An interesting question from a Linkedin thread....While it may be something of an overstatement to say that everyone is creative, the reason that some people would not believe this of themselves is that creativity is first defined to children as artistic creativity.
If you are mocked for your inability to draw beyond stick figures, it may be years before you can look back and recognize that you have a gift for creative mathematics, managing people, or mechanical activity from fixing clocks and computers to developing complex engineering projects.
Nature or nurture? I would suggest that creativity is somewhat opportunistic. If you have the chance to try something or if you are challenged to do something and you step up, you are "creative." Try it, you'll like it.
Managing a younger boss - how to finesse working for a someone who has never seen a functioning typewriter
While you may not be keen on having a very young supervisor, your best strategy includes:
- If you are really unhappy with the selection process and believe that you are the victim of age or other discrimination, follow the appropriate legal steps and be prepared to accept the consequences. Talk your HR department; talk to a lawyer. Don't talk about this to every single one of your co-workers.
- If #1 is not true, stop whining. Right now. Whining and back-biting were unattractive and inappropriate in junior high, and they can cost you your grown-up job in the next 90 days.
- If you want to keep your job and to be valued for what you know and what you can contribute, you have to make perfectly clear from Day #1 that you are deeelighted to be on your boss's team, that you will do everything you can to assist him in the transition, and that you are invested in his success. If this is not true, start looking for a new job. If you sit at your desk and stew for the next five years (assuming you aren't fired), you will be a seething mass of inefficient hostility.
- Scrub from your vocabulary: "In my day.." "In the old days..." "We tried that once..." "We've never done it that way..." and anything else that smacks of your knowing how everything is and always should be done. You are not the leader of the band.
- On the other hand, you do have mission-critical information, and it is your job to very professionally broach the subject of that knowledge to your new boss. Suggest that you would like help in defining your new role -- you want to be able to provide useful information, you don't want to appear to be sniping from behind your desk, and at all costs, you don't want to appear to be undermining new leadership.
- Remember that your new boss may not have supervised anyone of your generation. If this person is as smart is senior management believes her to be, she should welcome your assistance if you present it with generosity and without being an overbearing know-it-all.
Looking for the File in 2009
The ugly specter of miscoded, misnamed and otherwise misplaced files has been conspicuous by its absence from most of the enthusiastic discussions of paperless offices. Perfectly executed, the paperless office should render “Where is the file?” a forgotten question. However, while this idea’s time has certainly come, it has within it the very real possibility of making “Finding the File” an excruciating electronic misery, and not much improvement over searching for a paper file.
The Paper File When The File was in a folder or in bankers’ boxes, lawyers and staff knew that it was somewhere – on a desk, under a desk, in a pile on the floor, behind the door, in someone else’s office, alphabetically misfiled, tucked into another file… While no one tracked the millions of hours each year devoted to “finding the file,” there was, in the end, some assurance that it was somewhere.
In the Very Olden Days, lost files could be painstakingly resurrected from lawyers’ “Chron Files.” In this now-forgotten labor-intensive process, the last copy of every document was typed onto flimsy paper called “onion skin” and saved in chronological order. In addition to keeping Client Files in order, a secretary managed her lawyers’ individual Chron Files, as well.
Donna Neff and Natalie Sanna come closest to raising the specter of lost files in the September 2009 issue of Law Practice Today in their piece about well-crafted file naming systems. They note “…that search software can be used to assist in locating documents; however, in our experience that can be a time-consuming process as one tries to guess what words or phrases might appear in the document being searched for…”
The lost electronic file Will the paperless office solve the decades-old problem of finding lost files? Keyword searches for lost documents are a lot quicker than searching every physical file in the office, but the “Dreaded Delete Key” retains its power. The paperless office will only fulfill its promise with thoughtful training whose goal is to have every document named and saved correctly.
The 5 stages of relationships with support staff: from "Good News!" to "Good Bye" in 5 easy steps
Lucky professionals work with talented staff who will generously share their technical skills and institutional memory. Your relationships with these folks will make or break your career.
Stage One: Day 1. From your first interview, most people are prepared to like you, to help you, and to invest in your success. They don't know you yet.
Stage Two: Act like a jerk – just once. Whether you are rude or abusive, you can almost always repair the damage with sincere apologies and absolutely no repeats of the offending the behavior. Flowers, candy and lunch are helpful at this stage.
Three exceptions: (1) Rudeness during your interview is nearly always fatal: few employers are willing to risk hiring someone who doesn't have the sense to behave before being hired. (2) Rudeness to strangers (wait staff) will cost you an offer and mark you for life. (3) Rudeness to clients can be instantly fatal, because the billing partner can torpedo your promising legal career by raising an eyebrow.
Stage Three: Act like a jerk – often. Whether you are rude, abusive, incompetent, lazy or tend to make mistakes and blame others, you are headed for trouble. The support staffers who might have smoothed the wrinkles in your appearance, covered for your small mistakes, and chuckled at your eccentricities, will now happily watch you fall on your face. For example: After a bank’s lawyer had been working for more than six months, staff began to ask "How long should it take for him to learn that each foreclosure needs a filing fee check, and that our lead time for a request is 24 hours?" and "When will he stop blaming us because he forgot to request the check?" Nearly half a dozen secretaries stopped covering for him.
Stage Four: Your staff complains to your boss. Singly and in groups they approach their boss and your boss, saying "I can't believe that he/she did/didn't do (whatever)." Your boss will notice when complaints about you begin to take up measurable amounts of her time.
Stage Five: The Piranha Stage. Singly and in groups, they say "It's him or us." Try to negotiate a reasonable severance agreement or just pack up the contents of your desk and sneak away in the night. Unless you have a multi-million dollar book of business, the choice between a competent support staff and almost any lawyer is easy – the lawyer loses. Your reputation is in tatters, and the support staff and professional grapevine in your city has marked you for life. People still remember the young associate in Baltimore who threw staplers at his secretary in 1988.
REMEMBER: You can never, ever be too nice to support staff. Flower, candy and lunches are helpful, but even those tokens won’t repair a relationship damaged by abusive behavior and lack of respect .
©Susan Gainen 2009
Stage One: Day 1. From your first interview, most people are prepared to like you, to help you, and to invest in your success. They don't know you yet.
Stage Two: Act like a jerk – just once. Whether you are rude or abusive, you can almost always repair the damage with sincere apologies and absolutely no repeats of the offending the behavior. Flowers, candy and lunch are helpful at this stage.
Three exceptions: (1) Rudeness during your interview is nearly always fatal: few employers are willing to risk hiring someone who doesn't have the sense to behave before being hired. (2) Rudeness to strangers (wait staff) will cost you an offer and mark you for life. (3) Rudeness to clients can be instantly fatal, because the billing partner can torpedo your promising legal career by raising an eyebrow.
Stage Three: Act like a jerk – often. Whether you are rude, abusive, incompetent, lazy or tend to make mistakes and blame others, you are headed for trouble. The support staffers who might have smoothed the wrinkles in your appearance, covered for your small mistakes, and chuckled at your eccentricities, will now happily watch you fall on your face. For example: After a bank’s lawyer had been working for more than six months, staff began to ask "How long should it take for him to learn that each foreclosure needs a filing fee check, and that our lead time for a request is 24 hours?" and "When will he stop blaming us because he forgot to request the check?" Nearly half a dozen secretaries stopped covering for him.
Stage Four: Your staff complains to your boss. Singly and in groups they approach their boss and your boss, saying "I can't believe that he/she did/didn't do (whatever)." Your boss will notice when complaints about you begin to take up measurable amounts of her time.
Stage Five: The Piranha Stage. Singly and in groups, they say "It's him or us." Try to negotiate a reasonable severance agreement or just pack up the contents of your desk and sneak away in the night. Unless you have a multi-million dollar book of business, the choice between a competent support staff and almost any lawyer is easy – the lawyer loses. Your reputation is in tatters, and the support staff and professional grapevine in your city has marked you for life. People still remember the young associate in Baltimore who threw staplers at his secretary in 1988.
REMEMBER: You can never, ever be too nice to support staff. Flower, candy and lunches are helpful, but even those tokens won’t repair a relationship damaged by abusive behavior and lack of respect .
©Susan Gainen 2009
What is Pass the Baton for Generation X?
As Boomers may retire on a slower than previously expected schedule, the very talented members of Generation X face two particular Pass the Baton issues. Both are related to their unique place in the demographic universe, which has 83 million Booomers, 43 million Xers and 73 million Millenials. Their skills will be in demand, and there aren't really enough of them to go around, assuming that Xer leaders will be demanded by employers everywhere.
1. Without appearing to shove the Boomers out the door and onto an ice flow, how do they develop the management and leadership skills that they will need to manage their organizations? This might be perceived as "grab the baton" instead of "pass the baton."
2. For the significant number of Xers who want only to be perceived as valuable contributors to their organizations with high professional profiles, how can they successfully avoid the mantle of leadership? Some far-sighted Boomers are beginning to ask their Xer colleagues to take on leadership roles, and there are Xers who would rather have their fingernails pulled out with hot pokers. How can they preserve their professional identities despite pressure from Boomers and the specter of a generation of Millenials who will soon enter their spaces, label non-leader Xers as "slackers" and throw them under a bus?
1. Without appearing to shove the Boomers out the door and onto an ice flow, how do they develop the management and leadership skills that they will need to manage their organizations? This might be perceived as "grab the baton" instead of "pass the baton."
2. For the significant number of Xers who want only to be perceived as valuable contributors to their organizations with high professional profiles, how can they successfully avoid the mantle of leadership? Some far-sighted Boomers are beginning to ask their Xer colleagues to take on leadership roles, and there are Xers who would rather have their fingernails pulled out with hot pokers. How can they preserve their professional identities despite pressure from Boomers and the specter of a generation of Millenials who will soon enter their spaces, label non-leader Xers as "slackers" and throw them under a bus?
What is Pass the Baton for Boomers?
The very first idea for Pass the Baton came from a conversation with a classmate at my 40th high school reunion. He had retired and then been hired back at a substantially higher salary because his employer realized that his knowledge had walked out the door.
Regardless of the economy, during the next decade, millions of Boomers will retire, change the way they work or die at their desks. Without a systematic way to extract the technical, historic and cultural information that they have, their employers and former colleagues are destined to reinvent or rediscover the processes, procedures and connections that Boomers operated.
A separate case will often be made for changing and updating those procedures, but without documentation -- without a roadmap detailing what was done and how and why it was done -- the cost of recreating that knowledge base will be staggering.
Regardless of the economy, during the next decade, millions of Boomers will retire, change the way they work or die at their desks. Without a systematic way to extract the technical, historic and cultural information that they have, their employers and former colleagues are destined to reinvent or rediscover the processes, procedures and connections that Boomers operated.
A separate case will often be made for changing and updating those procedures, but without documentation -- without a roadmap detailing what was done and how and why it was done -- the cost of recreating that knowledge base will be staggering.
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