Over the past month I've spent a week living in a cave in the Drakensberg while guiding Canadian tourists up the Rhino...twice! I've gone four-by-fouring in my fiesta which led to three amazing discoveries, more on those in a moment, I've run some awesome corporate training courses, I've been training super hard for the upcoming national champs for Ultimate Frisbee (stop sniggering at the back!), and I've managed to un-learn the habit of blogging all together! I have also become a convert to a new philosophy in management and psychology which gets us all feeling good about ourselves AND performing better! But you can be the judge of that :-)
A while ago I ran a course for Unilever and it went very well. After all the happy people left I still had a decent chunk of afternoon/evening sunlight left. I also had my trusty electric yellow salomon trail shoes and my holey (and wholly inappropriate) little red running shorts in the car. When faced with a trifector of good fortune like that there is only one logical course of action... some semi-legal exploration.
This is not unusual for me. Just to put you in the picture; I've trespassed into the back corridors of most shopping centers you could care to name, my old primary school (climbed the drain pipe and got onto the roof at night), the off-limits areas of u-Shaka and it's ship, the arch of Moses Mabida stadium (climbed without the safety gear they recommend, before it was open to the public and set up my mate's marriage proposal on the arch - They were the first ever!), the formula 1 track at Silverstone England (My father, the Anglican priest, was mostly responsible for this), the pitch of Moses Mabida two weeks before the first world cup game was played on it (very nearly busted but talked my way out) and, most probably, your back garden.So I headed out towards Giba Gorge, that festering pit of mountain bikers run by TVG, our team-building and adventure camp nemesis, to see what actually happens down there. To cut much getting lost and back-tracking short, I found myself on a little road/track that I think is intended for the cyclists only but I drove up it. The further I got the narrower it became until I passed under the highway and continued to climb up into the cliffs and valleys beneath Winston Park. Eventually the plucky Ford could do no more so I swapped from horsepower to manpower and headed out into the lengthening shadows and steaming humidity.
DISCOVERY NO. 1: The Secret Spot. The trail I discovered, and began to run, single-handedly turned me into a trail running devotee. It seems to be in the most forgotten little patch of wilderness between civilization and a bunch of hairy-legged, baggy shorted, visor adorned mountain bikers...and the highway, but the string of crests and tree lined zig-zagging downhills with off-camber bends, fallen trunks to hurdle, log bridges to flash over, vines to duck under and views to distract you from the pain and fast approaching root waiting to trip you made me laugh out loud as I pounded along! It's sweaty, mud-spattered, thorn entangled nirvana!
DISCOVERY NO. 2: When you get a puncture, while driving over super rocky terrain, you will cut the sidewall of your tires unless you stop instantly, especially if they are low profile tires
DISCOVERY NO. 3: The sixteen inch mags on a Ford Fiesta need tires in a size so rare you're better off selling the car and going fishing for megalodons or unicorns. And if you find a tire that fits, you'll pay till your eyes water.
This Fiesta driver probably needed a full set and went off the deep end after searching in vain for a period of many years.
My philosophical discovery has been the Strengths based movement in management theory, led, most eloquently, by Marcus Buckingham (look for him on YouTube, he's brilliant!). The thought is; stop spending all your time working on your weaknesses and suffering through the parts of your job that you hate thinking that you ought to be well rounded and keep a stiff upper lip for the sake of the team blah, blah. You won't succeed at changing yourself and you won't be able to be creative, motivated and energized when you're working in an area of weakness. You're only an asset when your leveraging your strengths. Starsky already knew this when he earnestly told a bunch of hard core bikers they had just beaten up, "Hey. Be yourself. That's what's really cool." The irony of the fact that he was in full disguise at the time was lost on him but his point still stands.
It's a beautiful look...
I'm optimistic, creative, I love teaching, mentoring and speaking, I'm good at motivation and looking after team dynamics and relationships. I grasp complex concepts pretty quickly and enjoy solving problems. I release potential in people and communicate well to an audience, but... I'm horrible at the other kind of communication, the day to day organizational kind to make sure every department gets the correct info at the correct time. I suck at creating systems or being diligent enough to keep one running smoothly for any length of time. I don't organise or manage details particularly well and the same trait that makes me great at thinking on my feet and improvising a way out of crisis often makes me leave things open-ended until I'm doing at the last minute what others would have done ages before.
As you think about a typical week, remember the stuff you just loved doing. You were successful at it, the time flew by while you were doing it and it provided an emotional high, you are interested enough in that topic that you would happily read up on it further and you can see that you are growing in that area or that it makes you feel that doing that task is what you were really created to do and it leaves you feeling satisfied as a result of your meaningful contribution to the world. Success, Iinstinct, Growth and satisfaction of Needs are the for SIGNS (how convenient) of a strength. Once you've identified them you need to be honest about the fact that your job, degree, church, family or team deserves them from you and, within reason, you need to start accepting roles that allow you to use them more of the time and positioning yourself so that you do the tasks which weaken you less and less. It's not shirking or passing the buck, it's just intelligent. And when you do have unavoidable parts of your work that weaken you you can set aside a time to do them when you've just come off the high of using your strengths and you can discipline yourself to get through that stuff in a specific chunk of time. This process will stop the toxic effects of your weakness spreading throughout your day every time you feel guilty about that thing you're slowly chipping away at or putting off.
The after effects of using a strength or a weakness are real. After the Unilever course that had gone well I was on a high from using my strengths which had a real impact on the creativity, resilience and optimism I took into my afternoon and led to my trail running expedition. Had I just come out of an afternoon hacking through the preparation of a berg hike, cross checking lists with equipment and racking my brain to think of anything I may have forgotten or a long meeting on staff structure and who exactly should be doing what, and reporting to whom as we look at the future I would have been exhausted and gone home to the TV via cinabon.
Get stuck focusing on what's wrong with your team-mates and that is what they will focus on. You will be making your most important resource weaker! Get them moving into what they're good at and they will start to fly!
I'm off to Capetown to fill up the love tank,Go Sharks against the Lions on Saturday! Go Tom Boonen in the Paris-Roubaix on Sunday! And Go Prawn Bunnies against the Long Donkeys on the frisbee field that same day! A Jenson Button win might be asking a bit too much though :-)
Until next week
Paul
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