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May 21, 2020 By Lynda Foster

Podcast: A Leader’s Guide to Getting More, Fresh, High Quality Ideas from Their Teams 050420

Join John Phillips, President of the Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council, along with Mary Miller, Director of RAMP, and the authors of A Leader’s Guide to Getting More, Fresh, High Quality Ideas from Their Teams Lynda McNutt Foster, CEO of Cortex Leadership Consulting and Richard Hammer, Associate VP Cloud Factory, 1901 Group, in an in-depth conversation about the findings of a 5-year study that included over 100,000 data points with more than 3,500 leaders and their teams.

Transcript of Podcast A Leader’s Guide to Getting More, Fresh, High Quality Ideas from Their Teams:

John:              Good afternoon. I’m John Phillips, your host and along with your co-host, Mary Miller. Thank you for joining us for another edition of Business at Lunch show brought to you by the Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council. Each day at the noon hour, we seek to talk with the leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs in the Roanoke and Blacksburg regions, to learn how they are using innovative strategies and just sheer determination to navigate their way through this unique period as we together create the new economy for our future. 

It is Monday and that brings in our regular topic, what’s working at work with Lynda McNutt-Foster and today we’re focusing on innovation of ideas in the workplace. In addition to Lynda, we have a second guest today. If you remember Lynda has been labeled a business icon by Valley Business Front and is a regular contributor to Forbes magazine. She is a certified conversational intelligence executive coach which makes her perfect for this talk show and she is joining us live on today’s show. 

John:              Great to have you join us and we also have Richard Hammer, Senior IT Consultant, Data Analysts, Enterprise Architect and Associate Vice President of the CloudFactory, and also with 1901 group. Richard, I see a vast experience leading teams involved in software development, and you’re certainly an expert in business analytical tools. Please take a minute and introduce yourself to our audience.

Richard:         Thank you for that introduction. The thing that I like most about what I do is building and tuning high velocity teams across the industry. I’ve had a successful 30-year career doing it and really enjoy working with this region on growing the companies and solving problems here.

John:              We appreciate you joining us for today’s show. Today’s show gets us a great opportunity to introduce a paper that Lynda has worked on. She says the RBTC and Cortex, Lynda ‘s consulting group. A first five part of a five-year study about the ability of leaders and their teams to generate new and fresh ideas. Title of the study A Leader’s Guide to Getting More Fresh High Quality Ideas from Their Teams Right Now, as she labels it “A Wake-Up Call to Any Leader That Needs to Innovate and Thrive”. Especially important in today’s environment as we’ve entered and continue to be in a marketplace where businesses and organizations are requiring constant creativity and problem solving. So, Lynda , tell us about this idea and what fascinated you about degeneration?

Transcript of Podcast A Leader’s Guide to Getting More, Fresh, High Quality Ideas from Their Teams:

Lynda:            Well, I’m just going to admit it. I am Lynda and I am an ideator. I grew up in a family of ideators. I’m someone who literally has now created an entire career about creative problem solving. So, I was fascinated and very curious about why when I was on some teams that worked, and we innovated and created the sort of break through things if I was in a position of authority. When I wasn’t in a position of authority, why were most of my ideas shut down? So, I’ve always been curious about that and I started gathering research about it. 

As I started working with teams, in anywhere from 12 person companies to 1,500 to 5,000 person companies, I started seeing these patterns of behavior. We started collecting data pretty extensively. We had to actually create a brand new software system to be able to collect the data. I wanted to see what’s happening between coaching sessions? What’s happening after the meetings? I wanted to observe teams and take notes on what they were saying to each other. 

So, we had to build an entire new technology. We had to figure out how to do conversational mapping and we had to be able to get people to want to and understand why self-awareness through assessments was helpful to them. The data would be helpful to us in helping to solve the problems that they were seeing on their teams. Look, McKinsey & Company came out with 94% of leaders want their teams to generate ideas and be innovative and none of them are for those people like they’re very disappointed. 

Well, that’s one of the main reasons they come to me and us is to go, “Wait, when we bring up something and say, ‘Hey, I need new fresh ideas.’ It’s crickets.” So, we have to do all that on a budget and we had to stay viable as an organization. So, none of it mattered at all. It wasn’t like this was theoretical. We had to stay in business so we needed to get results from our clients. There’s not a lot of studies out there like that from midsize and small companies and so this was a very unique set of data points that we’ve collected over these five years.

John:              Well, let me allow Mary to jump in here and ask some questions as well.

Mary:             So, Lynda, this journey sounds fascinating. Let me ask you what did jump out at you? What startled you as you began to look at the data? 

Lynda:            There were two things Mary. There’s like two parts. One was the data itself. So, it was very — from a macro level, we were easily seeing that only 12% to 19% of leaders themselves and their team members were strong in idea generation. Only 5% or 6% of leaders were strong in vision. So, it’s a four-part process: coming up with a vision, figuring out which ideas would work, planning and execution. You’ve got only 25% of any of the teams or even leadership groups who were strong in that first part. So, that didn’t really startled me. What startled me is when I asked the data person that I was working with at the time, he kind of pulled reports for me, I said, “Can you tell me, there’s a score that comes out in these assessments that says that people literally actively avoid one of the phases?”

What startled me in the data part was that 58% of the people had their lowest scores in ideation or idea generation, so to speak, 58%. 23% avoided vision. So, you sort of sit there and go, “Wait a minute, they’re not only not doing it, they’re actively avoiding it.” Then the second part was, how are they avoiding it? What does it actually sound like? What was so fascinating and doing the conversational mapping, actually, within meetings and after meetings with these quick touch points of the software that we had them literally like talk to it became a coach in their pocket, was that small things made a huge difference. 

If a leader was in a meeting and he was asking for ideas, and somebody threw out an idea, and he or she immediately said, “No, no. We’ve tried that before.” If an idea was shot out and someone said, “Yeah, but –” “Yeah, we’ve tried that before. That’s not going to work.” Then even if someone was strong and the beginning of entering a team with ideation those micro moments, those small conversations that we started tracking were shutting them down. So, exactly what 94% of leaders were saying they wanted, they were actually actively working against the outcome that they wanted to have.

Mary:             Wow. A lot to dig into there. So, talk to me just a little bit about why you think that’s the case. Why is it that we say we want one thing, and yet we don’t embrace it when we hear it? Or do we not know what we’re hearing? 

Lynda:            This is what I think, what’s so hard — this is a great question, Mary, because adult behavior change is very difficult. The success rate on adult behavior change is so low, that it’s studied extensively. So, we’re unconscious of most of our behaviors. In other words, if you for years have been in meetings and you say, “Yeah, but –” You say, “Yeah, but –” You don’t even know you said it. You’re not intentionally trying to shut down an idea. You’re not even aware that small thing just shut down somebody.

You don’t know that just by changing it like to “yes and”, you invite the person, it validates the other person. So, sometimes we’re focused on these big changes, right? These huge cultural changes, these massive, huge, expensive programs and that’s not what our research would say. Our research showed that these micro moments, changing people’s vocabulary, adding rules of engagement that they had to follow in meetings made a huge difference in whether the teams were getting better and better at creative problem solving.

John:              Well, let me jump in here and let everybody know that I’m John Phillips and you’re listening to Business at Lunchbrought to you by the Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council. Today, we are with Lynda McNutt-Foster and Richard Hammer, who together are the authors of A Leader’s Guide to Getting More, Fresh, High Quality Ideas from Their Teams Right Now.We hope you’ll join in our conversation by calling in at 540-795-2510. That’s 540-795-2510. 

We know if you’ve worked with any type of team, you’ve been through interesting situations to create ideas and motivate the team and we’d love to hear what do you have to say on this conversation. Let me bring Richard in to this conversation. Richard, tell me about what brought you into working with Lynda on the project and how you’re experienced in the IT world when it comes to what you guys found in this study how it all relates together?

Richard:         Well, John, the truth of it is working with instruments like DISC and Team [strengths? 00:10:13], you get a really good sense of what’s working, what’s not, and why. Having the opportunity to build and tune this model with Lynda, was also a lot of fun. We worked with the teams. We collected the data. We did data analysis. As you as you dive into the data, as Lynda shared, you start to see some patterns and then you start to see some exceptions. 

What’s most fascinating about those exceptions is bringing them to light and having those as hard or, as Lynda likes to say, sweaty conversations to figure out what can pivot and what can change and how to better engage the team strengths and ideation in particular. It’s been a really fun journey with Lynda and the team at Cortex and I don’t know that I would change any of those work that we did in helping the region grow.

John:              Mary, I’ll let you take it back from here.

Mary:             So, Richard, it’s so interesting. It’s all so interesting. So, I want to summarize again, what you saw and I’ve often said this, it’s easy to get some big things right. It’s all the little things that do actually add up and matter. So, what you all saw was some patterns. Can you speak to at all what the big takeaways are besides this –? I like this “yes and”. We can share that. Can you speak to some of the takeaways that you might be employing with the 1901 group?

Richard:         I can speak to that at length, but we only have like 45 minutes, so I’ll try and keep it concise. The single largest empowering piece is drawing people in in a way that they’re comfortable being drawn in and creating an environment where that comfort can exist without conflict or the perception of conflict. As Lynda was saying, even something as simple as pivoting “but” to “yes, and” is really important when you’re learning how to interact with and share ideas. Being included or invited to the conversation is also important. 

A lot of time folks won’t speak up if they believe their view is already represented or if they believe they’re going to be shut down. The shutdown is a receiving perspective. It’s not the intention generally of a manager or a director to shoot somebody down. They’re trying to be ruthlessly efficient and solve the problem. They have a desire to be short, fast and specific. Taking a moment to create the culture and draw people in in these micro expressions and micro interactions is a really key factor. Keeping things focused on the organizational mission is also critical. 

So, if we are tackling complex problems with clients, ensuring that we understand both the big picture and that the devils really in the details of execution is a critical success factor. Having everyone on the same page. Having everyone make sure they understand and can articulate that mission and know they have a voice and we are committed to listening to that voice is a key success factor. Those are just a couple.

Transcript of Podcast A Leader’s Guide to Getting More, Fresh, High Quality Ideas from Their Teams:

Mary:             So, Lynda, I just want to throw out to both of you.  I’m just thinking out loud here in this conversation. Is it helpful to have just a meeting or just a group think around ideation, rather than kind of hitting on it really quickly and moving on to something else? Is that a safer place? Because we would all like all of our team to be able to share their best thinking. I don’t think any leader wants to shut down the best thinking. We want to let it out. I’m wondering what kind of environment — what if we’ve been the leader who has been shutting it down and we want time to think on this and change to become the leader that wants to engage? See if you can help me walk through some of those changes. 

Lynda:            I think the best way to explain it is through an example. I’m working with literally a team I’ve been working with for the last month. So, they’re in crisis. They’re in a segment of talent acquisition that’s shifting in a big way. The presenting problem that the team leader was having was, “Hey, we’re going to have to come up with some innovation as we move through this and afterwards with our recruiting team, and I’m not getting ideas. I’m getting crickets.” This is a real life story. I just got out of a session, the fifth session this morning to unlock and so I actually had to do a lot of individual one on one conversations with the team members to see what their perspective was. 

We identified that there were some trust issues. We did a couple of sessions on trust and what might be breaking down trust, what could build it? Then I had them each get together in pairs with two or three of their team members and do an exercise around trust so that they could have that “sweaty conversation” individually. Also, they didn’t understand clearly what right could look like. They didn’t know how to develop that, that vision. Their team leader was shutting them down I found out, literally just by their body language. So, she would be sitting in a meeting and she’s just a thinker. 

So, she was sitting back in her chair and having this sort of emotional space. It was making all these behavioral types that were the opposite of hers think that she was thinking bad things about what they were saying. So, it was the thing that was like, once I got the trust built, once they understood what it was, once I said, “Hey, team leader, smile every now and then.” Use a couple of terms to reinforce that they’re on the right channel. 

We just had a session that was one of the most innovative I’ve had with the team. So, within one month, they went from total crickets to they literally today came up with 25 ideas and a specific executable plan for each one of them to start executing. So, that’s an example of what right looks like and what you’re going to need to do. You got to slow down the beat at first.

Mary:             So, Lynda, I think we’re going to take a break here in just a second. Maybe I know John could invite people to call in with questions. I’m wondering at this moment, if an outside point of view was what was needed to move that team forward. I’m just going to ask you, I’m going to come back after our break and talk a little bit about some of the other data in your paper. This is five-years worth of what you were observing. We’ve talked a little bit about it. You’re generously providing it as a download off of the newsletter on Wednesday. I think that’s incredibly generous and it opens up a kind of opportunity for a conversation across our region for this ideation that maybe we hadn’t been focused on. 

I heard a couple of comments about somebody may be stressed, maybe people aren’t smiling as much, all of those things are possible among any of us right now. I think there’s plenty of stress. So, I can imagine that solving problems might, under this situation, be a little more challenging. At the same time, we need to give each other that kind of — the freedom to be themselves as to how they’re addressing. So, John, you want to invite people to call in and I think it’s almost time for the news.

John:              Well, I will. I’m John Phillips, and you’re joined in with the Business at Lunchshow. Today, we’re fortunate to have Lynda McNutt-Foster talking about degeneration along with Richard Hammer, and together they are the authors of A Leader’s Guide to Getting More Fresh, High Quality Ideas from Your Teams Right Now. I hope you’ll call in, join in our conversation at 540-795-2510. Before we go to that break, we’ve got a few more minutes. I’ll ask you, Lynda, to talk a little bit about the string zones that are in generating and executing new ideas, you list out four of them in your paper. It’d be interesting to go through them and see how they relate to this conversation.

Lynda:            Yeah, I’m going to run through those very quickly and then I’m going to pitch it to Richard to explain — Mary had a great thought about, is it helpful to have somebody from the outside sort of come in and look and is that more powerful than the leader trying to fix this stuff on their own? I think he can speak to that because he’s worked in those types of environments and had outsiders come in and he can talk to that. I would say, look, visionaries you give them a white sheet of paper. So, that’s the first phase. The people who are strong in vision can answer the question, what do we want to have at the end of all of this? 

If it’s in recruiting, it might be we want to have great relationships with our candidates so they remember us. Then what are some ideas on the ways to get there? So people who are strong in ideation are very good at just throwing out ideas. “Well, maybe we could do a software. Maybe we can have a virtual event. Maybe we can do some virtual lunches. Maybe we could –” just all kinds of things that would lead to get you to your vision, and the outcome that you want. Once you have the ideas, the next strength is planning. So, planners love feasibility. They love to be able to go, “Hey, that idea won’t work. I don’t think that will work, but you know what, this one is the one we should start with, and I think we can really make it happen.”

Then finally, execution is these people just have a list. They like to get things done. Tell me what it is. They’re happiest when they can be involved a little bit in the planning because the person who’s faced front with execution is the one who’s right reputation is on the line, right? So, what was brilliant about the work that Richard and I did was where I was strong, he had offsetting strengths and there were some crossovers.

We had people on the team as we did this research that had strengths in each area. That’s really what you want to kind of do is create a team environment with a system to do this. Not relying on people’s strengths necessarily. So Richard, if there’s time bringing in an outsider, what do you think about that? How have you seen that work?

Transcript of Podcast A Leader’s Guide to Getting More, Fresh, High Quality Ideas from Their Teams:

Richard:         I think that the outsider provides a unique perspective and is able to listen without bias. All of us are in meetings, all of us have coworkers, some of us have had coworkers for 5, 10, 15 years. We know exactly what to expect. We anticipate what they’re going to say. We really kind of listened to reply versus really taking a moment to listen to understand. The value of an outsider coming in is they are truly invested in listening to understand and to better the environment. 

New employees are really the best outsiders that you can find because you hire somebody, and you bring them in, and the first four weeks that they come in, their eyes are innocent on everything you have going on. Even if they’re subject matter experts, even if they’re industry leaders, they’re trying to get a sense of where you are, of how you move, of how things move forward, of where the strengths are, of where the gaps are. They’re really trying to identify the culture and the environment so they can be successful as well. 

The outside consultants and coaches and trainers do that same thing and they are ruthlessly efficient to doing that. To kind of hit on a really important question that Mary asked, each of the core strength areas that we talked to, there’s a phase for and there’s dedicated time too. So, when you’re putting a vision down, the last thing you want to be doing is planning execution. When you’re doing ideation, the last thing you want to do is be shooting these ideas down, or trying to figure out how they work together or if they will work at all. 

So, each step is kind of a critical success factor that’s built on the others. There are small overlaps between them. Visionaries work with ideas really well back and forth to figure out what the master plan is. Ideators work with planners in figuring out where the boundaries are, as long as the planner understands that the boundary right now is ideation. Then executors really love to work with planners on the entry point to the work they need to get done. So, I hope that doesn’t require any further clarification.

John:              Richard, that helps. That’s a very good insight there and as we move toward the bottom of the hour, we’re move back over to the news and I I’ll turn it back over to Bill Trifiro here in a moment and we’ll be back after this news break and continue our discussion. I’m john Phillips and you’re back along with Mary Miller and you’re listening to Business at Lunchbrought to you by the Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council. Today, we are working with Lynda McNutt-Foster and Richard Hamer and together they are the authors of The Leaders Guide to Getting More, Fresh, High Quality Ideas from Their TeamsRight Now. 

Join in our conversation by calling in at area code 540-795-2510. That’s 540-795-2510 and help us with our conversation. Richard brought up before the break how someone who is new to the organization, a new hire comes in for the first couple of weeks with a entirely different set of eyes and that’s also a benefit of using a consultant in your company, but I’ll ask the question to Richard, to you and to Lynda, either one of you take it, on how to cultivate that new person and not shut those ideas down when they come into that organization.

Lynda:            I’ll jump in and then I’ll pitch it to Richard and just I do want to sort of get in here how lucky we were to get to work with Richard. We certainly couldn’t afford him. Thank God, what we do and the projects we were working on was something he found interesting. He’s very much about trying to solve really complex problems. So, I deeply appreciate that and what I — I’m going to repeat some something I said before, which was what’s working at work is mission value statements on a wall, on a poster that senior leadership sort of push out there are not what create an innovative team. What creates an innovative team is welcoming, making time for other people’s perspective. 

So, what it sounds like is “Hey, guys, we got a new team member. I can’t wait –” before you’ve been jaded or bias about any of us or this company, “Hey, I just want to have a session where we kind of tell you some of the problems that we’re having. I just want your first brand new thought about what you’re seeing.” So, that’s what I’m noticing is that rules of engagement where you literally say we appreciate other strengths and ability to contribute. We remain curious and issue practices like making time, specific time to gather different perspectives, and especially those that are new and youngest on the team are really valuable. What do you think, Richard?

Richard:         I think that’s valuable. I think having the ability to listen to understand is also critical. A lot of us are really in a hurry to listen to reply. We really don’t take a minute to embrace a different view that might be from the person beside us or in front of us. In a work environment, the creative genius that comes out of simply being present and saying, “That’s a really good idea” is rarely heard because we’re always moving on to that next step of execution and drive and solution. 

The key in addressing those boundaries with any team is really establishing a trust, as Lynda has rules of engagement are a key success factor, and then an openness to we’re going to fail. We’re going to get it wrong. We’re going to learn together. We already have failed. We’ve had great success at failing a lot of time because innovation comes out of failure. When a new team member joins, they’re going to be terrified and excited. When a consultant comes in, they’re going to be terrified and excited. When a coach comes in — but we’re not really ever terrified. But we are definitely excited because there’s always something new to understand. 

That’s where Lynda gets her passion. That’s why she’s an ideator and that’s why she really enjoys engaging these complex problems. I’m more on the technology side, everything is virtual. So, with enough time and money, if it can be imagined, it can be solved from a technology perspective. That can be inhibiting and that can be freeing because the investment is made. The key is really getting your key people to ideate in a safe environment with you.

Lynda:            Yeah, I’m just going to chime in and sort of talk about the crisis that we’re in right now as businesses. So, when you have a lack of ideation right now, what it sounds like is the marketplace is basically crashed underneath of us. The customers aren’t calling in. We can’t go see them the way that we used to. We don’t have enough resources. We don’t have enough money. We don’t know if — that’s what it sounds like on a team right now, if you’re stuck. 

What it sounds like on a healthy team, and I’m getting to see it all the time right now with some of the companies that we’ve worked with over the last few years, it sounds like, “Okay. Here’s the issue. We need to contact customers, but they don’t really want to hear about our product right now. What are five other ways that we can reach out to them and connect with them? Maybe we could do a newsletter. Maybe we could do a quick Zoom to teach some of our clients. Maybe we can have a virtual lunch with them and just listen to what they’re saying.” 

So, there’s differences right now between teams that went into it with tools and teams that didn’t have the ideation generation process in place to be able to get people unstuck from, “Oh, my gosh,” still in shock almost that what’s happening is happening. So, what do you think, Mary? 

Mary:             Yeah, Lynda, I’ve got all kinds of thoughts. I want to go back [inaudible 00:31:34] our listeners, I want to go back to week after week, early on, we talked about the DISC assessment, and understanding where our strengths are, and how we function. So, I go back as you’re building a team and the team that has these tools, that is who are your team members. I just really love Richard repeating again, listening to understand the importance of that, as everybody is really, I believe, bringing their best thoughts to the problem before. 

I want to tie in the paper and some of the data that you saw and hoping that our listeners will download that. The leader reading through that, could you just maybe talk about them coming out of the paper? What could be some real concrete first steps? Because not only are we — unless you talk about the problems and how challenging it is, right now, people can’t necessarily clearly formulate the totality of the problem. Would you agree with that? 

That we’re not quite sure when the situation [inaudible 00:32:56], people are talking about timing. They’re talking about needs. They’re talking about customers and how all of us are going through assessments and saying, “What is it we need? What do we have to do next? Who are our critical partners?” So, all of us are kind of in a similar situation and we need our leaders and our teams to step up. So, could you talk a little bit about Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, download the paper, read the paper? How could you bring your team together around the conversation in that regard? 

Lynda:            Yeah, I think that’s great. What I would say is one of the main conclusions is the ability of senior leaders and their managers to remain curious by actively seeking different perspectives from all levels of the organization. That’s one of the main takeaways. You guys have talked about that and we’ve talked about that. What I would say which is always so fascinating in the research and studies we do is how much money an organization will spend collecting data about their customers and the marketplace and all of this, and how they think their experience with people gives them the ability to instantly be able to identify what people’s strengths, behaviors and motivators are. 

I just did a test with a team earlier today where they guessed and all of them were wrong about their leader, and what was motivating her and what her highest behavioral type was and what her strengths was and things like that. So, we don’t guess what the marketplace is going to do, but yet we guess about people. I mean, it’s so cheap. I mean, you’re talking about you didn’t want to do a full study on your team for $2,500 to $5,000. I mean, a full in depth, give a specific outline of what you need to do to be more effective at creative problem solving and what type of methodology you need to apply to be better at experimentation. 

Here’s what we realized in the studies is nobody at work wants to seem stupid. So, they’re afraid to throw out their ideas. Why are they afraid to throw out their ideas? Because they don’t want to seem incompetent at their job. So, what can leaders do right now is exactly what Richard was talking about, which is listen to understand, listen for information, not confirmation. Lean in with curiosity. What that sounds like is going up to the youngest person on your team tomorrow and saying, “Hey, I haven’t only really heard your thoughts since this has been going on. What do you think?”

I don’t care if that’s a [inaudible 00:35:45]. I don’t care if it’s the city of Roanoke and it’s the person collecting “Thank you, God” or trash every day, once a week. Go to the front lines of your company of the people who are contacting your customers who are executing and ask them what they think. Just say, “Thank you.” Don’t shut them down. Don’t say, “Oh, yeah.” And give them an explanation. Just say, “What else are you thinking?” and listen for information.

John:              I’m John Phillips and you’re listening to Business at Lunch, along with Mary Miller, Lynda McNutt-Foster and Richard Hammer. We’re talking about generating ideas at work and they’re recently published article A Leader’s Guide to Get More, Fresh, High Quality Ideas from Their Teams Right Now. We hope you’ll join in our conversation by calling in at 540-795-2510. I’m curious to ask Richard and bring Richard into the conversation. We’ve talked a lot about how to continue ideas and the creation of ideas, but as a manager, how do you assess tolerance of ideas in your culture? If you’re a manager, how would you go about doing that?

Richard:         Wow. Assess the tolerance of ideas in my culture? I’m going to try and break that down a little bit. I think ideation is a challenging topic. I think when you’re talking about ideation, I don’t know that there is such a thing as a bad idea, in truth, when you’re when you’re going through the ideation phase. In fact, I actually have an exercise I do with teams sometimes when we’re stuck, when we’re looking at a network problem or a software problem or a cloud infrastructure problem.

I say, “Okay. We’re going to put everything traditional aside here. I’ve got 10 subject matter experts in the room. I’ve got opinions and frustration because we have this connectivity issue or this routing issue or the software issue or this security issue that we can’t get around.” I’ll say, “Throw everything that we know aside.” I erased the whiteboard completely and I say, “I would like to know every bad idea you can think of.” Obviously, the first answer is, well, the only secure computer is a computer that’s not on and plugged in and has no access to it behind the safe and the world can’t operate if compute is put that way. 

Now, the least safe computer is one that’s sitting out on the internet for anybody to do anything that they want to publicly. We’re looking for ideas on how to ensure safety, configuration, integrity of data, that processes are followed for access, that all the laws and regulations are followed, but I want every idea. I want the bad ideas. I want the good ideas. I want to spawn and foster thought and communication on solving the problem forward as opposed to shooting each other down or saying, “No, that won’t work.” Or saying, “The process doesn’t work that way.”

So, when you’re really focused on ideation, you’re completely open to anything and everything being possible no matter how ridiculous or absurd it may sound because if I were to say, “Hey, let’s just hook this computer up to the Internet, and let everybody access it.” One of my engineers might come back and say, “We could set up a DMZ, allow routing, provide secondary authentication, and really get by this problem we’re having with security by setting up a jump box or gateway.” 

All of a sudden, my stupid idea has become a gateway to understanding and discovery of a possible solution that hadn’t been visible before because it didn’t trigger the brain, the cortex to solve the problem. So, that’s kind of where I go with that endeavor when there are a tolerance issues or conflict issues involved in the team.

John:              What certainly puts the —

Lynda:            I’m just going to jump in there.

John:              Go ahead, Lynda.

Lynda:            I was going to jump in there because in the article on Wednesday and in the report you’re going to be able to download Wednesday, there’s actually five specific questions. So, everything that Richard is saying, is an exact way to sort of listen to your team and see what’s happening. There’s these five questions that leaders and their teams can sort of go through on Wednesday and say things like, “How many new ideas to solve your toughest challenges have you considered in the last week? Do the consultants you use work directly with senior leaders and your teams do not just generate ideas, which is the question, but do they teach you how to generate ideas in your teams? If polled, what percentage of meetings would you your people in your organization think are a waste of time?”

Our data is showing that you can literally eliminate 50% of the time in meetings and see only good things come from it. So, if you have an hour long meeting, cut it to a half an hour. If you have a 30-minute meeting, cut it to 15 minutes. Challenge yourself over the next two weeks to cut your meetings in half time wise and see if you don’t get more engagement from the people in that team. You know what? Measure your failure tolerance. Are you measuring your failure tolerance? How many things have failed?

I can tell you in some organizations that I’ve gone into, been a part of if you’re not failing consistently, they literally think you’re not trying. They’re like, “You haven’t considered enough ideas,” Because if everything that you do is working, that means you’re not pushing the envelope of innovation because innovation is messy. It’s just messy. It doesn’t even have to be expensive, as much as it is a little messy because it’s trial, error, trial, error.  I mean Thomas Edison, what did he say? I found 1000 ways not to make a light bulb. Nobody just wakes up tomorrow — and it’s innovation. It’s trial and error and we have to have tolerance for that. So, John, you were [inaudible 00:42:09].

John:              Recently we had — go ahead, Mary.

Mary:             I was just going to say so Lynda, we work with the startup community. Sometimes startups don’t realize how — we look to big companies, and we actually think they’ve got it figured out, but we’re not looking on the inside of big companies. So, many people attended an event with W. L. Gore, we brought someone in from W. L. Gore, who was head of ideation for the company. He literally funds teams to go down a road to develop something knowing clear well that probably only 2 in 10 will actually move to a later phase, that probably 8 in 10 will fail. 

So, it’s a really interesting concept in big corporations that get it right, they understand it, but small teams, they just are afraid of failure. They don’t think they have any tolerance for it. So, embracing failure, I love hearing that. I thought it was a really good comment that we have to expect to fail. We can’t be right all the time and we have to have some tolerance for that. So, I thought that was really a good takeaway for some of our smaller companies that might be listening. 

Lynda:            I mean, the question is, is as you get bigger, are you playing to win? Are you playing not to lose? So, that’s a big thing. The bigger the corporation, the more money the executives make, the more they have to lose. So, they’re literally just playing protectionism with their ideas. They’re, “I don’t want to fail because we’re the number one. We don’t really want to push it.” If you’re a startup entrepreneur, and I’ve been one four times and I’m grateful that I sold one to an international company and every one of them have made a profit, however small sometimes. But, certainly I’ve always made more money than I could make working for somebody else at any given time, which is a success for me. 

So, with entrepreneurs, it’s interesting. I mean, you have a certain runway. So it’s like, how long can you keep that runway going so you can experiment enough until you land on something that the marketplace finds viable and valuable. So, you can sustain sort of that customer relationship, whatever that is, for a period of time while you continue to experiment. So, a lot of entrepreneurs I see spend a lot of time in planning. They have an idea, which they think is a vision, or they have a vision that they think is an idea. Then they spend these months, sometimes years, planning exactly how it’s going to be before they actually interact with the first customer. 

I know Samantha Steidel in our region has done a ton of research and I think her dissertation is somewhat about this particular topic with entrepreneurship. So, they don’t even do any customer discovery. Then they go out there, they have $100,000, or sometimes a million, and it fails miserably because there was no experimentation in the customer discovery process. 

A Leader’s Guide to Getting More, Fresh, High Quality Ideas from Their Teams

Mary:             Yes. We really do focus that customer discovery and the importance of it and so you can’t develop in a vacuum. You’ve got to engage and find out what your customers, not only what they need, but what are they willing to buy? So, sometimes people need things but they’re not willing to buy them and there therein lies the challenge in and of itself. So, this has been really fascinating. I know we’re getting close to the end, John, I’m going to hand this back to you and let you wrap up with some questions. I look forward to next Monday with Lynda. Thank you, Lynda, so much and thank you, Richard, also appreciate that. 

Lynda:            Yeah. I think we have a caller on the line.

John:              Thanks, Mary. We do. So. I’ll let Bill put the caller through and Simone is on the line from Roanoke. 

Simone:          Hi.

John:              Simone, thank you for joining us today.

Simone:          Thank you. My question is related to small teams who have had no exposure at all to ideation. How do you suggest that a safe space is created for teams especially for those teams who have maybe had processes and ideas dictated to them and they have no idea where to begin? 

Lynda:            I’m going to answer that a little bit, and then also pitch it over to Richard. What I would say is there was a phenomenon that we witnessed in our conversational mapping, which was a learned helplessness. So, if a leader is really strong in ideation and vision, they sort of come to the team with those things, and then the team gets used to., “Okay. We need to plan it. We need to execute it.” It’s like a muscle that had atrophy. So, they just rely on the one ideator in the room who is generating the ideas. So, the ideas are in depth. So, it’s kind of a learned helplessness. What do you think, Richard, from what we’re seeing from our research?

Richard:         My favorite exercise in answering the question is the team building exercises where that ideator muscle is asked to make observations only and not speak. You present the team with a complex set of tabletop exercises, or a puzzle to solve or a game to play where it requires out of box ideation and a set of hard rules in what that works. You encourage the playfulness and freedom and laughter and failure in building trust amongst the team members in that fashion. So, it doesn’t even have to be a work related problem. It can be something as simple as or as complicated as we need to get to the movie theater, how do we do that? 

As the tabletop exercise and the narrator walk through the process, you discover certain things about how to get to the movie theater, whether you have a vehicle, whether you’re wearing shoes, whether it’s snowing, and you kind of walk through the exercise to see who the thinkers are. The next important piece in that process is observing who’s participating, but not necessarily speaking up and invite and engage them softly into the process. 

The number of times, folks sit quiet and observe because they don’t feel like they’re invited to participate is shocking to me. Explicitly inviting, to lightly inviting their participation makes a huge difference, especially if it’s a safe environment where there really isn’t judgment on it being wrong.

John:              Lynda, as we move toward the close of the hour and the close the show, tell us, if you were talking to entrepreneurs, for the first time on this subject, what are some of the key things you’d like them to take away from our conversation that we’ve had today?

Lynda:            Small things really matter. The way that you engage people in a conversation and invite them in, matters. It’s the small things, rarely the big things, that are affecting your ability to creatively problem solve. Embrace failure, do not shun it. Give rewards for the best idea that failed this month and do lessons learn from it. So, have some fun, and build trust on your team and start finding fun ways to creatively problem solve. That’s what I would take away, I would have people take away.

John:              Certainly, in today’s environment, as we move through a very uncharted territory and a restless economy, ideas are more important than ever. As we all come together and find different ways to solve the problems that many of which we have not had an opportunity to be through before, but together, these ideas can help us bring together the future of our businesses and as we move into the reopening of the economy, which we hope is very soon, we’ll be able to put many of those to work. We do want to close today and say I’m John Phillips and I appreciate you for listening to Business at Lunchbrought to you by the Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council.

Special thanks and appreciation to Lynda McNutt-Foster and Richard Hammer. Together, they are the authors of A Leader’s Guide to Getting More Fresh, High Quality Ideas from Their Teams Right Now. We truly value and appreciate our listening audience and appreciate your call in today and this concludes our show for today. We’ll return on Tuesday when we talk entrepreneurship with several technology startup companies from our region. We hope you’ll stay safe and have a successful day and I’ll turn this back to Bill.

Filed Under: Blog, Press Releases Tagged With: 1901 Group, A Leaders Guide, Blacksburg, Christiansburg, Cortex Leadershipship, Leader, Lynda McNutt Foster, North Carolina, rbtc, richard hammer, Roanoke, Survey, team

March 10, 2019 By Lynda Foster

NEW – Leadership Coaching Conversation for Peak Performance I Course

Accepting applications for Winter Program, 2020 Now!

Cortex Leadership Coaching Course - Be Better Than You Were Yesterday

This advanced track learning begins where other leadership programs leave off.  After you’ve learned the basics of understanding how to engage your team members, mastering your time, building trust with others, adapting to different behavioral preferences, becoming a better problem solver, and getting better results through others, you are ready to take the next step in leading through coaching.

Whether you took an executive leadership course with Cortex or completed one with another organization or college, you will find relevant and applicable tools and build your skills quickly in coaching, mentoring and consulting your team members to peak performance through Leadership Coaching Conversations I.

In a recent Harvard Business Review study they found that more than 80% of managers/leaders who thought they were coaching their direct reports were actually consulting them.  They also found that the skill of coaching can easily be taught.  The key components of becoming a better performance development coach includes the skills of active listening, building and maintaining trust, emotional and conversational intelligence, and asking quality questions.

Leadership coaching conversations will be a unique experience to increase your coaching and emotional intelligence skills sets and practice and will give you ample opportunities to practice what you learn.  It is in the practice of coaching that skill is truly built.

This course will leave participants with an increased ability to coach themselves and their team members to achieve their peak performance.

How long does the course take?

2 – Full Day In-Person, Live Sessions

2 – 2-hour coaching practice clinics that can be completed in-person or via Zoom video conferencing

5 – One-hour live, video training with author of content with your small, 10-12 person leadership cohort

8 – Hours of homework

Course includes:

Cortex Coaching Enhancement Platform is designed to track the comprehension of the coursework, motivate you to take action, and ensure that you execute what you have learned.  These tools are provided for 4 months with the ability to provide progress reports on the participants forward momentum.  They include an interactive “coach in your pocket” for on the spot instruction Articles/research that allow you to take a deeper dive into selected learning modules

Live Full-Day Sessions:

With a focus on the content you will learn in the cohort video conferencing sessions, you will experience a 2 full days of working with other cohort members and Cortex Certified Coaches to receive the instruction and evaluation you need to improve your craft of leadership coaching conversations.

This will be an immersive experience that takes our past coaching clinics to a whole new level of instruction and practice.

Coaching Clinics:

In addition to your deep dive days you will also have the opportunity to practice your coaching conversation skills during one of the offered coaching clinics.  Whether you are in-person or on Zoom video you will experience a structured learning environment that allows you ”test drive” what you have learned with fresh faces and a desire to be coached.

One of the participants of a past coaching clinic made these comments about his experience:

“I find the coaching clinics refreshing. When trying to coach my own staff the day to day work that has to get done can get in the way; what should be a transformational conversation often becomes transactional. There are task lists, deadlines, projects to be done. By coaching others I’m able to focus just on the skills I need to develop as a coach and on the person in front of me.”

-Nathan Flinchum

City of Roanoke

Syllabus

Coaching For Peak Performance – The Cortex Coaching Method, Part 1

It’s easy to think you are coaching your team members if you are the one doing the evaluation of your skills.  To be an effective coach you will need to learn the core skills of coaching others and have different types of coaching methods depending on the person and the circumstance.

Performance development occurs when the person can trust that you have their best interest in mind.  To accomplish this you must first be sure that they understand their role and they feel appreciated for working hard to execute that role.  Your employees need to receive effective feedback on how they can improve their performance and trust that what right looks like for you is something they are capable of achieving.  When those factors are applied, only then is the table set for coaching to occur.

Through the use of the proprietary Cortex Peak Performance model, you will be able to identify your high potential team members and coach them to reach their maximum contribution potential.  This simple yet comprehensive model will help you set up effective coaching conversations with your team members and move them from the high potential zone to the high performance zone.

The learning objectives for this segment are:

•The four R’s of Peak Performance coaching:  Roles, Recognition, Review, and Refine

•How to define the roles of those on your team and set them up for success and maximum contribution

•How to properly appreciate and recognize the efforts of those who contribute to the team’s success

•How to effectively review and evaluate the performance of your team to increase engagement and alignment with the team’s mission and vision

•How to successfully navigate the conversations required within each step to move the conversation from evaluation to appreciation and ultimately to coaching

Active Listening – The Cornerstone of Effective Conversations

Effective listening skills are crucial in order to build trust and coach others.  This module breaks down the keys to active listening and teaches you how to listen from 3 different centers to not only hear what others’ are saying but also to capture the emotions and intent in every conversation. 

The learning objectives of this segment are: •How to become a better active listener through demonstrating the 5 key elements of active listening i •How to leverage the listening strengths and overcome the listening challenges of your unique behavioral style to better communicate with other behavioral styles •How to listen from the 3 different centers:  your head (what they are thinking); your heart (what they are feeling); and your gut (what they have experienced) •Practice what you learned •

Coaching For Peak Performance – The Cortex Coaching Method, Part 2

The best intentions can occur between a manager/leader and their direct report.  They want to have a coaching session, yet it usually turns into a conversation where few questions are asked and a specific desired outcome of the conversation is reached. 

Managers/leaders need a simple and effective coaching model to follow to create trust, have the team member feel heard and understand, and develop a plan to take the next step of their development journey.  This is why the Cortex Coaching Method was developed.  The method will provide managers/leaders with an easy to use and apply tool that they can feel confident and comfortable to use in the performance development process.

The learning objectives for this segment are:

•Learn the Cortex Coaching Model – its origin and why it is proven to be effective

•How to use the method to better structure a performance development coaching session

•How to use it with other, simple tools to keep the growing going Discover additional tools that provide quality questions for any level or phase of the performance development spectrum

The Coursework also includes:

Exactly how to prepare to coach for each of the 4 types of coaching conversations which are:  performance management, development management, trust/relationship building (or rebuilding), and check-ins (accountability).

•Best practices for coaching in the moment through conflict

•Proven techniques to quickly build rapport with others

•How to use empathy to build connection

Contact [email protected] or [email protected] for more information on this course and others designed to make you an even better leader.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Christiansburg, Coaching, Cortex Leadership, Leadership, lynchburg, performance, Richmond, Roanoke, Training

September 30, 2018 By Lynda Foster

One Path to Solving Your Biggest Problems at Work

Try this Path to Problem Solving this week

Problem SolvingIt can be confusing.  One minute you need to smooth over an upset team member.  The next, you need to hit a deadline on a report that is due.  You need to jump on a conference call and send out an email to that customer that wants a quick response.  You get to Friday and it feels like nothing truly important got done.  A month can go by you’re still battling the same issues you did last quarter.  What are you supposed to focus on?  Is it what the customer wants?  Or is it what you promised your team member you would get done? Maybe the most important task is getting that report that was due last week finished and sent out?

It’s easy to say you need to focus on the intersection between what truly matters and that which you can control.  It is much harder to pinpoint exactly what those things are and most importantly, to execute them.

Start here.

Begin with the end in mind by filling in the blanks because it’s important to create clarity before trying to solve any problem you are facing:

  1. If we get to the end of the year and ________________ is not complete the consequences will be significant to our team or organization.
  2. If we don’t ____________________________, we will not complete that thing that has such high consequences.
  3. What we need to do is ___________________________, to make certain we complete that thing.

Try this if you are stuck.

  1. Am I or are we focusing on things that are not within our control right now and therefore wasting time and energy that could be better spent elsewhere? Do we know what right will look like December 31, 2018?
  2. What is within our control right now, that we can change, fix, or complete? Do those tasks or issues work towards our goal of what right looks like?
  3. Is there anything that can be removed from our task list so that we can fully focus on tackling the things that matter most to achieving what right looks like on December 31, 2018?

If all else fails, do this.

  1. Stop. Really.  Just stop.  You could be operating from a place of anxiety which will not result in the best outcomes or your highest-level thinking.  Take a day to observe what is really happening in yours or others work flow.  You could be dealing with a systems issue.  If you have time to redo things constantly and fix things that are messed up or done improperly you have time to observe and plan for better outcomes.
  2. Get a thinking pair. Find someone who will ask you great questions and be curious about what you are doing, how you are doing things, and why you are doing certain things at all.  Curiosity is key here.  Your thinking pair is not an “expert” but rather a specialist in asking great questions that bring out our highest-level thinking.  The answers are there, you may not be seeing them from the perspective you are at.
  3. Unplug and relax. Sometimes we’ve worn ourselves out trying to solve the same problems over and over again.  Our brain needs a break.  Take a drive.  Go for a walk or run.  Turn off your phone, don’t check your email for a few hours, take some nice deep breaths and allow your brain to do its best job possible to solve some of your toughest problems.

Finally, it’s important to remember that competence breeds confidence.  You got this!

 

 

 

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Charlotte, Coaching, Cortex, cortex consulting, Cortex Leadership, england, Lynda McNutt Foster, problem solving, right look like, Roanoke, Training, Vermont

September 23, 2018 By Lynda Foster

Stress Busters – Quick remedies for short-term stress and management techniques for the long-term

Stress Busters

There is no way to completely eliminate stress.  Regardless of the job you do or do not have, your income level, where you live, or your responsibilities, you will experience stress.  Finding ways to manage the stress to create an outcome that results in a healthy state of mind is important to reaching your highest level outcomes.

The most important aspect of stress management is having some type of plan for dealing with acute stressors and for long-term situations that cause stress.

So what’s your plan?

Short-term remedies

Try one or more of these when you find yourself in an acutely stressful situation.  These can occur when things occur that you did not expect or have planned for.  Acute stressors tend to appear more often if you do not have an adequate plan in place that takes all factors into consideration.

Turn off the notifications on your phone and email.

If your phone or computer is constantly dinging and binging at you all day and night you are operating in a reactionary way to others requests.  Perhaps that’s your job.  Many times, though, you simply haven’t thought of a better way to deal with necessary demands for your time and energy.

If you are in an acutely stressful situation, and you can turn things off to make to create some distance between you and the demands.  Make the world quiet for a moment so you can switch on your highest level thinking.

Appreciate.

Appreciation and gratitude are the antidotes for anxiety and anger.  Many times we feel frustration and stress because we want things to be different then what they are.

Stopping to appreciate someone or something will help switch on your higher level thinking and immediately improve your decision making capabilities.

Stop.  Breathe.  Store.

Sometimes things occur and we feel as though we need to address them immediately.  Many times, however, the proper response is no response, at the moment.  When you feel your blood pressure rising, try this method.

Stop.

Breathe.

Take several deep breathes.

Slowly breathe in through your nose for a count of 8, hold it for a count of 4, then breathe out for a count of 8.  This will reduce the pressure on your amygdala (the almond-shaped gland in your brain that creates that flight, fight, freeze or appease impulse) and will switch on your pre-frontal cortex (the CEO or decision making part of your brain).

Store. 

Does the situation that is causing you acute stress need your immediate attention or can you store the data that is coming in for you to think about later when you have some distance from it and time to figure out a long-term rather than a short-term solution for it.

Stretch.

Thoracic extension: Put your hands behind your head and bend your upper body over your chair’s back as far as possible. Draw your shoulder blades together and hold for two seconds. Release. Repeat eight times.

Hip-flexor stretch: Place one foot on a chair and lean forward while extending your arms overhead. Gently arch your back while moving your arms (keep them straight) back slightly. Hold for two seconds. Do eight reps.

Break it down.
If the acute stressor is of a significant size when it presents itself, break it down into small pieces and tackle the most impactful one, first.  Perhaps you’ve heard the saying, “How do you eat an elephant?”, one bite at a time, of course.

Long-Term Solutions

Exercise.

The best way to increase your ability to manage stress effectively can be getting some sort of regular exercise.  Even a short walk, 3x a week, can make a big difference over time.  Creating a habit of moving more and sitting less can help.

Food.

Look at your food as a source of energy.  The more nutritious the food item, the more it will give you energy.  The lower nutritional value the less long-term energy for your day it will provide.  Foods that have been identified as “brain food”… good for your cognitive abilities:

Blueberries
Salmon
Almonds
Spinach

The big picture.

Create a strong understanding of why you are doing what you are doing.  Ask yourself regularly why you are doing what you are doing.  What are the outcomes you want to achieve long-term from the activities you are participating in?  How does what you are doing serve you to reach those outcomes?

In my popular keynote Embracing the Pressure When the Pressure is On, here are some tools and tactics that might be helpful to you as well:

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: blowing rock, Charlotte, Cortex Leadership, Richmond, Roanoke, stress, stress management, stress remedies, virgnia, washington

September 17, 2018 By Lynda Foster

I Will Find My Genius Zone

I Will Find My Genius Zone
And Learn to Live in It!

By:  Lynda McNutt Foster, CEO
Cortex Leadership Consulting

Raising our Conversational Intelligence© with others is important.  Changing the conversations we’re having with ourselves is the vital first step to breaking through to discover the genius that lives within all of us.

According to research at Cleveland Clinic Wellness, 95% of our thoughts are habitual.  80% of those are negative.  This pattern of thinking may keep us safe, yet does little to help us grow.

Repairing our thinking involves becoming aware of what beliefs we have that may not be serving us.  These beliefs could be the cause behind the “two steps forward, one step back” experience we keep having each time we try to break through what Gay Hendricks calls our Upper Limit in his book The Big Leap.

4 Main Activity Zones

Incompetence – these are things we are not good at and that can be avoided or delegated.  Look for team members and others that are great in these areas and move them off your plate.

Competence – You can do these tasks, but so can others.  This is the activity zone we get stuck in when we take on too much and are feeling overwhelmed.  Yes, you can do it.  That doesn’t mean that you should be doing it all.

Area of Excellence – The world finds this activity valuable in some way and you are rewarded because of this zone.  This is probably the activities you make money from.  If you are successful right now, this probably your current comfort zone.  If you lead a team, this is the first area you want to strive to have each of your team members reach.

Zone of Genius – Your Zone of Genius is the set of activities you are uniquely suited to do.  These are derived from your special talents and gifts.  When fully realized you will experience abundance, love, and creativity and levels not possible in the other zones of activity.  When you apply this principal to your team, this is where the real organizational greatness comes from.

Barriers to Reaching Your Zone of Genius

  1. Feeling fundamentally flawed
  2. Thinking you will have to leave others behind in order to truly get ahead
  3. Believing that you are a burden and more success would only bring more hardship on those around you
  4. Being afraid of outshining others

Ways we sabotage ourselves that hold us back are things like worrying about things we can’t control, squabbling over the small stuff, blaming others when things don’t go our way, deflecting compliments and getting sick or hurt as soon as things start going in the right direction.

How these show up are when we lie, break promises and withhold truths.

Questions to consider regularly:

Are you telling yourself the full truth about which actions you are taking that are and are not serving you at work?

What are you willing to risk in order to experience much more joy and abundance from the work that you do?

What do I need to:

Stop doing?  Start doing?  Keep doing?

In order to break through my Upper Limit?  If you lead others, what methods of coaching can you use to help them identify their Upper Limit and find their Zone of Genius?

Do you have an accountability partner to help support and encourage you to break through your Upper Limit?

I can.

I will.

Today.

www.cortexleadership.com
www.gomonti.com

For more information call:  540.776-9219 or [email protected]

 

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized, Virginia @ Work Tagged With: Cortex Leadership, Lynda McNutt Foster, norfolk, portsmouth, Roanoke, Virginia, women at work

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