If you want to shine, step out of line

They say anything you need to know in life, your mother taught you. Having just celebrated Mother's Day around the world this weekend, I think most of us would agree that #MotherDoesKnowBest. That said, even mother's golden advice cannot always get you through the fast-paced, unrelenting world of work and life. This is, after all, the age where Siri/Alexa (#MumSurrogates) and your employer's IT department (who are tracking your key strokes and webpage visits for "productivity analysis") probably know you better than you know yourself. So, for those looking to grow personally and professionally, a new strategy must be devised to not only advance one's self but to also better understand one's self.

Enter Chris Barez-Brown's Shine, How to Survive and Thrive at Work, a humorously delivered guide to rediscovering your drive, passion and ultimately, how it can impact your professional life by strengthening your personal one.

Shine is an excellent opening foray into the realm of professional development, unlike many of the artificially complex mental exercises you will find in HBR's leadership series.

So how does one Shine?

3 KEY TAKEAWAYS:

1) ELVIS HAS (RE-)ENTERED THE BUILDING

The more Elvis you are at work, the more breaks you’ll get and thus the more Elvis you’ll become.

When Bono (U2) was looking for partners for his 3rd World Debt campaign, he would walk into the boardroom and ask "Who's Elvis around here?" In other words, who's the maverick in the business? Who challenges the status quo? Who has loads of energy about them and is not afraid to break the rules? Because if you're going to impact the world, you will not get very far with a bureaucratic corporate drone on your back. You need someone who can shake the trees, hard, so that that the coconuts fall where they need to. By focusing on this concept, Chris lays out the rest of the book thesis which is about how to build your personal and professional brand for a better quality of life without losing these lives to the "void" that work can often become as we chase deadlines and "the next project".

While there are many facets to being Elvis, perhaps the below quote captures the fullness of the concept succinctly.

Be a dick, not a cock. What is a dick? An endearing name for somebody who self-expresses in playful and creative fashion and sometimes gets it wrong; they don’t care when they make a fool of themselves; they are risk takers.

Now an Elvis at work is harder to manage--at least for those managers who themselves are not an Elvis or not able to recognize original thinking and feeling in others. Which means being Elvis can often come with repercussions as you might become professionally isolated, marginalized or even pushed out. It is definitely not going to be everyone's go-to promotional strategy. But for those of you who wish to have a congruent existence--act the way you feel, and do what you believe which is how the best mothers (and fathers) in history have made the biggest impacts--it is definitely the strategy to develop and pursue.

2) BE EMOTIONAL, NOT (JUST) LOGICAL 

Whether you're a doctor, a lawyer, a manager, a concierge, recycling technician, data scientist, or construction worker, logic and rationality seem to be the top two (and only) requirements for successfully functioning. Everything has to measure up, follow a linear path. In fact, the only professions where emotion seems to be tolerated are those of acting, writing and stand-up comedy--activities which actually invite humans to self-reflect and connect with something that might only make sense at an intuitive level. So what if we were to bring this same angle of self-reflection to our professional endeavors? Chris writes

It is crucial for our mental and emotional health to know that we don’t need the job we are in. We can do something else, and do it well. You bring more magic to your work when you know you’re doing it because you want to not because you have to

Allowing yourself to connect with your emotions can definitely help you to assess if you're doing the right thing, working in the right place or company. But beyond that, if leveraged further, it can act as an unparalleled motivational force whose returns will far exceed those that the standard HR "perks" try and emulate. In short, emotion leads to passion, passion leads to results, and results lead to leaders... which is our next and final point.

3) BE THE "BIG PICTURE" 

You are now the Big Kahuna. You've made it. But do you deserve to keep the title of Big K? An emotionally-aware Elvis is definitely good at what they do: that is why they're on the stage. But once you're there, you need to continue engaging with your audience. The true Elvis is a master communicator and connector. They are not just singing the corporate anthem at full blast assuming everyone at the back of the theatre can hear them perfectly. They are setting a vision, telling a story, and making sure their audience are the essential characters and heroes of that story.

  Populate your stories with people you want to make heroes of—every time you tell that story you give your characters more energy and more chance to shine [themselves]

A study was done back in the 1970s analysing the traits of successful companies and successful CEOs. While a hole host of "attributes" were "correlated" between these factors, perhaps the most telling of all was the following: companies performed better when their CEO was completely unrelated to the industry they operated in. When a CEO with a PhD in medieval Nordic poetry ran a chemical company; or a CEO with 5 degrees in astrophysics ran a creative agency. To be sure, these CEOs had the core management skills needed to run their companies and lead their employees. But perhaps what most contributed to these companies' unique growth-runs during their tenure was the fact that their complete lack of technical, a.k.a. logical, understanding of the businesses they had been invited to run allowed (or forced) them to tap into their emotional abilities. This allowed them to connect, communicate and inspire their organisations--the mark of a true Elvis.

Putting things in Perspective

The biggest lesson from Shine is that you must be ready to completely question your assumptions... about everything. Mother (#BlessMums) helped to shape our original psyche and ways of filtering the world. But that doesn't mean that this viewpoint should be the only, unchanging one. Nothing is a straight, logical problem to be solved. Education is constant and our willingness to adapt also must be. Like Chris says, we need to be more like air pilots: they adjust their flight paths constantly to remain on course. The destination is known, but we must constantly continue searching for the best way to get there. And the best way to do it is to "be flexible and fill our lives with new stimuli that challenge our perceptions of who we are and what is important"

So, be Elvis. Feel, don't just think. See the big-picture destination and learn how to inspire and include others to join you on the journey. Whether you're the CEO who can recite the epic tales of Odin, or a founder who's ready to change the world, it's time for a dab of Jailhouse Rock and a pinch of Viva Las Vegas!

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