Harmonics

“It wasn’t until I lost my job, I realized how lost I was in my job”.

Meta’s news today along with other global tech firms has started a wave of downsizing to reduce costs. Investor backed tech firms have grown exponentially in recent years which led to rapid hiring to meet demand. Now just as quickly when the tide turns, we are seeing rapid firing.  Once confidence dips in the markets, the first way many corporates know to stall a share price fall is to make a downsizing call.

In Ireland, we are protected by employment legislation laws around terms and conditions for redundancy, which cushions the blow. In the remote world of work, we now live in, some impacted by these layoffs will be leaving colleagues they never physically met!

In our Outplacement work, I have met thousands of people just after they hear this emotional news. When I meet them, they are often hurt and experiencing feelings of sadness, loss, shame, and anger. They are fearful, not knowing what to do next. It’s an emotional tsunami of feelings as neurochemicals are flooding through the body. They are in a survival emotional state.

The Emotional Spectrum Model illustrates our 8 primary emotions. The 5 primary survival emotions are Fear, Anger, Disgust, Shame and Sadness. They historically protected us from danger when we were being physically attacked. When you lose your job these survival emotions kick in because your self-worth is under attack.

But, the surprise/startle emotion is a potentiator and can flip response states. Between stimulus and response there is a space, this space offers choice. Rejection is an opportunity for Redirection.

Redirection takes time and when you are anxious and fearful, you want the quick fix, the next job! Time is needed to do a career stock-take to clarify how you could move to the thriving side of the emotional spectrum. This is where you seek out roles which bring you excitement and joy. Working in a thriving culture where you are trusted and valued. These are the attachment emotions which bring career happiness and engagement.

In the past two years especially, I have come across many people permanently operating from survival emotions. They are stressed and burned out in their work. They haven’t taken the time to reassess their future career direction. Bad as this news of redundancy will be for some, it is the opportunity to press pause and reappraise their definition of career and life success.

One person I coached through job loss said to me lately – “It wasn’t until I lost my job, I realized how lost I was in my job”.

If you are facing redundancy, I would ask you these three questions to help you do a career stocktake:

• What emotions were you regularly experiencing each day at work?

• When in your career past have you been at your best and what made it so?
• What strengths and skills do other’s say you bring to a project and why?

John Fitzgerald is the Founder of the Harmonics Group. Harmonics specializes in helping organizations plan for change, manage change and support their people through change.

Follow Harmonics on LINKEDIN and keep up to date with trends in the World of Work

I am meeting a lot of people recently who know what they don’t want but don’t know what they want! They are often busy and burned out and need re-direction.

I want to share a simple but powerful model we have used with over 30,000 people in helping them to future proof their career direction.

This model is based on the principles of neuroscience and is used by every successful business to adapt and anticipate future change – so we have adapted this model for careers.

Neuroscience has shown us the human brain has three regions; the ‘instinctive’ reptilian region which is great for taking action and getting stuff done. The limbic system helps us to understand our own and other’s emotions and building new influential connections. The neocortex helps us to stand back, take stock to make decisions about the future.

The brain is lazy and wants to follow the same tried and tested pathway as yesterday. We know from neuroscience, 95 percent of our daily brain activity is unconscious, so most of your decisions, actions, emotions, and behaviour are on autopilot. To future proof, you need to disrupt these habitual patterns to create new neural pathways in the brain and so too new career pathways.

The three regions of the brain give us everything we need to future proof, but from our experience we tend to overload on ‘doing’. This is where the robots thrive executing routine tasks, so as humans we now need to be smarter to stay ahead.

Think firstly about how great businesses balance these three regions of the brain. They need to step back from ‘operations doing mode’ to ensure they are in-tune with their clients changing needs. They do this by conducting ‘research and development’ to adapt their services to stay relevant for the future. This is enhanced by their ‘sales and marketing’ teams in staying close to customers to gain a premium price.

To Future Proof Your Career – You too need to stop being busy in ‘instinctive doing mode’ to take time to reflect and do your own ‘research and development’ to ensure you know what’s changing in the future of work. Once you know what skills and opportunities are in demand, it is within your agency to upskill and/or reskill to increase your market value. You must also do your own ‘sales and marketing’ to build influence and position yourself for what you want not what is simply offered to you.

What We Know Is – We are living in a time poor society; we are ‘always on’ but rarely reflective. We spend too much time in doing mode – what we call ‘the busy box’. Mobile and Digital technology is stealing our focus and distracting us from what we really want. The Great Resignation and Quiet quitting are all symptoms of increasing stress and burnout. What is needed is time out take stock and future proof your career.

Here are 3 Great Questions to Future Proof Your Career –

1. Research and Development – What is changing in my Profession, Organisation and Sector. What skills will this demand?
2. Operations – What skills and work environment give me energy and bring out the best in me?
3. Sales and Marketing – Who needs to know I am seeking new career growth experiences and the skills I have to offer?

The Harmonics Career Stocktake Process is an immersive 1-1 coaching process we offer to both Organisations and to Individuals to help them reflect and reskill to reposition their career on what they really want for the future.

If you are interested in finding out about Harmonics Career Stocktake Coaching Programme, please contact Liam Mc Donnell Harmonics lmcdonnell@harmonics.ie for a confidential chat and we will forward you our brochure

“Know who you are. Know what you want. Know what you deserve. And don’t settle for less.” -Tony Gaskins”

John Fitzgerald is the Founder of the Harmonics Group. Harmonics specializes in helping organizations plan for change, manage change and support their people through change.

Follow Harmonics on LINKEDIN and keep up to date with trends in the World of Work

Carmel called me asking for help as she had just been promoted to a manager role for the first time. I had coached her before. As we got to talk, it became clear to me Carmel hadn’t fully considered the implications of now managing her colleagues.

We met for a coaching session and I went through the ‘4 Success Factors Model’ above. The questions provide a reflective space to think deeply and be well prepared before jumping into a manager role.

Promotion can be exciting, motivating, stressful and all consuming. The excitement of being promoted can overshadow the reality of what is required to succeed. Research shows us between 40%-60% of management new-hires fail within 18 months!

This happens because newly appointed manager fail to pay attention to 1 or more of the 4 Key Success Factors as they transition into their new role.

The First 2 Factors focus on ‘What it takes to succeed’, the last 2 Factors focus on ‘How you will be at your best’.

1. Context – Knowing the Big Picture and not assuming anything. This involves asking searching questions and knowing what resources are available at this time for you to succeed.
2. Clarity -Understanding what success looks like through the eyes of those who appointed you, so you are on the one page from the outset. Clarity also applies to knowing your own values and what you stand for so when it comes to negotiations you are firm to face challenges.
3. Collaboration – The quality of your relationships will determine your success or failure in the role. Developing your emotional intelligence helps you to understand your own emotions and those around you.
4. Coaching – Time and space dedicated to reflection, thinking and planning is critical each day. Select a support team to include a coach, mentor, a specialist just like a professional athlete would do to achieve their performance goals. No one gets there alone.

I would encourage every newly appointed manager to script their own answers to these 4 Key Success Factor Questions to be best prepared.

In Carmel’s case, she was emboldened to seek out answers she had failed to ask because she feared she may have been overstepping the mark. She needed to understand she had now stepped into a position of more authority and responsibility.

If you are interested in finding out about Harmonics newly Appointed Manager Coaching Programmes please contact Harmonics on 01 8942616, 061 336136  or email info@harmonics.ie for a brochure

“The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.” –Ken Blanchard”

John Fitzgerald is the Founder of the Harmonics Group. Harmonics specializes in helping organizations plan for change, manage change and support their people through change.

Follow Harmonics on LINKEDIN and keep up to date with trends in the World of Work

I was coaching a Senior Leader last week and the issue of burnout came up. I gave her an exercise to explore the sources of stress and anxiety for her, by going through a typical week and journaling where she spent her time. I also asked her to share her weekly screen time breakdown usage with me which proved to be the most revealing.

Her total daily screen time was 5 Hours 51 minutes per day!

Her Weekly Screen time highs were

• Instagram 5 hrs 41 mins
• Whats app 4 hrs 32 mins
• Facebook 4 hrs 9 mins
• Spotify 3 hrs 18 mins
• Podcasts 2 hrs 24 mins

Her daily pick ups to look at her phone were 77 with most pick ups on Wednesday topping out at 95 to bring her a total weekly pick up number of 503!

My coaching client is not alone, take a look at your own screen time to see how you compare. My view is we are not reflecting on what this attention economy is doing to our lives.

The US Average is that we spend 5.4 hours a day on our phones each day, 2.24 hours on social media! We check our phones 63 times a day and we are exposed to almost 5,000 advertising messages a day online. We need to wake up and see we are being programmed to react to what others want from us. Advertisers want us to feel needy and unfulfilled so they can promote their products and services through influencers. The perfect body, vacation, house, lifestyle, job! The pressure to be perfect is coming from the outside in.

In my book ‘Future Your Career’, I spoke about determining what you want ‘from the inside out’. We are now living through a massive change in how we work and we need to start making intentional choices based on what we want in our future. We only get what someone else wants of us from our i-phone. We will get what we want when we create space in our lives to visualise and mentally rehearse what we want. This is what Hi- Performing Sport’s athletes do, so why not learn from them. This week choose to be intentional in your choices and not just reacting to what others want from you.

Stand for something – as the saying goes “be yourself everyone else is taken!”

#leadership #futureofwork #timemanagement

 

In a recent workshop I was facilitating for an Organisation, the topic of acknowledgement came up as a common themes in many strands of feedback to the Leadership Team.

A new hybrid ways of working model was being rolled out and the top team were looking for everyone’s buy-in. It soon became clear in the room the model was not getting the buy in they expected.

After some break out sessions and listening to different feedback on the tables it became clear no one really understood the new ways of working model, it had been poorly communicated and the middle manager group were of the view- isn’t this what we do every day anyway!

It was a great example of a business accelerating the change process without any acknowledgement of what people have been through in the past two years. Every business loves a structure, a model, a system to simplify the change process.

In facilitating many of these sessions down through the years, it is clear to me that we focus too much on getting the model right while less on the implications of how this plays out in the real world context of doing my day job.

Humans are complex, change is challenging but one thing is constant. People want to be acknowledged for the work they do, for the unique challenges they have overcome (like working remotely for the past two years). In our rush to accelerate the next change project we are failing to acknowledge our people.

Take the time to listen without rushing in with the answer, empathise instead of criticizing and acknowledge instead of accelerating. These leadership skills are undervalued in the constant striving for more.

As in nature change takes time and cannot be forced.

Processed Fast Foods are bad for us, yet we gobble them down each day. Organic Slow Foods take more time to grow, are less perfect but are much better for us longer term.

Take the time to acknowledge someone on your team today.