This is the 11th essay in the #26essays2017 challenge that I’ve set for myself this year. I’m doing this because I’m the first to admit I’ve become a lazy writer: allowing guest posts and series and cross-posting to make up the bulk of content on The Diane Lee Project across 2016. The brave, fearless writing that readers admired and respected me for has all but disappeared. This year—2017—will be different. I’m reclaiming my voice—my write like a motherfucker voice! Opportunity (noun) – a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do anything. A few weeks back, I wrote about opportunity in Australia… and how
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This is the 7th essay in the #26essays2017 challenge that I’ve set for myself this year. I’m doing this because I’m the first to admit I’ve become a lazy writer: allowing guest posts and series and cross-posting to make up the bulk of content on The Diane Lee Project across 2016. The brave, fearless writing that readers admired and respected me for has all but disappeared. This year—2017—will be different. I’m reclaiming my voice—my write like a motherfucker voice! Opportunity (noun) – a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do anything. In Australian workplaces, there exists a strange, mythological beast. This beast is
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This is the 2nd essay in the #26essays2017 challenge that I’ve set for myself this year. I’m doing this because I’m the first to admit I’ve become a lazy writer: allowing guest posts and series and cross-posting to make up the bulk of content on The Diane Lee Project across 2016. The brave, fearless writing that readers admired and respected me for has all but disappeared. This year—2017—will be different. I’m reclaiming my voice—my write like a motherfucker voice! “Be the change you want to see in the world.” “Somewhere inside all of us is the power to change the world.” “If you think you
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This is the first essay in the #26essays2017 challenge that I’ve set for myself this year. I’ll be writing one personal essay a week: 26 in total. And I’m doing this because I’m the first to admit I’ve become a lazy writer: allowing guest posts and series and cross-posting to make up the bulk of content on The Diane Lee Project across 2016. The brave, fearless writing that readers admired and respected me for has all but disappeared. This year—2017—will be different. I’m reclaiming my voice—my write like a motherfucker voice—and I’m starting with this essay about pride in aforementioned voice even though many would consider
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This post was originally posted on WFA.Life. The Freedom Road series documents my transition to a more freelance, less corporate working life. It’s been a while since my last post. Two months, in fact. (Sorry, Andy.) But I haven’t resting on my laurels, licking my wounds, thinking woe is me. I’ve been taking action, and making decisions, and damn it feels good. Two months ago, I applied to volunteer at KOTO in Hanoi, Vietnam. Within a week, I had my response. They wanted me. To say it was one of the happiest pieces of news I’d received in a long time
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This post was originally posted on WFA.Life. The Freedom Road series documents my transition to a more freelance, less corporate working life. Message received loud and clear In the last month, I’ve taken stock again. How many more times do I need to do this until it sinks in? I’ve got the message loud and clear now. Finally. This life, this working current life, is not for me. It’s stagnant, stultifying and deeply unsatisfactory. The message I received—loud and clear—is that I’m not stuck. I have options. And I need to take them, before I die a slow, agonising death
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This post was originally posted on WFA.Life. The Freedom Road series documents my transition to a more freelance, less corporate working life. The last time I posted, I was having all kinds of trouble moving to a WFA.Life. It started with my work situation, which has kind of sorted itself out—well, as much as it can in the circumstances. I’ve moved from being incredibly disenfranchised and unmotivated—knowing, of course that I couldn’t just up and quit—to being much more settled and motivated. Tied to that, was the amount of overwhelm I’ve been feeling and experiencing. There is just so much
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This post was originally posted on WFA.Life. The Freedom Road series documents my transition to a more freelance, less corporate working life. I made a couple of rookie errors… I got it wrong. So very, very wrong. And I’m paying for my mistakes. In more ways than one. How could I—a seasoned war horse—make a number of embarrassing rookie errors? Things seemed perfect… I have always wanted to pare back my working hours, but I didn’t have the level of income to allow me to do that. Not until 2012, when I landed a plum role as a training consultant
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How can you fix your organisational culture? It’s the age-old question that just about everyone asks at some point in their working lives: how do you fix a workplace culture that’s dysfunctional and toxic? The short answer is: you can’t. Sorry about that. The long answer is you can, but it takes a significant amount of energy, time and (probably) money. And in an age where most organisations want a quick fix, most organisational culture projects are doomed to failure because they are long tail. And these projects fail not because of systems, frameworks, project plans, policies, procedures, processes, guidelines or communication, although these all
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Waaaaaaay back in the 1960s and 1970s, before university ethics committees stamped out these sorts of experiments, two researchers wanted to know more about how human beings reacted to authority, and how positional power impacted relationships. Stanley Milgram, a researcher at Yale, was interested in how Nazi Germany came to be, particularly the horrific and tragic treatment of Jews during this time. He wanted to understand how normal, decent people could be involved with or tolerate or turn a blind eye to state sanctioned cruelty (even psychopathy) of an appalling scale. He was interested in what part authority and obedience to authority,
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Back in 1997, Fast Company published an article that was a wake-up call for businesses. Its premise was that workplaces were being flipped: the old model of the boss calling the shots and having all the power was going the way of the dinosaur. The employee, as a valuable knowledge worker, was now in the position of being able to pick and choose where they worked and for whom. If they didn’t like the work, conditions, management, colleagues, culture, or whatever, they could move somewhere more amenable. Knowledge workers were mobile workers. And powerful. Park that thought for a minute.
Continue reading...Steven Covey wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and we all know he is the pin-up boy for effectiveness. Colleagues, managers and peers love to quote frequently from his book. I’ve read it and it makes a lot of sense. But what I’ve found is that in workplaces in particular (the ones I’ve worked in anyway), Highly Effective People are often the exception rather than the rule. What is a more common occurrence is having to deal with Highly Useless People or HUPs. You know the ones I mean, and they come with a number of frustrations, particularly
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