What's Right With Vanilla?

Hello Humans…

My Muse this fortnight celebrates vanilla, and of course it contains a related human leadership message.

If you are wondering whether vanilla ice cream is my flavour of choice. Wonder no more. It is indeed. Little did I know though, way back, when I was a much younger and far less experienced vanilla ice-cream-eating human, and my flavour of choice, the mighty vanilla, would play a role in the first session of my Human Manager Experience ‘HME’ Program.

Spoiler alert. I ask my HME Program participants to guess my ice cream flavour of choice. There’s a reason for asking that question, but you’ll have to attend the HME to get the fullmethod and story. Read on though. I will reveal a little below.

Before I do that, let me set a frame around vanilla.

On one level vanilla is used to describe a basic product or service with no special features. On another level vanilla is used to describe a lack of excitement or spontaneity. Has your boss called you vanilla lately?

Let me reframe vanilla for you here Human.

On an entirely different level vanilla is described as a spice derived from a tropical climbing orchid, with spikes of large fragrant greenish-yellow flowers and long fleshy pods containing the seeds (beans) of the genus Vanilla. Has your boss called you vanilla lately?

You are craving vanilla now, right? Don’t head to the fridge just yet though. Read on.

In the HME I set the ice-cream session up using the first of the two descriptions above to deliberately provoke the participants. I want them to expect that the HME will be a pretty basic Leadership 101 Program with no special features, and not particularly exciting at that. (Little do they know of course what is to come over the next two days.) I also use the session to gauge where and how the participants see themselves as humans and as leaders. When they look into the mirror what do they see? Unexciting, basic, average, and plain? Not always but often.

I then move them quickly to a place where we talk about flavours, toppings, sprinkles, and the myriad of other ways to enhance ‘vanilla’.We talk about enhancing vanilla for particular reasons, but not changing it for all time.

What’s the Leadership message in all of this typing about vanilla?

Vanilla in all of its spice, fragrance, colour and usefulness, and even with its spikes and climbing nature, is more than okay. As a human the next time someone offers you their observation that ‘you are a little vanilla’, you might thank them.

As a leader, your job is to celebrate vanilla. Yes, there’s certainly plenty of ways to add colour, texture and flavour to vanilla to suit a particular situation, role, task, job or set of circumstances.

Sending your humans to an HME Program with me will certainly add flavour and texture, for example.

But here’s the thing, the main Muse message today, your job is to celebrate vanilla it isn’t to change the very essence of the vanilla humans in your care and under your watch.

Exciting News Fellow Humans my Human Manager Academy is now open for foundation members to register interest. Click on the link below to find out more and register to be one of the first to join in late November 2022.