Category: workplace strategies

Can’t Believe My Boss Made Me Do This


Let me tell you this crazy story back in my corporate world job days...

(Be sure to read my last blog How would you define leadership? here).


At A Glance

∎ A crazy story when I worked in the office downtown

∎ Key takeaways - do we need bad things to inspire positive change?

∎ Work Culture pro tips   


You'll Never Believe What Happened...

Back in my corporate days I had a boss who used to make us chant in the afternoon huddle. It felt like a frathouse in many ways. I always felt uncomfortable trying to join the chanting as it felt fake, and forced.

Everyday I would dread when the afternoon huddle came about, debating on if I was going to actually say anything or mouth the words silently like I was lip syncing.

The thing was you didn't want to be called out for not being part of the group. As I write this now, a dragonfly hovers outside my window and a plane's wings catch the sun and flash a bright spot of light.

It's such a contrast to the dudebro environment at my job at this marketing company.

The office building was located off Congress in downtown Austin, Texas so you could easily walk to a hip lunch joint and grab a bite to eat while people watching suites and ties, the homeless, college students, interns, bike messengers, musicians playing brunch gigs or fellow office workers.

I was late coming back from lunch one day and the CEO Luke, a very white dude bro singled me out as soon as I stepped off the elevator. The afternoon huddle had begun.

Luke told me in front of everyone that to go back to work I had to do 25 push ups in front of everyone. There were about 30 people standing in the office.

I got down on the floor and did the pushups.
"ONE!" 
"TWO!"
"THREE!"

30 voices chanted in unison, counting the pushups as I did them, each time I came up I heard their voices chant the number until I reached the 25th pushup.

Walking out the glass double doors of that skyscraper on my last day there felt so good. I made a promise to myself to never work in that type of environment again.

I don't mind a little bit of the competitive spirit but this wasn't that.

When you're running a company, one of the most important assets you have is company culture. It's what motivates you and those you work with to go above and beyond just the bare
minimum to get by and achieve greatness.

Let me assure you - there wasn't a lot of greatness achieved at Main Street Hub. It was a toxic place to work on many levels. The positive takeaway is that this experience is informative on how not to be. 

From Rat Race to Ship Captain...What Does It Take?

More than one person that worked at MSH hub went on to become an entrepreneur.

I worked at a few more jobs, including Facebook before I started my firm but it begs the question:

Do we really need bad work environments to spurn industry disruptors and innovation in the startup world?

I can't answer that question definitively as I don't have a magic crystal ball that would show me the alternate life path if many of the jobs I worked at didn't have such terrible work ethics I never wanted to work at a day job again.

Clearly, it doesn't affect everyone the same way as well.

Some stay in a bad situation for years at a job they tolerate, just barely, because risking starting something new seems to be too much to do.

Whether it's a new job or venturing into entrepreneurship many are frozen accepting emotional abuse on a daily basis because we are trained to get a safe job and stick with it.

But there is a movement now, to invest in ourselves and our dreams.

With angel investors, startup accelerators,* the 1000 and 1 programs you can buy online to teach you how to start a biz (believe me I'm a program-a-holic)...

- being your own boss isn't such a far away concept as it used to be.

What happens though, if you become a boss, scale your company as big as some of the jobs you used to work for, and make so many of the same mistakes with soft skills that you are now doing to employees what was once done to you?

Paulo Freire wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that often what happens is the oppressed rise up to become the oppressor in a vicious cycle and we have to create a 3rd role of stepping outside this binary cycle to achieve freedom.

Social Impact Starts At Home


I think that's what motivates many of us in the entrepreneur world to not just start a business but start something special for our communities that gives back.

We seek to rise above hell with fluorescent lighting and cubicles to do something more. To be independent. Not just chase a dream but live it.

The increased connectedness of the internet facilitates good ideas making a greater impact.

In 2021, challenges that once felt hyperlocal are being discussed on national and global levels.

Issues like financial literacy in underserved populations, access to clean water, education for women and girls, and environmental conservation are just a few of the problems that social impact companies are attempting to tackle. [Source: Causelabs]

The increase in social impact organizations means that the people working to solve these challenges have more resources than ever before.

But no matter how grandiose the company mission is - we must take care of those at home first.

Ensuring there is good communication with healthy company culture, lateral leadership approaches to management and intrinsic motivation for projects is how to help ensure success. And employee retention. Don't be Luke at Main Street Hub.

Be someone that inspires, who is curious about new perspectives and genuinely appreciates other people.

This is a good recipe for creating friendships that last, better social networks as well as professional relationships.

If you aspire as an entrepreneur that makes a difference in the world, you'll benefit from developing relational capital not just financial capital, as you never know what opportunities come a-knocking from who you know.

When you build a positive work culture your employees become brand ambassadors once they believe in what you're doing.

That's better than cracking the whip.

What needs to change in the workplace? Comment below!

Check out my hip hop podcast From The Jump 

Know an entrepreneur making a difference? Invite them to join our tribe: https://trevorwgoodchild.com/entrepreneurtalk

PSS. I'm working on the website for Entrepreneurs That Make A Difference and am seeking feedback from business owners on what benefits you'd like to see in a SAAS membership, let me know if you'd like to contribute your ideas and become an early adopter.



Facebook disapprove your ad and won't tell you why? Need done-for-you FB ads?

Schedule a time to talk to a Facebook ad policy expert who worked at Facebook
here.

Enjoyed this blog? Signup here to get updates on new startup blogs.

                                              .  .  .


How to Fail Successfully

Fail fast, fail often, fail forward is a Silicon Valley saying that brands failure as a badge of honor, as if it is a secret right of passage towards success. This is both right & wrong, and I'll explain why we need to redefine our relationship with failure.

When a surgeon fails - that's life or death. When the Challenger rocket blew up - that failure cost the lives of the crew. So failing fast and failing often isn't a mantra that surgeons embrace for obvious reasons.

Back in the Upper Paleolithic era, when mankind drew stick figure animals on the walls of the Lascaux Cave we had a good reason to fear failure. This was a healthy fear that helped us survive from larger predators.

Fast forward, we now fear economic depressions, failing a final exam at our college or university, or failing to overcome the same obstacles that stopped our parents from becoming more successful in business or life.


We fear getting rejected when asking someone out on a date, we fear losing our job or abrupt market changes making our service or product irrelevant in the entrepreneur space.

As a result, we tend to avoid situations that are high risk, both economically and emotionally. This inclination to avoid failure actually produces more failures.

The car is coming towards you at breakneck speed and you don't dodge left, second guess dodging to the right and end up as roadkill.

Being too afraid of failing to make the right move is a recipe for making the wrong move.

You're stuck at a job you hate, have a promising idea to launch a business but want to wait for a zero-risk opportunity to launch. You want everything to be perfect first.

20 years later, shuffling papers on your desk, you think about how much the cost of living has risen and how your pension won't pay all the bills after you retire. Wait, what about that idea?

Too afraid of failure, you never took the leap. Having A+ syndrome, waiting for the perfect moment was a bigger failure than the actual risk you would have taken to start your own company.

Doing anything innovative, or disruptive to established routines requires taking the risk that you're going to fail --at least part of the time.

You may have read my other blogs about Elon Musk's way of thinking and how he used it to succeed at Tesla. Here's Musk's thoughts on failure:

"There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here [@ SpaceX]. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."

This echoes one of the speakers at a marketing conference I went to in Orlando, Florida who said,

"If you're not embarrassed by the first results -- you didn't launch soon enough,"

We'd never have medicines that help to cure ailments if we didn't explore the unknown and in doing so, fail a few times. As Facebook's early mantra goes, "Move fast, and break things."

While a friend of mine, that I worked with at Facebook mentioned, when he was talking to Mark Zuckerberg, "Mark didn't mean it in the way many engineers at Facebook interpret it as," the concept of prioritizing momentum over just waiting for an unrealistically perfect moment to arrive still holds true.

When we put a ban on failure we put a ban on progressive, and a better future.

Taking a shot at something great will require calibration - just like sighting in the crosshairs of a gun, pellet gun, paint gun or rifle - you'll have to miss a few times to see how far away you are from the target. You may miss more than you hit.

At least in the beginning.

Shakespeare is known for his greatest works like Romeo and Juliet but over twenty years he wrote 154 sonnets and 37 plays which were lacking in character development and had plots that were shoddy, incomplete and not really put together that well.

Now that we've established the importance of trying, even if you may fail, and how important failure is to help you calibrate the best path to success it's time to debunk Silicon Valley's failing fast and often mantra.

When entrepreneurs are too focused on celebrating failures as a token accomplishment, toasting to their bravery, important info is lost on how to work smarter not harder.

Failure provides valuable insight into what worked and what didn't work in our process of launching - to just throw spaghetti at the wall without a strategy or analyzing the results waits time and money - and the effort of even trying.

When we fail, we often try to hide it, or misrepresent what happened as someone else's fault. We twist reality to fit a rationalization of why it wasn't our fault and pass the buck onto other people or factors beyond our control.

What's the harm in fudging the truth a little here and there? you may ask.

If we don't own up to where & how we've failed then we learn nothing from the experience. What's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing and expecting different results. That's what Blockbuster & Kodak did - look where it got them.

When we pass blame for our failures onto outside elements - the girl that rejected us, the upset customer, the competitors in our niche - we have 0 cause to course correct and improve.

Time, effort and money are thrown down the drain re-attempting the same failed strategy we didn't learn from, crossing our fingers hoping our luck will change without taking responsibility for how we can change our luck.

This is one of the biggest misconceptions about determination and 'just working hard & not giving up.' If we're aimed in the wrong direction all that yelling at the GPS won't do us any good. All that effort is wasted.

The adage "No pain no gain" misrepresents the value of learning from failures in broad strokes. The aim isn't just to fail fast. It's to learn fast.

We would benefit from raising a glass to toast to the nuggets of gold we learn from failure, not just failing.

Another way I often see failures framed is as a loss. "I lost a lot of money in my first start up that didn't pan out." But you're only taking the L if you frame it that way.

A better way to frame failure is as an investment, and take note of the data you get from your efforts. This isn't data you'll find in a fortune cookie or motivational bumper sticker.

Intelligent failures can help you succeed more than previous successes if you take the time to look at what worked in your attempts and what didn't.

One of the best ways to overcome depression from failing at something, whether that's at a relationship, business launch, or personal venture is to learn something. Learning from your experience will never fail.

The founder of Forbes Magazine, Malcolm Forbes says it like this:

"Failure is success if we learn from it."

When we were children, we had to stumble and fall before learning to walk. Imagine if had our parents telling us,

"Don't try to walk because if you do you might fall."

We had to learn how not to fall in order to discover the joys of walking. A single failure is just the start not the end of our journey.

One of the benefits of examining failures for what worked and what didn't is we begin to ask better questions.

Sure, the solutions may evade us in the beginning, but by asking better questions we start to understand more, and with more understanding comes better strategies, with better strategies comes a higher chance of success.

Much of the time we focus on instant gratification. The faster we can get to the prize the better. Spending all our paychecks on Friday and being broke on Monday is an example of this.

Eating at fast food restaurants and pleasuring our taste buds instead of overall mind body spirit health that lasts us into old age more fit, and able-minded is another.

The famous marshmellow experiment in the 1960s, by a Stanford professor named Walter Mischel, tested children's self control. They were given one marshmallow and told if they didn't eat it, they'd get a second marshmallow.

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 followup studies herehere, and here.)

To increase our short-term pleasure, we often avoid actions that might fail.

Yet those who succeed in life delay gratification longer, recalibrate for seeing the bigger picture in the long term. Not falling for the trap of perpetually living in the short-term gratification that social media seems to exacerbated.

"Failure hovers uncomfortably close to greatness," said James Watson who was one of the discoverers of our DNA's double-helix structure.

So your aim should be to re-center your attention on the elements that you can control - the energy and approach you take when attempting to achieve a goal.

Always put the ego aside to prioritize curiosity over pride.

Ask yourself, after failing, "What went wrong with this failure?" and fix the method you used, recalibrate the angle of your approach based on the data your failures provide.

However - that is only part of the story. You need to also ask:

"What went right with this failure?"

Keep track of the higher quality choices you made, even if they produced a failure.

Work on perfecting the method or strategy you're using, and focus on updating your processes. Don't be afraid to use first-principle thinking here too and rewrite the script from the start.

When you reduce the stress on just achieving a specific goal, and work on developing your strategy, you'll improve at everything. The goal because a side-effect of a well-developed system instead of just a lucky guess using a life hack.

We get intrinsic benefits and value from activities we're doing because we're so in love with what we're doing that failing isn't even relevant anymore..

This kind of mindset is similar to one taught in Thich Nhat Hanh's book, the Miracle of Mindfulness, when he describes an incredibly huge pile of dishes and becoming overwhelmed until he re-focused on just washing each dish as if it was the only dish.

Let's put this in perspective of the workforce. When employers only reward success and reprimand or punish failure, this leads to workers just not sharing about failures. Employees try to hide where they've failed instead of look where they can learn from them.

They exaggerate their successes and try to pose everything done in the best way without being intrinsically invested in wanting to learn from mistakes and perfect a process.

This is in essence, shooting the messenger - especially when the failure was caused by an error in the system the employees were using not always just their own competence.

A business stagnates when it stops learning from its mistakes. It's the same reason Sears went out of business.

And it's understandable to an extent - we're taught to justify our failures by blaming other people or circumstances, but yet when we see someone falter we start labeling this failure as a result of their internal processes;

They were lazy, didn't pay attention, incompetent. Our habit of logging the failures of others can be repurposed as a source of data for how we can do things better.

Many companies I've worked for in big tech, Microsoft, Apple or Facebook say they can understand failures or like to learn from them, don't actually do this in reality.

They'll debate that failures mean someone is at fault, blame needs to be assigned, and without discipline and punishment employees will just take advantage of this and fail more.

In actuality - you can let your staff take risks as long as you have high standards. If someone keeps making the same mistake it's time for a one-on-one with quality control.

You can punish sloppy work or poor performance but also reward intelligent failures.

The best performing hospitals have a culture where the nurses are allowed to give feedback to the doctors so everyone learns from mistakes made, the worst are where doctors are untouchable and above critique. These hospitals tend to make more mistakes and hide them according to first-year doctoral student, Amy Edmondson's study in the 1990s.

Her Ted Talk is pretty amazing here:

Is this blog too detailed? Perhaps - I get pretty passionate about discovering solutions to problems we keep repeating. The attitude on failure is one of them.

Let's take a look at how failure works in schools, particularly at the college level.

The New York Times has a great article on this:

"Preoccupied in the 1980s with success at any cost (think Gordon Gekko), the American business world now fetishizes failure, thanks to technology experimentalist heroes like Steve Jobs. But while the idea of “failing upward” has become a badge of honor in the start-up world — with blog posts, TED talks, even industry conferences — students are still focused on conventional metrics of achievement, campus administrators say."

We’re not talking about flunking out of pre-med or getting kicked out of college,” Ms. Simmons said. “We’re talking about students showing up in residential life offices distraught and inconsolable when they score less than an A-minus. Ending up in the counseling center after being rejected from a club.

Students who are unable to ask for help when they need it, or so fearful of failing that they will avoid taking risks at all.” Almost a decade ago, faculty at Stanford and Harvard coined the term “failure deprived” to describe what they were observing: the idea that, even as they were ever more outstanding on paper, students seemed unable to cope with simple struggles."

The solution to this anxiety about even trying due to fear of failure is to experience failure on a regular basis. This is true for any phobia. When I started driving, I was freaked out by everything - how close the cars were, the speed of vehicles, going on super high curving overpasses.

It took time and experience of exposing myself to driving more and more that the fear lessened and driving skills also improved.

Each setback becomes the training to overcome the next one - if we choose to learn from failures and take the risk of failing again. And again. And again. Each attempt builds resilience and familiarity.

What's something you couldn't have achieved if you didn't try first and fail?

Comment below!

Read the last blog on SEO tips here

New Solution to Facebook Ad Policy Violations

After years of working at Facebook, I understand exactly what ad copy in your funnel is triggering the automations and how to get compliant. I'm a Facebook ad policy specialist and can audit your funnel, and share what to say that Facebook wants to see instead - but just isn't telling you.

Want to book a call to talk to Facebook and get results? Get solid answers directly from the source instead of guessing, googling and playing roulette? Schedule a call with me and I can easily tell you proven reasons why the automations flag you and how to become compliant.

You'll be swapping out walking in a minefield of ad flags, to have a sure path to having your Facebook ad accounts protected from being disabled. My clients have included social media marketing agencies of Tony Robbins, Harv Eker and Dean Graziosi. I'm featured on the Queen of Facebook Mari Smith's Marketing Essentials Course.

Save energy and money - how much is it costing you to not know why Facebook is shutting you down? My calendar is here.

Tony Robbins

I get 100s of emails a week from businesses and advertisers asking for help when their facebook ad account keeps getting disabled, so my calendar gets booked fast. But if you want to get to the front, you can pre-pay for a consulting session here: Book a call

facebook ad account keeps getting disabled

If you want to skip the line before this offer ends, immediately secure an expert-level Facebook consulting call from someone at Facebook. Book a call with me now! If you're ok with waiting a bit longer, and entering the waitlist to see if you're eligible - Schedule a call or contact me via email.

Mari Smith and Trevor W Goodchild

 

What the Workplace Looks Like – Post COVID19

Image by cromaconceptovisual from Pixabay


Many businesses have come to a full stop due to the Corona Virus, or rather the response to C-19 from governments across the world putting entire countries on lockdown.

What does a post Covid workplace look like?

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor, 21.0 million are unemployed in America right now. The unemployment rate and the number of unemployed persons are up by 9.8 percentage points and 15.2 million, respectively, since February 2020.

Employers are taking a step back, scratching their heads and trying to figure out what hiring strategies look like, and how workplace organization will accommodate social distancing.

Remote Workflows Increase Employer Value

You may have noticed that businesses you work for or are a customer of have started partially staffing offices again. To the extent this will continue depends on the spread of the corona virus, death counts, and potential vaccines.

Many workplaces, especially in the tech sector, already offered remote work options. When I provided IT support for Facebook's servers, Facebook had us working partially remote.

This added many advantages being able to multitask household chores like doing laundry while still monitoring dips and spikes in the flux of Facebook's site stability.

Employers adapting to C-19 by offering remote work options will attract some of the best talent from literally anywhere in the world. 


This increases job satisfaction as well if location is no longer the make or break factor in accepting a job. How many times have people moved away from friends and family just to land a 'good' job?

Countless.

What happens when your commute time is increased 5 times as much driving to and from work? Definitely doesn't make you appreciate working somewhere more.

I've known folks who commuted literally from other cities to work everyday. And not outlier suburbs but literal whole other cities hours away.

Working remote offers savings in gas money, babysitting money for parents, and expands the talent pool employers can select from.

Productivity Hacks & Employee Behavior Drives

If the new future post covid19 involves more remote work, employers will need to develop new productivity hacks. This includes the necessity of increasing engagement among employees.

When I worked remote for another IT company that offered tech support for colleges we had group chats where we could share comments together on more than just the job.

The social aspect helped relieve the monotony of working only by yourself at home without physical socialization.

Socializing is important. Research by Oxford University's Saïd Business School, in collaboration with British multinational telecoms firm BT, has found a conclusive link between happiness and productivity:

The happier employees are the more productive they are.

Autonomy and trust will need to be increased in order for even a partially remote workforce to be productive.This means, individually, employees have to find out their specific behavior drives.

This is likened to the aspiring college student - if you went to college one of the things you had to figure out, consciously or by habit, is how you learned the best.

Are you a visual learner? Audio learner? Did taking notes by computer lessen how much you retained versus shorthand notes that are hand written in a notebook?

One of my biggest challenges going to the University of Texas was discovering how I learned the best. It was a Rubik's cube.

Spanish grammar was a particular roadblock for me. Through trial and error I discovered that I learned best by immersing myself in Spanish Netflix shows, Spanish radio stations, and attending Spanish speaking meetup groups - in addition to the standard flipping of index cards for vocab and grammar memorization.

Employees will need to find new routines if working remote, that helps them stay focused and productive. Management can take the lead helping this process by increasing engagement and feedback activities.

The End of Chats by the Water Cooler Era?

Side chatter may be reduced if people aren’t physically at the job place. No more random stops by your friends desk on the way to your lunch or the bathroom.

No more chats by the water cooler

While to some this sounds like a good 
option it’s good only in the out dated IBM of the 60s work model of dress codes, strict workplace protocols that kill creativity and innovation.

This antiquated notion that the more alike and the same everyone was the easier it is to control them and increase their output has been proven wrong by numerous studies (read my blog on intrinsic motivation).

Some of the best ideas that created billions of dollars in revenue came from chats at the water cooler, as well as side projects that were left up to individual employees to develop to their own liking versus strict company standards.

Gmail itself was invented by an engineer during Google's famous 20% days.


"We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google,"

as Business Insider quoted Google saying.

Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, created the first version of Gmail in one day, reusing the code from Google Groups. The project was known by the code name Caribou, a reference to a Dilbert comic strip about Project Caribou.

The point is, if remote work is going to become the norm, management will need to adopt more flexible strategies from leadership to keep folks motivated to not just do the minimal but to exceed expectations.

Companies will be at an advantage
to be inclusive of free range creative brainstorming moments where staff can socialize, share experiences and create mini think tanks.

What other ways do you see the workplace changing due to COVID19? Comment your thoughts below!

                                              .  .  .

Enjoyed this blog?
Signup here to get updates on new startup blogs.
Check out my Medium page here
Is Facebook not explaining why the disapproved an ad?
I worked at FB for years and offer FB Policy Consulting here

Available for freelance writing and guest posting on your blog: [email protected]

business blog, business blog, business blog