Naureen Alam is the Senior Manager, Future Business and Technology at AGL. A change-maker in the clean energy industry, Naureen is passionate about operationalising innovation & tech to realise a sustainable energy future. Recognised as an Engineers Australia’s Young Engineer of the Year finalist and selected for EnergyLab’s Women in Clean Energy Fellowship program, Naureen has also completed a Masters in Sustainability Leadership from Cambridge University, UK. Naureen has delivered $10million value by leading a gender balanced and technically diverse team.

Source: Women’s Leadership Awards

Mani Thiru is the APAC Business Lead within the Aerospace & Satellite Solutions team at Amazon Web Services. Mani works to enable the space sector achieve its most ambitious goals by leveraging cloud computing and transformative services like machine learning, artificial intelligence, satellite & data analytics to deliver innovation in a range of areas; from space enabled agriculture & emergency disaster response through to space exploration and earth observation research.

Source: Women’s Leadership Awards

Antoinette Lattouf is an award-winning Network 10 journalist. She’s the Director and co-founder of Media Diversity Australia. In 2019, Antoinette was named among AFR’s 100 Women of Influence. While continuing her day job as a television journalist, Antoinette led landmark research into the lack of diversity in the news media which made national and international headlines, introduced paid internships for CALD entry-level journalists, oversaw the launch of a free directory of CALD professionals for journalists to use as talent interviewees. She also leads a team of 30 volunteers who help run MDA and is about to hire full-time staff to help the charity grow.

Source: Women’s Leadership Awards

Right now, there is an unprecedented opportunity to take your power back.

The world has gone through a collective and simultaneous hurtling of all their playing cards in the air. The game rules you might’ve been adhering to are now no longer relevant or even available to you.

Perhaps you made the choice not to catch that card and put it into play again. Or perhaps the other player decided it was outdated, and took it off the table.  Either way, the game has changed, and there are opportunities everywhere – if you choose to see them.

Seeing them takes awareness on a heightened level. It takes viewing change through the lens of life happening FOR you, not TO you.

Ask yourself “if this change was happening FOR me, what are the opportunities here?” Share on X

The kicking and screaming will come from those who thought that the game you were playing had a conclusive ending. For them there will be grief, toxicity, blame, shame, guilt – all of the emotions. Their projections needn’t impact you showing up in your empowerment.

For you, beautiful unique woman of flex, empathy and love, using this framing question as an approach to life will gift you an endless reservoir of opportunity.

EVEN when the “happening TO me” crowd is throwing all their toys out of the pram – straight at you – all you will see is opportunity.

So how do you re-orient your life and career around opportunity rather than consequence? Share on X

Stop: judgement, blame, theorising, accusations…just stop.
Surrender: understand you can only change your reaction and how it all makes you feel.
Choose: see how this is working FOR you rather than against you
Be led: imagine the opportunity as a thread of string in front of you… let your curiosity and intuition follow it by asking yourself ‘if this was an opportunity where would it take me next’.
Keep opening: don’t stop at the first destination or awareness that presents itself on that string, open up more – when you see the first opportunity, re-orient again by asking “so if I had that opportunity then where would we go?”
Gather: all the gold in that line of curious and intuitive thought.
Alchemise: bring the gold back to your conscious mind and alchemise it into a new form
Reassess: now take another look at the orientation of your situation, and see if it feels more open and expansive!

I bet it does! I bet there are powerful opportunities EVERYWHERE right in front of you!

Things look different depending on what lens you view them through. It’s not about “doing it the right way” according to the rules that were set up in a game that is no longer relevant to you.

It’s about constant reorientation to your life principles. Share on X

That is how you show up in your unique contribution every day, and make the impact you’re here to make.

Make it your only commitment, to generate from your contribution principles every day, in every moment and the outcome is always positive impact.

That in fact, is the only foregone conclusion.

#TheGreatResignation

I have been talking about what has now been coined the #greatresignation for over a year now.

I felt it mid last year, a shift from the adrenal RUSH toward the top, re-focussing to the navel-gazed murmur of ‘why am I bothering?” 

It was the echo of thousands in my network, and as evidenced by the trending hashtag, millions across the world!

I’m thrilled and excited that so many people are pushing back on the “bigger, faster & more” narrative we have been fed as the recipe to success for so long! But it finally seems we are waking up to a more holistic approach to life!

I can’t help but feel a little sorry for the corporations who are clearly out of touch

 

Those corporations are about to lose their greatest asset – their talent! 

They were the ones with the CEOs we could hear collectively hand-wringing with excitement at a rise in productivity and decrease in churn when Covid hit.

Word pushed down from the top…

“They will all be grateful just to have a job!” 

 

That attitude, I can only assume, is what led to truly short-sighted actions like that of the NSW Council that informed their working parents they were NOT to home-school while they were on the clock, despite them being in mandated lockdown (nice one Bayside Council!) 

No wonder 50% of the workforce is looking to quit, and are now being counted in, what I’d like to introduce as a new metric “the Unfulfillment rate”!

The Unfulfillment Rate

In the past month alone there have been over 13 articles addressing what Anthony Klotz, a psychologist and professor at Texas A&M, coined as ‘the Great Resignation’. 

As it turns out, it’s not just that we had time to think about what more there was to life, or what our unique contribution was going to be. It was a perfect storm of discontent that was already brewing…Covid just accelerated it.

According to McKinsey’s  “COVID-19 and the employee experience: How leaders can seize the moment” article of last year, one of the areas for greatest potential improvement was an organization strongly connecting their actions to purpose. Two thirds of McKinsey’s survey respondents said their organisation does not do this well. 

With all that navel-gazing time over the past few years, and the reported mass ‘spiritual awakening’, people are searching for more…or at least ‘different’.

To be clear, there are a few factors at play here. The stats quoted everywhere show a huge 40-50% resignation rate, but in fact only 3% of them are actually retiring. Many may be starting a business, but certainly not all! 

So that means all is not lost for every corporation, because the rest of them are looking for more fulfilling work in line with their values. And that job could very well be in YOUR corporation – as long as you address what is important to them!

Talent want Purpose

Now more than ever, employers have the opportunity to help their talent ‘live their purpose’ through their employment. And it will pay off for everyone, according to McKinsey, because when employees find their work purposeful, (and the company values purposeful) they are much more likely to “sustain or improve their levels of work effectiveness, and they have four times higher engagement and five times higher well-being.” (McKinsey June 29, 2020 )

Yet for so many people, what their purpose actually is, can be an elusive concept! And C-suite executives steering the ship are certainly not immune to their own personal purpose calamity! So with everyone searching for more, and a good percentage not really sure what “more” actually is, how do we create alignment between the corporation’s values and the talent’s purpose? 

… it can’t be just a feeling or idea

It starts with everyone not just FEELING inside them what their purpose and values are, but being sure of them. And then being able to articulate them, and market them in every interaction. That’s what creates opportunities to be noticed or make change. (We did it as babies – articulating our needs – there was no such thing as silent, resentful crying back then!)

As it turns out there are MANY corporations out there who really do care about their people, their purpose and doing good. (And of course, then there are the ‘Bayside Councils’ of the world!!)

It’s all too easy to blame our dissatisfaction on the corporate culture, but if this pandemic has taught us anything, it is to take responsibility for ourselves and our needs!

…you need to articulate your Unique Contribution

As an employee, if you cannot explain what drives you, and how your unique contribution will positively impact the organisation, then you are likely to be bound as a cog in a wheel – or if the stats are anything to go by, you might just quit with no plan!

And corporations, if you can’t articulate your values and purpose to attract aligned talent, then you have a colossal problem on your hands… Because employees have had enough!

…welcome to the #greatalignment!

 

 

References:

• https://apple.news/AO9GcFhixRMyl_rJ2rnbVVA
• https://www.businessinsider.com.au/why-everyone-is-quitting-great-resignation-psychologist-pandemic-rethink-life-2021-10
• https://www.businessinsider.com.au/how-covid-changes-remote-work-housing-entertainment-fashion-flexible-economy-2021-7
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/avivahwittenbergcox/2021/11/16/the-great-resignationactually-a-mass-retirement/?sh=31dacdc318ba
• https://www.theversemedia.com/articles/anthony-klotz-defining-the-great-resignation
• https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/making-the-great-resignation-work-for-you/13615106
• https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/covid-19-and-the-employee-experience-how-leaders-can-seize-the-moment

@A_WittenbergCox, @csreinicke, @andrea_c_hsu, @SteveAndriole, @kendraguidolin, @tylerakern, @ShawnDBaldwin, @shalailah, @JimenaZubiria, @jmmoran12, @MeredithMetsker, @ranimolla, @WIRED