00:00:00: Introduction
00:01:34: The quote
00:02:52: How the quote inspires
00:04:42: The effect of the statement
00:06:46: Ideas for action…
00:06:53: … 1: job crafting
00:09:30: … 2: ask for feedback
00:12:04: … 3: get some squiggly stretch
00:14:25: Final thoughts
Sarah Ellis: Hi, I’m Sarah.
Helen Tupper: And I’m Helen.
Sarah Ellis: And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast. Every week, we choose a different topic to do with work and your career, and share some ideas and actions to help all of us navigate these Squiggly Careers with that bit more confidence and control.
Helen Tupper: And this is the fourth in a slightly random series that we’ve decided to do over the summer, because we thought is everybody committed to take lots of deep action with their development in August?
Sarah Ellis: No. No one needs a matrix in August, I don’t reckon.
Helen Tupper: Really? No one needs a matrix in August? Oh, that makes me sad, but I think you might be right. People do need a bit of inspiration in August, some sort of light ways to reflect and think about what you’re doing, and maybe take back into September when you come back to everything that’s in your inbox. So, that’s what this series is all about. We are taking quotes that have inspired our career, things that have helped us to think slightly differently about our development, and we wanted to turn them into something that you can use to reflect on for yourself, and you can also hear about how we’ve put into action, so that maybe you can adopt some of that stuff too. So, this is the fourth, and it’s the final one of this series. So, let us know if you’ve liked it. It’s helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com.
But just a recap of what we’ve covered so far: episode 1 was, “Run your own race”, which was a quote that has worked for me; episode 2 was, “Never live your same year twice”, which is a quote that has helped Sarah along the way; episode 3 was to, “Challenge your limits, don’t limit your challenges”, another one that’s worked for me; and today, Sarah, what are we talking about?
Sarah Ellis: So, it’s not really a quote
Helen Tupper: I mean, off brief as always! Great, thanks for that!
Sarah Ellis: What it is is a definition of leadership.
Helen Tupper: Okay!
Sarah Ellis: Which is what nobody asked for or wanted, but that is what we are doing. And I think there are not many definitions of leadership that have really connected or stuck with me, which is why I think it sort of works as a quote, because it has inspired me and it has resulted in action. So, I feel like it still fits the criteria. And this comes from Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones and their book, Why Should Anyone Be Led By You? and their award-winning Harvard Business Review article with the same title. So, if you don’t want to read the book, have a look at the article. And they describe leadership as, “Be yourself more with skill”. And for me, I just think that is a really good reflection for everybody. So, yes, it was written in the context of leadership and exploring leadership, but who doesn’t that apply to? We all need to be ourselves more with skill, in terms of how we turn up at work, how we show up, how we keep learning. So, that’s what we’re going to explore today.
Helen Tupper: What does it mean to you? That’s, I think, the first question. If you were unpacking it out of your brain, what does it mean to you and why does it resonate with you?
Sarah Ellis: So, I think the reason it resonated was, I remember reading this work, and it’s very clear that there is no blueprint for being brilliant, and I think that’s quite reassuring. You know, I don’t have to change my personality, I don’t have to become something I’m not. What I actually need to do is be a better me. I think that is actually the really important point. And I think it probably particularly connected with me, because I did spend, I think, a fair bit of my career, particularly in the early days, pretending to be someone I wasn’t, or feeling pressure to pretend to be somebody I wasn’t; so, to be more extrovert than I naturally am, to try and maybe have some skills that I’m not actually good at, worrying more about my weaknesses than focusing on my strengths, all of those kind of things. And I think once I started to make the transition to, “But how could I be a better me?” almost accepting me, my reality like, “Well, this is what I’m good at, these are the strengths that I’ve got”, then I found that really helpful. It’s much more motivating, because it feels more in your gift for something that you can go away and do something with. So, that’s kind of the first thing, it’s like, be a better me. Great, so I don’t have to worry about other people.
Then, the second part is the, “Be yourself ‘more with skill'”, It’s the ‘more with skill’, I think, doesn’t mean, “Oh, well great, I can just turn up and be myself”, because that’s the cop out. I think if you just go, “Be yourself”, the cop out is, “Oh, I can behave however I want, I can do whatever I want to do”, and I actually think it’s quite lazy.
Helen Tupper: Is there something that you have specifically done as a result of like, in your career, do you think there is something, like there was a moment where you’re like, “This is specifically better for me because of that; I did this differently because of that statement”?
Sarah Ellis: I think one of the things that changed for me is I started talking more openly about being introverted, and actually seeing very quickly how much that connected with people, who typically are also introverted. And also, it raises lots of questions, because some of the work that I do, sometimes people wouldn’t actually connect the work that I do with being introverted. But actually, there are lots of people who are introverted who like standing on a stage. Lots of comedians are introverted and they go and do stand-up comedy. At least I know what I’m going to present when I’m doing a big keynote, or whatever it might be. And so, I think it gave me permission to talk about that, and then I could see the impact of me talking about that with other people. And so, then it felt useful to do.
Then I think the other thing that it prompted me to do was to think about the things that I was very uniquely good at, like what makes me uniquely useful, and then to double-down on those things and go, well, just because I’m already good at them, you don’t just sort of go, “Okay, great, I’ve got those strengths”; actually, really think about how can I make those strengths stronger, how can I stretch those strengths, how can I use those strengths in different situations, lots of stuff that we’ve talked about on the podcast before around strengths. I put loads more effort and energy into my strengths after this and I worried a lot less about my weaknesses, much happier to sort of let some of those things go as just things that I wasn’t that good at, or to take the approach of, “Well, what does good enough look like?” and be satisfied with that. So, I think I put my learning and development effort and energy more into kind of strengths, less into weaknesses.
Helen Tupper: Okay then, so let’s talk about some ideas for action that have worked for you that you think could help other people take this quote into their work too.
Sarah Ellis: So, action number one is job crafting. And there is a quote from the book that says, “Individuals are now architects of their own working lives”. And they’re talking about some of the changes actually away from career ladders. Also, inspired by recently as a team, we did some work with Tailored Thinking, the brilliant Tailored Thinking, on job crafting, what that looks like for us. For people who’ve not come across job crafting before, because I don’t think it is a super-common term, I sometimes bring it up in workshops and lots of people are like, “Oh, what does that mean?” I think it is the difference between changes in your job happening to you, which I think happens to everyone. If you talk about someone’s job, how many people’s jobs stay identically the same year-on-year? Hardly anyone now, because companies are changing, there’s so much uncertainty. So, everybody’s job changes all of the time.
But how many of those job changes are intentional from you, are driven by you versus driven by other people or your organisation? And so, job crafting is you driving changes to your roles and responsibilities in small ways, in significant ways, usually in collaboration with your manager, with your boss. Because often, there might be some small tweaks you can make by yourself, but typically, if you’re doing this in a very thoughtful way, you can’t just go, “Oh, I’m just going to stop doing this and start doing this”.
Helen Tupper: You need their buy-in.
Sarah Ellis: Yeah, because you need buy-in. Also, it might have implications for other people in the team, so there’s the ripple effect of that. And so, if you’re maybe listening to this and you’re like, “Oh, actually, I’ve never really thought about how I spend my time in my job, like the tasks that I do, what I’m responsible for, what I’d want to do more of or less of”, and then really starting to think about that, it’s almost like taking ownership for your own live job description. I think that is a great way to ‘be yourself more with skill’ and grow in the role that you are in today.
Helen Tupper: If you can solve someone else’s problem or support their priority at the same time, that’s kind of the win, so that it looks like it’s a way in which you can stretch that strength and it has a positive outcome for them too. You’re much more likely to get buy-in, I think, when it works for both parties. And if you want to learn a bit more, Dan Cable from London Business School, great article you can read on job crafting, I think he’s great on job crafting.
Helen Tupper: Okay, so number two, what’s the second thing people should do?
Sarah Ellis: So, second thing is asking for feedback, but particularly on your blind spots. So, blind spots, things that other people can see that you can’t see in yourself, often quite hard to do. So, what I wouldn’t recommend is just saying to somebody, “Helen, I’d like some feedback on my blind spots”. I think that is a really hard question.
Helen Tupper: It’s quite a confronting question, isn’t it?
Sarah Ellis: Yeah. And so, I think we’ve got to be more specific. But the reason I think this is a good action on ‘being yourself more with skill’, is part of being skilful is knowing what you don’t know, and recognising that there will always be some things that you don’t know about yourself, and other people can give you some learning that you just can’t achieve alone. And a better way perhaps to ask for feedback on your blind spots that we’ve been testing and seems to be working quite well with people, is to connect those blind spots to a goal that you’ve got, to give a frame for that feedback and make it loads easier for people to answer. So, I was trying to come up with some examples here to bring this to life. So, what I could say to Helen is, “I want to be a leader”, if I was thinking about leadership, “I want to be a leader that gives people both the space they need and the support they need to succeed in their roles. It’s really important to me that I get that right, that kind of space and support combination. What might I be missing that would help me to do that really well?” And so, I still think it’s quite hard, it’s still not easy, but at least I’ve then said to Helen, “Well, this is something that’s important to me, this is a goal that matters to me”.
Or I could do it around one of my strengths. So, I might say, “I’ve got a goal around, well one of my strengths is coming up with ideas and I love a blank piece of paper. And I want to make sure I’m using that strength in as many ways as possible to help Amazing If to do what we want to do, to make Squiggly Careers better for everybody. What do I not do that I could start doing that you think would be useful for Amazing If?”
Helen Tupper: I find the second framing of that question easier than the first, like, “What do I not do?” I’d be like, “Oh, well, we don’t keep a bank of those ideas and we don’t come back to them. So, they either catch in the moment or we lose them”. I feel like that, I could answer much more easily, and it doesn’t feel like a direct critique of you. So, action three, our final thing for people to —
Sarah Ellis: I feel like these are quite hard, I’m giving people really quite hard actions.
Helen Tupper: We’ve built them up through this series, we’ve built them up already.
Sarah Ellis: Right, okay. I think you need to have some squiggly stretch. And this actually links really well, I think, to your previous episode, where we were talking about ‘challenge your limits, don’t limit your challenges’, because to be yourself more with skill, I think you have to put yourself every so often in a uncomfortable, uncertain, new situation, because being yourself more with skill if you are always in the same situation is easier. And that’s okay, that can be okay for a bit, I’m not saying you need to do this all of the time. But I do think there are moments where you’re like, “I’ve got to put myself somewhere different”. So, my examples were, like, side projects. That’s worked for me to be myself more with skill; volunteering. Doesn’t have to be those, those are both quite time consuming. I think it could be volunteering for something internally, you know, a project that you don’t know how to do. It could be a task that makes you feel uncomfortable, or championing something in your team that you just think, “I don’t know what that looks like”.
But I think if you are only applying this within your comfortable areas or the things you already know, you’re not quite doing the kind of more-ness. I think to do this really well, there has got to be those moments where you do transfer your talents. And I think there are small, medium, and big ways of doing that. But if you can’t remember the last time you did that, now might be a good time to start spotting those opportunities.
Helen Tupper: I think a nice way of doing that as well could be teaching somebody else, like mentoring somebody else. You’re extending that strength in a slightly different situation, and that can feel, like you were saying, not as resource-intensive as starting a side project, but they’re all valid ways to do action.
Sarah Ellis: Yeah. I always say I love mentoring based on what people want to learn rather than the level that they’re at. And actually, if you could set up something in a community or in a company where it’s like, “Oh, let’s all share a strength, and if you want to learn that strength, let’s do some kind of mentoring”, that would be a really good way to ‘be yourself more with skill’.
Helen Tupper: So, this is the end of our —
Sarah Ellis: Good luck everyone.
Helen Tupper: Yeah, honestly, good luck everyone. Well, I think we’ve given people lots of inspiration, lots of ideas. So, we did the four episodes, so there’s four main themes of inspiration for people, each one has three ideas. So, that’s 12 different ideas for action we’ve covered in the last couple of weeks. So, hopefully, lots for people to take into September to invest in their development. And if we have inspired you, do not forget that the Sprint is coming. The Sprint is coming in September. We will put all the links to sign up for the Sprint. If you are signed up for Squiggly Careers in Action, which is our weekly newsletter, or you follow us on LinkedIn, you cannot miss that the Squiggly Sprint is coming. So, please sign up for that, learn with us in September. But thank you for being part of this series and we love feedback, helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com. So, let us know if it’s useful, let us know if you’d like us to do it again in the future.
Sarah Ellis: Maybe a good question, “If we want to be the most useful podcast for you and your career, what gaps have we got?”
Helen Tupper: Oh, be ourselves more with skill! I love it! Yeah, let us know that, everyone.
Sarah Ellis: Living the dream! Thank you so much for spending some of your summertime with us, everyone. We hope you are finding them useful. But that’s everything for this week, and we’ll be back next with a normal Squiggly Careers episode. Bye for now.
Helen Tupper: Bye everyone.