Winning at Work
I recently went one on one with Carson Tate. Carson is the founder and managing partner of Working Simply, where she helps women and men of all ages find more joy, meaning and significance from their work. Carson serves as a consultant, coach, and trainer to executives at Fortune 500 companies including AbbVie, Deloitte, FedEx and Wells Fargo, and is the author of the new book Own It. Love It. Make It Work.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Carson: On December 26, 2011 I crashed head-first into the wall of my so-called life. I found myself sitting on the living-room floor, staring up at the twinkling lights on the Christmas tree, oblivious to the sounds of my family from another room in our house, aching with an inner weariness unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.
This was more than just physical fatigue or sleep deprivation. This was soul fatigue. The image of a successful woman that I’d always carried with me was that of a woman who was smart, driven, professionally accomplished, a Mary Poppins mom, a loving wife, a leader in the community—and someone who made it all look effortless with her calm, impeccable style. That superwoman was the gold standard I’d spent years trying to live up to.
But now on December 26, I’d woken up and realized I wasn’t living. Not really.
It wasn’t just that I was tired—tired of trying to do it all, tired of trying to live up to some bogus notion of success. It was my memory of my daughter’s first birthday, ten days before. As I sat there on the floor, I remembered watching her blow out the candle on her first birthday cake, which was the size of a small castle—one of those tell-tale symptoms of working-mom guilt. And suddenly I’d realized I couldn’t remember a single significant detail or moment from her first year. My daughter was the single most important thing in my world—and I was living a life that left me fundamentally out of touch with her.
That was the moment when everything changed for me. The moment when I knew it was time for me to re-evaluate my life. Time to get real about who I was and who I wanted to be.
I’d spent the first year of my daughter’s life frantically racing around the country to build my business. And what was the name of that business? Thinking about it, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. My company is called Working Simply. I teach people how to work more simply, more purposefully.
Ironic? Yes, painfully so. But appropriate, too. A wise woman once told me. “We teach what we need to learn the most.” Suddenly I grasped the full truth of that saying. Suddenly I realized how much I had to learn along with my clients.
I am very grateful that I woke up the day after Christmas, looked at my beautiful daughter and amazing husband, and decided that my busyness was no longer serving me. The drive to achieve my idealized notion of success no longer served me. It came with a cost so high that I no longer chose to pay it.
And I realized that “working simply”—the promise I make to my clients—is about more than simply being efficient, well-organized, and productive. It’s about moving beyond being busy to reclaim purpose and meaning in life.
Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
Carson: In my experience there are three defining qualities of an effective leader. They have an inspiring, compelling vision for their team. They are capable, persuasive communicators. An effective leader adeptly adjusts their communication style – content, tone and medium – to the needs and preferences of the person or team with whom they are communicating. And they are radically self-aware. A successful leader has keen insight and understanding of their behaviors and emotional triggers. They accept who they are and embrace both their strengths and limitations.
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Carson: In this new world of work, leaders and aspiring leaders can take their skills to the next level by embracing what I call B.R.A.V.E. leadership abilities.
B – Be specific. Ambiguity and abstractions undermine performance and results. Use precise language to describe success. To assess your clarity, ask yourself if your success description passes the “champagne test”. Is it clear enough that your team members know when to celebrate?
R – Focus on results. Busywork and Zoom face time burn out your team and distract your team from the work that drives revenue and achieves your strategic goals. Ensure you focus on both the quantitative and qualitative results.
A – Cultivate accountability. For each initiative, determine who has the “A”, or is accountable for the results. Ask yourself:
Is there a clear division of tasks?
Does each team member understand their specific task?
Does each team member know the process for reporting issues and results?
Are the deadlines clear?
V – Value the individual. Each member of your team thinks, communicates and processes information differently. Invest the time to understand your team members’ work style and communication preferences so you can lead a high-performance team.
E – Empower success. Set your team member up for success. Define each of the following for each project you delegate.
Limits of authority
Decision parameters
Resources
Communication guidelines and frequency
Deadline
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives and civic leaders?
Carson: In my consulting and coaching practice what differentiates the exceptional leaders from the average leaders is how they use their time. We all have the same 168 hours in a week. However, exceptional leaders recognize that time is a non-renewable commodity to be invested for their highest professional and personal return. As a result, three principles guide their decision making:
Each time you say “yes” to something you are saying “no” to something else.
Meetings without an agenda and a clearly articulated reason why their attendance is required are automatically declined.
Buffer time between meetings is essential to facilitate reflection, insight and execution.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading and managing teams?
Carson: Leverage diversity to achieve long-term success. In addition to gender, ethnicity, religion, age, and/or sexual orientation, there is another type of diversity that is important to consider: differences in work style – or the way in which we think about, organize, and complete tasks.
In any office you will find four work styles:
Logical, analytical, and data-oriented
Organized, plan focused, and detail-oriented
Supportive, expressive and emotional-oriented
Strategic, integrative, and idea-oriented
When members of a team, or leaders of an organization, all have the same work style, you’ll quickly run into trouble. For example, if everyone in your group has a big-picture, strategic, intuitive approach to work and chafes against the structure of project plans, you might frequently be over budget and behind schedule. Or, if everyone has a linear, analytical, and planned approach to work and dislikes disruption, innovative new product development would be impossible.
Promote and leverage work style diversity.
Adam: What are your best tips on the topic of productivity?
Carson: My three best productivity tips are the following:
Build and use a 15-minute list.
This is a list of tasks you can do in 15-minutes or less. Use this list to capitalize on those micro-segments of your day, the 5 minutes you wait for the Zoom call to start or the 10 minutes you wait in the drive-through line at Starbucks, to get work done.
Protect your 90
Block and fiercely protect (no email, no social media and no interruptions) 90 minutes a day to work on your highest value tasks and projects. And, ask each team member to protect their 90. 90 minutes a day adds up. At the end of the week, you and your team members will have dedicated 7.5 hours to high-value work.
Work in vacation mode
Have you ever noticed that before a vacation work is completed at warp speed? Work is completed quickly because there is a hard deadline – vacation. Set mini-vacation deadlines, like leaving the office at 5:30 instead of 6:30, and watch your productivity soar.
Adam: What should readers know about your new book? What are the key takeaways?
Carson: In my new book, Own It. Love It. Make It Work., I reveal why you don’t have to rely on your company, your coworkers, your boss, or anything other than yourself for your professional fulfillment and engagement. You can take ownership for your career, your life, and your happiness right now.
You can:
Be recognized and rewarded for your knowledge, skills, and contributions.
Align your job to your strengths so you can focus on what you love to do and make your work fit your life.
Shape your work in a way that meets both your professional and personal needs and goals.
Build meaningful, impactful relationships so you can advance your career.
Develop new skills and knowledge so you can increase your value and impact.
Design your job to find meaning in your work.
And any job you have right now can be upleveled, reshaped, redefined so that your true gifts and talents can shine.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Carson: Listen to and follow your intuition.