One of our values at Bulb is Make it better.

It should be self-explanatory, but what it means is that it is very important to us to be constantly improving and making everything around us better. It goes from making the world better by helping people purchase green energy at a cheap price, up to making our office a better place for everyone to work in.

I love this value. It encourages me not only to make things better around me, but also to make myself better. I now have this saying: Make Carole better.
There are things that are easy to be better at (e.g. learning about a new technology, a new language, a new product) but fundamentally becoming a better person is tough. It means changing one’s behaviour. Honestly, I find it really, really difficult. It can be easy for a few days but making lasting changes is hard.

One thing I want to do this year is becoming a great colleague for everyone. I can work with anyone but while I am a great colleague for some, I am just a normal one for others.
One of my problems is not being able to adjust my communication style enough when I interact with people. This is a mistake.
I am quite to the point, very focused and task driven. Some people love it, others really don’t. I want to be able to better work with the ones who don’t.

This is something I have been working on for a little while. It started with me trying to find solutions on my own. It got a little better, I became a lot more aware of the situations I made people, including myself, uncomfortable. However, I wasn’t getting better at handling these situations on my own.

And so I hired a career coach!

I only had one session so far, but it’s been really good. Having a professional coach brings a lot of structure.
It forced me to really think about what I am trying to achieve, why and how. It’s like running a project at work.

Another great thing about having a coach is the books and tools they can recommend.
I read this really good book called The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. I have learnt so much from it, about culture, people and myself. It definitely helped making Carole better already :)
And so I want to share a few things I have learnt from it.

The Culture Map

I was about to write a short review about my main takeaways, but then found this great article on Business Insider. I would recommend at least reading this review if not the whole book.

I would just add a couple of more personal points to this.

Communication

If you read the review, they talk about low/high context languages and giving feedback.
As a French person, one thing I hadn’t realised was that my language is quite high context, higher than American or English for instance. However, when it comes to evaluating and giving feedback, the French are very direct. And so this made me realise two things:
Since I am living in the UK, I need to be more explicit and give more context when I speak. For instance I often play devil’s advocate, assuming people know I am doing it. But that’s not always true.
The second thing is that when I give feedback, I am to the point. I slowly realised it can make people uncomfortable and worse be misinterpreted as I don’t care.

Persuading

The part about persuading was eye opening. In her book, Erin Meyer talks about principle (the French) vs application (the English) first.
It’s been really fun to observe the world around me keeping this in mind. I do now notice the differences in discussions.
French and British approach argumentations and presentations very differently. We often start with the theory, while the British tend to start with an example. This is really fun. And useful!

Leading

Something I realised reading the Culture Map is that there are roughly two types of leaders. This is what I think (please note this isn’t part of the book).
One type is the master type. They lead because they have more knowledge, wisdom, experience. They are kind of superior in a way. They are admired and trusted by their team to lead them in the right direction.
The other type is the enabler type. They may have less knowledge and less experience. But they are able to really empower each member of their team and enable them to their full capability.

Obviously things are never binary, there is a bit of both in each leader. But I always admired and wanted to be a master leader. Probably because they are highly inspiring (think Jedi master/apprentice or Samurai master/student :)).
This was until I saw a real enabler in action. Their ability to work with anyone and transform a team of individuals into a super team simply blew my mind. There are actually plenty of enablers around us (you can just look at any team sport). I just hadn’t realised it…

So these are some of the things I have learnt through reading this book, analysing the world around me and speaking with my coach. This is simply fascinating, the world is an amazing playground, and that should really help in making Carole better
🥳 (<= I just love this smiley)