education – Emma Lo Russo

September 24, 2011September 24, 2011

Choosing the right mentor

I was recently asked what someone should look for in a good mentor.

The first thing to do is to recognize the value in engaging a good mentor or coach to help you hold yourself accountable for developing yourself and taking your career to the next level.

The value of seeking a career mentor is in how they can help you bring clarity to your career goals over the near, medium and long term, to help you prioritize your next steps towards your goals, how to strategize and evaluate options in light of your goals and values, and to help you stay accountable to the path you wish to take. Through formalizing this relationship with someone, it provides a regular, safe and confidential sounding board to bounce your fears, aspirations and future challenges.

Finding the right mentor is based on how inspirational they are to you, how experienced, how insightful and how good they are in facilitating the right discussions. High Emotional Intelligence would rate as the key characteristic of a great mentor and just as you would look for a great employee, you want in a great mentor someone who has demonstrated that they are smart, talented, have a history of delivering great results and have built many great relationships and people through their leadership and association.

In a busy working world, it is too easy to rationalize to ourselves what we do and why we do it. Much harder to rationalize to someone else. Particularly if they are asking you the right questions and you are looking inside yourself to provide the right answers.

Both you and they will know when you are making excuses or seeing things through a narrow field of vision.

If you want to take your personal life or career to the next level, it may be time to engage a mentor. The benefits of having someone else push, question, strategize with you through mentoring can only lead to greater success.

December 7, 2009March 29, 2017

The extinction of the technoignoramus

“TITF” (pronounced tit-ef) my nearly 14-year old son said to me as I lectured him on his responsibilities.

“What?”

“TITF – you have Taken It Too Far” he said as he rolled his eyes and sighed again in frustration.

Well yes of course I have. I used words not acronyms for one thing.

Within days of this experience my friend told me about her 17 year old daughter who looked deadpan at her as she completed a joke and said without a hint of sarcasm “lol”. Clearly using the abbreviated form of “laugh out loud” was more efficient then actually breaking into laughter or even smiling.

Another friend told me of his son who had an intriguing t-shirt on – one with a picture of Chairman Mao on the front with a picture of Rolf Harris on the back and the word “ROFLMAO”. Obvious to his son and his friends (and probably anyone under the age of 21) was the clever use of these images with a well-known instant messaging short-hand statement. To the uninitiated, this stands for “Rolling On Floor Laughing My Arse Off”.

My six and ten year old daughter’s are learning mathematics through an online tool that not only provides relevant and prescribed homework activities, but allows them to “dual” with anyone at the same level who is online anywhere around the world. Assuming that they don’t want to just work to improve their personal best and total scores which allow them to move up levels and win prizes.

If they play with their Nintendo DS’s together or with friends – they can link up, see each other virtually and send visual or text messages to one another. They learn through interactive smart boards and are encouraged to remember their security log-in and to email their “safe” friends at school. Online G-rated games allow them to collect virtual points then shop for branded goods – often advertisements for the latest and greatest toy or gadget slyly marketed as movies.

Don’t worry about spelling – they happily use and rely on auto-correct and voice recognition tools saving their minds for more creative pursuits.

And these are just a few examples of how, where and when technology forms part of their lives already at such a young stage.

It thus makes for an interesting time for any business who wants to appeal to and attract a younger audience – whether this is as potential customers or as employees. Technology is deeply integrated in their lives and is considered as important to them as oxygen is to the rest of us. This is regularly reinforced to me as I use the threat of technology bans as my preferred tool to generate positive behavioural change in my children.

Technology is how they connect, communicate, conduct relationships, learn, evaluate, play, shop, design, share, promote, read, relax and even simply be a fan of their favourite band and brand. They are able to read moods, decipher genuine and honest representations, find and filter quickly to relevant information and multi-task across multiple platforms.

They connect and share information through SMS, Instant Message, FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Linked in, Bebo, Orkut, QQ, or their personal blogs. They share information in groups and communities all of which take precedence over checking their 1 to 1 email (most applications are not smart enough for the way they wish to engage when you can reach 1 to many through other mediums).

They scan a web page, click and watch the first seconds of a video to see if they will give you the next 10 seconds of their attention. Communicating your message quickly and succinctly is no longer an art, it is a necessity to get cut-through and engage this generation.

In business, we increasingly rely on technology to manage most aspects of our customer and employee relationships and engagements. While there is much value in face to face daily transactions, I have seen first-hand the smartest and brightest employees sitting a metre apart instant messaging each other rather than engaging in verbal communication.

It is not that they can’t verbalize, it is just they find instant messaging a much more efficient form of communication. There is much to be said and done, and abbreviating it, using shortcuts or forums to share solutions easily changes the scale of reach from 1:1 to 1: infinite. And this is able to be done much more quickly and efficiently than ever before.

Sharing knowledge and thoughts instantly in forums and in collaborative enterprise wiki’s now forms the basis for other’s future education. It can act as a referencing and training tool for employees, partners and customers. It is easy to see how it has more potency and is far more powerful than communicating individually and sequentially. Collaborative documentation tools make easy task of finding, reviewing and tracking of content that can be accessed by many.

Many years ago when I joined a progressive technology company, I joked about how I was the “technoignoramus” of the company. I knew if I didn’t actively seek to understand, embrace and use the latest technologies I was going to become irrelevant, maybe even extinct.

Recognizing that there was a gap in my knowledge regarding emerging technologies, I made it my business (and eventually helped me lead the business) in determining how, when and what were the best ways to leverage these new technologies within our products and our enterprise solutions.

This resulted in a growing of the product development roadmap and changing from heavy self-developed software applications to those that were available and supported in the internet “cloud” – much more accessible and beneficial to our moving global workforce. We were able to reduce communication costs through the use of Skype and deliver extended customer training programs using video and having it supported through YouTube.

Today I still continue to seek knowledge and look to participate in using new and available technologies in order to better understand them. I will play with them, use them, observe others using them, read about them and link to them. This has formed an important element in the role I now play in assisting other businesses and individuals understand where technology fits into their overall business, marketing and customer engagement strategy and see how best they can be leveraged.

With all of this technology around us, it still surprises me how many baby boomers and generation X’s still resist embracing new technology and social networking platforms.

They cite discomfort about strangers knowing something about them or the arduous chore of sorting through meaningless messages to find those of interest or value.

The one I have seen many shudder at is the concept of “follower” on Twitter. Somehow this is equated as “stalker” to some. Certainly in business if you have a bunch of potential customers and partners interested enough to stalk you, this can only be a good thing, right? They actually tell you who they are, tell you they want to follow you so that they can hear what you have to say, and to whom and what you recommend. And you can choose what it is that you share with them.

At a personal level it is about understanding the different available platforms, the controls you have and the intent of the people you choose to “friend” or “follow” and who you allow to follow you. You need to be comfortable about what information you provide and finding your comfort levels about reading and seeing information about others. One of the rules I follow is one I was taught many years ago – don’t ever write anything you would not wish to show your grandmother or would not want published or have attributed to you on the front page of the national papers.

Advantages of using technology are many – especially in being able to stay abreast of your own personal data and of others that you are interested in, their life successes, major events and challenges. I recently easily organized and could keep track of both a common interest group and a family event using Facebook.

I am able to take my office everywhere with me on my iphone which can double as my entertainment tool allowing me to watch the latest TED video or listen to my favourite songs. I can publish my own blog through WordPress (which has surprised and thrilled me at the size of my readership). I am able to easily keep in close contact with global friends and colleagues. I have been able to meet people and new businesses and have opened up many new relationships or rekindled older relationships that previously were either dead or dormant through using a combination of online networking and communication tools.

There certainly can be no safety in the expression “technology is not for me” or “technology is too scary” or “I delegate technology to others”. I fear for those who take confidence in standing behind the good old days with statements like “I believe in personal, intimate face to face interaction and in protecting my privacy and those of others”. In the past fortnight I have personally heard each of these statements. And unfortunately, none of them for the first time.

I know I don’t know everything. In fact I am far behind many leading technology pioneers. But I make it my business to become an early adopter and stay abreast of technology trends and changes. This helps me understand how they are utilized, where they work and fit in to the bigger personal, social, product roadmaps and commercial pictures. I see this as part of a strategy to help me stay relevant now and into the future and I urge you to do the same.

To be able to engage and be relevant to the broader population, especially the generations that follow us, both you and I can not afford to be a technoignoramus.

If you choose to stay closed to embracing and using new technologies, your days of being relevant or being heard or understood by others may in fact be numbered.

August 24, 2009March 29, 2017

Returning that special gift you have been given…

As we progress through our careers we gain the benefit of experience.

The situations we find ourselves in become more and more familiar. We meet the same type of personality profiles, we see the hidden opportunities in adversity, and the kind of traps or dangers in the decisions we need to make or in situations that we can create or avoid.

We also benefit from having a much stronger understanding of our own powers and limitations, having already navigated what it takes to progress, communicate, motivate or manage others. Mostly we have the benefit of having a number of wins and failures on the board and knowing why and what results in success, and why and what lead us to experience failure.

This experience and knowledge is a gift. Something we should cherish and relish. It is also something we should share.

As the saying goes, it is much better to give than to receive. And although it is not kosher to return the gift you have been given, there is something wonderful about returning the sentiment. Adding your stamp of personalization, consideration, love and attention can create a lasting impression.

The positive impact and empowerment you can generate by giving someone the time to help them with their particular concerns, queries or quest for knowledge, through sharing your experience can not be underestimated.

Looking back I can name a number of great people who “gifted” me their experience or who helped guide me along my way. Some of my greatest mentors and guides were my managers, but more often than not the greatest counsel and sage advice I received (and continue to benefit from), was from wise and experienced colleagues, associates, contemporaries and friends.

It was from them that I learned how to navigate tricky waters, what to look for and what to avoid. That mistakes and failures are to be considered great learning experiences, challenges to be explored and gained from.
Some of the best lessons I learned early on was that mistakes don’t need to be fatal. That you’ll never know how far you can go and how much you can achieve if you don’t push yourself to the very edge. That the biggest opportunities also come with the biggest risks and a fear of failure is really being cognizant of that fact. That it is silly to try to avoid mistakes which may result in having a risk profile so low that we don’t really move forward leaving the brave decisions to be made by others.

You also gain strength from others encouragement. When may already know what the right thing to do is, but to have it reinforced and supported by an appropriate anecdote or example from someone else’s experience provides the much needed impetus to move forward. It can help to have your strengths and talents reinforced to be applied in new situations.

As our experience grows, so we should “gift” this to others.

There are many opportunities to positively impact. To help those who are starting out, still green, still learning, who would benefit from a great dose of your encouragement and knowledge.

With each promotion or progression in our careers, can we dedicate time to give back and grow others? To make time to mentor someone (or a greater number of people) that we identify as talented?

To stop and help them find the answers they are seeking and to help them develop and perform to their potential.
From my experience, gifting others time and experience bring numerous benefits. And not just the feel-good emotion it will surely generate.

It provides an enforced discipline for us to synthesize our experience into insightful clarity. Moments to mine the wealth by revisiting our working lives and review what really worked for us and why. To turn the many grains of experience into valuable pearls of wisdom.

It also helps us to reflect and recognize where we still have room to learn or develop.

So I ask this question, how can you share more of your experience with others? If you are already doing this consciously or unconsciously, can you do more of it?

Whether you offer this through formal mentoring or coaching or through informal mentoring and genuine sharing, listening, advising others, there is nothing more rewarding than giving to others and to see them grow greater from the collective experiences.

Not only can you help someone progress you may find in turn, you have gifted yourself another valuable experience.

July 8, 2009March 29, 2017

The power of “Pressing the Flesh”

It doesn’t matter how clever we are. Nor does it matter how many books, forums or surveys we read. Nor how many official meetings we attend. If we do not get out there to “press the flesh” we are not going to be across what is really happening in the world we are responsible for.

Without directly talking to those you have responsibility for – whether this be your employees, customers, investors, family or community – how can you really be confident you have a handle on their real sentiment and emotion? Can you really know how your recent decisions have impacted them? Be certain that what you think is important to them is the same as what they think is important?

The only way to really know is to stop, ask and to listen yourself to the people you are responsible for, and if you can, to spend some time “walking in their shoes”. This can never be met by having this outsourced or filtered through other people.

It may require you to consider it as an imperative, a percentage of time you set aside, or build it into your daily schedule to ensure you are spending enough time being physically connected to the people you are leading and are responsible for. As much as possible, be engaged regularly and as close as possible on their terms, without the formality of a pre-determined agenda. The less rehearsed the encounter, the fresher your read on what is really happening.

It does not have to take up a huge chunk of your time or be a major single event. You can daily walk the corridors and visit workstations taking time to talk to people on the way to somewhere else. Or allocate a day a month to visit your customers’ businesses – and really talk to those who are using your products or services. Or man the phones, have open lunches, create social events and actively participate or help out if someone is away. There are many ways you can get out there and press the flesh. But it is essential that you break the shackles of your work desk. You need to go where you do not normally go. Talk to those you don’t normally talk to. You need to look to encounter as much of a reality of all your people (those you have a responsibility for) as you can.

The powerful return is far greater than helping others feel good. It is about getting a firsthand account and measure of what exactly is happening. It allows you to see what actions you may wish or need to take. What priorities to adjust or what new initiatives you may need to introduce. You may discover you need to make different types of investments or decisions but it is more than likely you will discover that you will need to improve general communications.

You may discover that this practice uncovers a great new opportunity. An idea that can set your organization apart. A product concept that becomes the next big thing. Or just find that these actions of you connecting can energize your team to deliver something greater than before.

If you genuinely care about your people and align everyone under a common vision that they believe in, they too will respond with care, passion and commitment. By engaging directly, they will feel valued and that they have a voice. That they are not dispensable or not important to you, but are instead seen by you to be important and part of helping create something great.

One of the more likely outcomes is the energy source you yourself will gain. Remembering why you went into business, corporate, NFP or office in the first place.

So go on, get out there. Start pressing the flesh. Now.

June 3, 2009March 29, 2017

Nurturing and inspiring tomorrow’s heroes

Most of our kids harbor a burning desire to be number one at something. They can easily conjure an image of themselves scoring the winning goal, coming first in a race, hitting the winning shot….but how many of them at first call on an image of the invention they are going to create that could change the world? Or a design of a building that breaks all previous thoughts or examples of possibilities? How confident beyond the age of two or three (when they really do believe they are a superhero), do they think they have a chance to be society’s hero? And if you asked them if they wanted to, would they think it is possible for them to be able to do so?

With three children of my own, and with experience of schooling across 3 stages (preschool, primary school, high school) and across four schools and three schooling types (State, Catholic and Private), I have discovered a distinct gap in our education system in helping nurture and inspire our children to become the inventors, entrepreneurs, and creators of tomorrow. As many of us know with our children, the connection between what they are learning today in school and how it helps them in their future is rarely understood by them. And to be honest, unless you raise the level of abstraction in how the skills they are really learning can be applied in life – it is difficult for us to provide an answer to that connection in a way that will satisfy them. More than that, it seems that whilst our children might get lucky with an inspirational teacher, the exploration of engineering something new, the time given to create and celebrate a new invention, learning how previous inventions have changed our lives and the extraordinary achievement it represented in its time, does seem to be lacking, particularly in the early years of schooling.

By the time our children hit high school, unless they have a particular self-interest, most do not relate their natural strengths or interest in Mathematics, English, or Art to the possibilities within engineering and invention. We begin to prescribe requirements for university entry scores in relation to possibilities for pre-defined career paths, but are we really engaging our future minds on the problems, opportunities and possibilities that present every day for them to be inspired to solve and the path to get there?

Thomas Edison claimed that Genius was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. It seems to me that our education system is putting too much emphasis on, and we are providing too much by way of our own example, of the perspiration element. We seem to be ignoring the importance and are not providing enough emphasis and example-setting on the inspiration aspect. By emphasis I am talking within the design of our education system and in the time and responsibility we have as parents in encouraging, nurturing, and inspiring our children’s creativity and exploration of the “what if you could…” scenarios.

As we have increased our protective care, prescribing the after-school activities in a way that gives our children the best possible opportunities (or so we rationalize), is it possible that we may have not correctly weighed up the cost of preventing or constraining the ability for our children to run free and learn through natural exploration and invention? As we look to ensure enrichment, gifted and learning, and assisted programs to be supported at schools, have we put the same energy into seeing how creativity and invention is being supported and celebrated at school?

If we think about the future for our children, where do they sit within the world’s estimated population?

We know IQ is distributed evenly through the population. So how do we help our children make a positive footprint on the world, both for their generation and for their children’s generation?

Australia has an estimated population of 21million, an approximate 0.3% of the total world’s population. Rather than accepting it is OK to plod along, and accept what is, we have a responsibility and requirement to create a country of global visionaries. Those who see their playground as bigger than the constraints of our shorelines and the comfort we feel in our history of enjoying “the lucky country” and the “she’ll be right” philosophy.

It is absolutely critical that we teach our children now the importance and relevance of their uniqueness. Their unique mix of talent, skills, smarts and experiences. Of the same opportunity that they have as an individual to anyone, anywhere else in the world. They have an equal chance to make a difference; and that difference can come from their own creativity and invention. The problems they can be thinking about to solve may not just be the ones that they face, but rather the problems that we as a global nation of people face. Or may be something that can be enjoyed by others, enhancing and improving many lives, not just their own.

As a country, as business people, as parents – we have a responsibility to nurture and inspire our children to become tomorrow’s heroes.

I know I don’t have all the answers but I do want to keep asking the right questions. And help my children to keep pushing and exploring what could be. I would like for us all to find a way to break inertia, break stereotypical types, break the habits that too much “dead use of technology” like television and electronic games etc provide, and muster the energy to encourage our education system and society in general to promote and support invention and creativity in our children. For us to celebrate our inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs so they become the leading examples in our society.

Here are my thoughts of what we can do to nurture and inspire tomorrow’s heroes:

We must accept our responsibility to inspire and nurture our own children. We must help our children explore what could be and not allow them (or us) to get bogged down on the “how to get there”. We must make the process of exploration and creativity positive; we must invite it, suspend judgment, and allow for self evaluation. We must help our children see the beauty and the impact that inventions have bought us – everything from the printing press, microscope, bike, paperclip, microchip, spaceship all the way to the iphone and everything in-between! They are just a few examples – I am sure you can think of many more exciting examples to inspire others.

And it may be that with this focus, our children will dream bigger dreams, will be given the confidence to explore what could be and take will become tomorrow’s hero.