One year; 12 months; 52 weeks; 365 days

…since I got married to Mr EB and what a year it has been! Looking back to October 2008, it seems like it’s all got so much busier. So much has happened in that time and we have learnt so much, not just me and Mr EB but for all of us involved with Event Cornwall. Each month, sometimes each week, brings a new challenge which we learn from and off we go again.

The current challenge for me is around having lots of work and therefore having to trust my colleagues and let go of the level of control. I know I have trained them well and we are all focused on delivering our aims and making exciting stuff happen but this transition from core deliverer to manager is scary! And from their side of things, they have to be able to step up and take on the responsibility of that trust, the responsibility of the brand.

This process is difficult and it has required us to really understand our values and approach and therefore really understand what we offer to the marketplace that is different to other suppliers. Going through that process gives us so much more confidence in our own abilities, capabilities and future development, which combined with trust and effective delegation, means that we can continue to take on all the projects that we are invited to do, continue to grow and that the office is a really lovely place to work. Busy but brilliant!

true to type?

This week I have been on a Leadership Development Day with the Cultural Leadership Programme (which is all part of my endeavour to ensure that we continue to be a learning organisation with all of us developing our skills) and part of the day was Myers-Briggs Type Indicator testing. The Myers-Briggs model is basically a psychometric test with the aim of articulating how you communicate, collaborate, energise yourself and make decisions. It can be very accurate indeed and very useful in not only understanding yourself but framing your communication and engagement with others to get the best response.

So we went through the process and at the beginning I thought I was quite confident where I sit in the spectrum…but this wasn’t the case at all. On each of the dichotomies of the model, I could see my behaviour as the other option so when we were talking about Extroversion – Introversion, I was thinking I was clearly in the Extroversion camp but then started to realise that I also display a lot of Introversion behaviour. And this perplexes me.

Then the same thing happened with Sensing – Intuition; and Thinking – Feeling; and Judging – Perceiving and I found the discernment of learned behaviour and preferred behaviour incredibly difficult. I have learned to be a good all-rounder and transfer my approach and skills around those I work and collaborate with. So good, in fact, that I can not longer tell what I have learned to do and what I naturally do. Of course, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all!

I am really quite happy to not be put in a box. Not to have a stereotype that I conform to. To do things differently. I think that’s my type!

Feet on the ground, head in the sky

It just seems to get busier and busier which is brilliant but I’ve found myself starting to lose track, get distracted by the wackier ideas, drift off on trains of thought that are completely irrelevant…and I think the two are related.

Having an office base is great but it needs to be used and, more specifically, I need to use it. In order to keep clarity in our work, we need to keep our feet on the ground and get on with the job as much as dream up new ideas and design new events. So I need to introduce some discipline into the mix but not lose the dream time which is equally valuable which means fewer meetings!

I am really excited about our growth and Sammy joining us as Company Administrator. She is someone who will keep our feet on the ground, keep us sane and will remind us that we are not as great as we think we are and to get a grip! At the same time, she gets as excited as the rest of us about event ideas and creative stuff so hopefully, the office will become that place at the point where strategy meets the practical and where money meets the art. I think it’s a great place to be!

Dead chuffed!

You know that feeling when you actually manage to pull off something that was really challenging? Well, I am revelling in that luxury at the moment and am dead chuffed that the Mamma Mia Drive In Movie for MusicTruro was such a success. Don’t get me wrong, it was seriously hard work and needed all of the partners involved (Totally Truro, mpad, us, Council, suppliers etc) to make it happen. We have developed a way of working that is very productive and means we can take on a challenge because it’s grounded in the purposes and strategic aims of the festival as a whole (something that not all festivals and events consider).

My next challenge is just managing the workload and the penny finally dropped this week – I need some more help and why not employ a freelancer to deal with a particular project? And now we have an office base, this is a real solution to managing the workload and making sure that we deliver all our promises to our clients. So the team continues to grow – dead exciting!

And alongside all this, I am concentrating on developing my own skills too having done media training with others from Worldwide Financial Planning, Totally Truro, CSA Architects and Coodes. A really good day and I definitely learnt a lot (mainly how not to handle the media!) – thank you Rachel at mpad for setting it all up. And I’m off to London next week – firstly to celebrate mine and Mr EB’s wedding anniversary and secondly to go to a Cultural Leadership Programme Leadership Development Day which I hope will be really interesting and dead useful! I think it’s so important to walk the talk and train myself when I am such an advocate for my staff undertaking training.

Here’s to another week of being dead chuffed!

Production vs production capacity

It’s been a while, but I’m back! The trip to New Zealand was great and I did finally master the art of turning whilst throwing myself down the mountain.  Having been away, it did mean that I came straight back into flat out working to get MusicTruro up and running and I now write this sat at the Festival Reception – the joys of mobile broadband!

It has been utterly manic and this phenomenal workload (entirely my own fault), paired with reading Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, has generated a lot of decisions and shifts in my own practice as a leader, as an event manager, as a team member and as a human being. In particular, I have picked up on the need to spend more time on the important stuff and less on the crises and in order to do that, I need to plan better, build my resources, build my network and get some rules in place about when I work and how I work. Rather than focus solely on the production of the events, we are shifting to focus more on our capability and capacity for production – process rather than product – and by doing so, enabling us to produce all the more in a sustainable way.

We are moving into our new offices on Monday (hurrah!), the day after one of the most challenging events we have ever undertaken – the Mamma Mia Drive In. The challenge is what keeps us on our toes and keeps us learning, improving our practice, working smarter but there are times when it feels like an unsurmountable cliff. So deep breaths and, having booked time off next week, off we go again!

Are some more equal than others?

I’ve been reading the comments about Madonna’s very public statements about discrimination against Roma (romany gypsies) with great interest. The issues of equality and diversity are really interesting (and important) to me because it’s all about fairness. Some inner moral core tells me that everyone should be treated fairly  but the reality of the world is that the idea of what is fair is different depending on your individual viewpoint. Do you have the right to free speech, to vote, to walk freely in the street, to make up your own mind? Not everyone does and, more significantly, not everyone feels that they do.

One of the loneliest places can be in the middle of a crowd and similarly, one can feel trapped and isolated in the most liberal of societies. You don’t have to be black or disabled or gay or Christian to experience discrimination….you just have to be different. And that’s where humanity keeps falling over itself. We are all different but we just can’t seem to accept it. We are running a range of events wih University College Falmouth to promote the idea that everyone has the equal right to be treated as individuals but it’s impossible to design an event that has appeal to everyone so the answer is to provide a programme of events so there is something for everyone. Simple yes? well no, because everyone wants something different. I think we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.

On a slightly different note, I was sad but not surprised to hear that Falmouth Sound has been cancelled this weekend. All too often, we (the event designers, partners and managers) get carried away with great ideas that within our group make sense but there is little market demand for it and we go too big too soon without growing it from the beginning. In this particular economic climate and with a saturated festivals market, we can’t afford to get carried away. We must base our designs and ideas on sound footings without letting them become the same old thing repeated annually.  It’s challenging to be ambitious at the moment but with great risks come great rewards (and the potential to fail spectacularly!).

So, my thinking whilst I’ve been away….well, we’re expanding. It might seem bonkers to grow in a recession but we keep getting contracts in.  I have been thinking about how to get a better work life balance and we need some ground rules so we can focus on our productivity capability and capacity rather than just on the output. It’s not about doing more, it’s about working smarter and taking care of the stuff that enables us to produce the events, i.e. us.

Which leads me to my personal golden rules which are about being fair, seeing things from the other person’s perspective, being ambitious and achieving all that by focusing on our production capacity and building that. I’m actually getting excited about getting back to work….

Leadership over distance

After what seems like 3 weeks travelling, I (plus Mr EB) have arrived in New Zealand to spend some time on the snow and with my sister and brother-in-law who are living out here this year, so I am writing this on the other side of the world from the business.

Taking a break is vital but is nigh on impossible when it’s your own business, so the best I can hope for is a shift in work/life balance towards the life bit. And although we have only been here 24 hours or so, I have spent at least 23 hours of that NOT thinking about work.  Not even slightly. And I don’t feel guilty. Not at all.

Aside from a couple of urgent things, most of the hands on can be done by the rest of the team, Amy specifically, which frees me to just stay in touch with what’s going on and get a couple of things done that need some concentrated time.  I’m not going to try to ban myself from thinking or doing work because it’ll just stress me out and actually, as Dr John Potter pointed out a few weeks ago, our best creative thinking is done when we are relaxed so to ban myself from thinking about work stuff would be counter-productive in many ways.

Event Cornwall has been running for 2 years now and, in a time of recession, we all need to think creatively about what we do, how we do it and how we tell people about it so this time away is actually vital for the business, not just for my own sanity.  I love what I do and how we do it but there are always new projects to develop and new ways to work  so this time away is, hopefully, a really productive way to spend my time (and notably, more productive than being at home and being in the office).

AND I get to spend time on the snow and learn to snowboard which is something I promised Mr EB I would try when we got married (his side of the deal is to learn to sail).  I did a couple of sessions at Milton Keynes but I’ve never been on a real mountain. Now, when I can’t do something, I get really really frustrated and, when I’m tired, that means that I have a penchant for bursting into tears at the slightest thing.  I have to say that snowboarding doesn’t come easy and so after a short frustration and tears break at the top when I couldn’t actually get up on my toe edge at all, the fact that I then managed to board down the mountain on my heel edge without killing anyone else and at some speed is very pleasing to me! This very minor achievement is so pleasing to me that I will be doing it again tomorrow but by then, I’ll have set myself a new goal of turning. Watch out Coronet Peak!

This learning of new stuff is very refreshing.  It’s easy when you’re the boss to think you know it all and have all the answers but putting myself into a new situation where I don’t know anything has made me realise afresh how little I know and how much I have to learn. It’s a great example of leading by example and if that’s my contribution to leading the company over the next three weeks, then I’m doing my job!  I like to think that we are a company that takes on a challenge, which is true, but how often do we challenge ourselves personally?

Doubling up

In the next week, we have our first double – BBC Blast in Barnstaple and the start of Fal Week.  As well as the creative media workshops and showcase that we have in Barnstaple on Saturday, we also have the first day of It’s OK To Play – children’s activities on the Moor in Falmouth.  And it’s the first time that I have got a job into the company but not been the one to deliver it.

It seems like a small thing to get someone else to deliver it but the fact is that it’s my reputation and the company’s image that is at stake so it’s vital that the delegation works and that the person delivering is trusted and briefed properly.  The great thing is that Event Cornwall is big enough now that we have the staff trained and ready for exactly this scenario so I’m not worried about the event itself.  I am more concerned that I do the prep right so that they know what they are doing and what I have agreed with the stakeholders and partners.  It’s vital that I prepare both sides of the relationships so that there are no nasty surprises for anyone!

The thing that makes all this particularly challenging is that I am on holiday from Tuesday next week…so am cramming 3 weeks work into one and am petrified that I’ll drop one of the many balls that I am juggling at the moment, well not right now as I am typing but you know what I mean.

It makes me wonder if it’s worth going away…but the simple thing is that I have to. I’ll lose the plot (even more than I have already) and burn out if I don’t take a break and get away from the daily grind.  So, whether I like it or not, it’s vital that all the prep gets done, and done properly, so that the team can take on the project.  It’s vital that the company isn’t dependent on me (as much as I like to be needed…) so that I can take a break and can delegate and develop skills and it can all work without me.   And as much as it’s difficult, it’s all part of the company growing up and becoming all it can be. Hopefully, becoming all we can be – the leading event management company in the South West. We’re not there yet, but getting there!

Calming the storm in a teacup

When I get tired or when my to do list passes the 4 pages mark, the smallest thing seems too much. I have to curb this tendency on events as the one thing we just can’t do is make the issues any bigger – we’re the people who solve the problems, not make them.

But last night, when Mr E-B started going on about how difficult his evening was when he had 3 things he needed to do and how stressful it was, I’m afraid I couldn’t stop myself.  I am living in Barnstaple at the moment, working on BBC Blast here, and that makes it all the more challenging so I just got really stroppy. I mean proper stroppy and all tired and emotional. Think shouting and pouting and huffing. Not pretty.

I don’t normally do this.  I am always the calm, cool one; the one who calms everyone else down; who thinks on her feet and solves problems.  So it s a bit of a shock to people when I’m not able to be that.  It’s generally a storm in a teacup caused by the smallest of things and with no broader perspective than what is right in front of me so it passes quickly like a line squall at sea. And then I’m back in the room and back to normal me and I’m back solving the problems and keeping everyone else happy.

When this happens, the most important thing is to have my support network to pick me up and to remind me that, although I might feel overwhelmed right now, it’s not a matter of life and death. These friends and family are vital to enabling me to be who I am, and achieve all I can achieve, and they are very much appreciated. 

A friend said to me recently that I had really helped her to get some perspective on the risks of going freelance and starting her own business and how did I have time to spend with her talking about it. My response was that this is a two way street and for every time I have been there for her, she is for me and hence time spent with her becomes a benefit to me and so it works. The key is not to take advantage or become complacent in this support relationship - It definitely needs to be reciprocated. And never more so than when I throw all the toys out of the pram and need to be coaxed back into reality!

Safe yet ambitious ideas

This week I have been challenged and enabled at the same time…working with the Barnstaple WEX (or the BWEX as they are affectionately known!) is great.  Suddenly having a team means that I can’t really get on with any of my own work which challenges my ability to get on with everything and feel on top of life but is also inspiring and means that the ideas we generate are so much more than I would generate on by own.

It’s showing me that working with others is really worth it – aside from being sociable, the ideas we are generating are more ambitious and pushing me out of my comfort zone. I always claim to up for a challenge but I wonder how creative I really am.  The benefit of having inexperienced work experience staff on board is that they really do present different ideas but this can be challenging as a manager.  It can feel like they are arrogantly criticising your approach, that you aren’t good enough, that you aren’t ambitious enough, perhaps even that you are boundaried by your experience.  And this is difficult to deal with without getting stroppy and emotional and letting your insecurities dominate the situation.

The only way I have found to deal with this is to create an atmosphere where they all know that I am the boss but equally that I will listen to their ideas. I have also had to deal with those insecurities to become confident in my knowledge and abilities that I know is beyond their existing experience. It is vital to the development of our events and our industry that new ideas are encouraged and enabled and that we don’t let our own egos restrict that imagination and creativity. So best put my own insecurities away and get on with the job of enabling others to get creative with the BBC!