Writing as the ultimate side hustle

Last week, I was lucky enough to start an extended stretch of paid paternity leave, thanks to Zendesk's generous employee benefits. During this stretch, I hope to fit in some writing during my daughter's (infrequent) naptimes - because for me, writing is the ultimate side-hustle.

I've been intentionally focused on writing for the last four years, a span in which I started a blog about religion and politics, wrote a master's paper as part of a graduate school degree, started this website, and completed my first book (to be released September 1st!).

All of this has confirmed my assumption that there are very real psychological and even spiritual benefits to writing - but it's also shown me that writing can be a meaningful addition to just about any vocation.

These days, all organizations, and increasingly all vocations, are burdened with an excess of frenetic moments. While technologists once assumed that automation and artificial intelligence would afford more opportunities for leisure and reflection, we know now that the opposite has occurred. Never before has a culture spent so much time in the office, committed so many hours to workplace communications like email and Slack, and taken so little paid time off. In our vocations, we are busier than ever, so trapped in the pace of organizational growth that we have sparse time for the personal reflection that facilitates learning.

This addiction to freneticism (perhaps a dominant ideology of the 21st century) isn't confined to our hours on the clock. Increasingly, our life together is structured around 280 character communications, carefully-edited image feeds, and 24-hour news programs that define everything as "breaking news."

I once heard a speaker analogize the pace of life as a bustling party where all the attendees are crowded closely together on the floor. One's vantage point is restricted to the frantic movements of those around them in this great sea of bustling humanity.

But overlooking the party floor is an empty balcony with a limitless line of sight. By climbing on to the balcony, one could escape the noise and bustle and see the big picture. This speaker suggested that all learning in today's culture depends on our ability to cut our way through the clutter and the crowds in order to stand atop this balcony. Only by standing at this vista can we see fully see and appreciate the people, places, and systems at work in our culture. It is this vista that empowers one to grow, to lead, to transform.

The party floor of my life is especially crowded right now. Between work at a bustling tech company and parenting a lovely yet sleepless 3-month old, climbing up to that balcony has become more challenging - but also more important than ever.

That's why writing has become so meaningful to me. To reflect and to write is to access an express escalator to the proverbial balcony. When we write something meaningful (Tweets and emails don't count) with intention and focus, we transcend the barrage of push notifications, digital advertisements, and social media feeds. We create coherence out of chaos, insight out of sensory overload, signal out of noise.

Everytime I write, I picture myself at work in a side-hustle. A side-hustle is simply a vocation pursued in addition to one's full-time job. 43% of workers have some form of side-hustle, which are defined not by their consistency but their diversity. Some side-hustlers I know create freelance mobile apps, others install home security systems. Some roast artisan coffee, some provide personal training, others have ownership stakes in minor league sports teams. Some, but not all, side-hustles involve compensation, a nice bit of extra cash for that spring break road trip or March Madness bracket pool.

I might suggest that writing is the "ultimate side-hustle," in that it provides an opportunity to process, analyze, synthesize, and create - which is to say, it helps us to learn and to improve. And while it's true that amateur writing isn't lucrative, it does have one benefit that other side-hustles don't offer: it declutters.

Writing produces organization, it reduces the busyness of the mind. While other side-hustles might require additional time on email, additional hours dedicated to administrative minutiae, and additional energy lost to the same frantic chases that may characterize one's 9-5 job, writing doesn't require any of this. It's the only side-hustle that puts you atop the balcony, instead of blocking your path with more people and more noise.

With that in mind, here are a few tips for getting started with your writing "side-hustle":

• Select a theme that you are relentlessly passionate about. As a talent development professional, I see the connection between career skill development and the writing process - which is why much of my writing focuses on leadership development, instructional design, church leadership, and coaching. But not everybody is a work nerd. Some want to be as far away from the office as possible after closing time. Whether you write beer reviews or book reviews, political commentary or sports analysis, write about something you love. It's only by doing this that you'll find yourself coming back to the writing process, time and time again.

• Keep a backlog of topics. For me, the most difficult step of the writing process is deciding what to write about. I try to have 5-10 "backlogged" topics written on a list at any given time. That way, if I'm stuck with an hour to burn at an airport, or with 30 minutes to pass between meetings, I can access my list and start typing out ideas.

• Carve out a consistent time. This is perhaps the most important. Writing, like exercise, mindfulness, and other healthy behaviors, is a habit, and habits are supported by scheduling. I use the last hour of Friday afternoons at the office. I find it's a cathartic way to end the week. With my Friday afternoon writing sessions, I can leave the office with some closure.

• Use Evernote or Google Keep to jot down ideas as they arise. My phone is a repository of fragmentary writing ideas, of quotes I like, of stats I find compelling, of expressions and idioms that I want to build from. I think of my Google Keep account as a box of lego blocks. As I jot down ideas, I am adding new and colorful blocks to make the next project all the more fulfilling.

Coach high performers for engagement and retention

This is the fourth post in a series on coaching high performers. In the last post, we explored how coaching high performers creates sustainability and produces competitive advantages.

Researchers continue to find correlations between workplace coaching and employee engagement. When employees receive consistent coaching, they are more productive, motivated, and committed. 66% of employees who receive coaching state that it increases their job satisfaction. Two-thirds of Millennials committed to staying with a company for 5+ years have a workplace coach. It's, therefore, no surprise that coaching drives employee retention.

But when we pause to consider who receives coaching, we have to wonder if we're motivating and retaining the best people. Most "coachees" fall within two categories. The first is executive coaching, a practice utilized by 50% of organizations in which a high-ranking leader works with an external coach. The second is performance improvement coaching, in which a low-performer works with their manager and/or an HRBP in an effort to meet expectations. As we've explored in past posts in this series, high performers receive at best sporadic coaching.

So if we combine the data that coaching drives retention and engagement with the finding that most of our coaching falls outside of the high-performance segment, we can infer that we are boosting the retention and engagement of two groups: highly-paid executive leaders who are likely to stick around by virtue of their compensation packages, and low-performing individuals at all levels of the organization.

The practice of workplace coaching needs to evolve to engage and retain high performers, not just because hiring a new high-performing employee is prohibitively more expensive than retaining an existing one, but because it is essential to an organization's culture of innovation and sustainability.

Talent developers should explore three relatively simple actions that can improve the engagement and retention of high performers.

First, ensure that every high-performer has a high-performing coach. The best way to do this? Recognize that high performers might need a coach from outside of their "chain of command." Nearly every high-performer has a people manager, but most people managers are not effective coaches. Approximately 60% of managers are not seen as good coaches. Talent developers can change this by identifying high performers and pairing them up with an effective coach, internal or external. It should be the talent developer's responsibility to convene, check-in with, and evaluate these pairings, which will often cross org chart demarcations. Sometimes, these pairings will bring-in voices external to the company. We spend over $1B every year in the United States on external executive coaches. In the event a great coach isn't readily available internally, why not extend this same benefit to high performers across the business?

Second, enable the high-performers to be the next generation of coaches. The employees who drive results in your organization likely know what they would like to get out of a coaching/mentoring relationship, but they might lack the vocabulary to initiate, sustain, and optimize coaching partnerships. So don't wait until these individuals are promoted into a management position. The talent developer should resolve to create a new class of coaching talent by upskilling high performing individual contributors (ICs) in the practice of coaching. Don't just create a one-off training for this group. Continuously invest - in workshops, micro-learnings, reading materials, and job shadowing programs, so that the best of your best might continuously sharpen their coaching skillset. Then pair high-performing ICs with peers who need a boost - before you need to move those same peers into a formal performance improvement plan.

Finally, convene the best of your best for regular group coaching check-ins. Identify the best coach in your organization, and empower that coach to engage high-performers in a group setting, such as a monthly lunch group or quarterly happy hour meetup. Group coaching is particularly useful for high performers as it creates a sounding board with which innovative ideas can gain traction. The key to successful group coaching in this context is to bring together a cross-functional selection so that coachees can vet their ideas with the greatest minds in your company, and so that they can continue to work on their own coaching aptitude.

It's no longer a great secret that coaching is correlated with engagement and retention. The question now turns to whether we are engaging and retaining the right people. When we stop neglecting and start coaching our highest performing employees, we elevate the odds that our brightest minds will still be with us for years to come.

Coach high performers to create a competitive advantage

This is the third post in a series on coaching high performers. In the last post, we explored how coaching high performers leads to widespread innovation.

Organizations are notoriously inept at seeing and acting on problems of great significance (see: Kodak, Blockbuster, Lehman Brothers, Target in Canada, etc). And while there are many explanations for this myopia, I believe this inability to respond can be explained, in part, by company cultures that suppress the whistle-blowers, that hide the canaries in the coal mine, that obscure the proverbial pause buttons.

In today's workplace, we're encouraged to develop a "solutions-oriented mindest," and a high level of "change resiliency." Neither of these is problematic in and of itself.

But when an organization becomes too focused on solutions, it actually narrows its focus on internal and external challenges (see Adam Grant, The Creative Power of Misfits). When an organization focuses too much on change "resilience," it sacrifices some of its ability to ask critical questions, surface unforeseen challenges, and act upon the subtle yet significant problems that accompany any change.

And that's where coaching high performers comes in.

While it's true that high performers can be problem-solvers, they may be equally valuable for their capacity to flag the otherwise ignored weaknesses and threats confronting an organization. It might be said that a true high performer is best deployed not just a problem-solver but as a problem-flagger!

Part of coaching a high performer involves developing a "problems-oriented mindset," and perhaps even a bit of "change skepticism." We ought to hold coaching conversations with high performers in which we analyze and identify the competitive challenges that the rest of the organization chooses not to see. In these discussions, we should seek to put teams and organizations on a path towards sustainability - by surfacing factors undermining longevity.

We should seek to have these conversations with high performers - but we should be judicious and discerning about what constitutes high performance. It's likely that anyone in an organization can articulate a few conspicuous grievances about their peers or their day to day work. But we're not looking for senseless griping about obvious annoyances. Presumably, someone has already thought about these. We're looking for the hidden challenges, we're seeking to understand the imminent problems that are not readily seen by all. That's why these conversations are a perfect fit for your high performing team members: those who know the business, who know how it runs, and who know how to contribute to its success.

In these conversations, workplace leaders can use three familiar tools in slightly novel applications:

The first is the SWOT Analysis, a look into a team or organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Long applied in strategic planning meetings or executive retreats, SWOT Analyses have been the tool of senior leaders and those in the upper echelon of the org chart. But they shouldn't remain there exclusively. High performers should regularly be encouraged to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats confronting their team, with a keen emphasis on weaknesses and threats.

The key to using this tool for competitive advantage lies in using it consistently with high performers, in encouraging them to focus on the "W" and "T," and in naming weaknesses and threats that are not readily apparent to all others within the organization. The key coaching question in these conversations becomes: "What weaknesses and threats are you aware of, that others are not giving enough thought to?"

The second tool is "Five Whys," a technique often deployed to uncover a problem's root cause. With the Five Whys, a coach asks their coachee "why" a problem exists. Upon their answer, they ask "why" again, prompting a deeper level of reflection than we typically apply to workplace challenges.

Five Whys can help high performers evaluate proposed changes to a team or an organization, so as to identify what downstream effects such a change might create.

The third tool is "Value Stream Mapping," a process-mapping activity that identifies all of the steps involved in delivering a product from a business to a customer. Value Stream Mapping identifies redundancies and unnecessary steps that create waste.

Value Stream Mapping can help high performers to identify possible sources of clutter, or sources of clarification. With Value Stream Mapping, a coach encourages high performers to think about what an organization should add to or remove its critical paths in order to protect against competitive threats.

High performers have an aptitude for sensing consequential problems before the rest of the organization. Often, they are sensing these vulnerabilities at the same time our competitors are thinking about them. When we help high performers to identify meaningful problems - and not just to offer solutions - we buffer our organizations against future disruption.

So give your high performers permission to dwell on problems, and to be skeptical about changes. It may just be the competitive advantage you require in order to avoid stay relevant.