6 months council review/dinner

Its been a while since I wrote last, I've been traveling a lot, and I will be updating this blog with stories of my travels, as its all been JCI travels, and all been amazing. But right now I want to write about something even more amazing, my JCI London council.

For our 6 months review I took them all out for dinner at a small place in central London where there's a really nice private dining room, Chez Gerard.

We had some good food, some wine, and we went through what we felt had worked so far this year, and what hadn't. I also gave them my speech from the European Public Speaking  Championship (which I won!), and then I challenged them to write down the answers to these questions...

1) How will you take JCI London to the next level the next 6 months?
2) How will JCI London help your skills and your job the next 6 months?
3) Describe the dream organisation, the ideal JCI London
4) What has to be true in order for your ideal JCI London to be true?

Then, at the end, I had them all write down positive comments to each other that we placed in envelopes on the back of their chairs. We're 6 months through the year, everything isn't easy, we've all ran into some obstacles, we might have disagreed on things, some things we wanted dearly to do haven't happened yet, and we all need some cheering up (I loved the comments I got. Thank you so much everyone. I hope you all enjoyed the comments you got as much as I love mine!).

Again - in the responses to the four questions above, my council are amazingly ambitious and brilliant. I won't write down any of the responses here (many of them are very personal), but I will mention them in future posts as we will be working on them all over the coming 6 months towards Christmas....

Our next council meeting will be on membership, and I challenge you to think about how we can be the best for our members, take our organisation to the next level, and be the dream organisation.

Thank you all for everything so far!

Moving forward - JCI UK Presidents Day and the Impact Plan

Last weekend, chambers from all across the United Kingdom met in Belfast for JCI UK's second national event of 2010, the Presidents & Deputies day. It was excellent, JCI Belfast did a great job organising the event, and in addition to the formal parts of the program, we also got to see lots and lots of Belfast.

I was very excited, because this was the day I was to present the Impact Plan to all of the local Presidents in the UK. I knew from before that not everyone was as excited about the plan as I was, and that not everyone was as accepting of my role in it all. That's ok, I'm a new player on the stage of JCI UK, and I have maybe not been as good in communicating the purpose with it all as I should have been.

In the end I think it went quite well. I gave a quick overview over the plan, then we all decided on four topics we think are the most important for JCI UK at the moment. After some discussions we agreed on continuity, communication, profile and engagement. We then had a world-cafe style brainstorm with 4 groups rotating between tables discussing and mapping the different problems connected to the 4 topics. We focused on the problems and not the solutions mainly for two reasons. I felt we needed to get the problems aired, the problems we are facing needed to be recognised and put on the table, but also - now that the problems have been aired, we're done talking about them and from now on we will only be focusing on solutions. Basta.

After the brainstorm, I asked all the participants to look at the 4 papers and mark the problems they thought was most important, both long term and short term, this was then used to kick-start four volunteer task groups that will work on each issue up until the national convention in November. I was very happy to see that people took up the challenge and both volunteered to be part of and leaders of the various task forces, I'm also very happy to see that the groups have a variety of members from all across the UK, including Northern Ireland.

You can find the JCI UK Impact Plan on the slideshare link below.

Jci uk impact plan 2010 2012

View more presentations from JCI London.

Next week I'm off to Singapore for the JCI Asia Pacific conference 2010 and I'm very very excited! I've never been to Singapore, I'll get to fly the A380 plane over there, and in addition I'll get to go to another (I'm sure excellent) JCI conference where I'll meet up with old friends, make new friends and learn new things.  Now I only have to make sure I finish my Union Jack dress in time, I'm leaving on Monday, today is Thursday, and the dress is not yet started...(not to forget all the other things I have on this weekend, Saturday is JCI's day at the Art of Engagement, and I'm really really looking forward to that. Almost 60 UK Jaycees coming together for a whole day exploring leadership, management and engagement)

Taking JCI to the next step - Horizontal leadership - leading beyond authority

In this post I write about what we need to do to take JCI London to the next step, make us a player in the London civic space, and also a bit about personal ambitions and impact.

JCI London has a cooperation with Common Purpose where we organise a joint event about once a year. Last year's was on passion and this year's event will be on "your leading edge". Common Purpose and JCI have a lot in common, though Common Purpose is a professional organisation which allows for a whole other level of events, the passion and purpose behind the organisations are much the same, and the people are all engaged, passionate and interesting, so we all get along brilliantly.

I've recently started one of Common Purpose's programs, International Navigator together with my Marketing Director Evren. So far we've done one full day seminar and one half day learning session. The full day seminar was on leadership, power and leading beyond authority and it really got me thinking, challenging my concept of both power and authority. The half day learning session was on passion, we also worked through some individual leadership challenges (and not surprisingly I chose one JCI London is facing right now), but I'll write more about that later as it deserves its own post.


So what is leading beyond authority?
Leading beyond authority is a concept developed by Julia Middleton, the founder and CEO of Common Purpose, and expanded on in her book Beyond Authority: Leadership in a Changing World. 

In short - you have your inner circle, where authority is asserted by formal positions, structures or hierarchies. For me - I'm Director in my company, I'm President in JCI London, and both those positions give me a formal right to authority and power in those inner circles. In my company its the people I manage, and in JCI its my directors and council (though yeah you can debate how much actual power I have over my directors ;) ).

The second circle is the wider company, and in JCI its our members and partners. I have some notion of authority by being the JCI President, but I have no formal authority over anyone.  My position is recognized, but does not necessarily imply any direct authority.

The third and final circle is the wider community or civic space where we have no formal authority. I'm not recognised neither as JCI President nor as Director in my company. If I want to lead in this circle I have to do so based on personality, impact and achievements in that circle. Achievements and authority from one circle is not directly transferable from once circle to the next.

For each person and each organisation these circles are different, but overlap. For example one of our partners would have their inner circle in our second circle, while our inner circle would be part of their second circle, etc.

How do we move our authority into the third circle? 
I believe JCI definitively deserves to be more visible in the third circle, have more authority. I don't mean the authority or power to boss people around, I mean presence, visibility and recognition. I want the newspapers to call us if they need a quote from a young leader, I want the CEOs of companies to recognize that involvement with JCI adds value to a CV, I want the HR departments to encourage their employees to become engaged with JCI, and I want our programs and projects to be recognized.

We need to be more visible, have a clearer branding strategy (or rather...have a branding strategy in the first place), a fresh profile, quality events and also flag ship events that extend beyond our members. It all sounds so easy....after speaking with people who've never heard of JCI I've come to realize that there's no way we can expand outwards unless we know who we are and can explain this to people in less than an hour, so branding - knowing who we are, is the first step.

Horizontal careers
All this have also inspired me to look at my career and my goals and how I personally can move horizontally. I realised that I want to stop focusing on the upward career ladder, but rather focus on how I can expand my career sideways. Does this mean I don't want to move upwards in JCI UK? Not really, but that is because (and I might be big-headed in this) I think the organisation needs me to get more involved, but it does mean that if I had thought these thoughts last year I'd probably stayed on as business director and worked on creating more outwards impact in that role. 

This lead me to read a bit on portfolio careers (yes yes a book review is in the making). Portfolio careers are careers where people have more than one job, often jobs that compliment each other, jobs that contribute to our portfolio of skills. Jobs that make us feel more like a whole person, drawing on more than one skill set and more than one type of challenges. I want one of those!

Thinking about it, I've come to realize I  have a portfolio career. I have my day job, I write for Malvikbladet, and I'm the President of JCI where in addition to doing the management I also give quite a bit of training. Not all of the jobs making up a portfolio career need to be paid jobs, for example a trustee ship can be part of a portfolio career, and I definitively think JCI is part of my career, though unpaid. What do I want to do more of? More training, more speaking, more writing, maybe also find a trustee position somewhere.


So my goal for this year and the next two years is to move JCI London and JCI UK outwards into the civic space. I want us to be visible, to be a player, to be counted with and on. It will take time, but we need to start now. This year my focus is to create a brand for us, a profile, and make our members proud of who we are and what we stand for. Building on this we'll take the organisation outwards, forwards and upwards. yay!

councils and marketing and challenges all around

I've started my second round of individual director meetings - we meet over dinner or in another informal setting and discuss the year so far, the months to come, challenges and successes. It is interesting to note that almost all of the directors more or less find themselves at this point in time in the same position and with the same challenges. I encourage the directors to share experiences and advice, as they are all struggling with the same issue, and I suggest solutions.

What is this thing they are all dealing with? Team building...Team building, team building, team building... We've had a couple of months now with activities, projects and team meetings, and some things have worked out, and some things haven't, and the one thing they are all struggling with is this thing called team building...

How do you make a team work? And how do you get a team in the first place? I don't have the answers, but I continue to advice my directors to do several things - dare to give space to other people to take initiative, allow people ownership over projects and ideas, recognize the team members as individuals and follow up with them on the individual level, organise interesting quality events that attract new team members. I think the most scary of these is allowing other people to take initiative. We are all so ambitious, we want things to be the the best and be done as soon as possible, but sometimes we have to lean back and realise that sometimes that means not doing things ourselves. I must say though that my directors are good at delegating, this isn't a issue we have a lot, but something that was a hard lesson for me when I first headed a project.

Next council meeting will be special, I'm taking them all out for a big dinner in a private dining room in central London - both directors and deputies, and we're going to talk about how things have gone, and how we can take JCI London to the next level. In a way, all the meetings we've had so far this year has been building up to this meeting. Creating awareness of membership issues and processes, why people join and why they stay, how we brand ourselves, how we promote ourselves. I'm planning to challenge my council a bit, go outside the box, but at the same time create the confidence in each individual that this is something we can achieve.

I'm also very excited about our new marketing budget. I've been sourcing designers online, both friends and strangers, and now we're developing a long list of everything we would like to have made. We plan on creating a new graphic profile for JCI London, a profile that is both in tune with our history and our particularities as a chamber, as well as conforming to the global JCI branding guidelines. Very exciting!

In addition to the JCI London council meeting last night, I also attended the London Chamber of Commerce's council meeting. Every President of JCI London sits on the "grown up" chamber's council, and its a lot of fun!
 Yesterday we learned about the recent election (and it was very timely, as Brown just resigned the minute our briefing started!), and I learned about what goes into running a professional chamber of commerce. Its interesting to see they deal with a lot of the same issues - membership, press and meeting, though apparently on a different level.

I also really enjoy connecting with the individuals on the council, and last night left my head spinning with ideas and possibilities. And about a million lunch dates. And spinning from wine, something that my JCI council had to deal with when I was chairing our meeting right after...Did that positively or negatively affect my marketing proposal? Not so sure, but it went through!

Marketing workshop - extending our visibility & influence

Yesterday we had a (I think fun) workshop on marketing and PR for JCI London. We looked at JCI London's circle of influence, target groups, the ideal organisation, members - why they join, why they stay, and then how we can become visible.

We started out looking at the organisation and what our target groups would be, then we decided on 5 areas to brainstorm on using the GPS for Enterprise from Flanders DC (which the team really liked), and finally what would be our immediate action items.

 We also looked at facebook ads. I've been playing around on facebook, and though we've had quite a few click-throughs to JCI London's website, we've not had anyone signing up to the event I've promoted (for one I promoted last night's marketing workshop, but as this was election night for one of the probably most exciting elections in the UK since about 30 years....not many Brits turned up), the other event I've been promoting is the new member event the 27th, maybe still too far ahead.

To the left you can see one of the facebook ads, it will go live around the 20th of May, linking to a new member event the 27th, target - women university graduates in London. I got some advice on facebook ads from Marius Fredriksen, from JCI Evolution, and I'll probably go back to him ask for some more once I start to learn a bit more how it all works.

Here's one of the outcomes - some focus areas and the activity level we foresee in the various areas. Short term we want to focus on promotional literature (including fridge magnets, pop up banners etc) and things that enhance the membership experience and identity (merchandise). We then want to focus on media and the press, and extending JCI's visibility and influence in London's civic space (see a forthcoming blog post on leading beyond authority).

All in all - a fruitful workshop and I look forward to seeing what the team will come up with moving forward. 

Book review - Body language

So I'm reading an excellent book, but I'm really annoyed with the title. For a while I debated not telling you the title at all, just give you a non-descriptive link, but here it goes. Don't judge a book by its cover is a cliche, but this is really one of those moments. 

Winning Body Language: Control the Conversation, Command Attention, and Convey the Right Message without Saying a Word

And why do I not like the title? Because it sounds like one of those "how to win friends" books. This isn't a book filled with postures and how-to's, its a book that goes deep into the human psychology and history and looks at why and how we react to non-verbal communication the way we do.Why are we so nervous in front of a public? Bowden argues that it is because we've activated the same triggers in our brain as we would have activated if we were attacked by a mountain lion, its a pure fear thing, hormonal. And because of another hormone, oxytocin, its natural for us humans to mirror each other. So if you are standing up there on stage sending out fear signals, guess what the public is feeling?

The book its an easy - and entertaining - read. The concepts aren't easy, and its Bowden's experience as a speaker and his grasp of these concepts and the English language that makes it easy to read. Well worth your time.

who are you disapppointing?

One of my favorite poems is "The Guy in the Glass", it reminds me that the only person who will be disappointed in me, is myself. Not my parents, not my friends, not by my boss, not the JCI members, only myself. Of course - other people can be disappointed if I promise something then don't do it, or forget, but that's not the kind of disappointment I'm talking about here.

I'm talking about the more serious kind of disappointment, the am-I-fulfilling-my-expectations-to-life disappointment, the one that can lead to serious self-doubt and self-confidence issues.

One of the first things I say to members that want to get involved in JCI activities is to not disappoint themselves. In general, JCI members are ambitious young people, we see something we don't like and we fix it, we get ideas, we implement them, we go for our dreams, go-getters, sometimes even overachievers - you can call us a lot of things. And sometimes you can call us disappointed. Not in each other, but in ourselves.

Sometimes we think we can do everything, we'll spend an hour each and every morning working on JCI things, we'll get Richard Branson to come speak for us, we'll do everything, go to all meetings, travel...

And its a killer.

How, as a leader, do you deal with disappointment in a team? From an email saying "I'm sorry I didn't do what you expected", to someone who is so discouraged by their own efforts they don't even want to come to meetings any more? We've all been there - the project you don't even want to think about, the contact you should have emailed ages ago and now its too late, the note to yourself telling you to follow up on that lead...

So I do my best to not have to deal with it, telling my directors to not set themselves up for disappointment. I tell them that I will never be disappointed in them, in JCI we all participate as much as we can, but that they can be disappointed in themselves, and its a lot worse. It is better to give more than expected than less.

Yes - I am only disappointing myself, but is that really an "only"? Are we not the harshest judges of ourselves and our accomplishments?

I don't believe in living without expectations, I believe in following your dreams, being your best, but also keeping it all within reality. You should have a big hairy goal, an ambition you think is only 50% achievable, a dream to work towards and live up to. Just keep it --- you know ---- semi realistic. 

Investing in yourself - youth getting a competitive edge over their peers

There has been much written about unemployed and lazy youths having to get off their backsides. Youths – together with the rest of the UK – are facing the challenges of the recession, but not everyone is making this a disadvantage. In voluntary organisations we see many youths rediscovering the value of being an active citizen, not only to their communities, but also to their CVs and career prospects.

As President for the biggest Junior Chamber in the country, I see more and more young people looking to find that particular competitive advantage that will propel them into working life, fill that elusive gap on the CV, or help them make the next step on the career ladder.

Youth involvement in voluntary and political organisations decreased dramatically during the nineties and the first decade of the new millennium. Why? We-the voluntary organisations- don’t know. Did life get too comfortable, Did people not care about anyone but themselves? What we are seeing now is that involvement and membership in voluntary and civic organisations is again on the rise. Youths, including myself, are realizing the benefit of working for something other than our account balance.

Are we seeing the rebirth of the active and engaged youth? The abundance of jobs our parent’s generation got used to simply does not exist any more, jobs have to be created, they are not up for grabs any more.

JCI promotes youth leadership and entrepreneurship and we see that those members who lose their jobs rarely stay unemployed. Investing in oneself is worth more than investing in the bank. Getting proven hands on experience from a voluntary organisation, be it project management, leadership or budgeting, pays more in terms of real and tangible opportunities to get the dream job than any number GCSEs or A levels. Not forgetting the social and professional networks involvement in a voluntary organisation allows a person to build.

Branding JCI UK

Those who've known me for a while know I love making dresses, its just I've not had the time the last couple of years.

Combine that with a need for more visibility for JCI UK in international JCI circles and a lazy Sunday among inventive girlfriends (and pitchers of pimm's), and you have the result you can see on the left - formal dresses with a hint of Union Jack.

The greatest Chamber in the world

...at least that's our ambition.

Last night at the JCI London monthly council meeting we had a workshop with Sofie on branding, We analyzed the brand of the After Eight chocolate, then we looked at how we brand JCI London, and how we would like JCI London to be seen.

And it turns out JCI London's members are pretty ambitious! Which I like! Not only do we feel we live in the greatest city in the world, we also believe we are members of the greatest JCI chamber in the world (but to not sound too cocky, we modified it as "Becoming the greatest JCI Chamber in the world"). 

Next council meeting the 10th of May will be on membership - who our members are, how can we encourage them to be (and stay) active, how can we get more... All JCI London members are welcome. After the meetings we normally go to the pub for a pint of beer and some informal chatting.