Laura Wolfe Coaching LLC

Supporting the Evolution of Careers, Leaders,

& Climate Consciousness

Notes from #NOEW2017

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I blocked my calendar months ago in order to attend New Orleans Entrepreneur Week (NOEW) and it did not disappoint. Similar to the way others spend time at spas or at the beach, for me, there is nothing as rejuvenating as an event where new ideas are all around. I wrote about entrepreneurial energy years ago after my first NOEW experience and always enjoy Baton Rouge Entrepreneurship Week for the same reason. Seriously, I love a conference schedule so good that choosing among concurrent sessions is a challenge and last week I was flitting around trying unsuccessfully to catch them all.

Here are some noteworthy ideas that I heard:

From Leslie Miley (@shaft), the importance of environment or ecosystem. Miley contrasted the story from a tv documentary he saw about kids being taken into prisons to teach them consequences of deviant behavior with his own experience of visiting Apple when he was thirteen. This greatly influenced his ultimate path of becoming an engineer who has worked for some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies.

Miley is currently working with Venture for America to expand opportunities beyond Silicon Valley by growing the startup ecosystem in cities around the country including New Orleans. If you or someone you know is entrepreneurial and early career, the Venture for America Fellow program is worth a look. I shared more from Miley’s keynote on my facebook page last week.

The importance of ecosystem for startups and for careers is a concept mentioned throughout NOEW2017. In terms of networking, Kelly Hoey (@jkhoey) recommends researching what’s happening in the ecosystem where you want to be and find a way to be involved. She also said do your homework and approach companies on something relevant to them, rather than cold calling.

Another theme that cut across speakers and sessions was the idea of visual story telling, i.e., the idea of using a powerful visual to tell a story fast and with impact. Katherine Lay says visual storytelling is everything now. The goal is to simplify and distill. Marketers must identify the trigger for each audience. Clients (or potential clients) want to be validated, want to be pulled in, and the right visual can do just that.

Bevy Smith (@bevysmith) mused about how people want to skip the middle. She said the beginning is the honeymoon phase or possibly the ingenue auditioning for their life; everything is new and exciting. She refers to the end as the Miller Life moment, the time of celebration and accomplishment that we all enjoy. The middle is the work. Her aha about this middle phase is that she previously considered it the time to hustle but has realized it is truly the time to strategize.

Ben Castoriano and Everett Fineran‘s session on negotiation strategies was jam-packed with great information. The first step of a successful negotiation is to value everyone at the table and work toward a solution in which everyone gets something. It is a simple and basic negotiation concept that is sometimes forgotten.

These ideas are only the tip of the iceberg so expect more from NOEW in future blog posts.

It was a great and energizing week. Knowing where you get energy is an important piece of the self-awareness puzzle. Where to you go and what do you do to get energized? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Thinking About Management and Leadership

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Mardi Gras King and Jester

Happy Mardi Gras! We have been having carnival fun around here for the last few weeks but it’s time to share some snippets and today the focus is models of managing/leading.

Good management is sometimes elusive but always important. Did you know that the traditional textbook definition of management is planning, organizing, controlling, and leading?

In the late 1980s and early 90s, the conversation on how leadership and management differ heated up with books by Warren Bennis, John Kotter, and others. Ways the two differ include:
~The manager maintains; the leader develops.
~The manager relies on control; the leader inspires trust.
~The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why.
~The manager does things right; the leader does the right thing.
(from What is the Difference Between Leadership and Management?)
However, not everyone makes the distinction and often the words leader and manager are used interchangeably.

A 2016 Gallup study on millennials (you know it kills me to use that label) gives specific guidance on ways that managers and leaders need to evolve to meet the changing desires of today’s workforce. Some of these include shifting focus from paycheck to purpose, from manager to coach, and from annual review to ongoing conversations. The research looked at millennials but the findings apply to managing more than just those aged 23-35.

This excellent SHRM Foundation report titled Selecting Leadership Talent for the 21st Century addresses identifying and developing future leaders. Of interest here are five leadership demands identified by Morgan McCall that can be the basis for evaluating leadership effectiveness which include 1) set and communicate direction, 2) align critical constituencies, 3) demonstrate executive temperament, 4) set and live your values, and 5) grow and learn.
(from Recasting Leadership Development)

Finally, Bill Gentry’s book Be the Boss Everyone Wants to Work For: A Guide For New Leaders is an excellent resource for anyone new to a management/leadership role.

I’ve been thinking a lot about management and leadership as I work on my new series called Remarkable Managers: What They Do, an in depth look at the actions of managers whose work I know and appreciate. Polly Watts, owner of The Avenue Pub in New Orleans is the subject of my first profile. Check it out here if you missed it.

What do you think is the work of managers? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Remarkable Manager* – Polly Watts

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Polly Watts

*This is the first in my new series Remarkable Managers: What They Do, an in depth look at the actions of managers whose work I know and appreciate.

Polly Watt’s dad fulfilled his lifelong dream to operate a bar in retirement when in 1987 he opened The Avenue Pub. Polly, who was living in Kentucky during Katrina, came in to help and ended up working and living in the bar, one the few places open after the storm, for three months. Her father passed a year after Katrina and she then took over the pub moving her family back to Nola.

Polly spent the next several years reworking, renovating, and replacing most everything in the building which dates from 1845.

Business floundered post-Katrina and she was looking for a customer base. Half the regulars left after the storm and Nola newbies didn’t yet value neighborhood bars. During that time there was not much destination drinking. It became clear to Polly that to survive, something had to change because there wasn’t enough decent business to go around.

Although not a beer drinker, Polly began noticing craft beer and suspected it could be big. In late fall 2008, a rep from NOLA Brewing stopped by. Polly wondered who would pay $5 for a beer but wanted to support a new local company and held a tap in anticipation of the NOLA beer.

After Mardi Gras 2009, the bar received two slims of NOLA and in less than two hours it was gone. She ordered more which sold just as fast. Even more, she thought the beer tasted fabulous. Polly realized that craft beer was something to take seriously and began toying with the notion of ‘if you build it they will come’.

She gives credit to her Shelton Bros Distributors’ rep who generously shared knowledge and contacts and also later for American Craft Beer Week 2009, guided her to the ten beers you had to have. She decided craft beer was a bigger niche than first realized, knew she needed to learn, and turned to local beer expert, Dan Stein who was generous with his beer knowledge and expertise as well.

Polly discovered she liked craft beer and decided that because of its complexity, the experience she wanted to offer customers required she and her staff have a certain level of knowledge and sophistication. She is an avid learner and explorer and in this spirit embarked on a craft beer journey.

The Avenue Pub caters to and has captured the small craft centric market and regularly receives recognition and awards. Early on, Polly saw beer geeks starved for attention who were so happy that someone was just trying to understand them. This led her to start on social media with a kind of a religious zeal helping people learn. And it happened that she was in the right place at the right time.

When asked what she wants her customers to experience and how her people management style makes that happen Polly said “I want my customers to feel experimental when they are here, welcomed of course as well.” She went on to explain that what they do well at the pub is to be experimental and have fun with the product line. Early on Polly worked to develop a reputation for always having good product and knowledgeable staff.

Rotating taps.
Post Katrina when locals with old habits had gone and new people were in town, beer was becoming a high end option. Part of The Avenue Pub experience is an ever changing variety of beer which Polly says would not be possible without volume. She is also unwavering in her willingness to throw away kegs or sell at a discount rather than serve unfresh beer. It is interesting to note that the Pub has a max of fifty taps but only operates at capacity 30-40% of the time which mostly includes Zwanze, Mardi Gras, and Craft Beer Week.

She says one of her keys to success is lack of business background without which she hasn’t overly focused on profit percentages or worried that everything had to sell. Because of her product mix, she learned a straight percentage markup doesn’t work although business people sometimes get glued to that concept.

Sharing her vision.
Her decision to not sell Abita Amber or Blue Moon was intentional as they are widely available. The question for her was how to give customers an experience unavailable elsewhere. She realized high end beer drinkers are a sophisticated market and that she needed to travel to learn the story behind the beer and to know the brewer. In this industry, preserving a craft is important, especially in Germany and in Belgium.

In 2010 soccer mom Polly, along with Vicki, a thirty year employee of the bar traveled to Belgium to check out the breweries and hear the stories. Her rep from Shelton Bros distributors in New Orleans wrote letters of introduction. They were treated like family, like sisters or aunts, and as members of the community. The European brewers got a kick out of two middle-aged women so interested in beer and brewing and the stories behind it.

Zwanze Day 2013

On that first trip, relationships began that had less to do with beer, and more to do with brewers in Belgium who wanted to help, including Jean Van Roy of Cantillon. The relationship with Cantillon has continued and The Avenue Pub is one of the select locations around the world to receive the Cantillon Zwanze, a small batch of experimental beer released across the globe with a coordinated simultaneous tapping. (My husband and I attended the pub’s first Zwanze in 2011 and have since watched the amazing evolution of both the bar and the event.)

In summer 2016, Polly took ten of her staff to Belgium. This required buying locks for pub doors because as a 24/365 operation they had not been needed before. Part of the trip was hearing and sharing stories together. Before one brewery tour the group was served coffee on the fourth generation brewer’s grandmother’s china in the old family home on the property. This kind of learning creates expert bartenders who provide unbelievable customer experiences.

Deep understanding of the product line is important because the craft comes from the generational history. Watts says the US craft beer industry does not yet have that depth and passionate love of craft. The next Avenue Pub staff trip will be to Denmark and Sweden where she says, the industry is more like the US, dominated by young men.

Female in a traditional male business.
The European beer community accepted her as a woman bar owner in a way that the American community did not. If she wasn’t taken seriously at home she said it was as much because she was female as that she was offering a completely new model for both New Orleans and Louisiana.

At her first beer bar owners’ summit years ago, Polly made good connections and over the years has found bar owners to be helpful and generous with what they know. Many people have graciously served as mentors from whom she has learned much. Polly believes lots of people make good beer but it’s the relationships that endure. And these days, many more beer options are available than tap lines.

The importance of relationship extends to her staff as well. The Pub offers full time employees health insurance coverage in addition to the very rich employee development opportunities. When asked what three words capture her philosophy of people management, Polly said “Care about them. It really all boils down to this: people who feel invested and like they matter give that back to you.” She also told me that “If the only way this bar can be successful is on the backs of my employees, then I don’t want to be in business.”

At the core of her success are her relationships and friendships.

My thoughts: This management story exemplifies numerous smart business and professional development actions. First, Polly has a true growth mindset – that is the belief that abilities can be developed through learning and work. Also, her years as a bar owner/manager have involved ongoing testing and trying of ideas, i.e., she puts her hypothesis out there, gathers data, and based on findings decides on next steps. Finally, Polly recognized her need to learn and connected with many excellent mentors. She in turn is generous with her knowledge.

What do you think makes a great manager? Who do you admire as a manager and why? Please share in the comments section below.

Brené in Baton Rouge

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During the south Louisiana flood of 2016, Brené Brown contacted her friend and spiritual mentor Joe Reynolds, interim priest at St. James Episcopal Church in Baton Rouge, asking how she could help. The result was her talk last night attended by me and about 500 other people that raised more than $50,000 for flood victims.

She was quick to offer help she told us because she knew. Her mom had four feet of water during Allison, she and her family were without power, and her pediatrician husband volunteered in the makeshift clinics serving Katrina victims after the storm. She knows the need created by natural disasters and reached out to do what she could. She also said it is inevitable that South Texas will again be in need and knows Louisianans will be there to help.

And then she told us a very big secret: We need each other. No status, privilege, or wealth is great enough to keep people from needing each other.

The topic for the evening was the work that resulted in her latest book, Rising Strong, which focuses on what it takes to get back up.

If you have read my blog for any length of time, you know that I regularly invoke Brown’s wisdom and am a devoted fan of her work. Being in the audience last night was as exciting for me as seeing Sting or Trombone Shorty or Keith Urban. I tried to take notes but didn’t do too well. The following are bits I managed to capture although most could use more detail or elaboration. For clarification, check out her books and talks and website.

From her earlier work which includes The Gifts of Imperfection came this idea related to playing large vs playing small in our lives: “The problem with engineering smallness in our lives is that it is served up with anger and resentment.”

Brown next shared that for her TEDx University of Houston talk about vulnerability she decided to really put herself out there, i.e., be vulnerable. She wasn’t too concerned because only a couple of hundred people would likely ever see it. However, the national TED organization liked her talk and put it on their site and suddenly it exploded. All at once, the national media began talking about her work and vulnerability. Millions of people watched (and continue to watch) that TED talk.

Finding the daring greatly quote was a result of reading the online comments about her TED talk which caused her to binge watch Downton Abbey. This in turn led her to google more about the era and to wonder who was president of the US during the time. It happened to be Teddy Roosevelt who famously said “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Reading that quote changed Brown’s life and she now looks at her life as the time before and the time after that moment. Daring Greatly also became the title of her next book. The following are some ideas from Daring Greatly:

  1. To live in the arena you must be brave. If you are in the arena, guaranteed you will fail. Is it worth it? The question is will I choose courage or just be content?
  2. Vulnerability is about showing up and being seen when you can’t control the outcome; showing up and being brave. Being vulnerable is not weakness but actually a measure of courage. In her research with CEOs she has asked what is holding them back and some of the top answers are 1) not willing to have the hard conversations, 2) don’t want the feedback, and 3) don’t want to ask the hard questions. Interestingly, all of these require vulnerability. Side note: nowadays, failure is showing up on performance evaluations in Silicon Valley and the issue is not that a person has failed but that they haven’t failed. If they aren’t failing, they are not putting themselves out there. Vulnerability – risk, uncertainty, and emotional exposure.
  3. If you are not in the arena, I’m not interested in your feedback about my work. She believes feedback is essential to mastery but only feedback from people who have earned the right to give you feedback. We need feedback because we are hardwired for connection. Goal: let in what is useful, keep out what is not.

Finally, she shared ideas from her latest book, Rising Strong.

Rising Strong Phase 1: Reckoning

For Rising Strong, she interviewed veterans of active duty, leaders, creatives, and some elite athletes and coaches.

Physics of vulnerability is that if you are brave enough, often enough, you’re going to fail. The next step is to ask “What is the story I’m making up right now?” Go to the story.

Emotion is key in that story. Our response to emotion is actually physical. Resilient people recognize what that is for them. We are feeling beings who on occasion think. When something tough happens, emotion is at the wheel and thinking is in the trunk, all tied up. This is because it’s all about survival. Our brain is constantly monitoring and asking “what is happening? how do I protect you?”

Our brains recognize story – beginning, middle, end, and love a black and white story such as safe/unsafe or bad/good. So if something could possibly be a threat – funny look from the boss – our system can go into survival mode which is some modern day version of fight or flight. The remedy? Mindfulness – pay attention to how you are feeling. Practice tactical breathing. It actually changes physiology.

Emotional explosiveness is not a good thing if you are a leader.

Rising Strong Phase 2: Rumble

Examine the stories we are creating and rumble with them. Are they conspiracies and/or confabulations?

Conspiracies – a story with limited data points filled in with fear and belief. Without data, humans make up stories. ‘Shit happens’ is a funny phrase but in reality we are constantly making up stories about how and why things are the way they are. We make up what we don’t know for sure. Confabulations – lies told honestly. Again, rumble with your stories and determine if they are true or possibly conspiracies or confabulations.

Brown’s new research is on emotions. Asked several thousand people to name every emotion that they can. On average, people named three: happy, sad, and angry. However, those in the sample identified as resilient were able to name thirty different emotions – 10x what non resilient people could name. Empathy, self-compassion, and resilience all depend on emotional fluency. We need to be able to articulate what we are feeling. A subset of the thirty emotions identified by the resilient show up as anger, fear, or shame. Lots of people do anger better than disappointment, hurt, grief, sadness, etc.

Big message from her work – if you own your story, you can write your ending. If you don’t own it, it owns you. Also, people with the greatest tolerance for discomfort rise the fastest after being face down on the floor of the arena. Often the story we make up is that we are OK because we know people who have it worse than us. Therefore, we tell ourselves we are not allowed to feel bad/be angry. However, Brown has learned it is better to piss and moan with perspective than deny what is happening.

Thank God for moments of joy in the midst of struggle. Who does it serve to engage in comparative suffering? Why be in a race to the bottom?

Rising Strong Phase 3: Revolution

This phase is all about integration – to make whole – all the parts of who we are. And she stressed all parts of us, starting with our youngest selves and every version of us throughout our lives.

The most dangerous stories we make up are about our lovability, creativity, and divinity. All of these things are God given and no one can take those away.

In answer to a question about her work and parenting: Perfectionism is the most contagious straightjacket we pass on to our children.

Finally, a big lesson she learned from Joe Reynolds is that if you love someone, you’re going to hurt them. This makes the Rising Strong process important for everyone.