10 Quotes from Cy Wakeman at #SHRM19 on Ensuring Your Team is Ready for What’s Next
Our team attended the SHRM Annual Conference this year, and Cy Wakeman said 10 things that resonated with us. Read on for the Cy quotes, and follow along with The Point Blog for more insights from speakers and authors.
“Change isn’t as hard when we embrace it incrementally. One upgrade on your phone is easier than converting from a flip phone to the newest version. Get people to a state of readiness.”
“A leader’s new role: Help employees eliminate emotional waste by facilitating good mental processes.”
“Not everything is a change initiative- most of it is just your daily job.”
“Unreadiness for change causes surprise, panic, and blame.”
“Change doesn’t hurt, resisting change is what hurts. People don’t get hurt falling down, they hurt resisting the fall.”
“Your preference can’t trump the business case. Don’t favor preference over potential.”
“Stop trying to please everyone during change.”
“Standardize as much as you can in order to scale.”
“You’ve got work with the willing and activate them.”
“Too many people are asking to be empowered. But empowerment is really stepping into your own power.”
“Leadership isn’t about having all the right answers. It’s about having all the right questions.”
“You cannot opt out of fear and feelings. Determine what fears and feelings are leading to behaviors. Don’t play whack a mole with bad behaviors. Address fears and feelings directly.”
My Favorite: “If you cannot have hard conversations because they are making you uncomfortable you won’t be leading in the next five years. And it’s not the responsibility of the target of the conversation to prompt it. It is your job as a leader.”
“Courage is teachable, observable, and measurable. Fear is the biggest barrier to it.”
“Vulnerability is not full disclosure and oversharing. It’s not crying. It’s leaning in and staying authentic when things are tough.”
“It’s better to not have (organizational) values if values aren’t operationalized into behaviors.”
“Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”
“The number one trust-building behavior: asking for help.”
“The best kind of generosity is the assumption of positive intent.”
“The most resilient people ask themselves, ‘The story I’m telling myself is….’ then they check in on it directly. What are you making up? Check the narrative to get the right meaning.”
Spending the last week at the National #SHRM19 conference with 20,000 plus people provided the opportunity to see and hear a lot of speakers across a diverse group of topics and styles.
As I reflect on what made some stand out over others, I find this list of advice helpful to myself as a speaker and hopefully to you too, regardless of the size of the audience or the subject you may find yourself addressing:
Pictures and stories are worth 1000 words. If you can illustrate with a picture or a story, don’t put the words on a slide. No one reads a bunch of words on a slide. The fewer slides and the less content on the slide, the better.
Establish your legitimacy and expertise through your content, not through bragging on or touting yourself. I heard one guy say to begin his presentation, “I have thousands of clients, both national and international. I consult all over the world on this stuff.” I almost tuned him out there and then ended up walking out of his presentation because the delivery of his content was mind-numbingly boring and the slides had so much jumbled information on them, it was impossible to follow.
Don’t sell your topic during your presentation. People have already shown up for the topic. Give them what you’ve promised you’d deliver by sticking to the topic you advertised you’d be speaking about.
Get to the point. Talk about what people came to hear, but make sure you give background info to frame your point when needed. There is a delicate balance of making sure you provide context to people who may not know much about the topic compared to those who may be in the room that is seasoned on the topic. Balance providing context without boring the experts.
Engage the audience in some way through discussion, social media activity, writing and or personal reflection exercises with a partner.
Provide tactical things people can actually go back to the office and do/apply.
Follow-up with resource materials and slides to your audience via email or through the appropriate conference channels.
What have speakers you’ve seen done that made them stand out as a great speaker?
I’ve been asked to speak to a group of high school student leaders this week. I’m always open to almost any topic the organizers want me to cover that I have expertise in. In this case, what started off as a talk about communication skills morphed into talking about building confidence. The adult leader said that she felt as though this was a challenge for most youth of today.
I see this point and also see where there are a variety of factors contributing to it. One factor that I see related to both challenges in communication skills and confidence is the frequency of time that youth (and adults) spend on their phones.
I consider this a note to myself as much as it is advice in general, but the phone has become what I call the marshmallow of our times.
Remember the marshmallow study in the 1970s which showed that children who were able to delay gratification and wait to get two marshmallows instead of one were shown to be more successful by a variety of measures? As stated in this article:
The children who were willing to delay gratification and waited to receive the second marshmallow ended up having higher SAT scores, lower levels of substance abuse, lower likelihood of obesity, better responses to stress, better social skills as reported by their parents, and generally better scores in a range of other life measures. (You can see the follow-up studies here, here, and here.)
I’m not one to say that any piece of technology is the source of all evil, but when used to an extreme, which is what it has become for many, the modern cell phone has become:
A source of instant gratification (the marshmallow) that we can’t seem to put down or delay looking at.
It is has become a way to avoid direct communication with people.
It has become a way in which youth especially judge their self-worth through social media and other online interactions that aren’t based on reliable or useful sources for building self-worth and confidence.
All of which I believe is leading to lower confidence levels (among other negative things) in youth and adults.
Which then leads us all to fall victim to not shining our light in the way that positively reflects the talents, abilities, and gifts we have to offer, further thwarting self-confidence.
In the marshmallow study, the same article cites environmental factors that affect a child’s ability to have self-control and delay gratification, namely if they have been in situations where adults don’t follow through on what is promised. This leads children to be conditioned to not believe that the second marshmallow will ever come (maybe their parents are on their phone and that’s why they don’t follow through?).
But the article emphasizes that we can cultivate behavioral patterns that help us delay gratification (put the phone down) and build our own confidence levels:
You and I can do the same thing. We can train our ability to delay gratification, just like we can train our muscles in the gym. And you can do it in the same way as the child and the researcher: by promising something small and then delivering. Over and over again until your brain says, 1) yes, it’s worth it to wait and 2) yes, I have the capability to do this.
Building the muscle of putting down the phone when it isn’t necessary can help build confidence and patience in us all.
Some ideas to do this:
Commit to putting up your phone in certain environments, situations, or times of the day. Just like going to the gym at a routine time, find routine situations and times where the phone is off limits. This exercises your self-control and patience.
Intentionally engage in face-to-face conversations with your peers and family at regular intervals. Commit as a group to put your phone up during certain times and interactions.
Take social media apps off your phone that you find yourself spending too much time on and/or ones that you can tell sabotage your self-confidence. If you find the social media outlet as one in which you are constantly comparing yourself to others or you find yourself putting off doing more important and life-fulfilling things (things that build your gifts and build relationships) because you are constantly on the app, this is a clear sign it is eroding your confidence. Remove it. Use the time you would normally devote to your phone engaging in activities and relationships that help your light to shine. This produces a double boost in self-confidence. It removes that which is diminishing your confidence and focus on activities that build skills and abilities leading to a strong sense of self-worth and fulfillment. This skill-building and confidence can then end up impacting others in a positive way too.
I find it hard when speaking to youth not find a way to incorporate this clip from the movie Coach Carter into my talk. So somehow in talking about cell phones, marshmallows, communication, and confidence, I’ve found myself back in a place where this clip conveys a most important message that we all need a reminder of from time to time.
Please don’t hide your light behind the glow of your phone.
I hope to see you at #SHRM19 next week! If you are attending, stop by and see me at 10:45 am on Tuesday in Westgate Ballroom A for my session – “Do You Need to Raise Your Wages: A Step-by-Step Guide for Evaluating Your Wage Practices”.
If you can’t make it, one of the most important steps in this process is to get good market data. Where do you find this?
First: Contact your local Chamber of Commerce and/or Economic Development Entity and see if they do a local or regional wage survey that you can participate in and/or purchase. Most communities do something like this, and some don’t charge you anything if you participate by providing your own data.
Second: Identify online sources (both free and that may cost you money) that can provide you with data you need. I’ve found that using BLS, Onetonline.comPayscale.com and Salary.com provide good aggregate data that gives a general picture of salaries by position across the country and in specific regions. I never use one of these sources alone. I pull them all together and aggregate the numbers in order to even out any skewed data.
Third: Identify trade or professional associations you may be a member of or want to join to access data for specific positions, industries, and/or geographic regions. For example, when looking for recent college grad salaries across geographies and position titles, we use NACE.
Fourth: Contract with third-party consulting and compensation firms to provide you with off-the-shelf surveys they do at regular intervals or ask them to provide a customized wage analysis for you. Most of the time, a customized analysis isn’t cheap but for highly specialized and competitive positions, the investment can be worth it.
Where do you find the best data to decide if your wages are in line with the market?
