Are You Clueful? Do You Care?
I’ve taken to using the word ‘cluefulness’ and all its glorious variants because I’m tired of hearing people bandy about phrases like ‘he hasn’t got a clue’ and ‘she’s the most clueless person I ever had on my staff.’ Listen up: that language misses the point, and here’s why.
First of all, people who don’t have a clue don’t realize what they are missing. Duh. (Why would they have a clue about themselves if they don’t have a clue about others?
Second, I realized that it doesn’t matter if you have a clue or not. How many times have you found yourself in a situation where you really didn’t have a clue? (For me, the first video game after Pong left me in the cold. Blasting Space Invaders and chomping power pills just wasn’t an attraction.) What matters is whether or not you care.
In the case of video games, I was clueless but I still had to care. Between my two kids, the television was permanently tuned to whichever game one or the other was playing.
I was forced to confront my cluelessness and to try to become clueful.
Guess what. It wasn’t that hard. I asked questions. I listened politely. I shook my head, despairing I would ever be clueful enough. And amidst the head-shaking, some puzzle pieces must have rattled into place. I realized that my attraction to the game was irrelevant. It was important to my kids, and they were entitled to their own view of the game. And the world. And even their own view of me.
So that solved the problem. Because I cared, I became more clueful, at least where it concerned my job as mom. And, amazingly enough, it also worked at the office.
We can increase cluefulness in our time. We just need to care about it.
A Tale of Too Many Blogs
I’ve been blogging for seven years. My interests have been so varied that I thought it best to put my thoughts into categories, and to post them on several of my own blogs and lots of others. But that’s been a challenge: categories change.
When I started, Teamability® had not yet ‘arrived’. The idea that an organization could form a coherent human infrastructure and achieve beyond all expectations was at the core of my thinking, but I could not adequately express what it would take to do that.
My response was to categorize my thoughts into topics that people would relate to: leadership, teamwork, careers, entrepreneurship, sales, customer focus, recruiting and hiring, and just plain life.
As I sat down to put the finishing touches on the new book, @DrJanice: Thoughts & Tweets on Leadership, Teamwork & Teamability®, I realized anew that it is all integrated; that how we think about our individual life is affected by how we relate to others when we do productive work in teams. How we live within those close relationships affects us profoundly. Even the book, which is very personal, is an ongoing team project.
So I am blogging what is probably my few-hundredth blog, but with a twist. I am doing it to let you know that I am going to close up shop for the older blogs and refresh my favorites here, along with my newest thinking on the subjects of leadership, teamwork, and Teamability®. If you were a reader of this original blog, which was called Ask Dr. Janice back before I moved on to other blogs in 2011, I hope you’ll stay. If you’ve come here from one of my other blogs, I hope you’ll join and follow.
I do promise one thing: in keeping with my @DrJanice self, I’ll try to be brief (though more than 140 characters), to the point, and to always do it with you, dear reader, in mind and heart.
