Change

"Life offers you a thousand chances...all you have to do is take one."

Change is inevitable, change is constant...how open are we to change?

I work on a virtual team, which means most of us work from home 100% and call in for meetings, view shared documents via computer, and so forth. A challenge of virtual teams is building a connectedness in what can be an isolated work environment. On one of my weekly team calls I keep an icebreaker as an ongoing agenda item; how can we know each other better, just as we would if we stopped into an office breakroom, gathered around the water cooler, passed in the hall, or went to lunch with a colleague? I ask the team to create the questions and we rotate weekly who is on point to facilitate. Yesterday's question was "what is one of your favorite characters from a book, movie, play, or television, and how are you like that character?"

This was easy for me to answer: Frannie from "Under the Tuscan Sun." I shared with my team that there are two themes in Frannie's life: strength in the face of adversity and recognizing that what we seek in our lives may not come to us in the forms we intended, but they are still to be treasured. I think of God that way too- a prayer request may go unanswered, or really, the answer is "no." What is difficult to remember in hearing the "no" is the next part of God's plan, "I have greater things in store for you my child. Greater things are still to come, greater things are yet to be done."

Back to Frannie, she is faced with a challenge and could justifiably pull the covers over her head and hide away, but no, she goes out and embraces the passion that life is about. She begins with a trip to Italy to restore herself and on a whim in Tuscany, she purchases a crumbling villa that needs work and goes about tackling the project. Initially she dreamed of a house with children, laughter, love, and cherished relationships. In the end, there is a house alive with laughter, there is the joy of a child, there is love, there are cherished relationships- even if they didn't take the form she initially imagined as she set out on her path, and they are better than she could have imagined, partially through her openess and her willingness to take a risk. In those ways, I identify with Frannie...and how appropriate.

Change is constant in my organization at work and how, oh, I don't know, serendipitous, that I had that exercise to complete yesterday. Shortly after I prepared for the ice breaker my phone rang...my partner/mentor/coach on a major project I am supporting is being moved to another "opportunity" (I love how work situations, no matter how much they SUCK sometimes, are given the good ole PR spin- "opportunity" "increase acumen" "fresh perspective") and a former manager of mine is moving onto the project. I'll adjust. I don't disagree with the spin placed on these changes- there is some value to what the company line is. The failure I see is that there is no recognition of the human component to these working relationships. We are not robots, we do not focus only on leadership needs and "opportunities." There are human team elements that are altered, sometimes drastically, for what may be thought of as the greater good of the organization. Have some compassion. Realize that it's acceptable for team members to actually have feelings and emotions connected to change. They will get past it the shock of it, as will I, but when we start to view our employees as robots, we lack the emotional intelligence that should be present in any well-rounded leader. Sometimes people are hurt and they just need someone to acknowledge that change can be difficult and painful at times. For an organization so focused on change management, we have a long way to go with how we treat our "targets" of change. Oops, silly me, let me spin it..."We have opportunity in how we communicate with our targets of the desired end-state." Pass the Kool-Aid.