FountainBlue's April 2024 Newsletter
I’ve always been the person who checks in on others, to make sure that they are navigating changes with grace or at least fortitude. That’s been difficult because there’s been so much change for so many people.
It’s not just the standard and annoying little things we’ve all experienced before, but it’s also life-changing events which leaves people questioning purpose and intentions and choices. Stay strong and true to yourself. This too shall pass, and you will be stronger and better because of it… although it may not be the path you chose with intention and reflection!
Our leadership blog this month continues on the excellence theme from last month, but also focused on how to stay centered so that you can personally choose excellence.
Follow your North Star
Life is a journey, and excellence is your True North.
But how does one develop self-awareness to visualize and realize values and goals, centeredness to manage the immediacy of unexpected events, and the alignment to maintain a focus on that true north? Below are my humble reflections:
Self-Awareness - Develop your internal standard
Acceptance
Self-awareness starts with accepting your full self, complete with talents and foibles.
Perspective
Acceptance of self fosters acceptance of others who hold differences in backgrounds and viewpoints. More acceptance of others leads to a stronger community, ideally full of diverse and inclusive people.
Curiosity
Being open and curious can invite new opportunities to integrate knowledge and skills, expand networks, and remain adaptable.
Centeredness - Maintain your internal standards
Self-care - Dopamine, the Pleasure and Motivation Hormone
Eat healthy food, listen to music, sing and laugh when you can, enjoy relaxing baths, get relaxing sleep, and move your body every day
Socializing - Oxytocin - The Love and Social Hormone
Socialize with others, help others, give/receive physical touch, pet animals
Health and Well-Being - Endorphin, Feel-Good Hormone
Manage stress and pain by exercising, laughing, singing or listening to music
Emotional Stability - Serotonin, The Mood Hormone
Choose regular sleep cycles, get sun exposure, practice mindfulness, take walks in nature, start journaling
Alignment - Manage thoughts, words and actions to align with your internal standard
Self-Alignment
Reflect on what’s true for you, and how you are honoring your truth with your choices
Team Alignment
Explore how your group and its daily work/projects aligns with your personal North Star
Organizational Alignment
Ensure that the choices your organization or program makes are in alignment with your North Star
Your North Star can stand alone, or it can shine bright along with your team and organization, illuminating all it touches.
I hope these thoughts help you to develop, embrace and follow your own North Star.
Notes from last month’s When She Speaks Online Program
FountainBlue's March 14 When She Speaks program was on the topic of 'Manage Your Mindset'. Please join me in thanking our esteemed panelists.
We were fortunate to have such dynamic and engaging panelists to speak on the topic of managing their mindset at this time of great change. Below is a summary of their thoughts and advice:
Become more self-aware.
Reflect on your inner compass, serving a purpose which resonates for you.
Make plans to realize the purpose, the journey and adventure you're seeking.
Put guardrails and safeguards in place to help you remain in alignment with your principles.
Adopt a gratitude mindset and regularly celebrate all that's amazing about who you are today, at this moment.
Put your own health and needs first, while also driving for success for others and the organization.
Know that you are not alone, and connect with others who can support you when you do feel alone.
Respect that there's a time and place for everything rather than forcing a skill/role/position/opportunity on yourself.
Be open, curious, hardworking and competent.
Proactively seek those learning opportunities which would help you stretch what you can do today, and how success will position you for a bigger and brighter tomorrow.
Whether your current position and role is planned or not, make the best of it, learn from it, and succeed and grow from the experience.
Make the learning more important than the bottom line results.
Feed your own curiosity with opportunities to learn and grow in the classroom, on a project, or in other ways.
Bring out the best in others.
Adopt a positive growth mindset, making it contagious across the team and the organization.
Help your executives inspire and lead with purpose, compassion and respect.
Assume best intentions.
Find inspiration from people you work with and for.
Communicate with empathy and transparency.
Empower, inspire and engage, independent of your role in the team and organization.
Help your team focus on the purpose and filter out the 'noise', the things which are distracting and not important nor urgent.
Celebrate the victories and successes.
Help everyone be more resilient through difficult, longer term changes, leaning into each other for support.
Take a longer term, more strategic view of change.
Accept the change if you must, modify the change where you can, respond to the change in an unexpected way which might make things better for you and the team.
Be flexible and agile about the opportunities ahead, even when you have to make a business case for an unfunded opportunity.
Be clear on what you can control around a change, and strategic about how you manage through that change.
Take into account the needs of the customer, the needs of the team and its individual members, and your own personal needs as you consider how changes are impacting everyone in the short term and for the long term.
Leverage your network of relationships with mentors, sponsors, peers, etc., to help you see opportunities and challenges with a different perspective.
The bottom line for adopting a positive, agile and growth mindset is to keep choosing the next version of yourself, and sharing your advice and best practices with interested others, just like what our panelists did at this afternoon's event.
Notes from this month’s Front Line Managers Online Program
FountainBlue's March 7 Front Line Managers Online program was on the topic of 'Problem-Solving Best Practices'. Please join me in thanking our panelists.
as a Program Leader - Sondra Bollar, Oracle
as an Operations Leader - Mike Pettinicchio, Bestow
Our panelists shared much wisdom and many best practices on how to solve a wide range of problems with grace and wisdom. We live in times of great change, and adapting to these changes will build relationships, solve problems, and deliver for our customers. Below is a summary of their suggestions.
Accept the diverse people around you and include and empower them.
Practice deep listening with empathy, listening to understand rather than listening to respond.
Communicate with kindness, humility and respect.
Build a safe culture and place where people are invited and rewarded for speaking up and participating.
Be clear on what needs to be accomplished and the parameters and guardrails for getting the work done, without micromanaging.
Provide the level of resources and support your people need, based on their experience and preferences.
Be resilient and persistent, leveraging a wide range of strategies to address problems.
Take the short term view in addressing a problem and iterate so that you can address the longer term issues which might be associated with the problem.
Navigate obstacles and challenges based on your learnings from the past, the input of others around you, the guardrails set by customers, executives and managers.
Be metrics-driven, strategically focused on adopting and implementing strategies which meet goals.
Learn from your successes and failures, and keep learning and improving yourself.
Be an observant participant, learning from others around you on what works best for which audience.
Choose to keep learning and growing and expanding, based on the needs of your team and organization.
Put your customers and your team first, helping them perform at their best.
Make your internal and external customers feel important, prioritizing their needs based on factors such as urgency, importance and impact.
Create a platform so that all can benefit and invite input for creating and expanding that platform.
Mediate conflict between people, focusing on the challenges and opportunities which benefit all parties.
Adopt a 'help me help you' mindset, being the servant leader who empowers and equips team members, partners and customers for success.
We closed with a brainstorm about problem-solving.
What can we each do to become more effective and versatile problem-solvers?
Some problems require thinking creatively, outside of the box
Cross-check between your gut and your brain regarding problem-solving strategies
Take the initiative, be scrappy; ask for forgiveness
Decide to accept, change or leave when faced with something you don’t like
Leverage your personal style
Create a safe place so that your team can fully participate in the problem-solving
Optimize short-term and long-term benefits
The bottom line is that there are problems for every business, so creating a collaborative, learning-forward approach and leaning in with your stakeholders will greatly improve your probability of success.
Notes from last month’s VIP Roundtable Online Program
FountainBlue's March 15 VIP Roundtable was on the topic of 'Innovating on the Edge'. Our executives in attendance represented a wide range of industries, perspectives and backgrounds. Below is a summary of their remarks.
Much progress has been made on global networks and accelerating computing on the cloud. Innovating on the edge enables computing to take place locally, on the edge, rather than on the server or cloud, with sensors and devices.
Data is King.
Although our panelists experienced a host of opportunities and challenges for their respective organizations and projects, they concurred that it's a fundamental need to collect and manage the huge volume of data generated on the edge by a host of devices. The trick is to minimize latency (the time it takes to properly collect and process data) by optimizing data collection, filtration, storage and management so that decisions can be made and privacy and access are protected.
GenAI, LLMs and ML are driving Innovations on the Edge.
Groundbreaking AI and ML solutions operating on the edge are making it easier to filter, store and process the data, enabling next-generation hardware and software integrations which makes it easier to track, report on, and respond to well-defined scenarios.
Standardization is in order.
Agreeing on global standards for innovating on the edge will help the industry to grow and thrive, and also help define the workforce skills and needs for the future. But it's still early days so standardization at the global level is not likely to happen in the near future.
Below is a list of opportunities mentioned for innovating on the edge:
Digital twins for scenario planning, predictive failures, root cause analysis, prototyping etc.,
Security and compliance of data will continue to be of great important
Intelligent networking to manage routing and switching
Real-time management of data to detect compliance and security risk with quarantine, destroy and move options for example
Personalize experiences for users with devices on the edge
Manage authentication and authorization at the edge
Reduce false positive and false negative reports by filtering data on the edge
It was clear from our wide-ranging discussion that the need for compute power, storage capabilities, and software and hardware advances will continue to escalate. The question is which company/workforce/leaders can keep performing, and delivering innovations on the edge.