January 6, 2015January 8, 2015 by katcoster

How to take constructive criticism

Expansion by Paige Bradley http://www.paigebradley.com

No matter how amazing you are at your job it is unlikely that you will get through your career without being exposed to some sort of criticism, even if it is just a development need highlighted at appraisal time. I’m not great at taking criticism so this post is as much an advisory for myself as anyone else. There are two main types of criticism, constructive and destructive. Destructive criticism is personal and hurtful, and that is not the type I am writing about here. You don’t have to learn to accept destructive criticism; you have to learn to ignore it. For a harsh but amusing explanation of the difference between destructive and constructive criticism check out this Huff Post blog. With constructive criticism people are generally trying to help you, and whether you think they are right or not, what they have to say is likely to be the vibe they are getting from you so even if you don’t recognise your behaviour in what they are telling you, it is probably worth thinking about the impression you are giving others. Here are some things to think about when you find yourself in that dreaded situation:

Stop your first reaction

Easier said than done right? But at least think about what your usual initial reaction is, because it is almost always irrational. Do you get defensive and start listing all the evidence to prove you are not what the person is telling you? Or do you start blaming other people? Or get angry? Me? I’m a crier. I just can’t help it. I know what people are saying is probably right, and I am usually embarrassed. Recently my line manager took me aside in advance of a meeting a work. I had been asked by a senior director in the company to participate in a working group about something very important to me. My manager warned me that sometimes my passion can make me seem dogmatic and self-righteous, and her advice was to try and communicate in a way that brings people along, rather than turns them off. She was perfectly nice about it, she was trying to help me be more effective, and she was giving me advice rather than just telling me where was going wrong. But, as soon as she said it my eyes started to fill up, and I could feel myself getting hot. This is a sign of embarrassment. A normal, though not professional reaction. My boss could see my reaction and started to feel bad. But I quickly reassured her that she did the right thing; I didn’t want her to feel like she couldn’t give me constructive criticism, I want more of it, it is essential to my development.

Who is the critic?

Just because someone is giving you constructive criticism, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are right, but as I said, you should listen to what everyone has to say because you are making an impression on everyone. But you should think about whether the criticiser’s opinion is important to you, whether they are in a position to know the truth and what their motive is. Most people giving constructive criticism are just trying to help you, even if it may not feel like it. Your boss is hopefully just trying to help you develop, your colleagues are trying to make the team work effectively, and your customers are trying to tell you what you can do to give them better service and make them return. If it is the office busybody or someone who thinks they are more of an expert than they are, then their opinion may have less credibility for you.

What useful information are they giving you?

How good the critic is at delivering criticism will affect how much crap you have to wade through, but really try and think about the underlying meaning. Recently I sent an email out to a big distribution at work. It was trying to get people to do something really boring but necessary, so I used my usual brand of humour to lighten it a little. Well, one person replied to all with an inference that my email was bullying behaviour. I was mortified. Everyone saw it. Many people came to me and said “don’t listen to the guy, we all know he’s an idiot” (see previous point about who the critic is), people emailed my boss saying “anyone who knows Kathryn knows that was a joke, and most people I spoke to told me to ignore it. Except my boss. There she is again, insightful as ever. She said to me along of the lines of “you didn’t do anything wrong, everyone else supports you, but there is a lesson to be learned here and that is that humour doesn’t always come across in email, and just be a bit more mindful about what you write”. Any she was completely right, despite everyone’s support there was something constructive I could learn from the situation, even if it wasn’t the intended message.

You are not supposed to be perfect

This last point is important for maintaining your sanity and self worth. You are not supposed to be perfect. There will always be things that you can improve on, not just you, but everyone around you. Knowing that will make accepting criticism a lot easier. I’m reading Brene Brown’s book The Gifts of Imperfection at the moment and she mentions a line from a Leonard Cohen song, Anthem, which is a useful reminder “There’s a crack in everything. It’s how the light gets in”. Brown says “…our imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together. Imperfectly, but together.”

“There’s a crack in everything. It’s how the light gets in” Expansion by Paige Bradley http://www.paigebradley.com

December 7, 2014 by katcoster

Visual Note Taking and my dissertation Masterpiece

The Sketchnote Handbook by Mike Rohde
sketchnotehandbook.com

I discovered visual note taking late last year thanks to The Sketchnote Handbook by Mike Rohde. I was really taken with the idea of taking notes in images instead of prose. I started giving it a go at work. I’m a confident rather than good artist (as you might see throughout this blog!), but I really enjoy it, and have done since I was younger and used to draw ballerinas from my favourite childhood books. As a psychologist I wanted to know if there was any evidence to the claims the technique makes about helping memory and concentration. But there was no research, the book extrapolates from existing research on dual coding in memory (basically taking things in through more than one modality increases your ability to remember).

Example of a Sketchnote from The Sketchnote Handbook

So when the time came to decide what to do for my research project for my Masters I cast around for ideas. Should I investigate the impact of back to back meetings on management performance? Well I could, and that would be pretty worthy, but a bit dull. I was going to have to spend nearly a year studying this. So with some some slight reservations from my supervisor I decided to investigate Sketchnoting in the workplace. Except in my dissertation I don’t call it that, I call it ‘visual note taking’.

I taught a group of 10 people at work how to Sketchnote, and then asked them to use it in workplace meetings instead of normal prose note taking. For those of you that way inclined you can read the full report Visual Note Taking MSc. I warn you it’s long. However, I worked really hard on it and am really quite pleased with it. I managed to complete a scientific research project and write up 13k words while working and caring for 2 young kids. I don’t often give myself props but I’m fist bumping myself right now. If you don’t want to read all of it, at least check out the literature review as there is some interesting research in there, especially the papers of Neil Cohn, who writes about how drawing is a skill that must be learned, and isn’t an innate talent, the preserve of the artistic few. However, lack of proper teaching and nurturing of drawing in formative years means that adults grow knowing how to make only rudimentary marks, and lacking in confidence. In fact that is what I found in my research. Sketchnoting is very popular in online communities, especially those who do art and design for a living. For those less accustomed to regular sketching, the visual note taking technique proved challenging, and this affected how useful it was. All the participants really liked the idea of the technique, and could see how it might benefit them, but often their confidence held them back. And the amount of cognitive effort for them to figure what to draw in meetings, or how to draw something, often distracted them from the rest of the meeting. It worked best in passive listening contexts such as large scale briefings or training activities and less so in interactive meetings.

However, several participants expressed a desire to continue to practise the technique, so I am going to set up lunchtime sessions at work.

Visual note taking doesn’t have to be limited to meetings however, it is great for brainstorming activities, both on your own or in teams. Digital drawing is very popular right now, but I am a paper and pen kind of gal. However it would be great not to have to wield a rubber as my ideas change. To the rescue comes the Betabook! The Betabook is a protype product which is basically a white board on the go. Instead of wasting reams of paper, or rubbing pencil lines out (or leaving in changes if you are using pen) with the Betabook you can rub out as you please. The idea is that you can take a photo of the board for the essential notes that you want to keep (and my research found that very few notes are actually essential to keep). The product in on Kickstarter at the moment, and I have just backed it so I can get my very own 1st edition Betabook next spring. I can’t wait!

Jay Cousins, inventor of the Betabook

November 28, 2014 by katcoster

Packtypes

Which Packtype are you?

Life doesn’t have to be going terribly wrong for you to feel low in confidence and self worth. Sometimes the continual slog of getting the kids fed and out the door, getting to work on time and engage yourself, returning home through the traffic to tea time and the soul-destroying hell that is bedtime, it can make you feel like the only achievement is everyone making it though alive at the end of the day. With so much to do and think about you feel like you are doing a mediocre job at home and a mediocre job at work, and you struggle to identify anything that you are actually doing well.

If you are a ‘knowledge worker‘, spending the majority of your day thinking, attending endless meetings, and battling your way through bureaucracy you might often wonder what you are actually achieving, and would anyone notice if you didn’t turn up for work.

Maybe you have a job where you make more immediate impact, like teacher, nurse, retail worker, yet face ungrateful customers, helping people who don’t want to be helped, or the squeeze of budgets meaning you can’t do everything you know needs to be done. Without positive feedback it’s easy to forget what you are good at and why you went into the job in the first place.

I talked recently about the Johari Window as a tool for helping you understand yourself a bit more. The tool I am going to tell you about now plays a similar function, but is more descriptive and fun to do.

Packtypes were invented by Will Murray, based on his experience working with businesses and knowledge of existing personality tests. The essence of Packtypes is a pack of 64 cards each with a adjective. You pick the 12 that you feel are most like you, and each card is part of a Packtype. There are XX Packtypes, and essentially they are broad personality descriptors. You may find your profile contains several different Packtypes, or just a few types. Maybe you are an analytical Pointer Dog, or perhaps you are the people focused Coach Dog. If you are an outcome focused Guard Dog and struggling with a an imaginative but unfocused colleague, perhaps they are a Hound.

Understanding yourself is the first step to understanding other people. Being able to identify aspects of personality in yourself and others helps in the attribution of behaviour. Rather than assuming someone is trying to annoy you, or feeling like your colleagues are lazy or slapdash, understanding their motivation and strengths can help you to get along better. At the same time, Packtypes help you to identify your own strengths and appreciate what you bring along to the party. As with the Johari Window, Packtypes are not something you do in isolation. By getting other people to Packtype you, you can decrease your Blind Spot and gain a better understanding of the You you present to others.

This is just a taster, and I will be blogging more about Packtypes and how I am using them in my work and home life.

November 24, 2014 by katcoster

Escaping from Escaping

https://i0.wp.com/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Beach_pano.jpg

Why aren’t you working from here instead of in your dull air conditioned office?

The ‘Escape Work Fantasy’ genre is booming business in the world of books, and other media. I read the books with a mixture of envy (why can’t I be running a business from a beach?), scorn at their lack of realism (er, because I have two children, rent to pay and a pension), and finally self-loathing (if I were only more adventurous, dynamic, clever, I’d be an entrepreneur too).

Here are the things I have come to realise:

1. Almost none of the people who give up their jobs to become wildly successful freelancers have young children

2. None of them set up their own business fresh out of stacking shelves at Asda, working as a teaching assistant or admin for the local authority. Almost all of them come from corporate city life with a cushion of money and consultancy skills. This puts paid to the ‘anyone can do it’ fantasy

3. All of the people who give up their day jobs to work 4 hour weeks, or run their business from the Bahamas rely on those of us still working for The Man to live their lives. The person serving them coffee, the flight attendant, the assistant they pay to do the grunt work.

4. Success comes in many forms

Don’t get me wrong, these people have done well for themselves, they are go-getters, most of them have written books to share their knowledge. However, the ‘anyone can do it’ message is unrealistic and yet another stick for us to beat ourselves with, another way in which we have failed. I remember on my first maternity leave feeling genuinely disappointed that I hadn’t started my own kitchen table business, or written a sparkling debut novel about the trials of motherhood.

Even now in my dark moments there whispers a voice that quietly berates me for not having given it all up to pursue an (unspecified) dream, and scorns my lack of risk taking in searching for new jobs when I put that ‘within 50 mile radius’ option in the criteria.

We don’t all have a passion, we don’t all have the entrepreneurial spirit, or the resilience (emotional or financial) to run our own business. For some of us a job is just that, a job. We aren’t saving the world, we aren’t reaching professional heights, we are just getting through the day and looking forward to our next week off. Success and happiness come in all forms, from all areas of our life.

I’m not suggesting that anyone tolerates poor working conditions, or spends the next 10 years in a job that saps their soul. But for those people just muddling along, trying to find their way, sometimes it’s the small changes that count, and that’s where this blog aims to help.

November 22, 2014November 22, 2014 by katcoster

The window to your soul

I’m going to tell you about a tool that is regularly used in personal and team development. It’s called the Johari Window, and it was developed by a couple of chaps called Joe Luft and Harrington Ingham. Johari is a portmanteau of their two names – Joe and Harry. They’re like the Brangelina of the personal development world.

The tool is essentially 4 boxes, that look like a window, that are populated (either by yourself or in conjunction with others) with information about you, your skills, knowledge, experience, abilities etc. It looks a bit like this:

The Open Area or Arena contains the things that you and other people are aware of. This is the public you.

The Blind Spot contains things that are known to others but not to you.

The Hidden Area or Facade contains the bit of you that you keen from everyone else. This is the private you.

Finally, there is the Unknown. This contains things that you and others don’t yet know about you. This is the potential you.

The tool is used in many ways, but a good starting point is to use the list of adjectives that Joe and Harry originally came up with. You can fill in the bits that you know yourself but you can’t fill in the Blind Spot or the Unknown. This is where you need to get feedback from others, and why this exercise is great to do in pairs or in teams. A good start is to do it with you partner or your best friend. If you don’t want do do the exercise with anyone else, then try and pick up the feedback yourself. Listen to the complements people give you. Accept when someone says “You are always so organised” and file it away under you blind spot. If other people think you are organised (or any other trait) and you don’t, maybe it’s because you set impossibly high standards for yourself in that area.

So, what’s the point of this? We’ll firstly it is important to know yourself, and by getting feedback you can get a wider view of how you come across. This is a benefit in itself, as the positive things will hopefully give you confidence and remind you that you do have strengths. The things you don’t quite like as much you should see as areas for development. It’s ok not to be great at everything, no-one is. But we should work on the things that we aren’t very good at, because life, work, and society demand various things from us and we need to be able to deal with them, even if the qualities required aren’t our strengths.

The other facet of the Johari Window is to see how open you are. If you have more things in the facade or blind spot areas than in the open area then you may be struggling without realising why. By sharing more of ourselves with others we will find ourselves making more connections and feeling more understood by others. The same is true for knowing ourselves; by understanding how other people see us, or by realising the things we didn’t acknowledge about ourselves we can navigate our way in the world and in the workplace better, playing to our strengths and recognising our development needs.

Everyone has quadrants of different sizes, but all of us should be striving to increase the public us, whether that is by increasing our self knowledge and decreasing the Blind Spot, or sharing more of our true self with others and shrinking the facade.

As for the Unknown, well those aspects of you will emerge during challenging times, or maybe they are bugging you right now, bubbling away in your subconscious. When they emerge they will no longer be unknown, and you just might surprise yourself.

November 22, 2014November 22, 2014 by katcoster

Finding yourself

I said I would talk a little bit about myself, and this is one of those posts where I do, but that is because I’m new round here, and I feel like I should tell you a little bit more about myself. I’m a mum of two. Don’t worry, this isn’t a mummy blog (nothing against them, I just presume you’re not here to listen to me witter on about my kids, though you will have to bear with me for a few minutes). I list motherhood first as, there’s no denying it, currently it is the biggest part of my life; even when I am at work, I am a mother to two young girls, and they take up a lot of brain space. Important things that I learned at university, like how to calculate standard deviation, have been permanently overwritten with the theme tune to Fireman Sam. And every coat I own appears to have hair clips and socks in the pocket. Oh go on, since you asked, here’s a picture.

I have worked for the same company for nearly 10 years, doing various analytical and now staff development roles. I like cake, crochet, and listening to The Archers and tweeting about it on a Sunday morning. Rock on baby.

So, what does that all tell you about me? That I sound like a middle aged woman? But it doesn’t really tell you about the real me. You know when you get those questions “Describe yourself in 3 words?” yeah, I really struggle too.

Before I started this blog I sat down and tried to think about what the essentials of me are. My last blog was a testament to my inability to focus on one thing, and that was great and eclectic, but in doing so people who read it for the craft might be put off by the ranty feminism. And those who appreciated my calls for equality might have thought I was betraying the sisterhood with my keenness for crochet and baking. I want this blog to be focused. I want it to be part of my pathway to a future career. I needed to know what I really and truly care about. So I turned to my trusty felt tips and came up with this:

I’m a big fan of visual thinking, and that will come up more in this blog. This doodle or map (or whatever you want to call it) of me helped me to think about what I am really about. Interests is the easiest one. Interests are what you dream about doing when you’re putting the kids to bed. They are the activities you enjoy doing, whether it’s stamp collecting, watching films, or abseiling, we all have interests, whether we indulge them or not.

Values are a bit harder to define. If an interest is what you do, a value is why you do it. There are some great lists and techniques for uncovering your own values which I will blog about in the future.

Finally there are our strengths. I bet for most of you this would be the hardest section to populate, not because it is difficult to define strengths, but because it is hard to identify our own. If interests are things we like to do, and values are why we do things, strengths are how we do them. Again I have more things up my sleeve that can help you identify your strengths.

For now why don’t you give this technique a go? Get yourself some paper and pens, preferably coloured ones (always use coloured pens!) and draw a map of who you are. You don’t have to do it like I did, you don’t have to draw pictures or bubbles, but I will give this one piece of advice, avoiding writing it as a linear list; don’t constrain yourself by the number of lines on a page. Look for patterns and crossovers between the sections, and find out what makes the essence of you.

November 13, 2014November 22, 2014 by katcoster

Hello!

Hello

I’m Kat, this is me ^^^ Nice picture, hey? It’s, like, nicest picture I have of me, I normally look a lot worse than this. Usually I’m in pyjamas. All credit to my husband for the photos (and most likely all the photos that will be on this blog – you can see his website here by the way).

So, plugging my husband’s website already. Probably not great blogging etiquette… Despite outwards appearances, I’m not a newbie as this blogging lark. I’ve had a blog for a few years, talking about a mixture of craft, cake, feminism, personal development etc. A real mixed bag. But this one I want to be more focused, less about me and more about you. I mean, it will still be a little bit about me, I like to talk about myself a lot. I want this blog to be about how you can have a better time at work, how you can thrive, how you can flourish and be the best person you can be; how you can be more confident and satisfied. I’m avoiding using the term ‘happy’ here, because unlike the many books that will tell you otherwise, I don’t thing happiness is suitable or realistic goal in life. If you’re lucky it’s a by product. But that’s a whole other post…

So, who am I to be telling you how to make your work life better? Well, I am currently coming to the end of a Masters Degree in Occupational Psychology. No, it’s not the same as Occupational Therapy. It’s about applying psychological research and principles to any area of the workplace. Add to that two earlier degrees in Psychology, and an A Level, I have been formally studying psychology for 9 years now. I hope that gives me some kind of kudos in your eyes, because quite frankly I feel like most of what I’m saying is basically just common sense and really obvious, and what the hell do I know?! Work too, so that obviously helps me understand the workplace (see what I mean about stating the obvious?).

So, what I hope to do is provide you with advice, inspiration and food for thought on work, you and the interaction of the two, and hopefully entertain you a little bit along the way. Happy reading. Please comment, discuss, tell me what things you want to read about, tell your friends and, you know, stick around.

Nine to Thrive

Helping you flourish at work