"So, how was your weekend?" 😂

By User:JakeBeech - This file was derived from: MyersBriggsTypes.png, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

I read an interview with a female CEO in the The Australian Financial Review the other day (unfortunately paywalled so I can't share it), and she was asked what was the most valuable career advice she'd ever received. Her answer - "treat people the way they want to be treated."

This reminded me of a workshop I attended in the early 2000s, run internally by the global software company I worked for at the time. All the project managers were put through Myers-Briggs and DiSC assessments and spent the day learning how to apply that understanding when working with others - not just to understand themselves but also to learn to recognise what other people actually needed from an interaction.

The instructor started with a story I've always found amusing. Like a lot of us, he'd grown up being taught to treat others the way he wanted to be treated - "do unto others" - and he'd recently worked out that wasn't quite right.

He was a chatty guy, the type who liked a bit of small talk and would ask about your weekend before getting down to business. He just got a new boss, who was logical, direct, always on the move and clearly just wanted to get sh*t done. The working relationship was proving challenging and the instructor was starting to think about moving on.

Then he did this same workshop and worked out he was a high "I" in DiSC (Influence), and his boss was quite likely a high "D" (Dominance). So he changed his approach. Instead of the friendly small talk, he started opening his boss's door and saying "Morning - about that report - do you want option A or B? And then should I do C or D?" The relationship improved almost immediately.

A few weeks later he was at his desk on a Monday morning when his boss came over, leaned casually on the edge and asked "So, how was your weekend?". Yep - the boss had just done the same workshop. 😂 

I've thought about that story a lot over the years, and told it a few times myself - particularly to IT teams, where the "us and them" dynamic with the rest of the business can take on a life of its own. It's a really effective way to demonstrate the point about how to get the best outcome from an interaction. It helped shape how I approach leading teams, work with clients and navigate organisations - by trying to work out what someone else actually needs from an interaction, rather than defaulting to what I'D want. I realised much later that's basically the foundation for Design Thinking, although we didn't have the name for that then.

Happy Friday 🍷 

This article was first published on LinkedIn

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Interview with Institute of Community Directors - Boards urged to close tech gap

A couple of weeks ago I had a great chat with Matthew Schulz, a journalist at Our Community, after my post about the board pipeline problem for technology professionals.

That article landed earlier today - in the inboxes of more than 60,000 NFP leaders across Australia. That's a LOT more people than I expected to be talking to when I originally wrote about my own frustrating experience applying for board roles!

The piece covers the structural catch-22 that keeps technology expertise out of boardrooms: you can't get board experience without being on a board. Boards see the risk of appointing someone without governance history as more manageable than the risk of not having tech expertise - but that's a choice about which risk to accept, not an absence of risk. And right now, most boards are choosing the risk they understand less.

Ben McEvoy from Digital Directors ANZ puts the scale of it plainly: at the current rate, Australian boardrooms are on track to have one director with digital expertise by 2078. That's tongue-in-cheek, but the underlying governance problem it describes is real - and it applies well beyond the NFP sector.

If you work with or on boards, or are a technology professional who's been through the experience-required merry-go-round, worth a read.

Click here to read the article by the Institute of Community Directors Australia 

Learn more on the ENVEE Digital blog - Digital Strategy at the executive level

This article was first published on LinkedIn

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Career decisions

I withdrew from a job process this week, for a role I was genuinely excited about, which has had me feeling a little disappointed with the week.

The organisation ticked almost every box, including a solid Glassdoor rating. The role looked interesting, the boss's LinkedIn profile looked promising, and the conversations with the recruiter had been great. And then I sat down over the Easter long weekend with a bunch of solid Red Tulip Easter eggs and a glass of wine and started to think about the commute, which I'd pushed aside in my excitement about the role - 40 kilometres from home on a toll road and no public transport options.

The thing is, I already knew how this ends, because I worked in that exact location 25 years ago when I was considerably younger and it was theoretically much easier. At the end of that contract they wanted to extend and I just couldn't do it, because I'd started to detest the driving and it was wearing me down. I swore I'd never work there again.

And yet there I was, genuinely considering it, because I'd let the excitement of a potentially great role do the thinking for me, instead of using the part of my brain that remembers what it actually feels like to crawl home on the freeway on a rainy dark night in the middle of July, on repeat.

Withdrawing wasn't easy, especially with an interview already scheduled. But I just knew that three months in, things would feel even harder.

I joke about "old age" but it's actually great to be in a place to still feel the excitement, have the experience to sit with it for a bit and then apply some logic, and end up in the best place for right now. 😊 

Happy Friday 🍷 

This article was first published on LinkedIn

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Your team is already using AI. Does your organisation know what for?

I just finished a conversation with a long-time client who was keen to show off their new toy – a Claude.ai account their organisation had recently set up.

They’d been exploring what it could do and had just discovered something that genuinely impressed them. “Claude – can you see my email?” Yes. “Can you look through a specific folder, find all the emails with attached invoices, and compile the amounts into a single spreadsheet?” Yes – it was already running.

They told me this in the way you tell someone about a magic trick. “So cool!” Delighted, as they should be – that’s a genuinely useful capability that would have taken several hours to do manually.

I responded with something that was, apparently, mildly alarmed. Not dramatically – just a beat of “you did what?”

Read the full article 

This article was first published on the ENVEE Digital blog.  

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