Category: leadership

generosity, leadership

Step 331: Giving Our Best

Christa Avampato

“You get the best out of others when you give the best of yourself.” ~ Harvey S. Firestone

“The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.” ~ Sue Monk Kidd

I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership recently, and its elusive, mutable nature. I believe that the very best leadership is rooted in a deep desire to serve others. Though in its final expression it is outwardly focused on others, if we are to lead well we must have a deep understanding of what lies within us first. We must learn to enjoy and respect the company we keep in the empty moments before we can fully engage with others. We must know our own heart’s longing before we can uncover the same in others. To bring forward the very best in others, we must know and cultivate the very best within ourselves. To know ourselves, to really come face to face with who we are, who we mean to be, and how we should spend our time this time around is a lifetime endeavor.

Amid the stresses of daily life, how do we ensure that we leading a life composed of the very best we have to give? How do we make our days and years really matter? Here are 5 ways that I measure the quality of what I’m giving:

1.) Does an activity give me energy? I’m all for a good work out that leads me to a long, restful sleep, but aside from that I’m more interested in activities that boost me up rather than ones that leave me feeling depleted. If I start to feel my mind going numb, it’s best for me to move on.

2.) Am I giving and receiving something positive simultaneously? I may do a service project that helps someone else and makes me feel good about contributing to my community. I may write a blog post that helps me work out a challenge I’m having while also helping someone else. When I hang out with my nieces, the hope is that we’re all having a great time. If I’m doing anything that doesn’t strike this balance most of the time, chances are I’m not putting my best into the world.

3.) Is there laughter involved? By nature, I tend more toward the serious side of life more than the humorous side. (I’m working on balancing that out in 2011 – more details to come in a later post.) I can always rest easy when the activity I’m doing is somehow triggering laughter. Of course, always better to have people laughing with us than at us, but I’ve also been known to never be above self-deprecation if it increases the chances of a happy ending. Humility doesn’t get all the respect it deserves.

4.) Is what I’m doing furthering one of my larger goals? My blog posts are a great example of this principle. Each post isn’t in and of itself an audacious goal, but each one is adding to my goal of living a writer’s life. Smalls steps make the journey.

5.) Am I resting easy? My sleep cycle is my greatest signal of the value of my daily activities. I had insomnia for a good chunk of my life and my yoga training really helped to correct that, as did a lot of the work I’ve done with Brian. When my heart’s at peace, my mind and body follow. A day well-lived leads me into a night well-slept.

How do you measure what really matters and how do you keep track of whether or not you’re on the right path?

books, leadership

Step 194: Dragons, Fires, and Hornets, Oh My!

Christa Avampato

I live in a cool building. Residents leave books, magazines, and nicknacks of all kinds down in the lobby on two community tables. Recently, I picked up several books down there that I’ve been wanting to read, one being The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson. I’ve been seeing Larsson’s trilogy all over the place – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire are the other two. I haven’t a clue what the books are about; I just love that a man is writing about women actually doing something in the world that’s perceived as risky. And I like the book cover art.

I did read Larsson’s biography on the inside cover. He was the editor of Expo Magazine and a leading expert on anti-democratic activity. He delivered the manuscripts for all three books at once shortly before his death in 2004, having never written a novel before. 6 years later, they are all the rage. I’m sure there’s a story in there somewhere.

Inspired by Larsson’s titles, I did a little hornet nest kicking of my own. Yesterday I went to hear an executive from a Fortune 500 company speak. This executive, while known outwardly as an innovator, has recently been quoted as calling product development in the digital space “chasing shiny new objects.” That phrase makes me giggle. The world isn’t going digital, it’s gone digital. I fear for the people working at this company. In 10 years, despite its current dominance, I’m predicting that it will cease to be a relevant player because of its leader’s short-sightedness on how important digital is to its customer-base.

The Q&A session arrived, and I wanted to ask about the mobile technology projects that were recently and publicly cancelled by the company. When I was younger, I never hesitated to ask questions. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve tempered that impulse a bit, packaging my many questions of my youth in one pointed, more mature question. I asked very calmly about the leader’s thoughts on digital and received the response, “Well we definitely have to win there. I will just DIE if our competition beats us to that space,”she said through a very toothy grin.

If that Q&A session was an episode of The Office, the next frame would show me staring at the camera with a deadpan, bored look on my face. Newsflash Your Executive Excellency: the competition has already beaten you to the space, placed major PR bucks against their new digital products, and you don’t even know it. Your team has my sympathy.

My question had a bit of an agenda, and my agenda, as my pal Kelly would say, was morbid curiosity. It is amazing to me how many people in leadership positions think they’re too busy to be forward thinking. Having a vision, which means knowing where they are, where their competition is, and where the subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in the market are taking place is THE job of leadership.

Though the executive’s answer was hardly fulfilling, I’m still glad I asked. Calling in the Dragons, fanning fires, and disturbing the hornets involves some risk, but I think it’s better to call a spade and spade and understand it for what it really is rather than pretending that bad decisions are justifiable when better decisions are available. I wonder if that’s what Larsson is getting at in his trilogy, too.

career, leadership, work

Step 54: A Parade of Orange

Christa Avampato

Today I packed up my desk at work and at this very moment, the orange moving crates have are moving to a new floor where I’ll be sitting and working starting tomorrow. As a Pisces, the end of the zodiac cycle, I like endings because they allow us to complete a goal and look forward to new opportunities. I like the feeling of wrapping up a project, looking back on accomplishments that I worked so hard to achieve.

I do get a little sentimental during a wrap-up. Today it was a little hard to say good-bye to some co-workers, to know that I won’t be on the phone with them daily the way I was before. I’m so proud of the work we were able to do together, and I’m so grateful for the time I spent with them. This new opportunity before me is a dream position, and before I springboard head-first into the new job, I spent a little time reflecting on my last role and what I learned there:

1.) There’s no such thing as over-communication

2.) Never underestimate the power of honesty and reason to leave a lasting impression on people at all levels of an organization

3.) Saying what you mean and meaning what you say are the two most important things you can do on the job and in life

4.) Take care of a team so that the team can take care of customers so that customers’ opinions of and loyalty to the brand will take care of the shareholders’ investment; leaders need to focus their time on the base of the pyramid, not the top

5.) Leadership, above all else, is service and requires a high degree of empathy; care and concern for a team, as people first and employees second, is the surest way for a leader to be successful

Deep breath in, deep breath out, and here I go. In a new direction, on a new journey, armed with another experience to draw from.

change, dreams, leadership

My Year of Hopefulness – The Great Progression

Christa Avampato

“We must be silent before we can listen. We must listen before we can learn. We must learn before we can prepare. We must prepare before we can serve. We must serve before we can lead.” ~ William Arthur Ward

The Universe is trying to tell me something. Here I am on Day 2 with no voice. I can get out a squeak here and there. My friends have commented that I sound like a cross between Marge Simpson and those people on talk shows who want their identities to remain hidden. There is an odd kind of peace found in being silent. I can be silent about as long as I can sit still, which is to say roughly 5 seconds or so. At the moment, the universe is not giving me any choice in the matter. So I’m parked on my couch, being vewy, vewy quiet….

Those telepathic folks over at DailyGood sent me this quote last night about silence. I have definitely felt conflicting messages flooding my life lately – how to keep up and slow down at the same time, how to balance the effort to enjoy our lives with a constant eye on achievement and success. These are tough things to do. They don’t all play nicely together in the sandbox and often make us feel like we are at odds with ourselves.

So what if we begin with silence. My great hope is that you have not been forced into silence like me, but that it’s something you can choose, just for an hour or two. What can we find in silence? What kind of ideas can we get by sitting and being and doing nothing else? What do we listen to when we quiet our audible voice and the narrative inside our own minds?

Today, I am listening to the message that my life has many options. I don’t feel trapped at all – right now I feel like I have more options before me than I have ever had in my life. I am now most concerned with how to provide myself with the greatest amount of flexibility and freedom possible. And I’m learning that there are many ways to be free. We are free as soon as we choose to be.

I’ve also found that every day for the past several months I am learning so much about myself. I am becoming increasingly aware of what I enjoy and don’t enjoy, what makes me happy and what makes me sad, what kind of people I want to surround myself with and sadly which people I must release from my life, at least for now. I’m learning about the contribution I want to make to humanity, and I’m learning how my actions and words effect others and vice versa. To tell you the truth, it’s fun, albeit sometimes a little exhausting, to be in a state of hyper-learning.

And now the preparation. I was on the subway yesterday riding home from work and reading the following on one of the NYC subway posters: “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it. ~ Abraham Lincoln, A House Divided” This sentiment was true not only for the U.S. in 1858, when Lincoln made this speech, but for our own lives as well. Silence and listening leads us to know the first first piece of Lincoln’s statement so that we can then prepare, serve, and lead our futures.

I’m finding it very hard to have different segments of my life call for a different kind of personality. I certainly believe in and practice the principle of knowing my audience, though I also believe ardently that we must be authentic at every moment, we must be more like who actually are at every moment. In this new life that I am creating for myself, filled with freedom and flexibility, I am preparing the way, offering myself a variety of options for income and making way for opportunities to pursue whatever makes me happy and piques my interest. Yoga, teaching, creating products and services, writing, travel, and research. With solid preparation, it is all possible.

All this preparation leads us to serve the world and our own happiness in the best way for each of us. We all have unique talents and abilities. The way to happiness for one of us is not necessarily the way to happiness for someone else. We have different priorities and interests, we have different goals and different paths we’d like to take to get to those goals. The key is to always ask “is this the best way forward? Am I providing an optimal amount of service by going about my life this particular way.”

And then finally all of our service leads us naturally on to leadership. Leadership is a funny thing. While there are some that feel the best way to lead is with strong opinions, to develop a clear delineated chain of command structure, I couldn’t disagree more. To me, leadership is service in its highest form. As a leader, and by leadership I don’t mean a title but a behavior, my only role is to serve those I’m leading, to lift them up to be the very best people they can become, to lead the very best lives possible.

I have been abundantly blessed with great leaders in my life, in my family, at work, in school, and among my friends, people who actively gave me tough advice and great support and love all at once. The greatest hope of my life as I begin Act 2 is that I can bundle up that advice, love, and support for others who I will lead going forward, whether they are in a classroom, at work, or people who come to me for any kind of advice or help. Success will be that I can impart any wisdom on them with the same degree of grace and humility that my leaders have shown me. And then I will be certain that the great progression that Williams Arthur Ward discusses will be well on its way.

The images above is not my own. It can be found here.

change, leadership

My Year of Hopefulness – Pendulum

Christa Avampato

“One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.” ~ E.M. Forster

Yesterday a friend of mine was talking to me about the idea of leadership as a pendulum. “Imagine that the leader is up here at the top of the pendulum. Even the slightest movement made by the leader causes huge swings down at the bottom. Leaders need to be conscious that when they make seemingly small changes, the repercussions for others are enormous.”

I had never thought of leadership this way and wondered how I might be able to apply that to leading my own life. It’s easy to play out the idea of what big changes can do to our lives; what happens with the slight changes, the ones we don’t put so much thought into? How do they add up and what kind of toll do they take, for better and for worse?

First, for worse: I’ve been trying to remember to breath. That’s right – remembering to breath. Earlier this week I was starting to think about everything I need to get done in the next month. I’ve made so many commitments – places to be, people to see, tasks I need to complete – that I began to feel overwhelmed. How could I get this all done in the time I had?

Thinking about all of this I was holding my breathe. I closed my eyes and I let it go. I kept reminding myself while I had a lot on my plate, 99% of it was fun stuff, things I wanted to do. We have to take one day at a time, one moment at a time. If we think about swaths of time that are too large, we naturally get overwhelmed. Bite-sized pieces – that’s the key. Small steps.

Now, for better: what are the small things we can do in our lives that make a big difference? This week, I’ve been taking a few minutes before I go to sleep to close my eyes and empty my mind. Last week I was having some bad nightmares. I wasn’t sleeping well. And it was effecting my energy and my outlook. It was eroding my hope. This week, I found myself being a bit more bold, able to articulate my point-of-view calmly and succinctly, especially under very stressful situations. All that I needed was a clearer, calmer mind, and that 5 to 10 minutes of meditation before I went to sleep made a big difference.

The next time when I see big swings happening in different areas of my life, I’ll raise my eyes up to the top of that pendulum. I’ll take a look at the small changes I made, or the small changes I can make, that yield big results.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

business, economy, friendship, harmony, leadership, stress, work

My Year of Hopefulness – Harmonious Work Environments

Christa Avampato

I love to talk and on occasion someone says something to me that’s so striking that I cannot let it pass without writing about it. A friend of mine recently had her supervisor tell her that she creates a work environment that is too harmonious. I was so stunned by this comment that all I could do was laugh. And once that laughter subsided, I found the very core of this comment to be highly disturbing.

The American workplace right now, particularly in large corporations, is a tough place to be every day. Layoff rounds seem never ending and are referred to with a dizzying array of synonyms: “right-sizing”, “restructuring”, “displacement”, “down-scaling”, and the list goes on. At the end of the day a lot of very talented, bright, dedicated high performers are losing their jobs. Morale is low and bad behaviors abound as a result of fear, angst, and disappointment.

Layer all of these bad sentiments into my friend’s situation. Despite the fact that morale is very low at her company and the environment there is like a pressure cooker these days, she has found a way to bring some sense of harmony to her team and her projects. And the feedback to her is she creates too much harmony?! If she were ineffective at her job and unable to get anything done, I could possibly understand the feedback though that is not at all the case. She’s one of the highest performers in her department, due in large part to her ability to create winning strategies that are widely supported by others.

By saying please and thank you, and recognizing the hard work of her team she is being criticized by her boss who is unable to create any kind of good will due to his bad attitude and propensity for bullying. With all the anxiety in the world, we should welcome the contributions of people who can restore a sense of order and calm, particularly in the workplace. In the case of harmony, there can’t be too much of a good thing.

leadership

My Year of Hopefulness – Leadership

Christa Avampato

I have been thinking about leadership a lot this in the past week. I’ve been wondering what so many business leaders are saying behind closed door to their teams, knowing that the market is beating them up, morale is down, and anxiety is rampant. This is the pinnacle moment that every leader trains for – if ever there was time to manage through crisis and show grace under pressure, this is it.

I will go so far as to say that organizations who have senior leaders that can manage the current situation with grace and keep their teams motivated, involved, and supporting one another, will survive to fight another day. Those with leaders that lack bravery in these frightening times may not be so lucky.

Everyone knows it’s bad out there. Even if someone doesn’t want to discuss it, they know this market is as tough as they come. Once thing I can’t stand is to have someone telling the public something they already know as if it’s some great revelation. I don’t need politicians, CEOs, or finance gurus telling me how bad it is. I get it – I read the paper and I watch the news.

What would be immensely valuable to me, and what a select few like Jeff Bezos, are providing is a plan on how they will steer their organizations in this environment. I don’t want to hear anyone of power saying that they don’t know what to do in this market and that they are in uncharted waters. If that’s the case, then please step aside and let someone with vision take the reigns. I have no desire to sympathize with confused leaders. They’ve been pontificating on leadership for years – at conferences, in books, during interviews. Now in the moment of truth – this could be their finest moment. Leaders, are you up to the challenge?

business, corporation, ideas, innovation, leader, leadership

The Idea Guy

Christa Avampato

Some stories would be really funny if they weren’t so true. My friend, John, has successfully gotten his hefty graphic design projects out the door for the holiday season. He was right on-time and under-budget. We had coffee yesterday now that he’s successfully dug himself out from that pile of work. He was re-counting some of the sad and hilarious moments of the season and one of them really caught my attention. Well, actually one of the characters really caught my attention – his boss, Tom.


John largely does graphic design work for print. However, many of their clients are looking to them for web design work as well, specifically for social media. John doesn’t know much about this field so he had to dig in, learn the details, and then reconfigure his skills to get the job done. They had some big budget and time constraint decisions to make on some of his projects. He assembled the details in a clear presentation and then gave the decision options that were possible with the constraints they were under. After a 15-minute presentation, Tom cut in with some SWAG (Super Wild A*s Guess) ideas. Apparently, his company is fond of this SWAG idea to develop things like budgets, business cases, colorful PowerPoint presentations with smiley faces on them, etc. Poor John….

Professionally and tactfully, John explained why they really needed to choose from the options that he had presented. Tom stands up, and raising both of his hands to point at himself, says, “Tom, you’re not getting it. I’m the idea guy.” And gesturing to the rest of the team in the room says, “You guys need to make the ideas happen. I don’t care about the details.” Ouch. One of the team members actually rolled his eyes and plunked his forehead on the table. I feel another comedy sketch coming to me. And this would be a funny story, if it weren’t true. All we could was laugh as John was telling me this story. Otherwise, we’d have to cry. 

I love ideas; I can’t stand “idea people”. I’m not talking about people with ideas, innovators, product developers, etc. I’m talking about people who are full of hot air – lots of ideas with nothing to back them up. They have no ability to execute or even think about how it could be executed. And as a result, nothing gets done, the “make it happen” people leave, and innovation stalls. It’s a sad state of affairs. 

I have a simple piece of advice for companies that have people who refer to themselves as “idea people”. Get rid of them! Seriously. We all have ideas. All of us. The companies and people who win are also the ones who are movers and shakers, meaning they have ideas and they actually do something with them rather than just verbalizing them for their “minions” to do. These “idea people” are dangerous because they degrade others, as happened to my friend, John, and his team. By proclaiming themselves Lord of Ideas, they make everyone else feel small. If companies are going to get through these rocky times, teammates need to band together with a will to win. “Idea people” destroy the team dynamic, and that team dynamic is an asset that companies cannot afford to lose.  
career, corporation, leader, leadership, New York Times, Obama, politics, Thomas Friedman

The value of and quest for alignment

Christa Avampato

I walked around all day today with a smile from ear to ear because this morning I woke up more hopeful about our future than ever before. The afterglow of the election was shining brightly on people’s faces everywhere I went – at work, on the subway, in the grocery store. Construction workers at ground zero, my co-workers, doormen of apartment buildings in my neighborhood. I’m getting emails from friends telling me how excited they are about our future. And that excitement is infectious. Obama will be the greatest President this nation has ever had. I believe. As Thomas Friedman said in his column today, “The Civil War is over. Let Reconstruction begin.”


The critical activity that lies before Obama, and us, now is one of alignment. I thought a lot about the difficulty of achieving this state, especially among parties, factions, and classes that are sometimes so disparate with competing interests and values. I’m working on a project at work that is nearly at completion and just when I think I have alignment, something threatens to derail us and I have to gently and firmly coax that detail back into line. It is amazing how much daily effort and time alignment costs; it is an endless pursuit. 

So how will Obama get to alignment and how will we help him get us there? I’ve found that focusing on the finish line and getting others to place their focus there is most helpful. Playing pool helps.

An old boyfriend of mine was a very good pool player, and he taught me how to play. When I first met him, I wasn’t very good. I always focused on my cue ball, not on the ball I was trying to hit. And without fail, I would miss my shot. What I needed to do was get my eyes in line with exactly where I needed to hit that prized ball to sink it, not on the ball right in front of me that I would hit with my cue stick. I needed to keep my eye on the prize in the distance- that ball that I couldn’t quite get to directly. My game dramatically improved. 

The same strategy that works for pool can work for alignment. Get everyone looking toward the same goal, the same prize. And then you will find that they are less concerned that their desired road must be taken to reach that destination. As the leader, you choose the road that’s leading the group to the common goal, and cast the players according to their strengths and curiosities. Alignment is possible, even in the most fragmented of circumstances, if we as leaders are committed to making that alignment priority number one, every day.     
communication, corporation, culture, job, leadership

Opinion as fact not accepted here

Christa Avampato

My friend, Kelly, always had a saying in graduate school that she’d repeat whenever someone in class decided to spout off their belief system to chew up class time and to hear themselves talk. She’d say something like, “why do people think it’s okay to state opinion as fact?” Today at work I was reminded of that saying during my team meeting.


We were discussing some of the alignment issues our department has, not on our specific team but elsewhere in the organization. I think we might have all been getting a little too down on the structure of the business as a whole. 

One of the many things I love about my boss is that she has a great way of recognizing a negative attribute and then in the next breathe providing a unique positive that we hadn’t considered. She’s been at the company for a number of years in several different roles and one thing that she loves about the company is hearing the CEO speak. To quote her directly, “there is no CEO better to get you inspired about your business. In the world of CEOs, he is as good as it gets.” Immediately I thought, “oh, he must be very good at keeping people’s spirits up and encouraging them.” My boss followed up her statement with, “it is fascinating to hear him speak because he speaks only about facts. He never gives a speech based on opinions. Ever.”  

Now, I’ve heard a lot of speeches from leaders but my boss really got me thinking back to all the speeches I’ve ever heard. Some people throw a bunch of positive quotes and pretty pictures onto powerpoint slides and call that a motivational speech. They put up lists of books and websites they follow and reference and call themselves a resource. A lot of leaders do that. Many of them pace back and forth on the stage and say how much better they are than the competition, akin to cheerleaders. Most leaders do not base every speech in fact. Heck, some never base their speeches on fact. Now I find my new CEO even more remarkable, especially because our company, being in financial services, is under the microscope of every industry analyst, reporter, and rival. A tough climate to state just the facts, making my CEO’s continued honesty all the more worthy of admiration.

For the last three weeks I’ve been standing tall when I tell people the company I work for. Now I know I can stand even taller, up on my tippy toes if necessary, because all of this pride I have in the company is not based on opinion or belief or a “feeling”. It’s based in fact, and that feels great.