Category Archives: Mentoring

100 Conversations

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The contents of this blog arise from the ‘conversations’ I’ve had with people; whether in person or through various digital interactions.

I’ve been contemplating adding a level of intention to this, and have decided to embark upon: 100 Conversations

My goal is to reach out to 100 people and start a conversation with the question: At this point of your career, what problems do you want to solve? (this question spins off from a recent post)

My goal within this is: I’d like to support someone in solving what’s important to them… with a conversation.

I imagine that this will take many forms:

  • Share knowledge, experience, stories and crazy ideas.
  • Contribute to the building of professional networks.
  • Expose ourselves to different ways of looking at things.
  • Brainstorm, reinforce and develop ideas.

I want to offer each person an interested listener, who is focused on them… and who just might help them find something useful in chasing their goals?

Experimental Method

I think it will be a flexible process, but some forethought is always good:

  • The Conversation
    • Arrange to meet with someone for about an hour. Perhaps longer if the provided therapy/learning is mutually beneficial.
    • Prior to the meeting, I’d prepare them with the question of, “At this point of your career, what problems do you want to solve?”
  • Who Will I Meet Up With?
    • Part One: The First Twenty!
      • The first twenty conversations would be with friends and associates, with a cross-section of careers, seniorities and people.
    • Part Two: The Second Forty!
      • I think there’s value in not just speaking with those I know, but also meeting new people and hearing from them. During the first twenty interactions, I’d ask each person to recommend two people that they feel would find value in this kind of interaction. This would introduce one degree of separation.
    • Part Three: The Third Forty!
      • Similar to my last selection of forty, this one would be based on asking each person of the 40 to recommend one person. This would introduce two degrees of separation.
  • The Follow-Up
    • I think that each conversation will likely lead to a related blog post.
    • Perhaps it leads to a guest blog post by the person I meet with?
    • I’m not certain about the above, so I’ll leave it flexible.

The Results

These are links to the blog posts that have been inspired by these conversations:

#1 The Power of Being Heard

#2 Engineers Are Good With Numbers Until…

#3 Coaching, Mentoring and Metaphor

#4 The Power of “Tell Me More”

#5 Freedom of Time

#6 When No Mentor Exists

#7 tangent: Tools… Not Tales

#7 State Your Assumptions

#8: The Beauty of Being a Hack

What Problem Do You Want to Solve?

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Problem: Our ideas aren’t in space yet. Solution! Make model rockets.

I just saw a simple but fantastic post on someone’s facebook feed: Don’t ask a student what they want to be when they grow up. Ask them what problem they want to solve.

What I like about this is that it illustrates the importance of asking the right questions. We cheat when we interact with each other. We ask simplified questions, without stopping to wonder what we are REALLY hoping to hear. When it comes to kids, we just want to be entertained when they tell us they want to be a fireman. It’s something we can reminisce about when they’re an adult. (My answer when I lived in the middle of the prairies as a kid, was marine biologist. I probably hadn’t properly considered the whole thing. But it sounded cool).

If we actually wanted to understand WHY we got the response, we could have started off with a more challenging question. We need to ask questions of each other to try to get to the root. Then we can start to apply solutions to it.

So, instead let’s ask, “What problem would you like to solve?” Fires. Cats stuck in trees. People who are injured. Retiring with a pension. With those answers, we’d all see “fireman” without just leaping to that point… and we’d get insight into the kid’s mind.

What relevance does this have to the business of design?

Let’s apply this to mentoring and staff development. For staff reviews, most firms have some kind of standard form that might include asking an employee to establish goals. But, prior to that question we’ve just drilled them on their utilization, their CAD skills and all of the other things that we need(?) to place focus on within assessments. By the time we reach discussing goals, we’ve already predisposed them to respond with goals that mimic the content of the review. Of course their goals relate to training, certification etc…

So… how about we start the discussion with: What problems would you like to solve?

  • Our CAD library is disorganized.
  • I’m concerned with the homeless problem.
  • Our city isn’t implementing Complete Streets very well.
  • My knowledge of permaculture is lacking.
  • I’m hungry.

These shake up the conversation, and give us the chance to really empower our staff within areas where they have passion. That’s our goal right? But have you tried asking people what their passion is? It seriously doesn’t work very well. Passion! is so loaded and huge that it almost feels egotistical to answer. BUT… ask them what they’d like to solve? It makes it easier and actually points to where their interests lie.

This is a new brilliant flash of the obvious for me. Such an amazing change to the way we get information from our staff, our students and the public in general.

What problems would YOU like to solve?

Then we have a great discussion.

How to Build Mutual Accountability

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Infographic Overall

I love the term “brilliant flash of the obvious”. For me, it’s usually the product of long analysis, interesting conversations and deliberation. We get to the point where we’ve overthought something, and realize… the answer is simple and was just waiting for us to get to it! But, the fact is that we had to go through the process. When a thesis advisor of mine (Larry Harder) told me about the phrase, I believe he credited a Canadian landscape architect named Michael Hough. I’ve had this phrase/concept long enough that it’s a goal for me to find this elusive “brilliant flash of the obvious”.

Another thesis advisor (Dr. Robert Brown), left me with one of my most important “flashes of the obvious”. From his research methods course, I realized that if you outline your criteria for success prior to beginning your work, you have the power to define what success is. The power of this is that it encourages strategic thinking, the development of a concrete process to follow, and provides you with rigor that can be applied to the assessment of your final product. The easiest example is a playful one where you intentionally set the bar low for success. For example, if you state that your goal for a park design is to have it be an open space with seating… then success could be a parking lot with a bucket to sit on. Success!!!

The point of this blog post is to emphasize the value of entering into tasks with a goal (or goals), and understanding how these goals will be met successfully.

As a landscape architect, the most obvious application of this is the development of an agreed upon scope with your client. You need to establish not only what they want, but what they actually need. They often don’t know the ‘need’ part… and that is exactly why they have hired you with your expertise. Our success in this effort is directly proportional to our experience (knowing what to ask) and our communication skills. Good habits are often reinforced by avoiding bad outcomes. Losing money sticks in our minds.

The “brilliant flash of the obvious” part of this relates to the fact that we apply special tools and techniques with our clients in order to achieve solid communication (to avoid losing money)… and then we turn around and wonder why our staff do strange things? Why they didn’t approach a task the way we’d want them to approach it? Have we stopped to see if we’ve invested the time and effort into this the same way we do for things like losing money?

When we do think about it, I think the answer is that we didn’t establish an appropriate scope with staff… and perhaps more importantly, we didn’t establish how they would be accountable for their work.

Flogging Is NOT an Option

Our coping/communication skills are dependent upon the level of familiarity within our relationships. I can remain perfectly calm with a grumpy client. When I’m at home, an empty toilet paper tube in the bathroom can trigger an evening of passive aggression.

We spend most of our waking hours with our staff. This creates complacency with our relationship, and complacency leads to losing sight of the importance of good communication skills. We spend so much effort with effective client communication, but we just can’t seem to ‘find the time’ for staff. It’s not to say that things are dysfunctional, but there are certainly some things that we should be doing to set us all up for success. We can do better!

We Are a Product of our Baggage

Many of the strategies and processes that I employ are based on not wanting to revisit something bad that happened. I remember that fee where I forgot to include a certain typical scope item. My response was to create a fee template where irrelevant tasks are deleted, in order to benefit myself when I need to create a fast fee. Past Peter did Future Peter a favour by trying to protect him. So I say, “Thanks Past Peter! This one’s for you!”

So… back to criteria for success. If I’m working on a project on my own, I already have my own ingrained criteria for success. It’s easy to agree with myself and have a joint vision of where I need to go. In this case, there is an I in my Team. My Team is I.

Add another person to the mix (or more), and the need for a common vision and criteria for success becomes obvious! Right? Well… think about your project initiation process and see how it actively engages your team into shared accountability. If you DO have processes in place for this that you are successful… please share a comment on this post. Regardless… please read on.

Shared Accountability

We’re adults. We do our job. We can support those around us when they ask us to help out. BUT… until they bring us into a shared vision that we understand, we won’t be operating at our highest expertise. AND… we won’t be operating with initiative and passion until they craft a vision that somehow includes us. It’s human nature… we’re most involved when our tasks reflect us.

So… I’ll go back to the importance of establishing criteria for success. Below is a quick example of how this could happen. It relates to the importance of having a shared company vision that relates to all of your projects, and then project-specific vision.

Task 1: How Do We Measure Success?

Let’s assume that you haven’t had an office discussion like this. If you have a business or strategic plan, you’ll likely have all or part of these. The question is whether ALL of your staff have been involved in a discussion like this. The point of this is to develop a common language of common expectations that everyone is invested in. This should relate to everything that your organization does. Here’s a brief example of what it might look like organized within a hierarchy:

  • Happy Client (and most of these are for Happy Firm)
    • Meets Budget
      • Stay within design fee
      • Project within construction budget
    • Meets Schedule
      • Project bids on schedule
      • Meetings happen without rescheduling
      • Meetings are efficient
    • Meets Quality
      • Helps them achieve their organizational mission
      • Meets their operations and maintenance needs
  • Happy Community
  • Happy Environment

A good way to do the above is to give employees post-it notes and ask them to write one answer to the question “how do we measure success”, one per note. Use markers to make them bold and easy to read. Use different colors of post-its and markers to make it distinct and cool. Do not underestimate that the process itself it super important, and that includes how it looks and communicates.

Have each employee read their note, and put it up on a wall (whiteboard is great). As people add them, they should star to group them into similar groupings. As more are added, these groupings may also be divided into sub-groups. An important part of this is to discuss and examine hierarchies. Some of them might start to be specific, and they will lead into well the next phase of this process.

Use this as an opportunity to  stop and have those amazing “business of design” discussions that could result from this. You will likely find the perfect place to discuss your company’s mission and vision… if not even realizing that they can be improved to better reflect your company, staff and all. I’m assuming you have a business plan or similar that outlines your mission and vision. You do have that, right?

Task 2: How Do We Measure Task Success?

This discussion is specific to a particular project your office may be doing. It will expand upon and add specificity to items in Task 1. With this exercise, we’re walking a line between an internal agreement on what your firm is expecting of itself and its staff, and the development of project programming. That’s okay… final programming will lie with a client on any project, but your brainstorming may help you identify the questions you should be asking your client.

The conversation that spurred my thoughts on this blog post relate to a shared discussion of quality in my office. Our goal is to have our staff state what they feel represents the level of quality that we wish to achieve.

We’ve been talking about infographics in our office. We want to use the development of infographics to investigate our passions, refine our graphic design skills, and develop our approach to simplifying the presentation of potentially complex information. I could have issued this task by stating my top ten criteria for a successful infographic… but… that’s really kind of useless. Seriously. We’re designers, and as soon as I do that… I WILL limit what comes out of others. It might look like the easy way, but it does no one any good.

So… even on what might seem like the simplest of tasks, why don’t we take a few minutes and engage into this discussion of “what are the characteristics of the best infographic ever!!??!”

At the Task 2 level, here’s some of what we discussed:

  • What are the elements of a high quality infographic?
    • Tells a Story
    • Graphically Engaging
    • Simplifies complex information
    • ADDS to the discussion rather than duplicates
    • Comes from passion

Infographic Zoom

So now we have more details as to what we as a group consider to be the qualities of a successful product.

Task 3: How Do We Quantify Success?

This task gets down to the point of this entire blog post. We’re tying to remove opinion from assessment in order to increase the potential not only for success… but awesome success. If I were to have asked for a “great infographic” without any other information, I run the risk of setting my staff up for failure. Odds are that we would NOT have a shared vision of success.

So… down to the details. The discussion went into what exactly does something need to have to achieve it’s goals? The best part about this discussion is that we are working on a shared dialogue within the office that will benefit every project. When we understand what we mean by quality, by going through a specific case study, then we will start to open ourselves to small and large “brilliant flashes of the obvious”. OHHH!!! Peter has no idea what an infographic is!? He just wanted a bar chart??! Now we can open his eyes to how an infographic is soooo much better.

Or… we can at least talk about being intentional with story, graphic layout, etc…

  • The product is high quality
    • Tells a Story
      • Has a start, middle and end… and hopefully tension, conflict and the other things a good story has.
    • Graphically Engaging
      • Has a visual flow
      • Good color scheme

Task 4: Accountability

Where all of the above leads is that you have achieved a shared group vision. As a supervisor, you now have specific components to measure product success. As a peer working on the project, you have the tools to push each other when you say, “Is our story strong enough?”. Without this shared language, pushing another person can lead to conflict. With it, we can guide the conversation to how we get to our agreed upon goal.

Since we have agreed on what quality means, then we can review the product and congratulate the team on achieving success. If the product falls short, we can speak to what might be lacking and measure it against our group benchmark. I bet that most of the time people respect this accountability tool. BUT… recognize that communication is elusive. There might be the chance that what is lacking was not fully understood. Use it as an opportunity to continue the discussion. It’s about finding a shared understanding, and embracing the growth that will be a by-product of the right approach.

This shared vision is incremental, and experience dependent. You will hopefully have a common shared language with a person you have worked with for ten years. Don’t get complacent. These approaches have value, and allow evolution with each repetition. Also… they are critical to bringing new staff into the vision… AND… allowing the vision to shift with the good change that they bring.

Summary:

Thanks for reading all of the way. The summary of this is that we spend our lives facilitating our clients and stakeholders, but we don’t seem to use those same tools to benefit ourselves and our staff. When we stop to do that, we reap many benefits… with the most important being strengthening shared communication and establishing accountability.

The only real accountability is that which we enforce on ourselves. In order to internalize accountability, we have to be a meaningful part of the process.

Postcript: For my staff that eventually find this blog, I truly wish that I were the perfect boss/mentor for you. I’m human and miss the obvious a lot. Please reference the ‘benevolent manipulation‘ post. Remember, you can also initiate things like the above. That would make me happy since it illustrates a shared understanding. Understanding is good. =)

Mentoring, Semantics and Understanding

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When you get into the mechanics of optimizing a mentoring relationship, it involves understanding learning styles, communication, and a whole big messy bunch of “trying to understand another human being who isn’t me”.

A good example is establishing the difference between an error and a mistake. I’ll borrow this from something I saw online: An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.

When I’m working with people, I expect errors. That’s why we’re working together: I hope that they catch my errors and I catch theirs. As a supervisor, if the same error happens twice I’ll be clear about discussing that when an error happens twice, it becomes a mistake. A mistake can be avoided. When an error happens twice, we discuss how we can avoid it again. This might reside with the employee, or perhaps we change the way the company works or how we support staff. If an error happens three times, then it’s truly a mistake. It’s a similar discussion of how to avoid it, but then it also starts to venture into Human Resources territory. I assess whether there are roadblocks in the way of success that can be solved, or if it is personality-based.

The point of this is that we should have an intentional system in place that absorbs errors and minimizes mistakes. It needs to be an open discussion where people are encouraged to push themselves. Errors can be good when they are a product of learning and pushing oneself. In that light, errors are an indicator of a healthy, learning workplace where people are trying hard.

There’s a current approach to business that is themed “make mistakes faster”. It doesn’t sound as good, but I wish it were “make errors faster”. The idea is that we move ahead and learn from what we do. I’d just emphasize again that errors are good… mistakes not so much.

But… it’s just semantics!!! At the end of the day we just need to find the right words to have a mutual understanding. Let’s just learn from our errors/mistakes/boo-boos/blunders.

Mentoring – Peer to Peer

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Your role where you work is to complete your tasks to your highest capabilities. It’s typical that we stretch a bit, perhaps to 110%, since we figure out some things as we go along. What this means is that you make sure your supervisor doesn’t need to catch things that you should have done. What they should assist you with are the things that are outside of your capabilities, but fall within theirs. They then do the same as your work makes its way up to being reviewed by whoever is at the top of the food chain.

You’re not alone though. No need to be afraid that your sleep-deprived mind will miss things that you should have caught. That’s why we have co-workers.

I encourage people to engage with staff members who are at their level, or slightly below/above. Having someone with similar experience review your drawings allows them to assist you with new knowledge appropriate to your level, and catch the errors that shouldn’t make their way up the food chain. As a reminder, some of your peers are actually computers: spell check! When peer to peer is used properly, it’s a great way to share knowledge and to build confidence. It’s pretty awesome when someone comes to you for assistance and you can help them out. When they reciprocate, it’s also great.

When you do this, make sure your supervisor knows you did it. You’re reinforcing a company’s quality assurance/quality assurance (QA/QC) program by doing this. They can also provide guidance and advice to you that might help you best access this knowledge. It will also reinforce the fact that you understand your role within an atmosphere of active mentoring and knowledge acquisition.

QA/QC? That’s worthy of another post, but it’s good to understand the basic role of QA/QC:

  • Ensure that the firm has a process in place that maximizes correct review by the correct person at the correct time.
  • Ensure that the quality of work that reaches the client has no errors that THEY would catch. (ex. spelling mistakes, sloppy drawing, etc…)
  • Ensure that the content of the work meets your firm’s best management practices. (ex. you don’t forget to include snow storage)
  • Ensure that the work meets health, safety and welfare standards. (ex. proper handrail design)

Basically… a QA/QC process ensures that anyone who reviews the project (from concept to construction) gets to focus on the skill that they have and no one else does. Contractor’s are super happy when they can focus on building, and not trying to understand what they’re trying to build.

So… if you have enough people in your firm, look sideways for your first level of mentoring. This will build your skills, and help you identify the best way to engage with those above you to best gain their knowledge.

(*please note that I use the word “error” very intentionally. An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it. Errors are a part of learning. Mistakes happen when a learning opportunity is missed.)

What Does Mentoring Mean?

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2014-15 Corvus Design Holiday Party

Mentoring takes many forms. Many of our growth interactions with people are informal, and have only the structure of the conversation. There is value when we engage into mentorship in a more rigorous fashion, either through our own planning of our growth… or through defined relationships with specific people.

This blog post takes a loose look at our growth as designers, and how the importance of our learning changes over time. I certainly hope that it stresses finding the right people to interact with as we grow and change. The challenge is targeting the right interactions at the right time, to prepare us for the challenges we will face next. Bring out the crystal ball!

The First Stage of Professional Development

When we first graduate, we have been exposed to a wide variety of things through our schooling. We might be lucky if there are a few areas where we have reasonably advanced skills. Likely, we’re about to develop more applied skills in three months than we acquired in school. These will be technical skills. To maximize your own success, you will benefit from finding technical mentors or finding self-guided pathways through the plethora of online education that is accessible to you. In other words, bond with the nerd in the office who knows the keystrokes for obscure commands. When you appreciate that these obscure commands have a useful place in your life, you will be on your way to goodness.

Did the creative part of you just die a little bit? You have to keep on feeding it. At the back of your mind, please remember that the firm you work for needs to make money in order to keep you in work. As a new landscape architect, you will need to be a well-functioning member of the team. If you have sharp technical skills, you and your team will have a higher chance of success. To keep your soul fed, you will need to make sure that you are within an atmosphere of mentoring. Some people are lucky to have elder professionals who are good mentors, and some are not. Learn how to engage with those around you so that you get to plug into the things that feed the designer in you. While you may not get to be lead designer on projects for a while, you WILL get to influence and shape the process… and design elements within it. People underestimate how much control is possessed by the person with CAD mojo and good design sensibilities. If you draft up a plaza that has a good underlying geometric basis that lends itself to a simple and elegant paving design… you will now get to do that for me from now on. You just took something off my shoulders. Seriously… this kind of detailed design skill makes my world go round.

So… at a minimum make sure you have the mentoring you need for technical development, and ideally it’s delivered to you within the context of what it contributes to design. See if you can go the extra step and engage with others for design mentorship that goes beyond the technical. If options are limited, I just can’t emphasize how important initiative is. If you find a meaningful community project that your firm would benefit from, you could bring that to your team as something you’d like to contribute. If it’s your passion, it will feel natural for you. Your firm might even adopt it and pay you for some of your time. Be crafty about choosing things that relate to your firm’s business plan. Business plan? Make sure you know your company’s mission, vision and all of that jazz. Use that (nicely) as a way to benefit yourself when you show that what you do is a shared pathway between your growth and your firm’s success.

The Second Stage of Professional Development

So… now you are sharing obtuse keystrokes with new staff. You’ve grown within your firm where you are engaged into peer learning, and guiding the new guys. You have the core skills of a landscape architect, and are now expanding into the the first bits of the business of design: project management and a wee bit of client development. You have the technical skills where you can successfully complete work on a project. You’re now learning how to improve project profitability and increase the level of quality that is delivered to your clients. You are a honed blade efficiently slicing the fruit before you.

Along the way, you’ve also developed design mojo from learning from those around you… or have you? Have you been mentored? Or have you developed the core skills of a landscape architect, but you need more.

We all hope that our firms have the staff and leaders who will be ready for your next phase of learning. In a large enough firm, that might be the case. But at some point you will need to find the voices that aren’t immediately present. When you go out for drinks with old classmates and old co-workers, you’re using your existing network to your benefit. This is an organic approach to exposing yourself to their assistance. As our network of relationships experience new things, you get to be exposed as well when they tell you about them. Your network is now a critical component of your growth, and will continue to build value until the day you die. Seriously. Your network is now one of the most valuable things that you own, and it’s a wonderful long-term investment.

How do I invest in my network you ask? Get involved! A fantastic target for you is to be involved with your national professional organization. You’ll probably have to start with their local chapter. It’s a great way to learn about what’s happening locally, and be involved to learn the things they didn’t teach you in school. How to run a good board meeting. How to get along well with others. How to try to learn from people that you are likely in direct competition with. Hmmm… the last one is a challenge to your desire for mentorship! That’s why I love being involved with other organizations… or interacting with my peer professionals who don’t work in my region. Go to national conferences and engage with anyone you find. You’ll see that we love speaking with one another, and we’re even more free with information when we know it won’t reappear in a competitor’s proposal.

If you haven’t yet… get involved with your professional organization, and go to its national conferences!!!! For you landscape architects… I’ll make it as easy as sending you to their membership pages:

Your goals for this stage of your professional development will likely relate to discussions about project management, facilitation, communication, human resources. These are all things that you’re experiencing since you have more client contact and are becoming an involved person in your community. What? You say, “I’m not a landscape architect and I’m in the same place.” Bingo… you can now have interesting business conversations with anyone at any event who is at a similar stage of their careers. You can now easily expand your network to include a whole bunch of people. Buying a magazine at the corner store? Ask the owner what his challenges are and I bet that a few of them will resonate with you. How about the challenges of efficient communication to clearly define a task… and have both people actually understand each other?

To summarize so far: In our careers we begin with fairly basic things we need to know. These prepare us for the next steps where we need to know more, and it’s less about getting things done than it is about knowing how or why to get things done. Access to this kind of mentoring should be relatively straight-forward. The next phase is about finding the people who are equipped to have more complex discussions about the how and why. When it comes to the business of design, the key is to step back to understand what the concern/problem really is, and choosing one of many potential strategies to apply to it. Your direct experience helps, but when you can apply the combined knowledge of your network… wow.

The Third Stage of Professional Development

Congratulations. You are now a self-guided learning machine. You’re a leader of your own entity, or an (emerging) leader of an established entity. Stages One and Two hopefully had people that would benefit from grooming and mentoring you. You are now in a place where no one has mentoring you in their job description. You have a good network in place, and you have peers that are in similar places in their careers.

Be warned. You will go absolutely certified crazy if you don’t validate your need for the growth that mentorship has and will provide you. As a leader, you are the person who is responsible to fix all of the issues that no one has been able to fix. I am validating the fact that your existence will likely not be easy, and there will be times where it weighs on you so much that it’s hard to escape it within your regular life. One part of mentorship is the level of therapy that it provides. I have already referenced this in a few blog posts, and will continue to do so. The value of  people validating that you are not alone in the struggles you face is very important. This is even more valuable if it comes from an elder mentor.

Most of this post has related to using your networks for mentoring. This relates to the fact that every entity should have systems in place to support your growth and learning, and that you have actively reached out beyond this ready-made network to fill the gaps. I’d like to end this post on the value of a true mentorship.

I had the great privilege to be a part of Leadership Anchorage (year 13). As a shout-out, if your community has anything remotely like this program… do it! A key component of this was a focus on mentorship. The focus on this was not on a casual mentorship, it was founded within the need to have a mentorship where you had a contractual obligation to your mentor, and the mentor had the same with you as the mentee. This was fully intentional with goals and a discrete timeline. I won’t go into details on this, but it’s important to realize that there is benefit in establishing rigor within a mentor relationship. This ensures both parties understand the purpose of the relationship and its expectations. Don’t go into this lightly, and make sure that the mentor that you seek is not the mentor you want… but the mentor that you actually need. Don’t choose a person who you feel represents who you are today or yesterday, but represents who you would like to be.

This has been a long post. Be intentional with creating all of the different types of mentorship that you need, and ensure that they grow and evolve with you. Actively talk with your peers (and mentors) about mentorship itself. Be intentional.

Your Duty

Be a mentor. Support all of those around you as you can. Cliche as it might be, the fact is that a rising tide lifts all boats.

The (un)Benefits of Owning Your Own Firm

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ArchDaily posted a request today for input about The Benefits of Owning Your Own Firm.

When I talk to people about this, I used to say that it was like a version of retiring. Not retiring to go play golf, but retiring INTO something that was more of your choice. I always followed it quickly with saying that it also meant that any stress that you felt from then on was your own fault. You either didn’t say “No” to something, or you said “Yes” but didn’t adequately manage the situations around that positive response.

There are a lot of moving parts within running a business, and your success revolves around how you manage them. Accounting, contracts, taxes, employees… yet another list of things they didn’t adequately prepare you for in school. If you find peace in balancing your books at the end of the month, then you can look at that as a benefit of running a business. (Yes… this applies to me. Accounting is the only black & white thing in the areas of grey known as being a designer). You can always find people to help you with the things that don’t come easy to you. Your success is founded on bringing the right group of skills together (in one person or multiple people).

So, the biggest benefit of owning your own firm is also one of the largest downfalls: you are responsible for your own success. And at the end of the day, you are also responsible for your failures.

But… we usually don’t leap into starting our own design firm based on a desire to run the guts of a business!!! We want to be designers! Or, we don’t know what we want… we just want different.

Ten years into having my own firm, I realize that the discussion of running your own firm focuses on the running of a business, risk/benefit assessment, and other things like finding work/life balance. These are the easy things to talk about, and there are plenty of resources to draw upon. The biggest issue for me in running a business? When you run a business, there’s no one above you to tell you what to do… but that means there’s no one there to support you when you need help or advice. As a successful leader, you are good at mentoring those you work with (hopefully), but there’s no one there who has mentoring you as part of their job description. You are in effect… alone.

So, a significant thing to consider of owning your own firm is that you need to look outside for mentoring. You need to find the relationships where you can learn, and frankly… be reassured that you’re not completely crazy. I should have called this blog “Please tell me I’m not crazy.” Isn’t that what we crave in life, to know that we have shared experiences and aren’t alone?

With that, make sure your business plan includes an emphasis on building the relationships that you will need to continue to learn and be mentored. Hmmm… you are doing a business plan first, right?

(As a business owner… networking is also pretty darn important. Consulting others to benefit your knowledge (and theirs hopefully) is a very effective networking tool. I’ll save that for another post.)

Optimistic Cynicism?

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What personality type would describe someone who it optimistically bitter and cynical? Many of the posts that this blog will contain will start with a complaint in my head about how things are. Then the little voice inside of me tells me to make lemonade, “be solution based!” I grumble a little but then shift into trying to write about how I wish things would be.

When I meet with people, at some point I find myself saying, “You’re not crazy. You’re not alone. This happens to others. It’s just that you haven’t talked about it before.” Or I let them know that they’ve reminded me I’m not crazy. It’s reassuring to know our experiences are shared.

That’s part of the reason for this blog. I’m saying these things hoping that people nod their head and we both get a better feeling of where we are in the world. When we know we’re not alone, it helps us to work on solutions. This might be on our own with a renewed sense of “normality”, or collaboratively based on insight gained from other experiences.

So… this is just a short post to remind you that you’re not crazy, and you’re not alone. Move forward knowing you exist within a shared experience, and remember to reach out when you need it.

Build Each other Up

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You get to a point in your career when you realize that your value isn’t so much in what you know, but it’s your experience in how you apply it. There’s community value in sharing your knowledge. While perhaps initially counter-intuitive, my optimistic self would like to believe those that say this raises your value at the same time. Yes, competitors (existing or future) might have access to what makes you special, but the odds are they won’t be able to apply it the way that you do. You’re the special sauce that holds it all together.

When was the last time that you identified some people that might benefit from interacting with you? Or people that you know will have mutual benefit with you? Or people that YOU want to learn from? The fact is that most people like to chat with others if they feel that they are being valued.

That’s the point of this! When was the last time that you felt actively valued by someone? That they shared a part of themselves with you to help you be better?

It might just be the fact that I don’t roam in the right circles, but I have a feeling that our culture doesn’t prepare or encourage us to reach out (other than to therapists?). Are we convinced that we need to fight our own battles, and that sharing struggle is weakness? I think there’s relief when we do reach out. I know that I feel it when someone actively reaches out to share notes with me.

So… I choose to initiate it when I can. Not only do I feel like I’ve provided benefit for others, but I KNOW that I have gained. I have perhaps gained MORE, because I’m the one who initiated it and had my own internal hopes and goals for where it might go.

Life is about relationships. Relationships are about connections. We gain community value when we increase our connections and relationships. Everyone gains.

Your task:

Reach out to someone this week to actively engage for their knowledge, or to be their learning peer, or to invite them in for some mentorship of you.

Seriously… we don’t do this close to enough. I guarantee that if you seek to build someone up, you will also benefit.