FountainBlue's December 2024 Newsletter
There’s been so much change over such a short period of time!
What are we to do when the future is so uncertain? I'm making three choices:
Choose to hope for a brighter tomorrow.
Listen generously to others with warmth, curiosity, and a willingness to change.
Prioritize your well-being to ensure you are strong, healthy, resourceful, and energetic enough to support others.
In the spirit of the season, I’d also like to share one of my favorite quotes from one of my heroes - Maya Angelou.
Two Guardrails to Consider in 2025
As we roll into December, we start thinking about what we’ve done well this year and what we can do better next year. This is the perfect time to invite two guardrails to help you assess *whether* to accept the random projects, roles, and responsibilities that come your way and how to ask the right ones to emerge.
A Personal Guardrail helps you focus on putting yourself first while considering your tendencies, proclivities, history, and inclinations. It invites you to be self-aware and considered rather than emotional or reactive as you consider your choices.
A Strategic Guardrail helps you see the bigger picture, the ripple effect, and the short-term and long-term implications of the ‘ask’ on the table.
The Personal Guardrail
Say yes to something when it’s good for YOU rather than agreeing for fear of how the alternative might make you look or feel.
Do ‘pay it forward’ in ways that benefit others and leverage your background and experience while also helping you do what’s right for YOU.
Don’t let someone guilt you into taking on something that’s not necessarily good for you.
Don’t feel bad for saying ‘no’ or ‘maybe.’ Consider that the task/job/project/work doesn’t necessarily have to be done by you, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be done now.
The Strategic Guardrail
Consider the bigger picture.
Focus on creating opportunities where you will say yes.
Suggest a job, role, or task to benefit you and others.
Err on the side of saying ‘no’ while focusing on what’s strategically right to say ‘yes’ to.
Don’t take on simple tasks just because they are easy for you to do. Consider the precedence set and the longer-term implications of doing that easy task.
My commitment to myself is to break my habit of considering the Budget, Authority, Role, and Task (BART) implications of a challenge or opportunity before fully considering WHETHER to assume a commitment.
I plan to lean into my personal and strategic guardrails to serve myself and those I serve and trust better strategically.
May this post help you make strategic and personal choices to deliver improved results and a greater impact on yourself and those you touch.
Notes from last month’s Front Line Managers Online Program
FountainBlue's October 31 Front Line Managers Online program was on the topic of 'The Pandemic in Retrospect.' Please join me in thanking our panelists.
as a Product Leader - Sondra Bollar, Senior Director of Program Management, Oracle Application Labs (OAL), Product and Portfolio Center of Excellence (PPCOE) Oracle
as a Marketing Leader - Louise Lamb, VP, Marketing and Operations, One82 Inc
as a Scientific Leader - Leena Priya Makani, Scientist I (Gene Editing), BioMarin Pharmaceuticals
as a Legal Leader - Suchitra Narayen, GVP & Deputy General Counsel, North America Commercial Legal, Informatica
as a People Leader - Kerry Perryman, Senior HRBP, Samsung Research America
We were fortunate to have such passionate, experienced, articulate, resourceful, and wise panelists for this month's program. They were generous enough to share their wisdom and lessons from the pandemic and its aftermath. Below is a compilation of their thoughts and comments.
Our panelists began the discussion by asserting that we each come from different perspectives and experiences, but we all have something to contribute to the organization, the team, and its growth. Leaning into our differences will help us to adapt and grow through uncertain times, such as the pandemic.
Our panelists each shared stories of how their adaptability and flexibility helped them not only survive and thrive through their circuitous careers but also build the teams and products that support the growth of their organizations as a whole.
It was particularly inspiring to hear their stories of how their versatility helped them leverage past learnings, skills, and strengths to undertake whole new tasks, responsibilities, and roles depending on the organization's needs. The engineer becomes the program leader, the operations executive becomes the marketing leader, the executive becomes the entrepreneur, and vice versa!
As our panelists morphed from one role to another, pointers to common themes emerged. These themes included being strategic, creating measurable value, engaging a wide range of stakeholders, and being committed to a greater cause. Each panelist leveraged their strengths in these areas to navigate the myriad of challenges that arose from the pandemic, especially when everything was so uncertain and not normal!
This resiliency, hope, and faith kept each panelist engaged and helped them inspire and empower others to participate. It was certainly not all rose gardens and rolling meadows, but the incremental gains, the proactive and transparent, humble and forthright communications, helped our leaders keep it real, which led to increased participation and engagement from others.
Our panelists noted that the pandemic actually facilitated the evolution of business and technology into a hybrid, global, digital age! They emphasized the need to focus on delivering strategic outcomes, building collaborative networks, and providing exceptional customer and employee experiences.
The dynamic, far-reaching conversation also had a deeply human element. Innovation and leadership might have a team-wide and company-wide impact, but our panelists noted that focusing on one-on-one relationships is foundational to delivering these results and provided some inspiring examples of why and how to connect with others deeply.
As we ended our conversation, our panelists challenged us to 1) lean into each other as we navigate challenges and opportunities, 2) leverage scenario planning in collaboration with stakeholders to better strategize and plan, 3) incorporate technologies to manage and execute proactively, and 4) offer grace to yourself and others through challenging and uncertain times.
The overarching takeaway from this dynamic discussion was a challenge to reflect on how we can convert the challenges we face, even through a pandemic, into opportunities that benefit each of us! We hope that you are similarly inspired to undertake that challenge.
Notes from last month’s When She Speaks Online Program
FountainBlue's November 7 When She Speaks program on the topic of 'Sixth Annual Mentorship Best Practices'. Please join me in thanking our esteemed panelists.
Facilitator Linda Holroyd, CEO, FountainBlue
Mentors:
Roman Medina Perez, NPI Technical Program Manager, Lam Research
Archana Muralidharan, Senior Manager, Governance, Risk & Compliance, Palo Alto Networks
Mentees:
Denise Cable, NPI Program Manager/Project Manager, Lam Research
Soraya St. Claire, Senior InfoSec GRC Analyst, Palo Alto Networks
Our panelists represented a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives, but they had much in common.
They have faith, lean into the mentor-mentee relationship, and ensure that all parties benefit from the relationship.
They are passionate communicators and connectors and are invested in their people's success, projects, and companies.
They lead with humility, grace, and empathy, peppered with wisdom and humor.
Below is a compilation of their best practices for building mentoring relationships.
Mentorship is a choice.
Choose to build a long-term mentor-mentee relationship built on trust and openness.
Whether you're a mentor or a mentee, be courageous and curious, drawing on the resources, information, and people around you to help you get things done right and well.
Be courageous and open enough to even the UGLY truths, for nobody's perfect. Learnings often happen when you're open and vulnerable, and the full data is provided.
Forward-thinking companies embrace mentorship.
Join and grow a corporate culture that supports and rewards mentorship and continuous learning.
Support the ERGs and other groups supporting employee development and growth, for you will realize business benefits.
Embrace opportunities to learn and grow.
Build a broad and deep network so that you can be exposed to a wide range of perspectives.
Continue to learn and evolve while embracing the ever-changing landscape around you.
Connect with people who can expand your perspective about the opportunities and challenges you face now and in the future.
Aim for increasing improvements rather than perfection, which is an illusion.
Embrace opportunities for continuous learning both in the classroom and at work.
Thoughts on mentorship best practices:
Lean on mentors to provide guardrails or a map in order to help manage risks, align to objectives, pivot strategically, fail fast, and learn from mistakes.
Nobody has a panacea for all challenges, but mentors can provide the experience, wisdom, inspiration, and knowledge to help you succeed and increase your impact.
Lean into the mentor-mentee relationship as equals, creating value for both parties.
Mentorship is an ongoing relationship, not a one-and-done interaction.
Use the mentor-mentee relationship to acquire new facts, perspectives, resources, ideas, and goals.
Don't count on mentors to do your work for you or to prescribe how to address specific issues.
Ideas on how mentors can support you:
Mentors can be great partners when figuring out something together.
Mentors can provide you with ongoing feedback that supports your growth and development.
Mentors often make you feel heard as they listen deeply and have sometimes walked a similar path.
Mentors and mentees can work together to better brainstorm and strategize on a future we can't predict.
Mentors help you focus on what you CAN do.
The interactive conversation was far-ranging. Our panelists agreed that there are many ways to embrace the many ways mentorship may manifest: shadow mentoring, phantom mentoring, in-the-moment mentoring, technical mentorship, reverse mentoring, cultural mentoring, and cross-industry mentoring.
They also agreed that life and work are better with the mentees and mentors in our lives and have inspired us to cultivate these relationships in our own work and lives.
Last month I earned a certificate for Executive and Leadership Coaching. It’s my first coaching certificate, even though I’ve been a management consultant and executive coach for twenty years.!
My greatest insight from the experience is that most people are seeking a map of the terrain or some guidelines to help them stay on track. Some individuals will ask questions of a guide but often assume that the guide is unavailable.
Many of us are seeking out a sherpa—someone who has traversed a similar path and is ready and willing to share the load, answer questions, and offer recommendations based on our evolving goals.
It's possible that the sherpa may not exist!
Our journeys are personalized and influenced by a myriad of external and internal factors that shape every choice we make. This insight makes me want to help people become their own sherpa.
I’ve learned to focus more on deep listening and the management of our own framework and guardrails as we navigate what’s next.
Click on the button below if you’d like to sign up for a 15-minute, no-obligation call to discuss what's next for you!
Happy Holidays to one and all!
See you in the new year!