Category Archives: Uncategorized

Money gets to people’s head

There’s a good interview with Abigail Disney who, as you may of guessed by the last name, has a lot of money.

You can read it here: https://www.thecut.com/2019/03/abigail-disney-has-more-money-than-shell-ever-spend.html

I think there’s this idea that we should all aim to be rich. That money is a valid metric for success. I think it’s a bit like wanting to be CTO or CEO (something I’ve struggled with potentially wanting). It’s outsourcing your feelings of self worth to something you can point to. It’s not real, but you can tell yourself it’s important.

Brand Disloyalty

I still remember vividly that day at Scotiabank. I had just started university and wanted a line of credit for my small business. I had my business plan, which allegedly was important and met the manager. I was looking for $5000 and my father was willing to co-sign. He was not interested and for all intents and purposes told me to stop wasting his time.

The funny thing is now a decade later. Scotiabank really wants me as a client. Mortgage, credit cards, even lines of credit. I suspect that I make banks money now. I have a good job, have a house and some investments. But I’ll never bank with Scotia.

If you have a really big business, I think you need to be careful in not pissing off future clients. Maybe It wasn’t worth that manager’s time then, but if you didn’t care about me then, I won’t care about you now.

Mental Health in the workplace

I got one of the best compliments Yesterday. Someone I worked with previously is interested in starting discussions around mental health at their new workplace because of how much it helped them when we worked together.

I mentioned a bit of what happened (most of this was not done by me, I was just one small part of the events that happened) and I thought it might be helpful to share here.

It first started with someone saying that during one of the company meetups they would have a 1h thing where people can just come and chat about mental health in a random room. There were a few people who showed up. We decided to create a private slack channel where people could just talk openly about mental health. Word of mouth started spreading, especially among people who were like “Well, it’s not really _that_ bad, I don’t have a diagnosis, etc etc”. We welcomed them all.

I (and I’m sure many others) had follow up conversations with folks who were mentioning going thru rough patches. Since I was quite open about it, often mentioning in the #watercooler channel if I was feeling depressed or anxious and taking a break, lots of folks send me DMs just asking me about it and just wanting to chat. Sometimes it was about them, sometimes about a loved one.

I’d ask them all if they wanted to join and convinced them that even if it “wasn’t that bad” they should join. At another team meetup I did a lunch thing where folks could come and eat lunch one day with others and chat about mental health (or just listen).

It was just to see others who were also working thru things. You didn’t need to talk or anything, you could just listen. I did a bit of an intro of why I think it’s important and some of the things I struggle with, a few other people spoke, some didn’t (but they often would send me a private message saying thanks later).

When I left, it’s one of the things people told me they appreciated the most. To have someone who they saw as senior and a leader talk about this. It made them feel like it was “okay” to feel that way sometimes.

I’ve started doing talks in workplaces about this as well, if you (dear reader) think it could be useful for your workplace, I’m always happy to give a talk. I don’t charge anything but I ask that the organization make a donation to Kids Help Phone. For some organizations, donations aren’t possible so I send an invoice and make the donation myself.

I’ve done this talk in workplaces and at conferences such as Confoo and the feedback has always been very positive:

“6/5 Sensitive topic explained simply and with humour”

“Great personal touch”

“Good energy, interesting perspective and personal anecdotes”

“Very good talk. Honest, straighforward, helpful.”

“Important topic presented in a funny manner”

Confoo 2016 feedback

“Stéphane’s candid testimonial on mental health issues was truly engaging. With his great sense of humour and genuine presence, Stéphane puts his audience at ease, making participants receptive and open to tackle what can sometimes be a heavy topic. Having “just a regular guy” come in to share his knowledge of mental health, sprinkled with personal anecdotes, made us feel like we were having a conversion with an old friend. We learned lots of great tips and tricks to prevent or deal and were inspired to talk about mental health more openly.

Great talk, Stéphane, thank you!”

Gabrielle Michaud,
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada / Government of Canada

If you or anyone you know wants to chat about mental health, I’m always happy to listen.
Spoiler alert, I’m not a professional and will probably recommend you talk to someone a bit more qualified.

Fear in leadership part 2

I often used to assign malice to folks in leadership positions I strongly disagreed with. I then slowly moved to assigning ignorance. It made being compassionate to these folks much easier. Now, I often assign fear.  http://stephboisvert.ca/2018/12/23/fear-in-leadership/

Now here’s the tricky part. It’s way easier to notice and see this in others. Looking inwards at what you are afraid of…. Now that’s much trickier.

Rise of populism

There are lots of good think pieces on the rise of populism. This one has an interesting take on why the lying that Trump does is not a problem.

The rise of highly polished, professional politicians such as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton exacerbated the sense that politics is all about strategic concealment of the truth, something that the Iraq war seemed to confirm as much as anything. Trump or Farage may have a reputation for fabricating things, but they don’t (rightly or wrongly) have a reputation for concealing things, which grants them a form of credibility not available to technocrats or professional politicians.

It’s and interesting read: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/nov/29/why-we-stopped-trusting-elites-the-new-populism

Apoligizing

I apologized yesterday to someone I hadn’t talked to in many years.

I had thought about it a few times. But I always felt it would be weird. Or maybe that’s what I told myself to not have to deal with admitting I could have acted better.

I was pretty much “in the box” at the time. It felt good to apologize. They did as well. In a way, I think we were (and probably still are) very similar. It’s interesting how when we see ourselves reflected back to us we can see our flaws. Well, we probably don’t acknowledge that those are also our flaws, but we see them. We notice them and they frustrate us.

I think it’s noticing the similarities and the shared flaws that bring about compassion. It’s often easier with someone who “looks” like us. And I use look not just in the physical visual sense of the word, but “looks” in the same way Facebook does lookalike audiences.

I have a few other folks I’ve always wanted to apologize to. There are a few I’ve done, but not many, not enough anyway. Perhaps I should start on that…

The End is not a Failure

Often people talk about things that have ended like they were a failure. Mostly with relationships but often with other parts of life. Just because something ends, that doesn’t mean it failed. It could of been a great 5 year relationship that has lived it’s course or leaving a job  where you had a great time.

Things often come to an end, it doesn’t make it a failure.

Burnout

I think there’s a big misconception about burnout in today’s society. We assume that burn out is just when you do too much work. If you work 70h a week or something like that you’ll burnout.

I don’t think that’s the case. We already know what motivates people. Yet seem unaware that burnout is the opposite of this. Managers often are trying to “shield” employees and making decisions that are “for their own good” but creates the opposite result. Really what drives people to burnout is:

  • The lack of self-direction (Autonomy)
  • The inability to impact necessary change when it’s needed (Purpose)
  • The inability to grow in the direction we want (Mastery).

In the past, I’ve let folks work on things I thought were a waste a time. Not because I didn’t think they could use their time better but rather because not letting them would reduce their output to lower than it currently was. Even if they now spend 20% of their time on something I disagree with, the other 80% will be much more productive because of it and, in the end, that will help the team.

Now you may say, well I really don’t want that person to work on that. Or I really don’t think that’s a good idea. That means you don’t share the same vision as your employee and the only real solution is to let them go.

In the knowledge economy there are 2 things you should do with employees:

  • Empower them
  • Fire them

You should only ever do those 2 things. All the other ways out of the problem just postpone or create a worse problem in the future. As much as letting someone go is tough, most organizations I’ve been a part of should have done it more often rather than less often.

Swing Sets and Orange Juice

I remember when I worked in the Leader’s office and the Bev Oda orange juice story came out. Many people in the office were genuinely aghast of this. They really felt that this was emblematic of why we needed to kick the conservatives out of power. It was mostly the older more long time partisan folk. I was never able to tell if they genuinely had come to believe after all this time in politics that this topic really mattered.

I couldn’t tell if it’s because they felt that this really was what our work was about or if they just did a big deal of it internally to motivate the younger / newer / more influencable folk. To me it seemed slightly ridiculous. Now don’t get me wrong $16 for an orange juice is ridiculous, but here’s how I see that having played out:

You’re a cabinet minister, working late at the hotel. You have a rush meeting in the morning and you see the little breakfast card thing at the hotel. you check off a few boxes to get an early meal before you go to bed, prices probably aren’t listed. The next day you check out and since it’s the government you don’t get the bill for a few weeks, because of how invoicing and procurement works. A few weeks later it comes with the charges laid out and you just glance it over and sign to approve the charges. You probably never even realize that the juice was $16. The “opposition research” members of the parties comb thru expenses via Access to Information requests and gotcha, the famous “$16 Orange Juice” is born.

And really while $16 is a lot for orange juice, I don’t expect cabinet members to be spending their time trying to save $10 off some orange juice. They have much more important things to do.

But there we were making a webpage and an email campaign about this $16 orange juice.  It’s catchy, news reporters bite and folks click those links. For the record, Bev Oda fully repaid the amounts, agreed it was a mistake and publicly apologized for it. Regardless she was hounded for months about it and it ended with her resignation. What a great thing we had achieved. Force a cabinet minister to resign because of some orange juice.

The Globe and Mail wrote about this “problem” because a similar thing recently happened for the Prime Minister’s swing set. The Prime minister paid for the swing set himself, but not the installation fee. Regardless the $7500 swing set makes the news.

Now given that this is the prime minister, I’m willing to bet he can’t just pay $75 to Home Depot to get them to install it in the yard. There’s probably a bunch of rules about certified contractors and folks who need to pass various security clearances before you can start mucking around in the Prime Minister’s house. And I think everyone agrees that it’s not really a great idea to have someone you found on kijiji installing furniture at the PM’s house. Regardless, the swing set “cost” $7500 ($4,368 of that being the actual cost of the installation that the taxpayer paid).

The article ends with this:

I’m not sure what any of this says about our politics today, other than it’s not good. And the fact is, all political parties in this country are responsible for where we are today.

It seems like no matter what happens, it’s always someone else’s fault. I don’t think it’s the political parties fault. At least not entirely. Could there be some really principled folks who would not pick on such meaningless things? Probably. But we never see them….

Why is that? It’s perhaps because we haven’t voted for them, we haven’t reported the news on them, we haven’t clicked on articles about them. It’s easy to point fingers about this. But I think we should all start looking internally into what we’ve done that’s lead to this moment, what we are doing, and what we think we want to do about it going forward before looking to blame others.

On that note, Bev Oda, I’m sorry I contributed to ending your career. While I don’t agree with many of your views and opinions, I don’t think that should have been a career ending decision.

Campaigns don’t matter as much as they use to

Scott Reid asked if campaigns even mattered anymore. I think he’s partially right that they don’t. They don’t matter as much because the 30 odd days that are defined as a campaign are no longer the “real” campaign.

The “permanent campaign” has been a buzz word for a while but the implementation of it by the Canadian political parties has been lackluster at best. The digital outreach is strongly axed on fundraising instead of persuasion. I can understand why, with fundraising you see the results right away. There are easy to gauge metrics (what those mean and if they are the correct metrics is a whole entire post). Launching a year long persuasion campaign doesn’t show the results right away.

But that’s exactly what many conservative leaning organizations have been doing. A good example of this is “Ontario Proud“. The tactics for gaining followers are transparently obvious. Asking folks to “share if you’re patriotic” or posting some nostalgic pictures asking to “like if you remember this“. The idea is of course to be able to then target folks with the political posts.

It’s very smart and well done and an easy way to bypass the current campaign finance laws since there are no limits outside of election periods. I guess this is why they say campaign managers are always prepared to fight the last war.