As the father of eight and ten year old boys, I think a lot about the adults who are impacting them right now. I look at their teachers and feel a deep sense of gratitude for their investment in my sons and in all the kids in their classes.  I’m thankful that they are good teachers, and most importantly, good human beings who are not there because it’s a job, but because they know they are supposed to be there…maybe even called.  I’m thankful for every man and woman that volunteers every Sunday in their Sunday school classes. For no money and certainly not for their own gratification, they get up every Sunday morning at the crack of dawn to invest in the lives and character of my two sons. Who does that?  All I know is that I’m thankful they do. I’m thankful for the parents of Aidan and Ryan’s friends, and for each time that one of them compliments or praises, or gives constructive feedback to my boys. Who does that?  They do that. I’m thankful for my friends Sean and Rebecca, who don’t even live here in Seattle, but took the time on a short visit to Seattle to go to 3 hours of kids soccer just to see Aidan and Ryan play and hang out with our community of parents cheering them on. I’m thankful for my brother who sends my kids books that he read as a kid and who calls them and knows them, I’m thankful for my sister who doesn’t’ hesitate to tell Aidan and Ryan that she loves them every time she is with them and tells them what she means to them, and I’m thankful for my sister who has made each of them a quilt with her own hands that will drape each of their beds every night and remind them that they are loved deeply.  And, I’m thankful that we live close to all four of their grandparents who invest more deeply in them than you possibly imagine. And, that is only the start of hundreds of people who, for no good reason, sacrifice their own agenda to make it about the growth and development of my two sons.

A few days ago, I was tucking my sons into bed and telling them about my experiences playing little league soccer for the Queen Anne Jets.  I played on that team from 2^nd to 7^th grade.  It is all very near to me now because I coach Aidan and Ryan’s basketball soccer teams.  My coach for all those years was Coach Jim Locke.  As an adult looking back, I know he was a really good man. He had all the right makings of a great coach.  Coach Locke was a stocky and very athletic looking guy.  Maybe it’s because they were at eye level for me as a second grader, but I’ll never forget the strength of coach Locke’s calves.  I remember thinking, “That’s what a soccer players calves should look like.” He always seemed happy and full of an inner joy.  He was always very clear with us.  While I knew he cared about me and my teammates very much, he never hesitated to get very stern with us if we were messing around.  He was a teacher of the game.  He taught us the fundamentals of what it means to play soccer well.  He loved his son Wes. That was clear to each of us, but he treated us all as equals on that team. He was on time to practice.  He stood in the sun, rain, hail, and snow to lead a bunch of kids on a community soccer team.  And for no pay or praise beyond a thanks from a parent (kids aren’t that good at saying thank you sometimes), he invested in me as my coach for six years, and in other players for at least three years after that. Amazing…..

I just learned that Coach Locke passed away this last September.  As a coach now, I see that Coach Locke taught me what it means to be a coach, a father, and a leader. I know now that God has His hand placed gently over the life and legacy of Jim Locke. I didn’t know that as a kid, but I was watching. He represents what I aspire to be as a father, a coach, and as an adult in this world of children and adults. He modeled for me what it means to invest deeply in the lives of others through your time with them.  He didn’t have to be my Coach, but he chose to be. I’m thankful to you Coach Locke.  We were paying attention.

Hacking the World of Work

In March of 2010, I read an article in an airport about the all-hands hacking parties that Facebook does with all its employees with the intention of making Facebook better and better. Almost two years later, we launched a new class that all 70 to 80 graduate students in the Department of Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Seattle Pacific University would take and all 4 professors would teach.  Last night was the start.  It was amazing.  Many of our alumni even came back to come to this event.  I have to admit that after 17 years as a professor, something profound happened for me.  I saw the power of letting go of my own desire to control how learning happens, and seeing the possibilities that emerge when you release the beast that is the leader and learner within each of us.  It may have been the best classroom experience of my life, and all we did was create the “swimming pool” within which to swim, and then we jumped in.  Our intention is to tackle the most interesting, challenging, and very real questions facing work, employers, employees, and real people in the coming years. We said we would measure our success by a few things:

1. The amount of buzz in the room.
2. The extent to which 2/3 of the people in the room loved it, and the other 1/3 hated it (hoping that the 1/3 changes each week).
3. And by the number of outsiders who aren’t even enrolled who come (given that 15 alums showed up, I think it was a good start).

Here is just a small taste of the questions we addressed at the start…..

What is the psychology of the consumer of the future?

Is Social Networking changing everything?

What do we do when 80% of the workforce are contract employees?

What happens when China and India are the biggest world economies?

What does the world look like if 75% of all employees are overqualified and over-educated for the jobs they have?

Which is more important—character or competence?

What if doing the right thing doesn’t increase your ROI?

Should work be fun?

Can you speed up how fast a person learns?

What do faith, hope, and love have to do with ROI?

What does online gaming have to do with how I behavior at work?

How can I be effective when work is more complex than I can ever understand

What are you willing to sacrifice to make your organization succeed?

Been there, never done this.  How does I/O Psychology make a difference in 2015?

Where will we go next?  Come and join us and check it out.  We will all learn something.  You can decide if you fall into the 2/3 or 1/3J

I’m thankful for childhood friends from Queen Anne and Bellevue who still take the time to say happy birthday even though they knew me as the juvenile I was (and still am in many ways).
I’m thankful for my high school friends in Kentucky for their birthday wishes, because they accepted me at a time when was a long way from where I started.
I’m thankful to my college friends and their wishes because they put up with my mullet and tennis shorts that were so tight it’s surprising my voice ever changed, and because they were there to help me grow up a bit.
I’m thankful to my graduate school and 20’s friends because you watched me discover who I was, and who I was becoming, and you helped me gain the confidence to become an adult (whatever that means).
From North Queen Anne, to Bellevue Christian, to Jessamine County, to Seattle Pacific, and to Claremont…thanks to all of you.
I’m thankful for my church community through Eastlake and their wishes because we are now doing life together, raising kids, serving together, and trying to figure out how to be obedient and closer to God while being human.
I’m thankful for the birthday wishes from my friends who are a part of our community in Kirkland, and the opportunity to do life together, support and love our kids, and for the opportunity to coach your kids in basketball and soccer.
I’m thankful to the friends who have been around through big parts of all of that, knew me as a pressured teenager looking to get into a little trouble (from bottle rocket wars to naughty things with mail boxes and snowmen, from dorm room games to cemeteries, and from the Red Door to the 318, and from Jalisco’s to Targies to the High Brow). You have had my back for decades and because of that, I’m so thankful.
I’m thankful for the wishes from those with whom I work. You impact my life every day. Work has been very good to me. I can’t believe what I get to do and who I have had the opportunity to work with. From SPU to Boeing and Microsoft, from Heineken to Foster Farms to the Free Methodist Church, and from RTDS to Bad Bobby and beyond. My work life is filled with people who are amazing at what they do and deeply invested in architecting hope and possibility into the lives of human beings.
I’m thankful to my students and former students who took the time to wish me a happy birthday. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded that what you do and say matters. From Azusa, to Degree Completion, from OB to I/O…thanks to all of you.
I’m thankful to my extended family and friends of family. You have imprinted on my life in ways that I cannot fully understand in such powerful ways. Thank you for your birthday wishes.
I’m thankful for the birthday wishes from my wife Jackie. Enough said….
I’m so thankful for the warm birthday wishes from my sons…they do love birthdays! And for the annual gift of sharing my birthday with Ryan. What an awesome thing.
If I missed any of you, it’s not because I’m not thankful for you, but because I’m still the same guy you have always known who doesn’t catch every detail, but I’m thankful for you and your wishes.
I haven’t always invested in the facebook birthday wishes, but today it made me realize how good it made me feel that even though some of you saw me through some really awkward times, successes, failures, and even mistakes, you still took the time to send birthday wishes. Anyway, thanks y’all. You had an impact on me today.

Here’s an update on the work I’m doing with the team from HL2.

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If you haven’t been following the events on facebook, here’s the link. 

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/HL2seattle?ref=mf

So far the lessons for me are many, but here’s a sampling. 

1.  It’s not about giving up everything you have, but about being aware of what you think you need, and thinking first of what you have.  Haitian kids who had lost limbs and had very little food or water and still were smiling, taught me that lesson.
2. Dominicans have a different way of thinking about time.  It is more important to take the time to have a conversation with you on the street than be on time to my next meeting.  Relationship matters here.  That said, that may contribute to some of the economic issues the country faces. 
3. The last 500 years have taken this country through many peaks and valleys and impacts how Dominicans perceive their world.
4. Strong-connected leadership matters everywhere.  The concept of differentiation and sacrifice matter for the leaders I’ve worked with here too.
5. Leaders must set up boundaries and take the heat for it.
6. Ph.D. programs in psychology should still require a second language like they used to.
7. I miss my wife and boys so much on this trip.
8. The dislike and mutual fear between Haitians and Dominicans runs deep, but this tragedy brought them closer.  The language barrier plays a huge role in that.  Because they don’t understand each other, it makes trust very difficult.
9. The children in the Bateys (Haitian villages with many refugees) were the poorest of the poor, and they broke me in half.  I fell in love with them.  These kids have nothing, nothing, nothing, by western standards..and they were still joyful.
10. When we entered villages, I was approached by certain kids right away.  It made me wonder whether the same big 5 characteristics show up here too.  Ironically, the two boys that my wife and I will be sponsoring were both completely introverted (3 and 6 years old).   
11. The people here are thankful when they have good work.  The idea of doing what I love first and foremost is not the first thing you think about when jobs are scarce.  Proving yourself a trustworthy worker comes first.  If you drop the ball, you lose your job.

Lessons about myself.

1. My heart runs deep for children.
2. I am more than committed than ever to developing leaders in the toughest of times, meaningful times.
3. Leadership is soooooo important.  Our work will continue in urgency.
4. I must continue to be vulnerable, and take risks for the sake of those I am accountable for.
5. I am so thankful for my job, my wife, my students, my children, my life….for you.

More later.  I will see you all soon.  Lead on. I apologize for the typos….

Rob McKenna

I recently read a quote from an interview with the great poet William Stafford.  It said, “It’s a confirming, satisfying activity to do.  And it’s almost devotional.  Maybe that’s too strong, but it’s as if a day of my life deserves a little attention from life. It’s my kind of attention to stop long enough, to let the evaluative, the speculative, the exploratory impulses that are native to that portion of my time be manifest in a sustained way so that I can recognize them and get sustenance from them.” 

While the honest truth is that I struggled to understand a lot of poetry when I was in junior high and high school, this comment from ol’ Bill Stafford got me thinking, as does his poetry.  Whether we are writers, poets, electricians, leaders, students, musicians, baristas, businesspeople, pastors, parents, or engineers, this makes sense.  Is it possible that the real stuff of your life, the challenges you face at home and at work or even the most mundane things, could be important enough for you to spend a little bit of that life being intentionally reflective about that life? And, is it possible that giving a little bit of time to actually reflect would help you get it done, be more present, deal with adversity, and find hope in the midst of the real and present challenges of life.

So, here’s a way to measure the extent to which your “life is getting attention from life.”

1. Have you documented a list of goals that you want to achieve in the next year including work goals, personal goals, family goals, and spiritual goals?  What other categories would you include?
2. Do you make space every day that is away from the noise of life?
3. Do you have a vision for who you are becoming….that you could tell someone right now, if asked?
4.   Do you know what you want?  What kind of job, family, friends, community, and life?

You don’t have to have all of these answers, but the fact is that if you make the space to think about it, it will make you more interesting and purposeful, and probably a better parent, leader, and person.

This week I asked one of the emerging leaders who is taking part in the blog to generate the blog topic for the week. Her post is below. I look forward to your answers to her question at the end.

Week six’s class discussion left us with more questions than answers. The quartet conversation brought up some thought-provoking ideas that spurred our conversation about authenticity and then last week’s blog laid the foundation for our discussion about sacrifice and its relationship to loss. As a class, we wrestled with both questions for a considerable amount of time but did not even come close to unanimously agreeing upon an answer. An hour and a half into the class session, during the break, I talked with a couple of people about the complexity of the concepts we routinely discuss in this class and how people’s insightful responses do not often confirm our own thoughts but instead introduce and provoke more complex and layered thoughts. Everyone in the conversation agreed that although the questions surrounding these topics are almost always difficult and often times ambiguous, it is important that we at least attempt to form thoughtful responses to them and then be willing to modify these responses when we hear legitimate arguments that may contend with our opinions on the issue.
Acknowledging the complexity of these questions and their tendency to linger and prod at our minds, what question or concept introduced in class has stuck with you the most thus far in the quarter? What concept has made you re-evaluate your behavior or another part of your life? How have the people outside of the class whom you have discussed these concepts with reacted? How did you feel about their reaction?

This last week I had a chance to spend some very intense and amazing time with a friend of mine who is a senior business leader. That doesn’t mean he’s a senior in high school who leads in business, but for those of you who need it bottom shelf like me, it means he’s occupied some pretty high level roles in the organizations where he has served. One of the most intriguing conversations we had (of which we had many) was around the question of sacrifice and what sacrifice looks like in the lives of leaders. The question we kept coming back to was this. Does sacrifice have to hurt? In other words, is it possible to think about the idea of sacrifice without the necessity of it hurting or having some potentially painful cost for the person doing the sacrificing?
It’s a really interesting question isn’t it? Does sacrifice have to hurt? If not, why not? Is it enough to take on a servant’s heart as a person, and if so, is that the same as taking on a sacrificial heart as a person? When calculating the cost of leading others and the personal cost to you of living a sacrificial life as proposed in Philippians 2 from the Bible, does it have to hurt? I’ll leave the response to you experts!