Mojovation Consulting

Mojovation 2023 in review

2023-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

So, last Christmas I reflected on the half-year since Mojovation Consulting had sprung into existence, and outlined some bold predictions for what 2023 had in store. Bearing in mind that those boasts included “a blog post a week”, and I actually managed nine posts (including this one!), you’ve probably gathered that things were… not quite what had been planned.

Yet there’s been plenty of excitement - with more to come in 2024, for sure this time! Let’s simultaneously look backwards and forwards…

2 major life events

At the start of the year, I certainly wasn’t anticipating a 2023 divorce, but here we are! Much of the year has been spent in a degree of upheaval, renting a flat while selling the previous family home, supporting my former partner in her property purchase, and finally completing one of my own. This was, obviously, a lot. I’m glad that I’d stated my hopes for 2023 to include “more mindfulness”, and that I’d already discovered the benefits of therapy and sleep meditation, as I needed all of the help that I could get at times this year.

As the year draws to a close, these areas of my life are finally approaching some semblance of stability. I’m getting the hang of co-parenting, and starting the exciting journey of putting a stamp on my new home, including finally returning to the position where I have an office which isn’t also my living room!

1 coaching qualification (almost) completed

Somehow I’ve neglected to mention Barefoot Coaching on this site before, but I’ve been working towards their Accredited Coach Training Programme since September. It’s an intense course spread over five months, with a subsequent option to pursue a postgraduate certificate, so this is likely to dominate my attention through much of 2024 too.

While my freelance coaching opportunities have largely been sidelined as I focus on both the Barefoot course and my full-time role, I’ve had many opportunities to practice and develop my coaching skills during my time with Barefoot Coaching, including participating in reflective practice and capturing a log of my coaching sessions, meaning that an International Coaching Federation (ICF) membership is on the horizon for 2024.

2 books written

About 33% of my blog output this year has been in support of the book which I published this year, Finding Mojovation (available via Amazon and Leanpub), which has now been out for long enough that I’ve started to receive royalty payments - a happy bonus, given how much fun I already had in putting the book together.

But it’s not the only book that I wrote this year! I also took part in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) for the first time, writing a 53,000 word first draft of my YA fantasy title The Dreamlinkers. In early 2024, after some time away from it, I’m planning to revise and extend it to nearer 70,000 words, at which point I’m planning to self-publish via Amazon. I’m also planning to take part in NaNoWriMo again in 2024, with a sequel to The Dreamlinkers already in the works.

21 bucket list items completed

My goal for the year was to complete one-third of my “43 things to do before I’m 43” list. I went somewhat better, completing almost half of the list, and leaving only eight items to be completed by the time I turn 43 in September next year!

I completed most of the activities that I’d flagged for completion at the end of last year, plus plenty of others, with particular highlights include getting my first (but not last!) tattoo, seeing the Northern Lights in Iceland, and appearing as a featured extra in a film which is due for release in 2024!

My Mojovation resolutions for 2024

I’m wary of gazing too much into my crystal ball after the unpredictability of the year gone by, but in the interests of setting myself some targets, here’s what I’m aiming for:

Gaining a coaching accreditation. As above, my course with Barefoot Coaching will unlock many potential opportunities. I’ll certainly pursue an ICF qualification, which will also include a significant number of coaching hours, and I’m undertaking some free sessions with volunteers in support of my coursework.
Mojovation Office Hours. This was an aspect for the site which I’d planned when site version 2.0 launched: some weekly “first come, first served” time where anybody is welcome to drop in for chats about their careers, challenges, or miscellaneous Mojovational Q&A, possibly via Twitch. Once my new office is fully kitted-out in the new year, this will be one of the most noticeable changes on this site!
Regular blog content. Maybe not weekly, but at least monthly - more than this year’s nine posts, at least 😁
Finishing my 43 Before 43 list. This should be mostly a foregone conclusion; of the eight items remaining, I’ve already got firm dates when six of them will be done. There’s the small matter of reading War and Peace still to go, though, so I’d better start that soon…
Publishing my first novel. This spring I’ll be paying another visit to the residential writing retreat which served me so well when I was writing Finding Mojovation, and I’ll be using the venue to put the finishing touches to The Dreamlinkers - coming to Amazon in 2024!

I hope you all have a restful end to the year, and I wish you all a joyful and prosperous 2024!

Finding Mojovation launches!

2023-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

The day has arrived - the eBook version of Finding Mojovation is now available for purchase on Leanpub! 🎉

There’ll already be plenty of marketing material out there on the web by the time that you read this - maybe this is even the first blog post that you’re reading since purchasing the book (in which case, hello!) - so this post is going to be slightly bigger-picture.

Regular readers will be familiar with my journalistic credentials and my love of writing, which stretches back to being in primary school. Whenever we were given assignments such as “write a story covering one side of A5 paper”, I’d frequently fill multiple pages, sometimes with recurring characters and plots. I became so renowned for it that one of my teachers took a particularly lengthy story that I’d written - it was tangentially related to Robin Hood, as I remember, probably meaning that I wrote it around the 1991 launch of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves - and after asking me to type it up, proceeded to bind it and add it to the “real” books in our school library.

It’s a moment that I’ve been longing to recapture, and with Finding Mojovation, it’s one step closer. I’m awaiting feedback and thoughts from my first batch of readers, to make sure that there’s nothing glaringly obvious that I’ve missed, but within the next couple of weeks I’ll be pushing the big button which converts the book to both paperback and Kindle format. Excitingly for me, with my background in podcasting, I’ll also be going into a studio to record the audiobook version for release on Audible; depending on how all of the above goes, these should all see the light of day by the end of October.

And then it’ll be on to the next project! Anyone who browses the copious footnotes in the book might spot that I’ve teased a couple of additional Mojovation titles (hopefully both coming to fruition in 2024), but I’m planning to dabble in fiction writing for a bit first, starting with finally taking part in NaNoWriMo after so many years of forgetting to plan anything in advance.

I hope you enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed creating it!

Key takeaways 📝

Finding Mojovation is out now on Leanpub.

Paperback, Kindle and Audible versions should follow by the end of October.

Stay tuned for more Mojovation books in 2024!

Coming soon: The Mojovation book!

2023-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

At the end of 2022, I made a bold announcement in my end-of-year review that I would be releasing a book this year, in the same vein as the posts that I’ve been sharing on this site for the past year. As some of you are no doubt aware, life got in the way a bit - but things are now very much on-track, with a title, a release date and a pre-order page! 🎉

Introducing: Finding Mojovation

👉 Preview/preorder Finding Mojovation on Leanpub

It seems fair to describe this book as “twenty years in the making”, given I’ve yet to fully put my university journalistic qualifications into print, and given that Finding Mojovation is a book which discusses the future of work by reflecting on experiences (good and bad) from my past two decades in software development.

If you’ve read some of the blog posts on this site previously, you’ll have a good idea of the vibe. The book is split into two distinct parts:

Part 1 (tentative title: “The World of Work”) focuses on the ways in which are working environments have changed, and how their systems are often set up to fail us as individuals. We’ll discuss some of the ways that we (as both ICs and managers) can help to improve the situation, and how we can help to create a better working environment for ourselves and our colleagues.
Part 2 (tentative title: “Reclaim Your Mojovation”) is more focused on how we can each thrive in our own way, by creating opportunities for happiness and a sense of fulfilment. We’ll discuss how to find your own mojovation, and how to use it to create a better working life for yourself.

I’m undertaking an intensive writing process to get this book onto your shelves and screens; I’m currently on a five-day writing retreat during which I’m aiming to finish a first draft of Part 1, at the very least.

I’m publishing on Leanpub, which gives me the flexibility to release (and revise) the book in stages. This also means that I’m actively looking for reviewers and feedback, with free/discounted copies of the book available for collaborators.

The eBook should launch by the end of September, with a print version to follow not long afterwards (I hope; this mostly depends on how seamless Leanpub’s Amazon publishing integration process turns out to be.) It’s an exciting adventure for me, and I’m hoping it’s one that you’ll benefit from too.

Even if you don’t purchase the book yourself, I’d be grateful if you could use the “Register Your Interest” form on the Leanpub page, as this expression of interest can be very helpful in encouraging others to take a look at the book.

Key takeaways 📝

The eBook version of Finding Mojovation is available for preorder on Leanpub.

A print version will follow later in the autumn.

If you’d like to help with reviews or proof-reading of content, please get in touch!

Are you having an authentic Out Of Office experience?

2023-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

This blog post was inspired by a recent live YouTube discussion, “Out of Office”, from 9 Out of 10 Testers.

Go on, admit it. When you’re getting ready to leave work for a vacation, what are the words that you type into your Out of Office message / Slack status / team communication channel? Despite the geographical boundaries asserted in the tweet below, chances are it’s more like the latter than the former.

European out-of-offices: “I’m away camping for the summer. Email again in September”

American out-of-offices: “I have left the office for two hours to undergo kidney surgery but you can reach me on my cell anytime”
— Samuel Pollen (@samuel_pollen) April 30, 2021

The truth is, as remote working and flexible working hours become more common, the boundaries between work and home life are becoming increasingly blurred. This is especially true for those of us who work in the tech industry, where the expectation is that we are always available, always on, always connected. It’s not uncommon to see people working on their laptops in coffee shops, on trains, in airports, even on the beach.

So it’s unsurprising that, when it comes to taking time off, we sometimes struggle to disconnect. We frantically add clauses into our status messages: “I’m away all week, but I’ll check Slack a couple of times each day, and in an emergency you can reach me on my mobile.”

What drives us to do this? In part perhaps, in overworked times, it’s the guilt that we perceive when we’re taking time off while our colleagues are continuing to put their noses to the grindstone. We want to be seen as “one of the team”, that we can be “there for them” if they truly need us. But it’s a frightening fact that most teams can survive without a particular member of staff for a week or two. If they can’t, then there’s a bigger problem that needs to be addressed, before that person decides to leave or gets hit by a bus. (Worse, what if they can survive without you; have you holidayed yourself out of a job…?)

In part, perhaps we’re also trying to protect ourselves so that we don’t return to an overflowing inbox on our return. I’m especially guilty of putting in a couple of hours on the Sunday evening before returning to work on a Monday morning, so that I can effectively hit the ground running when I’m back at my desk. But this again speaks to the same problem: what’s happening which is preventing work from being allocated to others in our absence?

In the busy summer holiday season, there are obviously more holidays and therefore teams are working with fewer resources. Yet it’s rarely the absence of any one individual which causes a problem. In my experience, the challenges occur when the lines of delegation break down. Picture this scenario:

Jo is away on holiday. They write on their auto-responder: “I’m out of office next week. Please contact Tony in my absence.”
Tony is away sick one day. They leave a message on Slack: “Sorry I’m off today. Please redirect enquiries to Emma.”
If you have a query which requires Jo’s assistance, you find yourself having to contact Emma. However, Emma doesn’t have knowledge of Jo’s day-to-day role, nor access to the same systems required for their job.

And that’s with only a couple of loops in the chain - and also without any recursive loops (I’ve certainly seen situations where, in the scenario above, Tony says “I’m sick, talk to Jo” when Jo’s on holiday). As with any sufficiently large team structure, the more nodes you add, the more the complexity increases, and the likelier it is that something will go wrong.

As with a lot of the Mojovational posts, the secret is acceptance. These situations are commonplace; you’re not doing anything especially wrong. And with acceptance comes a level of comfort. That’s why the Simpsons GIF at the top of this post (from the episode Homer Goes to College) is so surprisingly zen:

Professor: “If anyone would like to stay, I’m going to hold a comprehensive review session after every class.”
Homer: “Do we have to?”
Professor: “No.”
Homer: “Then kiss my curvy butt goodbye!” * runs outside to chase squirrels *

While the episode is making an important point about Homer’s lack of academic rigour, he’s doing a better job than us of having an authentic Out of Office experience. He doesn’t say “Kiss my curvy butt goodbye… but if something important comes up tonight, send me an email and I’ll pick it up.”

I’m not saying that we should all go out and start chasing squirrels, but the secret to a successful Out of Office experience is as simple as Homer makes it appear:

When you’re off, be off. That’s it. Delegate whatever is necessary in order for you to feel comfortable with doing this. If you spot yourself saying “But I can’t take time off, because….” then address whatever the “because” is.
Equally, upon return from holiday, try to normalise the idea that the first day back is going to be at a slower pace than usual as you get back up-to-speed. When talking about team workloads or velocities, try to factor in the time taken for people to catch up after a holiday. It’s also why some of the most successful sprint teams that I’ve seen will run a Wednesday to Tuesday sprint, rather than Monday to Friday: it’s hard enough to start a sprint planning session on a Monday morning when everyone’s had the weekend off, without also accounting for those who could be returning from holidays.
If you’re holding yourself back from taking holiday in case it negatively affects your team’s experience: don’t. When you don’t allow yourself to take time off, you’re increasing your risk of stress and burnout; and when your colleagues see you avoiding holiday, it makes them feel guilty about taking time off for themselves. Be a trend-setter. Take the time off that you’re entitled to, and encourage others to do the same.

With these few pieces of advice, hopefully holidays will begin to feel more like actual holidays again!

Key takeaways 📝

Don’t avoid holiday because you worry about the affect that it will have on others.

Do do some due diligence before you leave, to minimise the impact that your absence will have on others.

Do ensure that managers lead by example (especially if you’re that manager).

A rest is as good as a change

2023-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

So much of our modern literature on productivity and performance tells us that we need to focus on doing more. You’ve seen all of those LinkedIn influencers who boast that they’re up at 4am each day, and that their success can be attributed to their ability to work 18-hour days. (It’s a wonder that they even manage to find a free moment to write those LinkedIn posts.)

But the truth is that we can’t be productive all of the time. Our bodies and brains need time to rest and recharge, which we most often associate with sleeping. Sleep is one of the first things that we sacrifice when we’re feeling overworked, and yet even when we train ourselves to get more sleep, we often find that we’re still feeling tired and unproductive.

That’s because sleep is just one of many different types of rest that are available, as Saundra Dalton-Smith explains in her TEDx talk, “The real reason we are tired and what to do about it”. She describes seven different types of rest, and explains how we can use each of them to recharge our batteries.

Consider the following seven categories, and where you may currently be experiencing a deficit:

1. Physical rest 🏃‍♂️

This is the type of rest which tends to be easiest to recognise, as our body will give us very clear signs that we’re in need of it (unless you’re Jack Bauer in 24). Physical rest is often best achieved passively (via sleeping), but you can also pursue active physical rest, such as yoga or stretching.

2. Mental rest 🧠

When your energies start to sap at the end of a school or working day, it’s often because your brain has been overworked by all of the experiences that it’s absorbed. While sleeping can also be helpful in achieving mental rest (and sleep is a proven way to help us to process and retain information), any form of “switching off” can be helpful. We can achieve this throughout the day by ensure that we take regular screen breaks, stretch our legs, go for a walk, or practice some form of meditation or mindfulness.

What “social rest” means to you will depend on your personality type, as discussed in our book review of Quiet: The Power of Introverts. For some people, they can “unwind” and feel better about themselves by spending time with people who give them energy. For introverts, these interactions can prove draining in themselves, and social rest is more easily achieved by the reverse: taking a break from excessive social interactions, and spending time alone.

4. Creative rest 🎨

Creativity, again, means different things to different people. It also needn’t mean that you have to be highly skilled at a given discipline - I enjoy playing the guitar, but I’m no Jimi Hendrix (feel free to insert a more modern reference here).

When we express ourselves creatively, our brains experience a relaxing effect, which can help us to feel more energised. And if we’re particularly adept at our specialism, we may even enter a state of “flow”, where we lose track of time and become completely immersed in our activity.

5. Emotional rest ❤️

We all experience emotions, often negative ones, on a daily basis. Some of us handle this by suppressing our feelings, or choosing to defer their experience. This can lead to a mental overload, which we often refer to as “bottling up” our emotions. You can achieve emotional rest by creating the time and space to be authentic about your feelings (which may involve talking about them, journalling, or just sitting with yourself and acknowledging their existence).

6. Sensory rest 👁

The modern world is screaming out for our attention. Be honest, have you read to this point in the article in one go? Or have you been skim-reading, or swiping away other notifications on your phone, or turning up that song that you like on the radio, or dealing with the latest drama from your partner or children? It’s no surprise that many of us find ourselves in need of sensory rest; creating screen-free time, or going outside and enjoying the natural world, can be a great way to achieve this. Try to give your senses a complete rest: I used to always pair a walk with listening to some music or a podcast, but try leaving your headphones at home one day, and see what it’s like to experience the true nature of the world around you.

7. Spiritual rest 🧘‍♂️

Spiritual doesn’t need to mean religious (although it can be that, if it fits your beliefs). It’s about finding a sense of purpose, and feeling like you’re doing something that matters. This could be as simple as finding a hobby that you enjoy, or it could be something more profound, like volunteering for a charity or a cause that you believe in.

Summary

If you’re feeling tired, it’s worth considering which of these types of rest you may be missing. It’s not always easy to find the time to rest, but it’s important to remember that not all rest is the same. If you’re feeling tired, it’s worth considering which of these types of rest you may be missing.

You can view Saundra’s TEDx talk in full below!

Key takeaways 📝

Sleeping is not the same as resting.

Learn to recognise each of the different forms of rest.

Try to find a way to incorporate each type of rest into your working day/week.

Practicing agile environmentalism

2023-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

At the recent Bluedot Festival, I watched a wonderful talk from scientist, author and comedian Matt Winning. As a companion to his book Hot Mess, he discussed the various ways in which we can reduce our carbon footprint, and the impact that this can have on the environment. He also discussed the importance of not letting the scale of the problem overwhelm us, and to instead focus on the small things that we can do to make a difference.

Working in technology, I’m acutely aware of the impact that our industry has on the environment. For those who commute regularly, the carbon footprint of our daily travel can be significant. And for those who work in the cloud, the energy consumption of our data centres is a constant concern. (That’s without even getting into the impact of the constant heap of environmental waste that we generate by constantly replacing our devices, or thinking about how far the ingredients for our lunchtime sandwich have travelled.)

Measuring your carbon footprint

If you want to put a relatively precise number on the scale of your environmental impact, set aside some time to look at the Carbon Footprint Calculator. It’s not an exact science (if you pardon the pun) but even if the number(s) that it produces appear meaningless upon first glance, it’s relatively easy to imagine how you could reduce each of those numbers by 10%, 25% or even more, depending upon the scale of change that you’re happy to make.

What can you do?

Climate change is a huge problem, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge, especially when the largest (potentially planet-saving) changes need to be made by big businesses. But there are a variety of ways in which individuals can make a difference, and they needn’t involve making huge sacrifices to your lifestyle. Some of them may even make you happier and healthier!

Travel and Transportation: If you’re a frequent car traveller, could you switch to public transport, or even walking or cycling? If you’re in the market for a new vehicle, would you consider going electric, or at the very least investing in a hybrid or more fuel-efficient model? Or could you even consider working from home more often, to reduce your commute? (Home working, of course, has its own impact on other energy consumption, but it’s still likely to be a net win.)
Home Energy Use: Could you switch to a green energy provider? Could you reduce your energy consumption by turning off lights and appliances when they’re not in use? Could you invest in a smart meter, to help you to monitor your energy usage? We appear to be slowly coming out of the deep end of the UK energy crisis, but it’s still worth considering how you can reduce your energy consumption, and how you can make your home more energy-efficient.
Diet: Could you reduce your meat consumption, or even go vegetarian or vegan? (I’m not suggesting that you need to go cold turkey - there’s another pun - but even the simple act of a “Meat-Free Monday” could significantly reduce your footprint.) Could you buy more locally-sourced produce, or even grow your own? Could you reduce your food waste by planning your meals in advance, and only buying what you need? (I’m a big fan of organisations like Too Good To Go and Olio, which allow you to buy surplus food from local restaurants and supermarkets at a discount, to prevent it from going to waste.)
Shopping: It’s not only food which gets an environmental boost when you shop locally. Could you reduce your online shopping, and instead buy from local businesses? Could you buy second-hand or locally-made items from independent retailers, which would give a boost to your local high street too?

Reduction vs offseting

The above suggestions are all about reducing your carbon footprint, but there are also ways in which you can offset any unavoidable carbon emissions. This is a way of “paying back” the environment for the carbon that you’ve consumed, by investing in projects which will help to reduce carbon emissions elsewhere. (For example, by planting trees, or by investing in renewable energy projects.)

I’ve been supporting environmental projects through Ecologi since the summer of 2022. Via a monthly subscription, you can support tree-planting and other environmental projects, both in the UK and abroad. They’ll even send you emails each month with photographs of where your money is going! (If you use my referral link to sign up, we’ll each get 30 trees planted for free!)

In a world where our mailboxes and inboxes are overloaded with junk or demands for money, it’s nice to get a regular reminder that you’re making a difference. As of the time that you’re reading this, I’ve planted 478 trees, and offset 22.33 tonnes of carbon. That’s the equivalent of 17 long-haul flights, or 55,401 miles driven in a car. (Yes, those numbers are updated automatically - just another meta-reminder that making a change needn’t require a huge amount of effort!)

Key takeaways 📝

The biggest changes can be made by the biggest organisations. Environmental activism and awareness are key!

That said, there are plenty of ways in which we can all make subtle lifestyle changes as individuals.

If you can’t reduce, you could consider offsetting.

Lessons learned from 20 years of working

2023-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

July 2023 marks the 20th anniversary of starting my first full-time job in tech. Sure, I’d had plenty of part-time and temporary jobs during my student days (including many happy years working in HMV), but following my graduation from university, it was time to find myself a desk and a computer (hopefully with a window).

I’ve been fortunate to have encountered more good times than bad, in ways which have occasionally been fortunate (swerving potential large-scale redundancies by leaving organisations just before they happened) and some which have been more earned (surviving redundancies by having the right skills at the right time). But there are a few common threads which might be relevant to anyone who’s entering the job market right now, especially if it’s for the first time.

Finding your passion might take time

I left university with a degree in journalism, and little more than a desire to not enter the world of journalism. The course left me somewhat jaded; even in the days before “fake news”, dumbing-down and clickbait, it was obvious which way the wind was blowing. With that in mind, priority number one became “paying the bills”.

I tried to maintain a journalistic connection with my first role, working for a company which built bespoke websites for events related to the magazine industry, cutting my teeth on websites for such illustrious events as the National Recycling Awards. Truth be told, a part of me was still holding out hope of making some industry contacts who might help me to put that degree to good use, but the closest I came was meeting David Bellamy at one of the aforementioned niche industry conferences.

I wore a lot of different hats during my three years with that first company. I joined as an office administrator, but was given the opportunity to manage a new dedicated customer services team. When the customer service team became bogged-down by repeated complaints from customers about recurring bugs, I trained myself as a tester and grew a team as QA Manager. And when there were gaps following staff departures, I even took up the reins of Development Manager for the best part of a year.

Trying lots of different roles gave me the opportunity to learn what I was actually passionate about. It turned out that the world of testing was right for me: as a journalist, my strength had always been sub-editing (basically, proof-reading and checking for adherence to style guidelines). Testing was very similar, but much less mundane, and so I jumped in with both feet. While I’m no longer spending quite so much time on the coal-face of testing, this somewhat chaotic path was extremely helpful in cementing what I actually wanted to do with my life.

Know your craft

So you’ve found your dream job. Fantastic! But don’t rest on your laurels. Whatever your industry, things are constantly changing. New standards will emerge, and new tools and devices will arrive on the marketplace. If you’re keeping your head down and just doing “what’s expected”, you might suddenly discover that “what’s expected” has shifted under your feet.

I’ve seen this on a large scale earlier in my career, when I was working within a test team where management suddenly decided that they wanted to reshape the test job specs to be much more automation-focused. It was such a large shift in responsibilities that the team were all put under threat of redundancy while they demonstrated whether they’d be capable of fulfilling this new role. Thankfully, I’d been honing my test automation skills independently of my day job, meaning that my involvement in the process was described as “a formality” by the powers-that-be. But I watched other skilled people lose their jobs, as the company had suddenly decided that they didn’t value those skills as highly any more - and they hadn’t seen where the market was heading.

We’re seeing this happen under our feet right now, with artificial intelligence. Some people may fear that their jobs could be negatively impacted by AI; some people may find their jobs become easier as they can incorporate AI tooling into their workflows; but perhaps more worrying is the group of people who aren’t even aware that there’s an AI revolution happening.

Keep in touch with your professional community, by following respected industry figures on social platforms, subscribing to podcasts, attending events or participating in online forums. Even if you’re just absorbing rather than contributing yourself, you’ll be positioning yourself to be at the forefront of new developments.

Know your worth

With inflation, energy crises and other external factors at play, everyone’s feeling the pinch more than ever. This has made people more hyper-aware of their earnings, and how their spending power is affected (especially negatively) by what’s happening in the world. With this in mind, be wary of doing anything which boils down to “doing extra work, for free”.

While I’m about to share some amusing stories about bad reasons that I’ve had for leaving companies, I’ve never regretted moving on from a role for financial reasons. In that aforementioned first company, despite all the different managerial badges that I wore during my time there, I was never able to get my salary to £20,000. Granted they were different times (it’s probably more like asking for £25-30k in the current market) but it’s not as if I wasn’t demonstrating my worth, nor demonstrating my commitment to the company (I was with them for over three years).

When it became clear that I’d hit a (relatively low) pay ceiling, I made my peace with it and sought out a company that was willing to pay what I felt I was worth. (And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the first company went through some mass redundancies, followed by eventual liquidation.)

Talking about salaries is still seen as something of a taboo subject. As a manager, I’ve always tried to encourage transparency and openness, even when this has negatively affected the company. Within one team, we were advertising new roles with a salary band significantly higher than several long-serving members of the teams. When all of my attempts to achieve salary alignment for these individuals failed, they left the company and took up roles which were able to offer them what they deserved.

Make your peace with office politics

While I’ve certainly had noble reasons (such as ethics) for choosing to quit some roles, it’s funny how many jobs I left - particularly in the first half of my career - for reasons which seem somewhat trivial in hindsight. While I’ve never been a fan of office politics, or other sorts of corporate game-playing, there were still certain things where I thought “I can’t believe this company works in this way!” where I didn’t have the knowledge of “well, actually, almost every company works that way”.

Here are a few of them, and good ways to make peace with them!

Feeling more qualified than those above you. This is often the nature of how promotions work - the Peter principle teaches us that skilled people will find themselves repeatedly promoted until they reach a level which exceeds their competence. So if you’re observing this skills gap, there’s a reasonable chance that said person is also having internal conflict about this. Demonstrate your value to such a manager by becoming someone that they can rely upon to help them with difficult tasks.
Not getting the recognition that you deserve. This can sometimes go hand-in-hand with the above! One of the downsides of repeatedly digging your boss out of hot water is if they take ownership of your ideas/solutions for themselves. While you can’t control how others act, you can certainly strive to become the kind of leader or manager who shares the plaudits with people who deserve it.
Too much work / not enough time. This is never going to change! Managers are always going to want to ship products, driven by executives whose focus is on securing the bottom line. If you work feverishly to finish a project a week early, you don’t magically get a week off; you immediately begin work on the next project which itself has a dangerously short deadline. Don’t be a hero. If you put in unreasonable extra hours to get the work done, this turns into “hidden effort” which only leads to the company confidently overestimating what they can achieve next time too.
It seems like management doesn’t know what they’re doing. Most of software development is a degree of guess-work! It’s why, in agile development, we talk about things like “estimation”: we don’t know how long something is going to take to build. We use agile methodologies to decrease time-to-market, because we also can’t be sure that users want what we’re building until we put it in front of them. It’s unrealistic to expect product managers to be some sort of genies, with their crystal balls illuminating the perfect approach to building a product. Uncertainty isn’t a weakness; it’s a prompt to work smartly and collaboratively.

Don’t burn your bridges

So you’ve decided to leave a role, and you’re confident that it’s for a good reason which you’re not going to regret. You may even feel a huge burden has been lifted from your shoulders, with your excitement for your new role vastly outweighing your lack of passion for your current role - a difficult sensation if you’re on a long notice period.

Nevertheless, try to remain professional and dedicated during any notice period. If your new role isn’t everything that you hoped it would be, you might (as I’ve done previously) find yourself taking advantage of the common parting message “if it doesn’t work out, we’ll have you back in a heartbeat”. Even if you don’t return to the same company, local networks tend to be relatively close-knit, and with a 2-3 year tenure being pretty common in the tech sector, you may find that a former colleague or manager has moved onto another organisation themselves, and they might remember you as a potential pivotal member of that new team. (This has happened to me on no fewer than four occasions in the past 20 years!)

Then, of course, there are references. I’m sometimes asked for references for people that I last managed over five years ago. When such a request comes in, a manager often has to recall their most recent or lasting memory of working with that person. If you’re someone who didn’t pull their weight during their notice period, or bad-mouthed your team after they left, it doesn’t matter how many years of hard work you’d put in before that.

Key takeaways 📝

A job might not be for life any more, but a career is.

Focus on crafting a career which aligns with your passions.

Jobs are sometimes going to suck. That’s why you get paid to do them. Don’t sweat the small stuff, but know your worth.

How to avoid losing yourself in remote work

2023-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

The world of work - especially tech work - has been evolving rapidly in recent years. In part this has been driven by employees’ needs and demands, but COVID has obviously played a massive part too, and nowhere is this most apparent than in the world of remote work.

I’ve been working remotely almost permanently since 2017, when I took a job specifically because of the novelty of a fully-remote position. At that time, many people perceived remote working as something of a “doss job”, or that we’d be working in our pyjamas or doing the gardening (hopefully not both at the same time).

Yet it’s funny how a lengthy enforced period of remote working for the entire workforce can reshape peoples’ attitudes towards ways of working. For some, the pandemic was an eye-opener as to how outdated our working practices had become; it’s often possible to be just as efficient when working remotely, while reducing our commute times, costs and environmental impact. For others, it merely solidified their feeling that they’d prefer to co-locate with colleagues in an office setting, perhaps due to their dissatisfaction with the nature of remote working. Nevertheless, the change was so marked that it helped to give rise to an entire movement, known as “The Great Resignation”.

For those who’ve jumped on board the metaphorical remote working train, things aren’t always easy. It’s easy to feel like you’re “always on”, with your email or Slack messages just a few metres away. This can lead to burnout and mental health problems if left unchecked, so how can you avoid falling into the pitfalls of remote working?

Know when you’re “off”

In an office environment, it’s pretty obvious when you’re done with work for the day. Even if you’re commuting with a laptop, there’s a distinct moment where you shut everything down, get up from your chair, leave the office and return to your home.

There’s less of a semantic disconnect when your home is also your workplace, particularly if your workspace is in the corner of a high-traffic area, such as a living room or dining room. It’s so tempting to just start work early as soon as you’ve finished breakfast, or to stretch your working day by an extra half-hour now that you don’t have a commute to worry about. But unless your contracted hours were modified at the same time as your working arrangements, you’re not being paid to work these extra hours (and they soon add up).

The easiest way to switch-off is to create a physical disconnect; for instance, by having a dedicated office space and setting yourself a “go home” alarm for the end of your working day. If you’re not lucky enough to have a home office, then look for some other way to create that sense of separation: for instance, putting your laptop into a bag, a drawer, or unplugging your monitor. Just do something which makes it a minor hassle to recommence work, and you’ll be less likely to dip into it during your downtime.

Make sure colleagues know when you’re “off”

With the world getting smaller, and distributed teams often working around-the-clock, it’s difficult (especially for growing companies) for people to predict when you may or may not be working. All that you can do is make it as visible and obvious for them as possible. Protect your own calendar time; depending on which calendar system you’re using, it may be possible to indicate your “working hours” within the calendar’s settings; if not, book yourself daily “out of office” appointments for before/after your working day. This should hopefully prevent people from booking meetings with you which fall outside your working hours - though don’t be surprised when they still do. (Most major calendar providers are quite good in this area, but Google Calendar is especially good - you can set your calendar to automatically reject any meeting invites which are outside of your working hours, and it will immediately/politely draw the meeting organiser’s attention to the reason that you declined.)

Similarly, Slack/Teams allow you to set a “Do Not Disturb” or an Away status. Again, depending on your messaging platforms and calendar systems, it’s often even possible to get these to update automatically (so that, for instance, Slack immediately shows that you’re out of office as soon as your working day finishes). Slack, in particular, has been making huge strides here: when you’re about to send a DM to somebody, it will politely tell the sender if your notifications are currently paused, giving them the option to override this if they deem it an emergency situation.

Above all, in your own working practices, avoid mistakenly setting expectations which others might feel that they need to follow. This is particularly true of out-of-hours emails, especially if a response is requested (such as for a meeting invite); when you send such communication, you’re not just sending an “I’m working late” signal, but you’re also effectively asking others to signal (by way of reply) whether they’re working late too.

Remain available for critical issues

For as much as self-management of your time is a desirable goal, and one which you’ll have to enforce for yourself, it’s equally important that you are still able to be a “team player”. It’s important to protect your personal time, but sometimes there could genuinely be something which requires urgent attention, for example if you’re part of a team which supports the production environment of a high-traffic website.

For this reason, it’s useful to make sure that there’s a genuine, easy way for somebody to get hold of you if they should really need to. Often this comes in the form of a runbook, which can be particularly helpful in the event of an out-of-hours incident (who do we call? how/where? in what order?)

Having a well-drilled runbook enables both teams and individuals to have a clear distinction as to their responsibilities in the event of an incident. Importantly, it also allows individuals to set broader boundaries in their working lives: “I’m unavailable out-of-hours, unless it’s a Severity 2 incident or higher”.

Take regular screen breaks

One of the other big dangers of working in your living quarters is that it’s very easy to lose track of time. Surrounded by your home comforts - your favourite beverage, your choice of music and everything else which makes you feel cosy - it’s easy to accidentally remain transfixed in your chair for hours on end. Even when there are meetings, you’re merely firing-up Zoom, rather than walking across the office to a meeting room.

One of the most-recommended ways of breaking this sedentary cycle is to follow the so-called 20-20-20 Rule: every 20 minutes, take 20 seconds to look at something that’s at least 20 feet away, for at least 20 seconds. Personally, I make a point of doing this during meetings, thanks to a large bay window with some stunning Peak District views. This means that, during the course of a one-hour Zoom call, there should be at least three occasions when it looks like I’m staring off into the distance!

If this seems like a lot to keep track of, then you could always automate it. Utilise a timer such as a Pomodoro timer, which is designed to allow you to achieve focus for a sustained period, followed by a short break at the end of each period. Use the end of your Pomodoros to stretch your legs, and look anywhere other than your computer. You may find that this is where some of your best ideas are born!

Vary your surroundings

Although the term “remote working” is now growing in use in everyday parlance, there’s still a tendency for people to associate remote jobs with “working from home”. However, when you think of it as “work from anywhere”, many more exciting options emerge. Depending on the type of work that you do, maybe you can float around a local coffee shop, to immerse yourself in the buzz of having people around you. (Maybe you even want people to stop you and ask what you’re doing!) Or if you’re in a constant stream of meetings, see if it’s possible for you to convert one into a “walking meeting”, where earbuds/headsets allow you to remain focused while also getting some exercise.

At the extreme far end of the spectrum, there are digital nomads, who leverage their working arrangements to support their ability to travel around the world, or to move to a more cost-effective living location. Such arrangements will often need to be discussed with an employer first (especially if they result in a permanent relocation to another country, which could have tax or payroll implications) but if you’re in a life position which allows a lifestyle like this, it can be one of the most rewarding ways of reinvigorating your working environment.

In summary

Most of us have now seen enough evidence to demonstrate that remote working is feasible, but we’ve been paying less attention to its long-term sustainability. Managers and employees alike need to pay close attention to signs of overworking and burnout, to prevent people from developing destructive habits.

After all, if a company loses an employee to burnout (resulting in them having long-term sickness, or quitting altogether), the company will often barely take a breath - that’s what hiring processes are for. Yet for the individual who’s affected, the problem often runs deeper, and impacts areas of their life which can’t so easily be patched-over.

You are totally replaceable at work. You’re not replaceable at home.Home is your real life.
Keep that perspective. Always.
— Beth Kelly 🍉 (@ChalktalkKelly) September 13, 2020

If this is a topic that’s interesting to you, you might like to view some of our previous articles on remote working:

I also recorded a live webinar for the Ministry of Testing which goes much more in-depth with these issues, which is viewable by anybody who signs up for a free Ministry of Testing account: How Testers can Shape the Next Normal

Key takeaways 📝

Remote working doesn’t need to mean “working from home”.

Make sure that people know when you’re available (and when you’re not).

If you know that you’re reachable in an emergency, use that knowledge to disconnect during the rest of your downtime.

Does ChatGPT understand mojovation?

2023-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

ChatGPT and AI-driven content is on everyone’s lips at the moment, and I’ve found some real successes in using it for technical content. While it’s not specifically trained to generate code-related content in the same way that GitHub Copilot is, it’s a particularly useful tool for refactoring (e.g. “identify how I can improve the performance of this code”) and for creating boilerplate outlines in languages that you’ve not worked with before.

On the prose side, I’m yet to be fully convinced. I’ve seen examples of, for example, ChatGPT generating generic-looking cover letters to assist with job applications (which simultaneously look the part, whilst also saying nothing). But what about a business plan?

I spent a couple of months last summer constructing an outline for Mojovation Consulting, and the services that I could provide. It’s time to find out whether that was wasted effort; could ChatGPT get me to the same place within 10 minutes?

Given the definitions of the word “mojo” and “motivation”, please provide me with a suggested definition for the word “mojovation”.

ChatGPT's answer

"Mojovation" is a colloquial combination of the words "mojo" and "motivation," referring to a state of being in which an individual feels both a strong sense of confidence, energy, and enthusiasm (mojo) as well as a clear sense of purpose, drive, and determination (motivation) towards achieving their goals. Essentially, mojovation refers to a heightened state of both mental and physical readiness and determination that enables an individual to perform at their best and achieve their desired outcomes.

Given that I practically coined the word myself, and there’s not a lot of training data for it to specifically work with, that’s a pretty adequate definition (it comes pretty close to the version that I wrote). It’s an obvious conclusion, given the two source words, but it’s phrased in an easy-to-understand fashion.

How might somebody improve their mojovation?

ChatGPT's answer

There are several strategies that an individual can use to improve their mojovation:

Set Clear Goals: Having clear, specific, and achievable goals can provide a sense of direction and purpose, which in turn can increase motivation and help to build momentum.

Find Inspiration: Seeking out inspiration from role models, mentors, or even just motivational quotes or stories can help to cultivate a positive mindset and increase motivation.

Create Positive Habits: Establishing healthy habits such as regular exercise, meditation, or journaling can help to build momentum, reduce stress, and increase confidence, all of which can contribute to a stronger sense of mojovation.

Celebrate Progress: Celebrating small wins along the way can help to build confidence and momentum, which can help to sustain motivation over time.

Surround Yourself with Positivity: Surrounding oneself with positive, supportive people and environments can help to foster a sense of community and create a sense of accountability, both of which can help to sustain motivation and build mojovation.

Take Breaks: Taking breaks and engaging in self-care activities such as spending time in nature, practicing mindfulness, or engaging in hobbies can help to reduce stress and increase energy levels, which can help to improve mojovation.

Remember that everyone's journey towards improving mojovation is unique, and what works for one person may not work for another. It's important to experiment with different strategies and find what works best for you.

As you’ll see with a lot of these answers, while ChatGPT will occasionally make passing callbacks to the word “mojovation”, it’s not really trained to understand the concept (even though it had just provided a definition). Instead, it slips into the habit of providing generic answers on how to improve motivation; this is potentially fine, and it may be that I should simply downplay my use of the word “mojovation” (and restrict it solely to the business name).

How might a company called Mojovation Consulting be able to help its clients?

Time to ask ChatGPT to help me formulate a business plan, or at the very least, some marketing copy that I can use to help with selling my services.

ChatGPT's answer

Mojovation Consulting could help its clients in several ways, depending on the specific services they offer. Here are a few examples:

Motivation and Performance Enhancement: Mojovation Consulting could work with clients to develop strategies and techniques to improve motivation, engagement, and performance within their organizations. This could include identifying areas of improvement, developing performance metrics, and providing training and coaching to managers and employees.

Leadership Development: Mojovation Consulting could provide leadership development services to help clients develop the skills and qualities necessary to be effective leaders. This could include executive coaching, leadership assessments, and training programs designed to enhance leadership abilities.

Organizational Culture Change: Mojovation Consulting could work with clients to assess their organizational culture and develop strategies to create a more positive, supportive, and engaging work environment. This could include developing and implementing programs to improve employee well-being, enhance team cohesion, and foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Change Management: Mojovation Consulting could help clients manage major changes within their organizations, such as mergers, acquisitions, or restructuring. This could involve developing change management plans, providing training and support to employees, and helping to ensure a smooth transition.

Team Building: Mojovation Consulting could provide team building and development services to help clients build high-performing teams that are aligned with their organizational goals. This could include team assessments, team-building activities, and training programs designed to enhance team communication, collaboration, and performance.

Overall, Mojovation Consulting could help its clients improve their organizational effectiveness, enhance employee engagement and motivation, and achieve their goals by providing a range of consulting services and solutions.

This is pretty much boilerplate stuff for anybody who’s dealing with motivation in any domain. In hindsight, I wish I’d asked a follow-up to make it write something more specific to (for example) agile teams, but as you’ll see in a later answer, as soon as I asked it to re-tailor the content then it became weirdly obsessed with the newly-provided keyword.

Suggest titles for 5 blog posts which Mojovation Consulting could write, to help attract new clients.

It’s time to get ChatGPT to suggest where I should guide my content next. I didn’t specifically ask for SEO-friendly articles, but it appears to have put some thought into it:

ChatGPT's answer

Sure, here are five potential blog post titles for Mojovation Consulting:

"The Power of Mojo: How to Unlock Your Team's Full Potential"
This post could explore the concept of mojo and how it relates to employee motivation and performance. The article could offer tips and strategies for helping leaders and managers build a culture of mojovation within their organizations.

"From Good to Great: Developing High-Performing Teams"
This post could delve into the importance of teamwork and team-building within organizations. The article could offer insights and best practices for developing high-performing teams, including strategies for improving communication, enhancing collaboration, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

"The Leadership Edge: How to Develop Your Leadership Skills"
This post could offer guidance and insights on how to become a more effective leader, with a focus on developing the skills and qualities necessary to inspire and motivate others. The article could offer tips and strategies for developing emotional intelligence, building trust, and leading with purpose.

"Navigating Change: How to Successfully Manage Organizational Transitions"
This post could explore the challenges of managing organizational change, and offer insights and best practices for successfully navigating major transitions. The article could cover topics such as change management planning, communication strategies, and employee engagement.

"The Culture Factor: How to Build a Positive and Productive Organizational Culture"
This post could focus on the importance of organizational culture, and offer strategies and insights for building a positive and productive work environment. The article could cover topics such as employee well-being, workplace diversity and inclusion, and building a culture of continuous learning and development.

They’re very generic, but they’re also very SEO-friendly. The titles aren’t anything like the ones that I’ve used on the site up until now (again, perhaps I could have written a follow-up where I gave it a list of previous article titles, and it reworded them to fit my “style”). Still, content-wise, there are some good starting points within those suggestions.

Suggest 20 single-word keywords which Mojovation Consulting could use in its meta tags, in order to drive more traffic via SEO.

SEO is a pet hate of mine, not least because it requires a lot of research and planning. I’m going to use ChatGPT to shortcut that for me, in the hope that it can produce something “broadly appropriate”.

ChatGPT's answer

Sure, here are 20 potential single-word keywords that Mojovation Consulting could use in its meta tags:

Mojo

Motivation

Performance

Leadership

Team-building

Culture

Engagement

Well-being

Change management

Transformation

Strategy

Productivity

Empowerment

Growth

Learning

Coaching

Communication

Collaboration

Innovation

Excellence

These keywords could be used in various combinations and permutations, depending on the specific content and focus of each page on the Mojovation Consulting website. It's worth noting that while meta tags can be useful for SEO, they are just one of many factors that search engines use to determine rankings, so it's important to focus on creating high-quality, relevant, and engaging content that will naturally attract traffic and backlinks.

Yes, that’ll absolutely do. It succeeds in allowing me to put roughly zero effort into something which is actually quite important, and it was nice that there was a cautionary paragraph about how SEO is more complex than simple meta keywords.

Which tech conferences in the UK might be interested in hearing more about the power of mojovation?

I’ve pitched to a couple of conferences already; let’s see where ChatGPT suggests that I focus my efforts.

ChatGPT's answer

There are several tech conferences in the UK that might be interested in hearing about the power of mojovation. Here are a few possibilities:

London Tech Week: London Tech Week is a major technology event that attracts tens of thousands of attendees from around the world. The event features a wide range of speakers and sessions focused on technology and innovation, and could be a great platform for discussing the power of mojovation in the tech industry.

Future Tech Now: Future Tech Now is a conference and exhibition that showcases the latest advancements in virtual and augmented reality, robotics, and other emerging technologies. Mojovation Consulting could position itself as a thought leader on the intersection of technology and human performance, and discuss how mojovation can help unlock the full potential of technology.

TechXLR8: TechXLR8 is a technology event that covers a wide range of topics, including artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and 5G. Mojovation Consulting could present on the importance of motivation and engagement in driving innovation and technological progress.

Mind the Product: Mind the Product is a conference focused on product management and development. Mojovation Consulting could discuss how mojovation can help product teams stay motivated, engaged, and productive, and share insights and best practices for building a culture of mojovation within product organizations.

Turing Fest: Turing Fest is an annual tech conference that brings together entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators from across the tech industry. Mojovation Consulting could present on the importance of motivation and performance in driving innovation and business success, and discuss strategies for creating a culture of mojovation within startup and entrepreneurial organizations.

These are just a few examples of the many tech conferences in the UK that could be interested in hearing about the power of mojovation. Ultimately, the key is to find events that align with Mojovation Consulting's mission and values, and that attract an audience that could benefit from its services and expertise.

I slowed down to analyse this answer more carefully, as I’ve seen examples in the past of ChatGPT making up fake citations. Do all of these events exist? Yes, although with some caveats that ChatGPT isn’t trained to take account of. For instance, several of these events are happening imminently, with their programmes already fully announced. TechXLR8 hasn’t run in the UK since 2017 (I’m not sure that ChatGPT really understands that I’m asking with a UK bias - it gives me an answer in dollars later). Future Tech Now and Turing Fest both seem like weird choices to pitch a motivation-themed session. Mind the Product, however, is a great suggestion, with an open Call for Papers: this is something that I’ll actually follow up on. Thanks, ChatGPT!

Suggest a title and format for a podcast which Mojovation Consulting could host. It should be both entertaining and informative, whilst also potentially driving new business.

ChatGPT's answer

Sure, here's a suggested title and format for a podcast that Mojovation Consulting could host:

Title: "Mojo Matters: Insights and Inspiration for High-Performing Teams"

Format: "Mojo Matters" would be a weekly podcast featuring lively discussions on a range of topics related to motivation, leadership, team-building, and organizational culture. Each episode could feature interviews with experts, thought leaders, and successful executives who have firsthand experience building and leading high-performing teams.

The format could vary from week to week, depending on the focus of the episode. Some episodes might feature in-depth interviews with guests, while others could be structured as roundtable discussions or debates. Each episode could also include actionable tips and insights for listeners who are looking to improve their own team's mojo.

Here are a few potential episode ideas:

"The Mojo Mindset: How to Cultivate a Culture of Motivation and Engagement"

"Leading with Purpose: Strategies for Inspiring and Motivating Your Team"

"Beyond Ping Pong Tables: How to Build a Workplace Culture that Attracts and Retains Top Talent"

"Breaking Down Barriers: Strategies for Improving Communication and Collaboration Across Teams"

"Staying Ahead of the Curve: How to Foster a Culture of Innovation and Continuous Improvement"

By hosting a podcast that offers valuable insights and entertaining discussions on topics related to motivation and performance, Mojovation Consulting could position itself as a thought leader and expert in its field. This could help drive new business by attracting potential clients who are seeking guidance on how to unlock their team's full potential and achieve better results.

Podcasts are my bread and butter (both as a creator and a consumer), so I was interested to see what ChatGPT would offer here. I’ll give it a B+: just like its blog post suggestions, these are extremely broad episode suggestions, but “Mojo Matters” isn’t the worst podcast title in the world.

Suggest 5 possible notable guests who I could invite to appear on the podcast.

Okay, let’s get some more meat on those podcast bones. Who does ChatGPT think I should invite to appear on the podcast?

ChatGPT's answer

Sure, here are five possible notable guests that you could invite to appear on the "Mojo Matters" podcast:

Simon Sinek: Simon Sinek is a well-known speaker, author, and leadership expert, who is perhaps best known for his TED Talk and book, "Start with Why." Sinek's insights on leadership, purpose, and motivation could be a valuable addition to the podcast, and his name recognition could help attract new listeners.

Brene Brown: Brene Brown is a research professor and author who has become famous for her work on vulnerability, courage, and shame. Brown's insights on leadership, culture, and human behavior could be a valuable addition to the podcast, and her engaging speaking style could help keep listeners engaged.

Daniel Pink: Daniel Pink is an author and speaker who has written several best-selling books on motivation, behavior, and the science of timing. Pink's insights on the importance of timing and motivation could be especially relevant to the themes of the podcast, and his engaging storytelling style could help make complex concepts more accessible.

Susan Cain: Susan Cain is an author and speaker who has written extensively on the topic of introversion and the power of quiet. Cain's insights on how to cultivate a workplace culture that supports introverted team members could be a valuable addition to the podcast, and her unique perspective on leadership and teamwork could help spark interesting conversations.

Malcolm Gladwell: Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist and author who has written several best-selling books on a wide range of topics, including motivation, culture, and the science of decision-making. Gladwell's insights on how to cultivate a culture of innovation and creativity could be a valuable addition to the podcast, and his engaging storytelling style could help keep listeners engaged.

I’ll give ChatGPT points for ambition here - I’ve read all five authors, but the chances of securing any of them for a tiny little podcast are highly unlikely. Possibly my fault for asking for “notable guests”; it’s clearly tailored its answers for notability.

How much should I charge individuals for a 1-hour coaching session with Mojovation Consulting?

ChatGPT's answer

Determining the cost of a coaching session with Mojovation Consulting would depend on a variety of factors, such as the experience and qualifications of the coach, the specific services being offered, and the market demand for similar coaching services.

Some coaches charge a flat rate for a one-hour session, while others may charge an hourly rate or a package rate for a set number of sessions. According to the International Coach Federation (ICF), the global average rate for coaching sessions is around $250 per hour, but this can vary significantly based on the coach's experience, specialty, and location.

To determine the appropriate rate for your coaching services, you may want to consider conducting market research to determine what similar coaching services are being offered in your area and what rates they are charging. You may also want to consider your own qualifications and experience, as well as the value that you believe you can offer to your clients.

Ultimately, the price you charge for a one-hour coaching session with Mojovation Consulting should reflect the quality and value of the services you are providing, while also remaining competitive with other coaching services in your area. It's important to strike a balance between charging a fair price for your expertise and services and making your services accessible to potential clients.

Given I don’t really know the answers myself here either, I’m not surprised that ChatGPT is vague. The one actual price figure that it suggests (which is referenced from ICF, an organisation I’m familiar with) is reasonable, but beyond that, there’s a lot of fluff and filler, as I’d expect due to a lack of specific parameters.

If I wanted to write a book espousing the value of mojovation in building agile teams, what should I call it, and what should my chapters be titled?

ChatGPT's answer

If you wanted to write a book about the value of mojovation in building agile teams, you could consider the following book title and chapter titles:

Book Title: Agile Mojo: The Power of Motivation in Building High-Performing Teams
Chapter 1: Introduction - Defining Agile Teams and the Importance of Mojo
Chapter 2: Understanding the Science of Motivation and Its Impact on Team Performance
Chapter 3: The Role of Leadership in Building and Maintaining Motivation in Agile Teams
Chapter 4: Creating a Motivational Culture - Strategies for Fostering Engagement and Empowerment
Chapter 5: Cultivating Team Mojo Through Goal-Setting, Feedback, and Recognition
Chapter 6: Nurturing Resilience and Growth Mindset to Sustain Team Mojo
Chapter 7: Dealing with Demotivation and Burnout - Strategies for Rekindling Mojo in Struggling Teams
Chapter 8: The Future of Agile Teams and the Importance of Mojo in a Changing Landscape
Chapter 9: Conclusion - Harnessing the Power of Mojo to Build Agile Teams that Thrive

In addition to the above chapter titles, you could consider including case studies, practical tips, and exercises throughout the book to help readers apply the concepts and strategies to their own teams.

Okay, by this point I was feeling a bit ChatGPT’d out. I’m starting to recognise some of its “tells”: keyword-heavy, vague, and a bit repetitive. Does AI get bored? There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of its suggestions, I just know that if I thumbed through a contents page, that sounds really bland.

If I were to create a 1-day training course about better mojovation, can you break it down into 5 suggested modules (with content)?

ChatGPT's answer

Sure, here are five suggested modules for a one-day training course on better mojovation, along with some potential content for each module:

Module 1: Understanding the Importance of Mojovation

Defining mojovation and its impact on individual and team performance

Reviewing the research on the connection between motivation, engagement, and productivity

Identifying common barriers to mojovation and strategies for overcoming them

Module 2: Building a Motivational Culture
Examining the role of leadership in creating and maintaining a culture of motivation

Identifying the key elements of a motivational culture, such as clear goals, feedback, recognition, and empowerment

Developing strategies for fostering a motivational culture within your team or organization
Module 3: Goal-Setting and Feedback
Defining the principles of effective goal-setting and how they relate to motivation

Understanding the importance of regular feedback in maintaining motivation and engagement

Developing skills for providing constructive feedback that promotes growth and learning
Module 4: Recognition and Rewards
Understanding the psychology of rewards and recognition and their impact on motivation

Identifying different types of rewards and recognition, and when to use each

Developing strategies for creating a reward and recognition system that is effective and sustainable
Module 5: Sustaining Motivation Over Time
Examining the factors that contribute to sustained motivation and engagement over time

Identifying common challenges to sustaining motivation, such as burnout and demotivation

Developing strategies for fostering resilience and a growth mindset to maintain motivation and engagement over the long term
Each module could include a combination of lectures, group discussions, case studies, and hands-on activities to engage participants and help them apply the concepts to their own work contexts. The training course could also include opportunities for participants to share their own experiences and learn from others in the group.

OK, I’m beginning to accept that there are some things that I should just think about myself. ChatGPT lacks the context clues which are required to generate truly meaningful content, but it’s very good at confidently doing an impression of something which looks like meaningful content.

In conclusion…

Generally, the smaller the task, the more adequately ChatGPT was able to perform the tasks that I asked for it. When I asked it to think more broadly, the answers were increasingly vague and potentially unappealing, which isn’t brilliantly helpful when I want to use them to drive business.

What’s undeniable is the speed at which it operates. There are questions in that list which I’d spent hours musing over, without getting anywhere close to something that I felt was good enough to use. ChatGPT was able to spit out a response in a matter of seconds, and it was often a response that was better than anything I’d come up with.

The other fun part of this exercise is that I’m writing this blog post (and inserting ChatGPT’s responses) in VS Code, where I’ve got GitHub Copilot enabled. Whenever I add one of ChatGPT’s answers, Copilot is quick to suggest a follow-up question; I might try getting ChatGPT and Copilot to have a conversation with each other!

Key takeaways 📝
I fed the entire article above into ChatGPT, and asked it: Given the article below, summarise its conclusions into three bullet-pointed key takeaways. Here’s what it said:

ChatGPT is useful for technical content, particularly for refactoring and creating boilerplate outlines in new languages. However, its effectiveness for prose is yet to be fully proven.

Mojovation Consulting is a company that deals with motivation in various domains, but ChatGPT struggles to understand the concept of “mojovation” specifically.

ChatGPT can generate SEO-friendly blog post titles and meta keywords for Mojovation Consulting, as well as suggest potential tech conferences and podcast titles/guests.

A Mojovation year in review

2022-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

It seems like every service is doing annual retrospectives these days. But whereas my “Spotify Wrapped” just tells me how much time my son has spent listening to nursery rhymes on my phone, and my “Peloton Cooldown” just seems to highlight the periods that I wasn’t keeping fit due to illness, I’m hoping that there’s a real business benefit to looking back at what has happened at Mojovation Consulting in 2022 - and hopefully you’ll enjoy the insight too!

1 company founded

Mojovation Consulting sprang into being at the start of July, while I was in the midst of a deliberate break in employment, and while I was trying to establish a new direction for my professional career. It was a thought process which eventually led to me starting a permanent coaching role within the technical team at Makers, and which ultimately meant that I’ve been less active on this website than my initial flurry of activity!

The concept of Mojovation is still very important to me, and having now passed my three-month probation with Makers, my workload is beginning to stabilise to a point where I can start to think about how I can start to build Mojovation Consulting into a sustainable business.

15 one-to-one coaching sessions hosted

This is a number which has remained static since I resumed permanent work, as I haven’t had the time to take on any new clients, or to investigate how to convert personal coaching into paid work. But that’s not to say I haven’t been doing any coaching; far from it, as I took a position with Makers primarily because it allows me to focus on coaching as my day job (albeit with a large slice of curriculum development on the side).

Coaching continues to be my all-consuming passion, to the extent that my coaching bookshelf is rapidly approaching the size of my testing bookshelf, and I’m exploring opportunities for certifications and qualifications, cementing coaching as the new driver in this phase of my career. If I pursue a certification with the International Coaching Federation (ICF), I’ll be required to undertake a large number of pro-bono / volunteer coaching sessions, so if you’ve been coached by me in the past (or you’d be interested in doing this in the future), keep your eyes peeled on this site as I’ll be putting out a Call for Participants during 2023.

46 articles posted

Again, this is a number which blossomed during the early months of the site’s existence, as I was able to construct a daily writing habit (considerably easier when your son is in nursery and you’re not working full-time). But, starting from this moment, I’m aiming to sustain one blog post a week, with the hope of maybe increasing that number again as time allows.

I was recently introduced to Ship 30 for 30, an accountability-based writing cohort which seeks to help people to gain (and keep) the writing habit. While I’ve had successes in the past under my own steam, I’m hoping to take this course at some point in the second half of 2023, to help support my growing coaching business.

[UNKNOWN] article views

This is potentially a weird one. From day one, I made the deliberate decision to not track (or even gather) any analytics on this site. I wanted to write for the sake of writing, and I didn’t want to be distracted by the numbers. For the most part, this has worked just how I’d intended (for instance, I’m much more pleased that I wrote a post for World Mental Health Day rather than obsessing over how many dozens or hundreds of people viewed it). However, as I look to grow my business, there are benefits in understanding what content is resonating with people, so who’s to say whether I’ll change this in 2023.

In general, I’ve always sought qualitative guidance for the content that I’ve been creating. Articles have often been inspired by conversations with clients and colleagues, and there’s no danger of running out of ideas in the near future - the Mojovation column on my Trello board is still burgeoning with writing prompts, for articles coming soon to this site.

I’ve swerved away from social media in general thus far (our impressive 14 LinkedIn followers is a testament to that), and having taken myself off Twitter in 2022, I’m waiting to see if a better platform emerges to fill the void next year. Regardless, my focus will remain on content rather than viewership - although I have a few other ideas for how my content will arrive in front of people’s eyes next year!

My Mojovation resolutions for 2023

What does 2023 have in store? If you’ve read this far, you’ll already know that it’s not going to be a quiet year, not by a long shot. But on the Mojovation Consulting side, there are some definites that you can expect to see:

Regular blog content. While I certainly don’t have the time for daily blog posts, there’ll be at least one new article a week. If I’m able to increase and sustain this, a newsletter might follow, as I begin to explore other avenues for sharing content.
Mojovation on the conference stage. I’ve already submitted a couple of conference proposals for 2023; it’s a new world for me, as I’ve previously limited myself to speaking at software testing conferences (as my profession of choice until recently). But with my wider remit of coaching and leadership, I’m targeting some first-time appearances at new events.
A Mojovation book. As I openly stated on the About page, one of my personal motivations for generating content is to begin to gather ideas for a self-published book, on Leanpub or similar. I’ll be looking to start this in earnest in 2023, with a first draft beginning to emerge in the summer.

But I’m balancing this with the importance of self-care and pursuing my own personal goals outside of the business. These include:

Beginning a private journalling habit. This was an idea which my therapist proposed - as a way of restoring my passion for writing, and breaking the association with it being “work”, why not write some content which nobody else will read? There are therapeutic and creative benefits to this, and while I’m not one for new year’s resolutions, I’m coincidentally planning to start this on January 1st.
Starting a daily meditation habit. I’ve already been won over by the power of sleep meditation; while I don’t always go to bed as early as I should, I’m able to drift off to sleep much more easily than I used to, thanks to Peloton’s library of night-time meditation classes. I’m planning to also insert a morning meditation at the beginning of my working day, as a way of giving myself a “Minute to Arrive” before the chaos of my home life bleeds into the chaos of work.
Continuing to complete my mini bucket-list. Just after my 38th birthday, I made myself a list of 40 things that I wanted to achieve before I turned 40. However, then a baby and a pandemic arrived, so I wasn’t able to make much headway into this. I’ve persevered and turned it into “43 before 43”; I’m one-third of the way through this list already, and I’m aiming to complete another third in 2023. Among the things I’ve already booked: reading War And Peace, attending the Snooker World Championship, taking part in a competitive 10K race, going glamping at a music festival, and undertaking the National Three Peaks Challenge.

Whatever the year has in store, I’ll be sure to share it with you here. Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful 2023!

Speak up on World Mental Health Day

2022-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

10th October is World Mental Health Day 2022, with a theme this year of making mental health your number one priority. Specifically this year, it’s about taking back control: recognising what you can change (and acknowledging what you can’t). With that in mind, I wanted to broadly share the story of my own mental health journey during the past decade.

The ghosts of the past

In 2016, in a post which remains one of my most-read and best-received, I summoned the courage to write a LinkedIn post titled The battle with yourself in support of Geek Mental Help Week. While the events associated with it are now firmly in the past, it contains some important train-of-thought wondering which still lives with me today:

Have I recovered? I don’t know. I still can’t comprehend exactly what I was suffering from, or how to measure my rate of improvement. Some of it I might never fully recover from. But I’ve learned important lessons about what matters to me; an acceptance of who I am; and an understanding of what I’ve been through.

For me, the more I spoke about these issues, the easier it became, and the more I began to understand what I’d been through. When you’re put in a position of constructing a narrative around personal events, your brain becomes more finely attuned to helping you make sense of it. Hence I appeared on a couple of podcasts around the same time (back in an era before I was a podcaster myself), so if you’d like to hear “Neil from six years ago” talking about these challenges, here are a couple of places to listen:

The echoes of today

For me, things are… different today. Better? Probably. But I’m still adjusting to some major upheaval in my life during the past couple of years; namely, becoming a dad (and losing my own dad) during a global pandemic. In its wake there are new doubts and difficulties, most of which I’m struggling to put a label on. But I can recognise the echoes of what I went through all of those years ago, and where I failed to seek help when I needed it most.

While I want to do things differently this time, it’s still not easy. For more than six months, I’ve had a card on my Trello board titled “Find somebody to talk to”; a shorthand for exploring options around therapy or counselling. I’m having my first introductory therapy session today, courtesy of Self Space; I’m not sure what I’ll learn from it (there are a lot of avenues to explore) but I already know that I’m going to find it valuable and personally beneficial.

I’m here to talk

After my first brush with recognising my own mental health needs, I took it upon myself to become a trained Mental Health First Aider. While the qualification won’t make you a qualified medical professional, it seeks to do for mental health what physical first aid does in an emergency: allow you to recognise the signs of distress/danger, gives you the tools to support people who need help, and helps you to spot the signs of when further intervention is necessary.

It’s a useful toolkit to help me recognise symptoms within myself too, but it doesn’t make me immune: there are still many situations where speaking in confidence with another person is the most beneficial approach. And for that reason, it’s a service that I’m happy to offer to anybody else. Regardless of whether we’re already in discussions regarding my other services, if you have an immediate need to talk to somebody, please contact me and I’ll make myself available, free of charge, at the earliest opportunity.

Key takeaways 📝

Speaking about your problems is an important first step.

When you share, it makes your problems easier to understand.

I am here to help - please contact me in confidence.

BOOK REVIEW: Drive

2022-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

It seems incredulous that we’re approaching fifty blog posts on this site and we’ve not yet reflected on one of the key modern tomes relating to motivation: Daniel Pink’s Drive. It analyses how our primary motivator in the workplace - “seek reward and avoid punishment” - has remained largely unchanged since early industrial times. (Pay people more per widget, and they’ll increase their output of widgets.)

Yet this view of motivation is out-of-touch with both modern working life (where creativity and deep thought have replaced assembly-line production) and with society itself; where we aspire to more than just a roof over our heads, and work has become a necessary conduit to support personal and familial growth outside of the 9-to-5. Extrinsic motivation - rewarding people (often financially) - is no longer enough. If we want to get the best out of our teams, we need a new way of thinking.

The components of intrinsic motivation

Pink spends much of his book discussing the three core facets of intrinsic motivation:

Autonomy: Being able to choose what work you do, and when/where you do it. You’ll probably still be working towards a known goal, but you’re free to choose how you get there.
Mastery: Challenging yourself to improve your competence at key skills, through “deliberate practice”, with fast feedback as you go.
Purpose: Understanding why you are doing what you’re doing - who will benefit from your work, and what meaning you are bringing to people’s lives.

Whereas extrinsic rewards fade over time - give someone more money, and eventually they’ll want MORE money - intrinsic benefits conversely increase over time. When a workplace fosters our intrinsic desires, we feel an increased sense of belonging, which is increasingly engrained as we embed ourselves within that organisation’s working culture.

Increasing your own intrinsic motivation

For those of us who are significantly career-driven, and especially if you’ve found yourself chasing after salary bumps, it’s worth taking stock of whether you’re caring enough about the intrinsic rewards of a role. Try to construct an elevator pitch of the person that you want to be: What do you want to accomplish, or be known for? In the book of life, what would your “sentence” be (how would people summarise what you were)? The journey to this destination might be long, but you can break it into smaller chunks, and reflect each day on whether you’re moving closer to where you want to be.

You can also develop your own “deliberate practice” initiatives: regular, challenging goals which play to your strengths and seek to eradicate your weaknesses. Mastery doesn’t happen overnight, but by creating an attainable regime, you can drill these techniques until they’re second nature.

Pink also recommends that one great way to explore what’s important is to take a year’s sabbatical from work. This may be the definition of “easier said than done”, but I undertook a smaller version of this myself when I first founded Mojovation Consulting. I was fortunate enough to be able to justify taking a couple of months’ break, to set myself up for a new intrinsically-satisfying career journey.

Improving intrinsic motivation in the workplace

While we’re each masters of our own career destinies, as organisations we can do much to help everyone in our teams. Pink lists off a huge number of ideas, perhaps without necessarily showing the research to reinforce how successful they are, but here are a few to think about:

Giving employees some equivalent of “10% time” to focus on personal projects that help them to hone the skills that they use in their day-to-day role.
When creating goals/objectives, ensure that the whole team is helping to shape them, so that everybody has a degree of buy-in on what the company is aiming towards.
Design systems which assume good intent: for example, rather than designing a holiday system which aims to prevent a handful of people from exploiting the system (thereby disadvantaging the majority of people who will take an appropriate amount of leave, given the chance), give people the freedom and trust to shape their own way.
Ask people whether they feel like they have enough autonomy/purpose in their everyday tasks, rather than just assuming (or hoping) that they have.

I’ve worked in some companies which have been fearful of implementing policies like this; a fear that helping people to pursue advancement opportunities on “company time” will result in those employees being headhunted by larger organisations with heftier wage bills. But by falling back on extrinsic concerns, they’re missing the point, one which was reiterated by Richard Branson in 2014: “Train people well enough so they can leave. Treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”

Key takeaways 📝

Financial rewards are good, but they only go so far.

The three key components of intrinsic motivation are autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Organisations should strive to give people freedom to work in a way that makes them happy.

Getting a pay rise without changing jobs

2022-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

The need to negotiate salaries isn’t a new challenge. In fact, I remember in my first tech role in the early 2000s, plucking up the courage to be forthright with my line manager, to say that if I couldn’t get my salary up to £20,000 after several years’ increasing seniority within the company, then I was going to have to look elsewhere.

While it’s true that, as you climb the career ladder, you’re less likely to find yourself in the position of “I need a wage increase to pay the bills”, everybody’s feeling the pinch at the moment. Skyrocketing inflation, an energy price crisis, and post-Brexit/COVID shortages mean that unless you’re a high-level executive, your day-to-day way of life is being significantly impacted by changes which are outside of your control.

Yet we work on regardless, and with a recession and The Great Resignation being at the front of everyone’s minds, if anything we’re working harder to pick up the slack when companies can’t afford to hire or backfill. Increasing your workload with no commensurate change to your pay packet is just as bad as failing to secure a salary increase; possibly worse, as by sapping your energy further, it also robs you of one other commodity - free time. It’s no wonder that “quiet quitting” has become such a talking point.

If you want it, go for it

This was one of our hot topics on an episode of Tech Team Weekly earlier this year, embedded below (and slightly more expletive-laden than normal):

At the time, the Governor of the Bank of England had spoken out against workers asking for pay rises in-line with rising costs, warning that it could spark a spiralling increase in inflation. (I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether you believe bankers to be the best moral compass when it comes to saying what people should earn.) Yet repeated increases to the UK’s energy price cap, so significant that they’ve resulted in a shift in government policy, can’t go ignored.

Historically, there are some places in the world where it’s not culturally the “done thing” to ask for more. The Brits certainly fall into that category, but it’s compounded among other demographics too: for instance, women are generally less likely to ask for a pay rise, ostensibly due to a history of being snubbed when asking for them.

To an extent, the advice is “don’t ask, don’t get”. If your company has a process for requesting or reviewing your salary, then pursue it, especially if your accomplishments show you to be a valued, indispensable member of the team. Don’t forget that this can be judged not just on the scale of your achievements, but also the volume of them: there’ve been at least 3 or 4 occasions when I’ve left a company and they’ve hired multiple people to fill the role(s) that I was doing. What does that say about where my salary should have been at before? (It’s a breath of fresh air at my current company, Makers, where I’ve seen hiring taking place specifically to help with relieving the workload of existing staff members.)

The worst that you can happen is that you learn where you stand - and you can judge whether you might rather pursue alternative options elsewhere. It’s a sad fact of life that the easiest way to get a salary increase is by changing companies; just like mobile phone providers, the best deals are often only for “new customers”. This often comes to the fore when organisations are hiring, and their current employees observe the salaries that are being offered to new starters who are doing the same job as them. If, as an organisation, you’re not also prepared to realign your existing team’s salaries to match these rates, don’t be surprised if they accept better offers in the near future.

Isn’t there a better way?

I’m not the Governor of the Bank of England (yet), nor am I the person holding the purse-strings for a company’s salary budget. But it doesn’t take a financial genius to notice that wage crises have a larger impact on our organisations than simply the bottom-line:

When somebody leaves, even if you’re fortunate enough to afford to backfill their role, you can’t quickly replace the knowledge and experiences of that leaver.
Disruption to productivity - not just from a person quitting, but in going through the process of screening, interviewing, recruiting and on-boarding - can leave its mark on a team for many months.
With candidates being in high demand, often juggling multiple job offers, you may have to pay more to secure somebody’s replacement - often ending up paying more than the original person was asking for in the first place! (And that’s even before you take recruiter fees into account.)
When one person leaves, often others will follow, meaning that these financial challenges are often compounded.

It feels like, realistically, it’s in companies’ best interests to do better than they’re doing now. Particularly in difficult economic times, there should be an expectation - ideally in employee contracts - that salaries should automatically include cost-of-living increases in-line with inflation. Otherwise, if you only give a small number of increases to a subset of your workforce, you’re asking everybody else to swallow a net decrease in their earnings. If this seems like it won’t scale, at least consider whether one-off discretionary payments (for instance, aligned with increases in the energy price cap) could help to offset peoples’ concerns over whether they can even afford to not look for another job.

Key takeaways 📝

Failing to give inflationary pay rises shows you are devaluing your team.

All we can do as individuals is ask the question, with supporting evidence.

Meeting reasonable pay demands is cheaper than replacing an unhappy ex-employee.

When positivity becomes toxic

2022-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

“Cheer up, it could be worse!”

In recent years (and certainly since I discovered the book The Happiness Advantage), I’ve tried to live my life in an overwhelmingly positive manner, but more recently I’ve learned that - when taken to extremes - this attitude can create dysfunctional situations, and may even be toxic.

Toxic positivity occurs when performing broad optimistic assertions in complex situations. It’s a “good vibes only”, “everything is awesome” approach which (especially when applied to the challenges that others are facing) acts to deny or invalidate other peoples’ personal concerns, and lowers their sense of self-worth and self-actualisation.

Some situations just can’t be brushed aside with optimism. Pandemics, for example, and everything that comes with them. Positivity may serve as an immediate coping mechanism, but a refusal to confront difficult feelings will only lead to a “bottling-up” of emotions, it may deter people from seeking mental health advice, and this can lead to long-term psychological and even physiological problems.

We’re only trying to help

While I’m sure there are some sociopaths out there, a lot of people who display toxic positivity are doing so with best intentions at heart. They genuinely believe that, by deterring a person from negative thought, they are being helpful and improving a person’s outlook on life.

If you ever feel that you are hiding your true feelings, or that you’re asking somebody else to do the same, this might be a symptom of toxic positivity. If it leads to concerns being buried, painful emotions being suppressed, or the brushing-off of concerns, bad things can follow.

We see it in our workplaces all the time, from executives sugar-coating news around finances or redundancies, to performance review processes which can brush aside negative experiences in favour of focusing on what’s coming next. (I’ve written before about the dangers of giving people an unearned “Good job!”.) An enforced “chin-up” stance can even lead to people being conditioned to be accepting of abusive situations, both domestically and in the workplace.

Don’t shame people for having emotions. People saying “happiness is a choice” make the victim feel guilt for their emotional stance.

How to support the healing process

Healthy emotional responses start with ourselves, and here are a few simple ways to begin:

Learn to recognise your emotions, and be accepting of them.
Know what “normal” looks like for you, and attune yourself to spotting signs of an escalating emotional setback.
Build yourself a support network (even if it’s just a small one) where you feel safe to share when you’re having a bad day.
Create spaces which help others to do all of the above, too.

While I try to avoid excess positivity these days, that’s not to say that I don’t carefully shape my environment to avoid encountering scenarios which may create a negative spiral. My social media usage has significantly decreased, even just during the course of this year. I stay away from news headlines. And, for my sins, I’ve tried to avoid getting drawn-in to the period of mourning following the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, as I know that I’ve got unresolved grief issues from recent events in my own family.

Knowing this makes it easier for me to avoid creating a toxic positivity environment when I’m managing people. When somebody raises an issue of complicated emotions, rather than deflecting, it’s important to acknowledge them, and construct a plan to help them (and you) cope with their feelings, as they may be living with these emotions for a long time.

With a lot of workplace motivational issues, it can be summarised as “don’t overthink it” - but when it comes to toxic positivity, that’s perhaps not the case. Our natural inclination may be to shut down a situation which needs to be given room to breathe. You can, however, go a long way by genuinely caring for people’s feelings, fostering safe spaces (creating opportunities for people to share their problems outside the scope of their line manager, for example via a Mental Health First Aider) and by generally shaping your workplace initiatives to put people’s feelings first.

Key takeaways 📝

Don’t let a positive outlook lead to people’s emotions being denied.

Often people just need an outlet. Be that outlet for them.

You are the best judge of your own emotions. Don’t allow others to tell you they’re invalid.

BOOK REVIEW: Radical Candor

2022-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Kim Scott’s Radical Candor is a way of managing people which is built upon two key tenets: caring personally (about our team members, far beyond their work output) and challenging directly (by not avoiding tough conversations). When enacted correctly, it leads to more trusting relationships, more effective collaboration and better team growth.

However, when misunderstood, it can also perpetuate myths around aggressive leadership stances, so let’s get to the crux of the techniques that it offers.

“Don’t Be An Asshole” takes priority

The latest edition of Radical Candor comes with an important preface, reflecting misunderstandings and misuses of the author’s intentions in the mainstream media (such as in the episode of Silicon Valley which is seen in the GIF at the top of the page). Specifically, the “radical” variant of candor is often portrayed the same as aggressiveness, rudeness or toxicity, when it actually has compassion at its heart.

Scott clarifies that the ideas in the book are not intended to be an excuse for “bad boss behaviour”:

To me the word “radical” indicates a management philosophy that is both new and dramatically different from what came before. The idea that bosses should use their power to behave like bullies is old and banal, not new and radical. The key insight behind Radical Candor is that command and control can hinder innovation and harm a team’s ability to improve the efficiency of routine work.

The Radical Candor Framework, explained

Given the above revelations, the latest edition of Radical Candor seeks to clarify misunderstandings by portraying our desired behaviour as “compassionate candor”, in the new version of the framework pictured below:

The diagram also highlights the quadrants that you fall into when you fail to both care personally, and challenge directly:

If you challenge without caring, this is obnoxious aggression. Often this takes the form of broad, non-specific compliments, whereas criticisms are often deeply (and overly) personal.
If you care about people, but you don’t challenge them when needed, this is ruinous empathy. We prevent people from becoming the best versions of themselves by holding-back on advice which could help someone to learn or grow.
If you neither care nor challenge, this ineffectiveness of leadership is termed manipulative insincerity - you don’t want any hassle - including anybody thinking badly of you - so you often roll-over weakly and allow an “anything goes” approach within your team.

Each of these alternative quadrants highlights why a Compassionate Candor approach is not just a good idea - it’s basically the only approach that will work.

Growing through trust

By practising sincerity and specificity when giving both praise and blame to teams, it gives them full agency to shape their situation, in the knowledge that you’re not attempting to manipulate them, nor are you attempting to coerce them to act in a way that puts your needs first. It’s an approach which benefits being introduced slowly, carefully, over time: you can’t “force” trust to grow artificially, they have to be constructed through repeated demonstrations of living your values. This includes having an understanding and an appreciation of self-care techniques, and a knowledge of where each other’s boundaries lie.

One of the best ways of fostering this trust is by not just giving radical candor, but also asking for it back from your team. Make it clear that you’re open to criticism - publically, if it makes their feedback easier to give - and display gratitude when you receive suggestions for improvement, as you appreciate the effort to make changes happen.

However, when offering radical candor as a leader, one of the most important concepts is “public praise, private criticism”. It’s great to celebrate successes within your team and wider organisation, as it encourages reciprocal behaviours; however a public humiliation (however slight) can have the reverse impact, and result in your team shutting-down their input for fear of being next in the spotlight.

And remember, not everybody is the same. A major part of the Radical Candor journey is understanding the different “growth trajectories” that your team members might be on, and how your candor for their particular path can help to manage (or accelerate) progress in ways which it hasn’t been occurring before.

Better collaboration through openness

The final goal of Radical Candor that I’d like to highlight (though there are many more we’ve not touched upon) is harnessing it to improve your team’s collaborative processes, through a seven-step process:

Listening: Understanding when you should keep silent, allowing your team to fill the void with their ideas; and when it’s best to take a more active role to stimulate a stale conversational tract. But don’t just do this yourself - teach your team how to listen to each other, especially to those who might not always have the loudest voice in a room.
Clarifying: Participating in brainstorming sessions (both group and one-on-one) to ensure that ideas are refined until they are clearly understood and agreed upon, rather than starting a project or task with only a vague idea of the desired outcome.
Debating: Chairing an “open floor” during debates, and keeping the sessions focused on the debate itself, rather than committing to an on-the-spot decision on an outcome. Successful facilitation also means making sure that debate is respectful, and results in the team coming up with the best decision, rather than just focusing on “winning”.
Deciding: Ensuring that decision-makers are brought together at the right time, to make informed and prompt judgements around work activities.
Persuading: Making sure that decisions are communicated to everybody, positively and empathetically, with an opportunity for Q&A regarding the approach that was agreed upon.
Executing: Or, more specifically, ensuring your team is executing effectively, by removing obstacles and visualising workstreams to avoid blockers or ambiguities.
Learning: Analysing results/metrics and welcoming feedback on how a process was conducted, to ensure the opportunity to improve in any future processes.

By following these steps, and demonstrating a belief and caring nature for your team, they’ll be encouraged to bring their best selves to work, and together achieve winning results.

Key takeaways 📝

Nobody’s asking you to “fake” caring. Just care.

Being honest doesn’t mean being a jerk.

Communication is a two-way street. Invite candor from your team, too.

Converting passions and hobbies into careers

2022-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

There’s an age-old adage (one of those that’s so widely-spread that nobody can agree on who said it first): “Choose a job that you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life”. And while sometimes we all just need to pay the bills, or a straightforward role that fits around a busy home life, that’s why many of us seek to make a career in an area where we have a personal passion.

It’s a thought that was echoed by Steve Jobs, a man of many wise soundbites, who stated in a 2005 Stanford University commencement speech:

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

Yet when we follow our passions, or tell ourselves that we’re doing something “for the love of it”, we’re leaving ourselves open to heightened expectations, and even exploitation. So what’s the secret to making a living in an area that you’re passionate about?

Diagramming the conundrum

Earlier this year, a talk at the TestBash Careers event by Kiruthika Ganesan, Career Breaks and How They Shaped Me and My Career, introduced me to a valuable Venn diagram: the tri-junction of Talent, Passion and Marketability (originally published in ReviewAdda: Career vs Job) -

The diagram and its message are mostly self-explanatory, but it allows a few key insights into this debate:

If you have a talent for an in-demand skill, but you’re not especially passionate about it, that’s a job. It’s fine to do a job that you’re not passionate about. Sometimes, it’s even a necessity.
If you have a talent for something that you’re passionate about, but there isn’t a market for it, that’s a hobby. And that’s fine too! Hobbies are important - and if there comes a time when this talent is marketable, you’re perfectly placed to capitalise on it.
When your talent is also your passion, and there’s demand for it in the market - congratulations! You’ve found a career.

In this way, Kika’s talk was revolutionary for me, as it made me appreciate that sometimes, a hobby is healthiest if it remains as just a hobby. For instance, I love podcasting and will always continue to do it. However, unless I stumble upon a project with a significant (international) listenership, it’s never going to be a career for me. That’s not to say that I shouldn’t do it, but I should definitely be wary of how much of my energy I commit to it.

And, frankly, I’m currently trying to convert my coaching practice from “hobby” to “career”. I can recognise where I sit on the Venn diagram, based on the extent to which I’m finding my skills to be marketable. Until I have a substantial base of paying clients, I can’t call coaching a “career”.

(There are other business-related decisions to understanding where you sit within this Venn diagram: for instance, in the UK, HMRC has certain tax boundaries around self-assessment. At the time of writing, if you’re earning more than £1,000 per year from your “hobby”, then I’ve got news for you: you’re running a business, and the government wants to know about it, so that it can claim a slice of that pie.)

My encounters with converting passion

Weirdly, the closest that I ever got to finding true zen in “working with my passion” was my first big retail job, spending several years working as a sales assistant at HMV during my A-Levels and university studies. As a huge music and film fan, I was literally being paid to talk to the public every day about what I loved, including offering recommendations to customers, selecting albums for the in-store radio, and experimenting with how to position items to maximise revenue. It was so enjoyable that I gave serious (perhaps not serious enough) consideration to applying to be part of the company’s graduate training scheme, to pursue a route into retail management; it was only my desire to somehow make something meaningful out of an expensive journalism degree which put pay to that idea.

I chased this later in my career when I pursued a role with Last.fm, which definitely fell firmly into the “right job, wrong time” category. The company had recently been acquired by media conglomerate CBS, and were undergoing some major cost-cutting measures which hadn’t been revealed to users at that time; this led to a number of miserable months where my work involved removing features from the site and verifying that users (including myself, an avid user of the site) could no longer access these features. Still, although I was aware of these problems in my early weeks (and throughout my probationary period), I stuck it out for six months. This was my dream, I told myself, so why should I give it up so easily? (This was also an important lesson in not burning bridges - I maintained good relationships with my previous employer throughout this time, who openly welcomed me back when I decided that Last.fm wasn’t going to be the role for me.)

This is one of the biggest challenges of working in an area that you’re passionate about: you’re willing to swallow a lot more crap, to the extent that this could be leveraged against you if you’re not careful. This is most evident in the gaming industry, where unpaid internships (especially for games testers) are the norm - so many people want to do it, that they’re literally willing to give their labour for free. Even for paid employees, excess hours, crunch periods and burnout are still sadly the norm.

The passion obsession

There’s an excellent section in Rebecca Seal’s book Solo, titled “The passion problem”, which I wish that I could include in full, but it would quadruple the word count. In brief:

Saying that you’re passionate about your work shows a warped understanding of the word. (The Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition of it is “strong and barely controllable emotion”.) […] From a surviving-your-career-intact point of view? It’s unhealthy. Like busy-ness and working long hours, we have glibly adopted the idea of passion right into the core of modern thinking about work […]

I know how lucky I am to have this job, but it’s not my passion. I am not obsessed. In fact, I don’t even know what my passion is. I don’t think I have one. And that is 100 per cent, completely and utterly normal. Doesn’t sound it though, does it? Because we’ve been led to believe that successful people are following their passions, and that therefore, the two things always go together.

This is reiterated in a 2021 piece from Harvard Business Review, Your Job Doesn’t Have To Be Your Passion, which encourages the freedom which comes from keeping your passions flexible: by not committing to them as a career, you’re free to flex them in your spare time without the pressure of converting them into paying your bills. This is also evidenced in a BBC Worldwide article where a bookworm turned bookstore owner found his life being overwhelmed by work - to the extent that he no longer had time to read books!

If you’re making serious decisions about your career, the best advice that I can give you is to protect your love for the things that you love. Sometimes, this might mean committing to doing less of it (or, at least, under less pressure). If you’d like to talk to us about your conundrum, please drop us a line.

Key takeaways 📝

If a passion or talent isn’t marketable, it’s not a career.

If a hobby gives you joy, think what other emotions (good or bad) it would give as a career.

Don’t let your passion leave you open to exploitation.

Get more done with a ‘Not To-Do List’

2022-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Anybody who’s obsessively attempted to manage their workload or conquer their productivity will have experienced the joys (and pains) of making a to-do list, or a Trello/kanban board. You enter a zone where you become laser-focused on task completion; yet the tasks will never end, and all that you can hope to do is to tackle the correct tasks in the optimal order, to get valuable work done.

Yet, in the background, there are many other things that we “do” on a day-to-day basis, some of which we may be doing unknowingly, which restrict the amount of time that we have available to spend on the things that give us value. One way to address this is by creating a “Not-To-Do List”, identifying activities or bad habits that you wish to eradicate, in favour of intentional work.

What belongs on a Not-To-Do List?

While there’s no hard and fast rule about what to put on your Not-To-Do List, here are some questions which might give you some ideas:

What are the biggest or most regular distractions in your day?
Are there activities in your day which feel like a “waste of time”?
What do you wish you could say “no” to, but keep saying “yes” to?
What do friends, family or work colleagues say that you are spending too much time doing?
What do you do which could easily be delegated to somebody else?
Which activities are stressing you out, or draining your energy?
Which items on your “To Do List” are you completing just for the sake of completion?
What do you always try to quit during Lent or your New Year’s Resolutions?

Answering these questions may reveal aspects of your life where you could cut back, or be more stringent on how you spend your time. Even if they’re not work-related, they may offer tangible benefits to your productivity; for instance, a desire to stop bingeing on evening takeaways may lead to more restful sleep and a clearer head.

If you’re not sure what’s draining your time, one way to identify undesirable time-syncs is to keep a granular diary for a day (or, if you’re feeling brave, a week) where you dictate everything that you did in the prior 10 or 15 minutes. Be honest: were you checking Facebook? Browsing Amazon? At the end of the day, cluster your activities into categories, and then ask yourself questions:

Which categories consumed most of your time?
Did you find yourself spending more time than expected on a particular activity?
Which categories don’t seem like they’re worth the time that you’re spending on them?
How could you minimise the time that you spend on those categories?
Are there activities that you could eliminate altogether?

You might even want to consider plotting your daily activities onto an Eisenhower Matrix, to see how many “less important, less urgent” tasks are occupying your precious time.

If you’re really stumped for ideas, try looking at examples of other peoples’ Not-To-Do Lists. Everybody is different, but they might just give you a spark in an area that you hadn’t considered: check out Tim Ferriss’s Not-To-Do List, for example.

Optimising your Not-To-Do List

By this point, hopefully you’ve got a long list of habits and activities that you might want to eliminate. This is fine - we’re only human: we can be obsessive, compulsive and ritualistic beings.

However, trying to eliminate everything at once can be counterproductive. Your list will be so lengthy that you’ll constantly have to refer to it, in order to remember what it contains: you’ll have to add “Spend less time checking my Not-To-Do List” onto the end of it!

Therefore, it’s worth trying to keep your list relatively small - 10 items is a good benchmark. That’s about the limit to the number of items that you can easily remember without checking it; or, at the very least, print on a single sheet of A4 and keep it in your eyeline during the working day. Focus on the items which will gain you the most value: which items are most time-consuming, or are you doing most often? Which task(s), if eliminated, will give you the single biggest boost in focus time?

Once you’ve got your list, you also need to enforce it. If you’ve got issues relating to particularly websites or apps, a subscription to Freedom could be the best gift that you ever give yourself: it’s a tool which effectively proxies your internet traffic and prevents you from spending time on sites that you don’t want to (you can block a site altogether, set a daily time limit, or prevent the site from being accessed during key productive hours). Ask your friends/family to keep you honest too, particularly if you’re attempting to fix habits that they reported in the first place. Hopefully you’ll find yourself gradually doing less of the things that you don’t want to, and more of what matters to you.

Key takeaways 📝

We don’t have much free time; let’s stop spending it on the wrong things.

Make a list (or log) of the anti-productive activities which are consuming your time.

Narrow the list down to focus on the biggest time sinks.

BOOK REVIEW: Quiet: The Power of Introverts

2022-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

Susan Cain’s Quiet was a revelation to me when I discovered it. As a self-identifying introvert (an INTJ on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, if you’re curious), I learned that my personality type didn’t make me “weaker” than extroverts, nor was it something that should be stigmatised. Indeed, introverts have a number of superpowers which makes them better suited than extroverts in certain situations, if they can learn to recognise them.

Introverts are often mislabelled as merely “shy”, but this isn’t accurate - they can excel in social situations, but they find extroversion draining and it needs to be balanced out with quiet, thoughtful time alone. This is something I definitely relate to when attending conferences: there’s real value to be gleaned from one-on-one conversations in the hallways, and the social functions are often the best part of the event, but after a certain point in an evening, I just need to be somewhere recharging on my own.

The continuum and the mistaken ideal

People aren’t either binary “introverted” or “extroverted”: we all exist on a continuum, where are energies are gained and recharged through differing activities, at differing rates, depending on where we sit. To counter the above, extroverted people begin to dry-up after too much time spent alone, and need to recharge by being in a busy environment (something which was particularly challenging to recreate during COVID lockdowns).

So much of our society is built to favour extroverts. In workplaces, the loudest voices tend to dominate. We shape our meetings and open-plan offices around putting everybody in the same place at the same time, and letting the group figure it out. Yet there are undoubtedly people in those scenarios who could excel if they were asked to contribute in a different fashion; for instance, they might identify valuable ideas during a project brainstorming session if they thought about the scenario alone for an hour, rather than trying to make their voices heard among the “groupthink” of boisterous voices which are comfortable with leading the conversation.

We see the same in our school systems, where quiet children are urged to “come out of their shell”, rather than being encouraged to embrace the learning which can occur during deep personal thought, and to share their thought processes with their louder peers. (Indeed, there’s an entire chapter in Quiet which is dedicated to nurturing quiet children, which I probably at-best skimmed when I first read the book in 2015, but which is much more relevant to me today.)

Can you (or should you) change?

Research shows that people can move beyond their inherited personality types, but only to a point; like a rubber band, we can stretch, but only so far:

“Free will can take us far […] but it cannot carry us infinitely beyond our genetic limits. Bill Gates is never going to be Bill Clinton, no matter how he polishes his social skills, and Bill Clinton can never be Bill Gates, no matter how much time he spends alone with a computer.”

When moving in either direction on the introversion-extroversion scale, our brain’s emotional centre (the amygdala) generates anxiety within the prefrontal cortex, effectively sending a message that we should return to a more comfortable state. That’s why we’re physically capable of stepping outside of our comfort zones, but that it’s often stressful to do so. Susan Cain shares her own experiences with this challenge: she didn’t enjoy public speaking, but knew that it would be a vital part of her work. Therefore she self-tailored her speaking engagements to make them less stressful, in ways that benefited her: for instance, by speaking about topics which she’s truly passionate about, allowing her to focus more on her passion for the topic, and less on the row of faces in front of her. Incidentally, her success with this technique is evident in her TED Talk, which is one of my all-time favourites:

Whichever direction you’re moving on the scale, there’s a “sweet spot” of “optimal stimulation” that’s valuable to seek out, as it’s where you can do your best work for the longest. Once you’re aware of this spot, you should seek to optimise both your home and working lives to create situations which allow you to retain your balance. For instance, an under-stimulated introvert might gain energy by meeting up with a friend for lunch, but this may turn into over-stimulation if several other friends turn up.

In summary: Be yourself.

“The trick is not to amass all the different kinds of available power, but to use well the kind you’ve been granted.”

Regardless of to what degree you see yourself as either introverted or extroverted, there’s little to be gained in the long-term from pretending to be something that you’re not. However, there’s real value in understanding what strengths your particular personality type offers you, what saps your energy, and your individual “restorative niches” which allow you to recover. For introverts, deep thought, focus and insight will always be critical in business settings, and it’s totally possible to shape a role which fits with your strengths.

We’re always eager to promote diversity and inclusivity within our organisations, but neurodiversity - particularly within latent personality types - is often under-measured, under-reported and under-managed. We should seek to build teams comprised of both introverts and extroverts, and design our workplaces to support them accordingly.

Key takeaways 📝

Introversion isn’t a weakness, and nor is extroversion. Each requires different energies.

Our workplaces are too often shaped to favour extroverts.

Learn what makes you tick, what drains your energy, and what rejuvenates it.

Driving improvement with ‘Stay Interviews’ and fake resignations

2022-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

Despite our best efforts to drive frequent, open communication in our 1:1 catch-up meetings, too often we arrive at a point when an employee decides that they want to leave the company, and this frequently comes as a surprise to managers. (Though not always. In my time spent managing people, I’ve had three people who’ve left on my watch, and in all those cases, I was aware of the issues that were likely to make them move on, and was organisationally powerless to stop them.)

We then end up trying to “solve” this problem with an exit interview, which is the dictionary definition of “too little, too late”. It might allow for feedback which allows us to prevent others in the company from reaching that point, but wouldn’t it be better if we felt more comfortable sharing such feedback while we’re still healthy, committed members of the team?

The “stay interview”

I’ve been espousing the benefits of the “stay interview” for many years, yet the concept doesn’t seem to have reached mainstream traction yet. We should all be having this style of conversation, even if we don’t give it such a loaded term.

The idea of a “stay interview” is to regularly (and privately) ask our employees about issues which - if left unchecked - could snowball into a situation where somebody might eventually opt to leave the company. While people do often move-on from organisations for reasons other than job dissatisfaction, wouldn’t it be better if our career moves weren’t always driven by unhappiness?

The sort of questions which you might look to include in a “stay interview” are:

What do you enjoy most about your role at the moment?
What do you like the least (what would you change if you could)?
Where do you feel like your skills are being under-used?
When was the last occasion that you thought about leaving, and what triggered it?
What scenario might occur in the future which could trigger such a thought?
How do you feel about your current work/life balance?
What does your “dream job” look like - and how does your current role differ from that?

(For a more thorough list of questions, see Academy to Innovate HR: 21 Best Stay Interview Questions to Ask and Built In: What Is a Stay Interview?.)

Alternatively, as a solo exercise, you could try writing a fake resignation letter. Imagine you were actually announcing your departure today: What reasons would you give for moving on? What sort of company would you theoretically be looking to join instead? What would that company offer you that you’re not getting at the moment? As a result of this, you’ll have a list of talking points with your manager about possible dissatisfaction in your current role, or areas that you’d like to introduce into your role that you’re not currently benefiting from.

(A word of warning though: I wouldn’t draft this “fake resignation” anywhere near your actual email client, or possibly even on your work computer at all. You don’t want to end up one click or one file scan away from accidentally announcing an unintended departure!)

Using similar techniques in your job search

I took similar measures to shift my thinking earlier in the process when considering three competing job offers recently. While I made various lists of pros and cons, I also tried a writing technique: I wrote (but didn’t send!) rejection emails for all three roles, specifying what my reasons would have been for declining each position. I then looked at the issues that I’d identified with each one, spoke to the respective companies to find whether I had room for negotiation which could nullify some of the points, and ultimately learn which of the negatives were insurmountable.

In my case, this ultimately led to my declining an exciting role because it wasn’t financially viable for me to accept it. I was able to negotiate non-fiscal areas of the package which got me very close, and while I’m always an advocate for taking the best role over the highest-paid role, “I’d have to work my arse off to avoid losing our house” is pretty high on the negatives list.

Key takeaways 📝

Let’s have discussion about workplace dissatisfaction while it’s still manageable.

What would your resignation letter look like if you wrote it today - and are those issues surmountable?

Consider using similar techniques during a job search - why would you decline a role, and is there a way around it?

The dangerous misnomer of ‘unlimited time off’

2022-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

Back before everybody had the enforced experience of working from home, the concept of remote working was treated as something of a chucklesome curiosity. To many, it seemed like the ultimate dream; to those on the outside, it felt like a slacker’s paradise. While we’ve all now formed clearer opinions on remote working (we know what it is, and whether it’s right for us or not), there’s another equally-misunderstood perk which is on the rise: the idea of an Unlimited Paid Time Off policy.

It’s exactly what it sounds like: being empowered to take vacation whenever you need it, not based on arbitrary allowances. You can take it when you need it, without fear of having to limp to the end of December because you’ve spent all of your annual holiday allocation. And on the surface, there would seem to be two main camps: Surely it can only be beneficial for employees (more free perks!), and surely it can only be bad for employers (people will never be in the office?)

Yet from my experience, the positions are often reversed - here are a few things to bear in mind if you’re considering taking a role which offers unlimited time off (or if you’re an organisation who’s thinking of implementing such a scheme.)

Sometimes you need guidance

Most articles that I’ve read about the “pros and cons of unlimited PTO” have the same issue at the top of the Cons column: It’s a policy that’s open to abuse. If you previously offer employees 25 days of holiday, what’s to stop everybody from now taking 50 or 60 days a year, resulting in a huge drop in output for the company? In my past experience of working in an unlimited PTO company, the biggest risk isn’t employees gaming the system - it’s that (without an indicator of how much time off somebody is entitled to) people end up taking less time off: they’re less inclined to “spend” their allowances, and feel bad about taking arbitrary days off, because they’re choosing to “let the team down”. Consequently, unlimited PTO sometimes leads perversely to overworked and stressed teams.

The policy is clearer at my current role with Makers. Our unlimited time off scheme is also called a “minimum holiday policy” - we’re told to take at least 25 days off per year; to ensure we’re always taking 6-7 days’ holiday per quarter (rather than saving it for “quiet periods” which will likely never come), and even explicitly encouraged to take 6-7 days during our probationary period, to allow for restful learning. I’ve never worked anywhere before where we’ve been so actively encouraged to take time off in our first months with the company, and it’s certainly not something that I would have actively looked to do if the company hadn’t made it clear that they want us to take the time.

This, then, brings it back round to trust. Any “hands-off” policy like this is largely reliant on trust: the belief that people will make sensible decisions for themselves, while keeping the business’s needs in mind. Trust-based schemes are, by their nature, open to abuse (hence the phrase “abuse of trust”) and the fix is simple: hire trustworthy people and trust them. Two-way communication is essential, as employees also need to trust that an organisation will allow them to utilise their PTO policy in a healthy way.

An empowering reduction in admin

If you’ve ever line-managed people whose annual leave you’re approving, then undoubtedly you’ve often burned through hours of distractions in a week when people try to book or cancel holiday. I once worked with somebody who would “pre-book” holiday at semi-frequent intervals to ensure they were taking regular time off, but would then often cancel and re-book these days if the mood took them. I’ve also managed people who block-out their holiday at the start of the year, to cater for school half-terms and other parental responsibilities, only to then find themselves struggling when they need to take “actual” time off for recovery. (And, particularly regarding the latter, it should come as no surprise that women therefore face increased discrimination and fallout from holiday policies, as they’re more prone to be seen picking-up the childcare burden.) There’s an instant boost to morale and happiness when people know that they’re empowered to put their wellbeing first.

“When people don’t take a vacation, everything suffers—their work, their family, and team morale. No one wants to work for people who show them they can’t rest and be successful.”

– Katrina Kibben, LinkedIn: Pros and Cons of Unlimited PTO and Companies That Offer it

Compare that to an unlimited holiday policy, where people take time when they need it, with approval from their teams and peers, without needing to escalate decision-making or juggle arbitrary numbers. (Not that unlimited necessarily means unmonitored - it’s still important to keep a record of when people are on holiday, particularly if you’re working with clients who bill by the hour, or so that there is some way to ensure that leavers have taken “sufficient” holiday according to UK guidelines.)

So it’s great for managers, and it should be even more empowering for individuals. Whenever (and however or how often) you take time off, it’s critical to ensure that you’re still getting “good quality” holiday: you shouldn’t feel compelled to check your emails or Slack when you’re off. Processes should be in-place to allow people to cover, and it should be as straightforward as setting your Slack status to “On holiday - back tomorrow”.

And it’s a process where the onus is on managers to lead by example - if you observe your boss taking regular, clean breaks from their working schedule, you’ll be more compelled to see that as acceptable. And in return, people won’t take too much or too little time off - they’ll take the amount of holiday that they need in order to be their best selves in the workplace.

Key takeaways 📝

In unchecked Unlimited PTO schemes, employees are more prone to taking less holiday.

Consider a “minimum time off” policy, and let teams self-manage above that level.

Such policies should be supported by fostering a culture of trust and transparency.

Mojovation Consulting

Mojovation 2023 in review

2 major life events

1 coaching qualification (almost) completed

2 books written

21 bucket list items completed

My Mojovation resolutions for 2024

Finding Mojovation launches!

Coming soon: The Mojovation book!

Introducing: Finding Mojovation

Are you having an authentic Out Of Office experience?

A rest is as good as a change

1. Physical rest 🏃‍♂️

2. Mental rest 🧠

3. Social rest 🤝

4. Creative rest 🎨

5. Emotional rest ❤️

6. Sensory rest 👁

7. Spiritual rest 🧘‍♂️

Summary

Practicing agile environmentalism

Measuring your carbon footprint

What can you do?

Reduction vs offseting

Lessons learned from 20 years of working

Finding your passion might take time

Know your craft

Know your worth

Make your peace with office politics

Don’t burn your bridges

How to avoid losing yourself in remote work

Know when you’re “off”

Make sure colleagues know when you’re “off”

Remain available for critical issues

Take regular screen breaks

Vary your surroundings

In summary

Does ChatGPT understand mojovation?

Given the definitions of the word “mojo” and “motivation”, please provide me with a suggested definition for the word “mojovation”.

How might somebody improve their mojovation?

How might a company called Mojovation Consulting be able to help its clients?

Suggest titles for 5 blog posts which Mojovation Consulting could write, to help attract new clients.

Suggest 20 single-word keywords which Mojovation Consulting could use in its meta tags, in order to drive more traffic via SEO.

Which tech conferences in the UK might be interested in hearing more about the power of mojovation?

Suggest a title and format for a podcast which Mojovation Consulting could host. It should be both entertaining and informative, whilst also potentially driving new business.

Suggest 5 possible notable guests who I could invite to appear on the podcast.

How much should I charge individuals for a 1-hour coaching session with Mojovation Consulting?

If I wanted to write a book espousing the value of mojovation in building agile teams, what should I call it, and what should my chapters be titled?

If I were to create a 1-day training course about better mojovation, can you break it down into 5 suggested modules (with content)?

In conclusion…

A Mojovation year in review

1 company founded

15 one-to-one coaching sessions hosted

46 articles posted

[UNKNOWN] article views

My Mojovation resolutions for 2023

Speak up on World Mental Health Day

The ghosts of the past

The echoes of today

I’m here to talk

BOOK REVIEW: Drive

The components of intrinsic motivation

Increasing your own intrinsic motivation

Improving intrinsic motivation in the workplace

Getting a pay rise without changing jobs

If you want it, go for it

Isn’t there a better way?

When positivity becomes toxic

We’re only trying to help

How to support the healing process

BOOK REVIEW: Radical Candor

“Don’t Be An Asshole” takes priority

The Radical Candor Framework, explained

Growing through trust

Better collaboration through openness

Converting passions and hobbies into careers

Diagramming the conundrum

My encounters with converting passion

The passion obsession

Get more done with a ‘Not To-Do List’