Why I became a Management 3.0 facilitator...

Over seventy percent of employees in the United States hate their job! Five years ago, for one of the rare times in my 20+ year career, I hated my job too.

Steffan Surdek
February 25, 2016
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Do you know Melly Shum? Melly is the person who represented on an iconic billboard in Rotterdam (Netherlands). The billboard has been around for over twenty years. When you look at Melly in the picture, she looks like any other employee in your organization, but here’s the thing: according to the billboard, Melly Shum hates her job!

Melly became the icon representing Happy Melly which is a professional network with a shared purpose: to be a global network of businesses and individuals dedicated in some way to helping people be happier at work.

According to a Gallup poll from a few years back, Melly is not alone. Over seventy percent of employees in the United States hate their job! Five years ago, for one of the rare times in my 20+year career, I hated my job too.

My personal mission

When I started as a consultant and a coach back in 2011, I promised myself that I would focus on helping people in companies that were in similar situations than the one I was in before changing jobs at the time.

I also promised myself I would unleash the dormant leaders in organizations and help them step back into their personal leadership and have fun at work again.

Over the last four and a half years, this is what my work and my personal mission have become: creating workplaces where people matter and where they feel that their contributions to the organization matter.

I live this mission through the work I do in organizations, through the presentations I give about leadership at conferences, and through the articles and blog posts I write on various websites such as provokingleadership.com.

Why Management 3.0?

I heard about Management 3.0 when Jurgen Appelo's book came out, then when we integrated the course as part of the curriculum of Pyxis /campus. I took the course back in 2013 in Ottawa. It was given by my colleague François Beauregard, who was one of the first Management 3.0 licensed facilitators in Canada.

Last year, I started collaborating with François to give the course in Montréal and get more familiar with the course content. In the fall, I started giving it on my own in our public sessions in Montréal and Québec City.

What I enjoy the most as a Management 3.0 facilitator is having an amazing platform to help raise awareness of the leaders' role in organizations. The course allows me to share my message of collaborative, authentic, and intentional leadership in a setting where people can learn about the subject and reflect on their own behaviors. Management 3.0 is also an opportunity to teach them new tools to help them bring a different level of conversations in their respective organization.

Conclusion

Working as a coach in many different organizations over the last four and a half years gave me a new perspective on leaders in organizations and their impact on the culture and the people that surround them.

I came to recognize that many of them want to do the right thing, but either:

  • do not know what that is
  • do not know how to do it
  • or sometimes lack the courage to do it in their current organizational setting.

To me, the course is not just about the tools it provides, but it is also about creating those moments of personal reflection where managers can become more aware of their personal leadership style and the impact it has on the people around them. These moments can create the opening that may eventually lead to a lasting shift of their behavior as leaders.

The opportunity to hear their stories, challenge their current leadership belief systems, give them tools for better conversations and create that opening that may help change their organizations are the reasons why I decided to become a Management 3.0 facilitator.