Eat, Eat! A Lesson on Networking

"More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than at any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject." Peter Drucker

Lunch? Dinner? Who has the time?

Well, the Jewish mother in me says, "You gotta eat!" The organizational coach in me says, "If you're gonna eat, you might as well eat strategically!" No, strategic eating doesn't mean making sure that your meal has vegetables, protein and carbs (but don't tell that to my nutritionist). It means using your "down time" for a higher purpose.

I know this is not new. There are books about it, like "Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time" by by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz.

But in the same that NBC TV calls their re-runs "New To You" if you haven't already seen them, if you're not already actively networking, then this is, in fact, New To You.

Here are some questions to get you started:

1. If your network were "perfect" what three things would be different for you?
2. Where do you want to go in 6 months? a year? 3 years?
3. Who specifically can help you get there? How?
4. What's keeping you from taking a more active role in your own development?

...and one more:

5. Who in your existing network is draining you rather than giving you energy, and what might you do about this?

Deborah
www.myjewishcoach.com
www.jewishorganizations.blogspot.com
www.myjewishcoach.blogspot.com

Take this Job and...Describe It? Part II

So, more on the importance of job descriptions...(what am I talking about? check out part one here)

Benefit #3: Rarely does a new-hire have every piece of knowledge, skill, and attitude needed for success. By using job descriptions as a check sheet for training, employees learn what they need to do. A collection of well-written job descriptions provide direction for future learning, too. New and seasoned volunteers deserve training and education as well. Take your board, for example. Board member job descriptions will (read:should) include a part about fundraising responsibilities. Does that mean that every board member knows how to solicit a priori? Of course not! But if it's in the job description, then a board member should 1) know it's a-coming and 2) rightfully expect to be trained on how to do it! For a sample board member job description, post on this blog and I'll put one up!

Benefit #4: Finally, job descriptions are great for structuring performance evaluations. Most company's performance evaluation forms are severely overly-generic. Accordingly, employees aren't sure just what they must do to get a stellar review. Not reviewing your volunteers? I would say "tsk tsk", but who needs more Jewish guilt? Your volunteers need to be assessed, just like your staff does. Most volunteers want to be rewarded, positively reinforced, and recognized -- just like staff -- but a blanket "good job!" doesn't give them useful information about what specifically is working, and what could use additional attention.

Deborah
www.myjewishcoach.com
www.jewishorganizations.blogspot.com
www.myjewishcoach.blogspot.com

Take this Job and...Describe It? Part I

I'm often curious how my TIVO comes up with my personalized recommendations for shows "she" thinks I would like -- and judging from suggestions ranging from the romantic Sense and Sensibility to the demolition of Holmes on Homes, "she" must find me quite a puzzlement. It's mutual, honey.

In contrast, I am rarely curious -- and usually pleased -- with how my LinkedIn profile generates suggested articles for me. Here's a recent one about job descriptions that I enjoyed, and thought you might like as well. My additions are in red.

(From Dan Bobinksi's Workplace Excellence)

A well-written job description is your key to saving hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars -- for the recruitment, retention and development of paid staff, as well as volunteer leadership.

Here are two benefits -- more to come in the next posting!

Benefit #1: Clear, specific job descriptions make it easy to create interview questions that weed out applicants who don't match - and identify ones who do. Deb's note: Think about how to apply this for volunteer positions as well. Ever try to "fire" a volunteer? It's not pretty -- and it can often be avoided by putting the right people in the right positions in the first place.

Benefit #2: Even the best, most engaged new-hire becomes bored and disengaged if he doesn't think he's contributing to something bigger than himself. Written job descriptions are foundational for helping people see how their work fits into the bigger picture. Keep in mind that job descriptions can and should be a living document -- and should be used beyond hiring and performance evaluations. When used effectively, they can frequently reinforce the context for work. Volunteer job descriptions can similarly reinforce the context and importance of work, and can be used to begin a conversation about whether a volunteer is ready to move on to another, more engaging assignment.

Check back for 2 more benefits later in the week.

Deborah
www.myjewishcoach.com
www.jewishorganizations.blogspot.com
www.myjewishcoach.blogspot.com

Work-Life Balance: What the Jews can Learn from a Monk

Last February, I was a speaker at the Training Magazine Conference and Exposition, sharing some highlights from "Corporate Universities in the Non-Profit Sector," a chapter I wrote in a business book (or as my mom put it: "dry") The Next Generation of Corporate Universities (Mark Allen, ed.) One of the best things about speaking at conferences is that you get to attend the rest of the sessions for free, and I found myself in a session with a captivating speaker, Kenny Moore, former monk and present-day business executive. Talk about bashert -- he is the Corporate Ombudsman and Human Resources Director at KeySpan Corporation (now National Grid), where my husband works!

Anyhow, Kenny, author of "The CEO and the Monk" and host of the KennytheMonk.com website wrote a great piece in an email about Work-Life Balance that I am reproducing here, with not just his permission but his blessings (I mean, he was a monk...). BTW: He told me he loves the MyJewishCoach.com website!

So keep reading...

Work-Life Balance: A Conspiracy of Optimism
By Kenny Moore

Work-Life balance is, at best, a fabrication. At worst, a cruel hoax.

It's time to stop believing all the hype. As adults, we well understand that it's never been a question of balance. It's always been a question of choice. As the Spanish proverb reminds us: "Take what you want, says God, just pay for it."

Living with the Consequences

Sharon Edelstein has a young daughter named Rebecca. Sharon came home from work one day and found her jumping on the bed and told her to stop - she was going to get hurt. "I won't get hurt" Rebecca said, and continued bouncing. Her mother repeated the warning and added that she might also break the bed. "No, I won't," Rebecca insisted. Her mother gave up. "Fine," she said. "Do what you want. You'll just have to live with the consequences." Rebecca immediately stopped bouncing. "I don't want to go and live with them, Mommy," she said. "I don't even know who the Consequences are."

As the ancient seers stated so well, we don't get to do everything in a single lifetime. We merely get to make choices. Not all choices. Only some. And we pay a price for the one's we choose. Sort of like being at a buffet luncheon without your cardiologist. You can eat anything that's available; you have only to deal with the aftereffects.

Growing old gracefully provides more than ample opportunity to get clear about what we consider important and then make our decisions accordingly. In this journey called life, we're all free to do whatever we want. And like Rebecca, we need only live with the consequences.

But don't expect to get balance. What we'll get is stress: that dynamic tension of trying to creatively live out our lives in a less-than-perfect world. And we're required to do it all as frail, flawed and frightened mortals.

Want a high-flying business career? Go for it.
Might you desire to get married, raise a family and live in conjugal bliss? Good for you.
Maybe you'd prefer to use your artistic talents and create a world of new possibilities? God bless.
Perhaps you'd want to be independent and care free? I'm envious.
But if you expect to have it all, get ready to play center stage in your own exciting Greek Tragedy.

Finding Help in Unusual Places

I've got a wife who works full time and two teen age boys who are experts at disrupting the status quo. I spend most of my days behind a desk in a corporate job. I haven't yet found any balance. Mostly, I've found chaos. But alas, on a good day, some insight.

I no longer look to Jack Welch or Oprah Winfrey to give much help in discerning life's mystery. Rather, I look to the poets. Freud got a few things right and he was certainly on to something when he said: "Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me."

Making choices and living out the inherent tension it creates requires a focus on "being" rather than "doing." The ability to be silent, ponder the deeper possibilities and creatively craft a life-response are aspects of maturity more closely akin to the work of a Poet than a CEO.

Fostering this poetic outlook requires a personal discipline that may not be to everyone's liking. For those not yet ready to embrace it but prefer an addiction to cell phones, e-mails and non-stop meetings, e. e. cummings offers some practical words of advice:

Poetry is being, not doing
If you would follow,
Even at a distance,
The poet's calling,
You've got to come out of the

Measurable doing universe
Into the immeasurable house of being.

Nobody can be alive for you.
Nor can you be alive for anyone else.

If you can take it, take it and be,
If you can't, cheer up and go about
Other people's business, and do and undo
Until you drop.


Wasting Time: a Portal to the Divine

There's been a spate of books about Atheism surfacing of late on the New York Time's Best Seller list, but I don't think it's gaining broad acceptance. For most people, it's not a practical choice. It seems Henny Youngman's experience continues to hold sway: "I thought about becoming an atheist, but I gave it up. There were no Holidays."

The real threat for modern folks is not a lack of belief. It's a lack of time. We're so busy being productive and trying to get balance in our lives that we're in danger of missing the Divine when He shows up.

Being busy may work wonders for our Professional life, but it wreaks havoc on our Interior one.

If we want to find some semblance of sanity and advance in our Spiritual Journey, we may need to slow down, risk being less productive and indulge in the ancient rite of "Wasting Time."

In my earlier days, I spent 15 years in a monastic community as a Catholic priest. I remember once reading about "The Good Samaritan Experiment" with 40 seminarians at Princeton Theological Seminary. After waxing eloquently about their dedication to God and all His people, they were asked to deliver a sermon on the parable of The Good Samaritan. For those lacking the rigors of monastic studies, it's the story told by Jesus about a man who was set upon by robbers, beaten and left on the side of the road. A priest walks by and offers no help. Neither does a Levite, another religious leader of the era. It's a lone man from Samaria, hated by the local gentry, who goes out of his way to offer assistance - hence the title: Good Samaritan.

In the Princeton experiment, when the seminarians had their homily prepared, they were asked to walk to another part of the campus and deliver their sermon to waiting students. Half were told to hurry, because they were running late. The others were informed there was no rush, they had plenty of time.

As they journeyed across campus, the experimenters arranged to have an actor slumped as a "victim" strategically positioned along their route so that the seminarians were forced to step over or around the man.

So, who stopped to help ... and who didn't? They were all budding "men of the cloth" on their way to deliver a sermon on just such a situation.

What the experiment revealed was that those who were in a hurry passed the "victim" by. Those with time to spare, stopped and helped. It seems altruism and our commitment to our fellow man is less connected to our religious beliefs and more closely aligned with having some free time.

When the Divine shows up, most of us are busy being too productive to even notice His presence. Maybe God doesn't care whether we go to church, temple or mosque. Maybe He's already out in the world waiting to meet us, but we keep passing Him by because we're in such a hurry.

Paying a Price for Living our Lives

Since leaving the monastery, I'd had two near-death experiences. The first was with "incurable" cancer. The second, a heart attack. Both were not-so-subtle reminders that my time's running short.

We're not going to be around forever, and we're not able to have it all. Acknowledging this will generate more than ample disappointment and regret. And we'll pay a price for it: Guilt.

But don't be dismayed. Guilt doesn't necessarily mean that we've done something wrong. It's more an indication that we have said "no" to some larger authority: parent, teacher, boss. Guilt's an indication that we've chosen to live our own lives and not someone else's.

Stop trying to achieve balance and start learning to enjoy chaos. Discovering and relishing one's imperfect life sooner rather than later is what's available.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said that most of us go to our graves with our music still inside. So, forget about work-life balance and let go of the need to please everybody. Rather, get out there and make some choices and let your music resonate.

The guilt won't kill you and you'll do just fine if some folks don't like you.

And you certainly don't need to have it all. For as Steven Wright reminds us: even if you did, where would you put it?

P.S. If you're thinking about writing me, give in to the temptation. I love getting mail ... and being influenced by what you have to say. Please e-mail me at kennythemonk@yahoo.com.

Deborah
www.myjewishcoach.com
www.jewishorganizations.blogspot.com
www.myjewishcoach.blogspot.com

So my daughter Sophie doesn't believe in G-d...

Or, at least, that's what she said when her twin brother Jacob said that he does. Which means I have no way of knowing if she doesn't believe, or if she is continuing yet another year's resolution of doing and saying the opposite of Jacob.

Whether or not she was trying to get a rise out of me -- or raise some genuine questions -- I shared a thought with her about a fundamental difference between Christianity and Judaism that I had learned from a JTS professor who spoke at my shul last year (and as soon as I can remember who it is, I will let you know). He explained that Christianity is a religion of beliefs -- you must buy in to the whole megillah (not their word for it, of course), and failure to believe is sinful. Judaism, on the other hand, is a religion of behaviors -- you are judged on what you DO more than what you believe. Not believing in G-d doesn't absolve you from treating others with dignity and respect, or from engaging in the mitzvot. Being Jewish is about doing.

Do I care what she believes as Jew? Honestly, yes, I do. But that's because I'm her mom. But what the rest of the world will see about Sophie is how she behaves: respecting others, speaking kindly, sharing her gifts. That's what being a Jew is about.

Deborah
www.myjewishcoach.com
www.jewishorganizations.blogspot.com
www.myjewishcoach.blogspot.com