Pandemic Career Musings

There’s nothing like a lockdown to make you question where you’re spending your time. And I turned 40 this year, so the ticking of time has gotten a bit louder.

Rather than philosophize, I’ll try out some new kinds of work, and possibly start a new business this year. The current one is stable, so I think it’s time to grow in totally new areas.

Here are the things I’m considering:

• Productize the “mastermind” and bring it to corporate Philippines
• Be a corporate coach focused on people early in their careers
• Offer the Mesa Method to Philippine corporations

Below I explain what these are, what problems they solve and what value they could create.

If one or more of these sound like a solution to a problem in your company, I’d love to hear from you. Since I’m already in the second half of life, I’ve resolved to only work on things that have clear demand and that I am uniquely capable of delivering.

The Mastermind

I have tested all sorts of techniques to improve my work in the past years. Improvement here does not only mean productivity, but also better decision-making and job satisfaction (which turns out to have a huge impact on productivity).

If you ask me what technique worked best, my answer is clear: the monthly meeting I have with three or four other entrepreneurs. At this point, it has been running for more than three years. We meet in a coffee shop and follow a simple agenda, which takes us 2.5 to 3 hours:

• Wins since the last time
• Top challenges
• Goals
• Cool things you discovered

This is called “mastermind” in business circles. It is one of the best things that happened to me in the past years, so naturally I’ve always wondered why it works so well. I think Sebastian Junger’s book, Tribe, touches on the answer. The book explores joy amidst suffering among soldiers and primitive societies, and the alienation and depression amidst the comforts and security of modern city life.

My takeaway from the book is that for most of our history, humans operated in small groups. There is thus a deep need for the experience of achieving goals with and for a small troop of people we care about. This may be why sports teams and platoons of soldiers end up forming lifelong friendships.

I experienced this in corporate Makati. It was great to belong to a small team that meshed well and produced results that made an impact to customers worldwide. I did not mind the long hours, the late night conference calls and the occasional crisis, because all of us were in it together, and we were winning.

I also experienced the other side. One of the advantages of hitting 40 is realizing that you don’t have to wear your armor all the time: I have to confess that there were times when the corporate world was just hollow, lonely, meaningless.

I discovered that this was not because of the corporate environment. I also experienced this emptiness in the academe and in entrepreneurship. Having a tribe outside of my work team and outside of my household was part of the solution. It also surprised me with other benefits:

• Many of us tend to focus on problems. Celebrating wins is a great way to remember the many things we should be grateful for. Gratitude is linked to physical and emotional well-being, as this Harvard article presents. And according to a study by the University of Oxford, happiness increases our productivity.
• Explaining top challenges to people who are outside of our work team, but at the same time familiar with our domain, forces us to zoom out and get a clearer view of our current landscape. We question each others assumptions and tease out our hidden biases. We share experiences relevant to the challenge, which opens up a wider array of creative solutions.
• Sharing our goals to people we respect increases our motivation to achieve them. Studies have confirmed that likelihood of hitting goals increases with accountability.
• Sharing cool things is just a great way to conclude. Personally, it helped me discover so many great films, books, apps and events.

Can this work in the corporate environment? What is preventing companies from doing this? What is the best way of introducing this system and facilitating its execution? I have so many questions. The best way to answer them is to help corporations do it, learn and iterate until we have a solid solution. Tell me if you want to be an early adopter.

Corporate coaching

I’m also grateful to all the friends, family and mentors throughout the years that sat down with me for some serious conversation. I appreciate the accompaniment, the advice, and the way they helped reframe the stories I got stuck in.

It turns out the latter is called “cognitive reframing,” and it is one of the tools that corporate coaches use to bring the best out of the people they coach.

Companies could view their employees like cogs in a machine that convert salary into work output. At the other end of the spectrum, companies could treat each member of their team like athletes whose performance brings about victory. Corporate coaching makes sense with this perspective.

I was happy to find out that there are enough companies in the latter category to support an industry of professional coaches here in the Philippines and all over the world. The world’s biggest coach training and certification body is the International Coach Federation (ICF). There are two companies in the Philippines that deliver ICF-accredited coach training, Benchmark and Haraya.

Since I got so much from my one-on-ones, I naturally tried to pay it forward in my conversations with my teammates, students, and former students. Accompanying people in their personal and professional growth through these sessions has now become my top priority. It feels so natural to me, so I’m wondering now if I should get formally trained in coaching and extend my scope beyond my teammates and communities.

I’m serious about this. I talked to six ICF coaches in the past few weeks: the founder of Haraya, two coaches trained by them, and two coaches trained by Benchmark. Plus, I had a coaching session with a friend of mine from Hong Kong who had been doing this for years.

It appears that the economics are better the more senior the clients are. This makes sense, given the higher development and training budget for more senior employees in most companies. However, I feel the biggest impact come from coaching people at the start of their careers, as I have experienced firsthand. Another problem is that one has limited hours per day for coaching conversations. How can you remove time as a limiting factor?

My guess is that combining the mastermind with coaching could be a solution. One of the coaches I interviewed mentioned that the goal of coaching is not to simply give people fish, but to teach them how to fish — to eventually learn to manage their own psychology. To extend the metaphor, helping people build a mastermind could equip them with a team of fisherfolk that could haul in a catch greater than the sum of their individual efforts.

Again, I’ll have to actually do this to see how this works, and to adapt as we discover the many inevitable kinks that arise when an idea hits real life. Tell me if you would be interested in a pilot project.

The Mesa Method

After the corporate Makati and the academe, I spent some years in the world of tech and internet startups. The startup world is not only a laboratory for new businesses; it is also where experiments in new ways of working are conducted.

The ones I experienced firsthand were Startup Weekend, Lean Startup Machine and Design Thinking workshops. The writer Tiago Forte calls these “accelerated working experiences” or AWEs. The AWE first adopted by the corporate world was probably Agile software development. More lessons from the startup trenches could be brought to corporations. In fact, the groups behind the three examples above have started offering solutions to large, established companies after they stress-tested their workshops among startups.

The AWE that I’m studying right now is called the Mesa Method, developed by a Brazilian firm called Mesa. Like the other AWEs, it involves several days of deep intense work, using prototyping and real-life experiments to produce out-of-the-box solutions. Unlike the AWEs I’ve attended, the participants are a mix of people from inside the company and outside.

I have been doing Project Management workshops for companies and communities in the past years. This is another method I can add to my arsenal. But what really piqued my interest was this quote from Kobe.

Learning it would only be worthwhile if this could be implemented in multiple companies (this is overkill to just use internally), so I’d love to hear from you if this looks like something that could solve a problem in your organization.

Which should I prioritize?

Focus is the key to execution, so I need to choose which one of these I should work on in the next 6 to 12 months, and if needed, in the next years.

I’ll make a choice based on the feedback I get in the next few weeks.