked at the weather forecast and saw that rain was predicted for five of the seven days of our vacation. We changed our car rental from a convertible to a more sensible choice just before boarding the plane for the first leg of our flight south. We made it to Charlotte without incident, and then watched for hours as our flight was delayed due to an enormous storm crossing over Florida.

My husband and I did several things to pass the time. We alternately walked around the airport to get some exercise. We engaged fellow passengers and had several pleasant interactions. We read our books and email on our phones. We tried to make a game of when we would leave.

When the gate agent announced that we had a short window of time to take off if we were going to make it to Florida, everyone cooperated, and several people commented about how pleasant and understanding everyone was being. As we landed in the rain in Florida, a collective spontaneous cheer erupted from the passengers.

When we collected our luggage, one of the wheels from my bag had come off. As I was pointing this out to my husband, one of our fellow passengers told me about the wonderful experience he had when his luggage was damaged and encouraged me to go to the customer service counter. I went to the counter and made a couple of additional positive connections there.

While all of this was playing out, I remember making several conscious decisions to not be annoyed or angry. I know that this was why others stepped in to help and I know that many of them had also made the same intentional decision not to be angry.

When we finally arrived at our condo, our family expected us to be in a terrible mood, but we were not. I am not sure how much I influenced or was influenced by the other passengers’ choices to remain positive and civil, but I know that my internal dialogue and choices made the experience better for me and my husband.

Travel delays are often unpredictable and can be extremely frustrating. In situations where you feel a lack of control, taking ownership of your response can help to put you and others at ease. This week, I encourage you to make the conscious decision to choose serenity in the face of unexpected adversity.

 

Shift Your Focus from Fear to Freedom

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I recently visited my son and his wife, and each night we played a new board game. It was so much fun! One of the reasons that I was able to enjoy playing so much was that I didn’t expect to win (or fear losing) because I was focused on learning a new game each night. 

I was able to contrast that feeling of fun and freedom I experienced learning and playing board games with the feelings I experienced attending a couple of Ohio State basketball games recently. The team struggled in both games, losing one and winning the second in overtime.

I recall being extremely distressed during both games, which I attended with the intention of having fun. As I analyzed why I was distressed, it became clear that I wanted to be associated with a winning team and had tied the outcome of the game with my own self-worth. Any sports fanatic would be able to relate. 

So much of my sense of fun and enjoyment comes from learning new things, meeting new people and solving new problems. It’s easy to feel this way when I am new to a job or situation, but that fun can turn into distress when the things that are being criticized are things that I had a hand in creating because they are tied to my sense of self. 

This insight is helpful to me in two distinct ways. First, it gives me empathy for the people who created the things I am trying to change. Second, when I feel distressed, it becomes a cue for me to change my focus from myself to the impact I want to have on others. It is an opportunity for me to move from fear to freedom.  

What gives you a sense of fun and play? What causes you distress? How can you use your distress as a clue to change your mental habits? 

Finding Joy Through Random Acts of Kindness

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My daughter is in the middle of a stressful semester in college. The last time I talked with her, she shared that to help herself feel better, she started looking for ways to share kindness with others.

Recently while on campus, she noticed that someone had left a water bottle behind at the end of class. She took that bottle and tried to track down the owner. While she wasn’t able to find them, she reflected on how good it made her feel to have tried to do something kind.

That reminded me of some advice my mentor gave me during my recent job transition. He told me to take time each day to thank someone for something they had done, with the goal of surprising that person for being recognized. The challenge was to surprise and delight.

When we combine attention with creativity as we look for ways to be kind, we can delight ourselves and others. As I prepared to write my blog post this week, I felt weighed down by obligation. When we approach kindness as an obligation rather than a fun game, we risk losing our joy in the journey.

February 17 is National Random Acts of Kindness Day and I invite you to join me in finding joy as you look for creative ways to be kind.

Shift Your Mindset, Keep Your Focus

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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.

Passing the Torch of Positive Leadership

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A month ago, I announced I was leaving Temple after five years as VP and CIO. The outpouring of appreciation and well-wishes has been overwhelming and wonderful.  
The thing that I am most proud of during my time at Temple is the deliberate crafting of an empowered and positive work culture. This was a team effort with many people stepping up to help. 
The HR development team created and delivered the “Wiser Way” leadership training that taught common language with concrete tools to improve communication and habits. A self-nominated team developed the mission and later formed the culture committee that included me and our HR partners. A recognition committee developed the “Cheers for Peers” program. We dived into DevOps and Agile practices. We read and discussed books. We created “Wonderful Wednesdays/Whenever” to foster innovation and uninterrupted work time.
Here are a few of the comments from team members about the impact of these cultural changes.

“You’ve lit a spark and set things in a new direction. You’ve made a difference in so many ways starting with ‘seeing’ your staff and other Temple colleagues and encouraging us all to ‘see’ each other, too.” 

“I just wanted to say THANK YOU for everything!  ITS culture is more open-minded, more empathetic, technologically more forward-thinking, and it feels like our collective self-esteem is reaching upward.”  

“You’ve made a profound impact on my professional and personal life through your leadership and example of strength through vulnerability.”  

One colleague cited the book “Stewardship” by Peter Block and the value of service over self-interest. The sentiment summarizes the lasting impact that I and so many leaders in our organization desire to have.

“The book says that ‘Stewardship is to hold something in trust for another. It is the willingness to be accountable for the good of the larger organization or community of which we are a part, by being in service to, as opposed to in control of, those around us.’ I think the way you carry yourself, ‘leadership’ could directly replace ‘stewardship’ in that quote. You truly have left us in a notably better place than when you arrived on many levels that are not articulated by data and statistics. Now it’s up to us to make sure we continue the momentum and example you set. I believe that measure is the simplest yet most important aspect of successful leadership.”

I am now passing the torch of positive leadership to the Temple ITS team. Will the culture that we created together continue to thrive and improve?  I am leaving it in your capable hands.
 

Instilling Hope for Deep Change

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I have been asked to co-lead the strategic planning for the university. This is both exciting and daunting. In trying to get clarity about the assignment, I had my first one-on-one conversation with Temple’s Chairman of the Board, Mitch Morgan. I came away from the conversation filled with hope. I have been playing back the conversation in my mind trying to understand what he did that left me with such positive feelings.
The first thing he did was introduce himself. He described his journey sharing personal details that clearly communicated his values and management philosophy. He talked about how much of his success was being a great people-picker.
Next, he invited me to share my personal journey and deeply listened to my answer asking questions in a caring way that made me feel comfortable.
He emphasized how great he thought Temple was and also why we needed to change. He articulated the urgency for a clear strategy for the university because of the increasingly competitive educational landscape that has been accelerated by the Covid pandemic.  
He honored every person he talked about. His first sentence about every person was that he loved them and I believed that he did. 
He indicated what he was not good at and what he needed help doing.
He clearly articulated the type of leadership he needed to make the change he was seeking at the university. Then he asked me if I would be willing to help and told me why he picked me for the assignment.  
After I said yes, we talked candidly about the challenges and the ways that he would support me as I did the assignment.
In a nutshell, he demonstrated the positive leadership traits that I have been trying to develop for many years and validated my decision to come to Temple. 
My challenge for you this week is to examine how you are interacting with others, especially when you are trying to activate deep change. 

Supporting team members who have ideas for improvement

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“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?

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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

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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

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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.