Sullivan & Stanley’s Post

Transcript

So tonight was a wonderful opportunity for us to celebrate our amazing change society. This was our second associate Summit and it's just brilliant. It's brilliant to see so many amazing people to connecting. Some folks who are working for the same client, yet different work streams haven't met before. I was kind of blown away by the conversations that were happening around the bar. People were so inspired from a variety of discussions that we had throughout the evening. People reconsidering their. Rear and moving to a more fractional, more balanced way of working. Well, this evening I had the delightful role actually of hosting the panel around Pat's book, The Disrupted Executive. And we were joined on the panel by two other individuals, Sarah Finnegan and Carrie Nod, both of whom along with Pat really brought alive the opportunity that portfolio working provides to senior execs. I heard Carrie and Sarah both talk about the fact that we can get in our own way and that when you're. As a senior executive, you don't actually understand your worth and it's only when you venture into portfolio working you start to realize that all of your skills and experience, they come together and they're all transferable and they're all of value. Portfolio life for me is is wonderful. I find it incredibly stimulating to be involved with so many different organizations at the same time. And I learned from 1:00 and then whatever I learn from the first one, I can apply for the benefit of the other. And the more I learn, the more useful I am to the more organisations. Work with and I love that and that's what portfolio life means for me. I think what it means to me is again, being controlled, deciding the work that I want to do that matters to me, but also having a bit of time for the other passions in my life and things like self development about time with family. So today we were looking at how we can breakdown team communication barriers. It's how we can take a team that individually is doing well and actually make them highly performant team well. Most of us in the change society work for short periods of time with diverse teams, so the ability to understand other people, change our communication style and build trust is essential to get those teams into highly performant position as quickly as possible. The best way, but the only way I know to get teams to come up here. Is to build trust, because when we trust the people we work with. We'll start having the difficult conversations and we'll get that signed main component of trust. These communication and if we understand our own communication and what our strengths are and what our challenges are, we can adapt our communication. The style of the other person. And when we adapt our communication to the style of the person, that's when we get the best results. If we expect the other person to adapt to us, that's why we can get conflict. And we talked about some of the work we're doing with the current client on mission based working, talked about some of the highs and the lows, the challenges and what it means to be an associate in that kind of environment. So I think a big learning is how the associates have to really pull together. And we're not heroes of the story. We're there to help the client be successful. And a really good conversation with Guardian Coalition helps bring to life. There's actually 2 flavors of value that we get from mission based working. So the first one is the obvious one. It's the value that the team sort of create towards the mission. Second one. A bit less straightforward, it's almost more valuable. And it's about surfacing those organizational challenges along the way because it's those, if we can address them, they're unlocks the the real transformation for the forward. Every rock that you're tripping over is actually a goal. We've just got to do something with it. If you're good with your time, clear what your objectives are and you keep focused on what your clients need, what your company needs, you can deliver that in a short amount of time. And not to feel pressured, maybe just take that, you know, five day week role or however much time you've got, you'll feel that time. So being quite clear about what you're gonna offer and the value you're gonna add and then make sure that you deliver that value in the time that you've got.