Playing well with others

I hated group work in school and in college. I hated the fact that I seemed to get grouped up with a bunch of people who were either clueless or incompetent, or worse, they outright wanted to team up with me because they figured they could coast while I busted my ass to get my/our A. Funny that I now work in a profession that is nothing but teamwork. There's a design team in my office, consisting of landscape architects, interior designers, planners, exterior designers and architects, and project managers. There's a full design team outside my office, consisting of various engineers and other consultants. There's a team of clients and users that we have to work with to get the project designed. And then there's a team of contractors and subcontractors who actually use my drawings to build the stuff the client asked for and we drew.

When teams work, it's beyond awesome; but when they don't work...oh, dear God in heaven, make the pain stop. A few things to remember when working on a design team,with other architects, designers, and engineers:

• It's inevitable that we're going to be on teams, and we need to make the teams work as best as we can. Ignoring or just not engaging with your colleagues isn't going to make the project better, and it isn't going to make them go away. Talk design ideas, details, and plan ideas through with one another. Even if you think their ideas are crappy or not well thought out, everyone needs a chance to engage and be heard. Giving them the courtesy of listening earns you your right to be heard.
• Err on the side of asking too many questions. You never know when something you're doing is affecting other parts of the team (especially the engineers) in a huge way. Let folks know when you're making changes or need to change or fix something.
• Sometimes you'll be the one willing to work with others and talk things through and others will be the ones not wanting to engage. It will be incumbent upon you to make the dialogue happen. If your teammates are giving you the Heisman arm and won't meet with you, or the engineers or other consultants are being unresponsive, ask your project manager and/or other managers in the office to help you get a response or get everyone together. Explain to them the consequences of not coordinating or having the conversation you're asking for.

Teamwork isn't always a blast, but you can actually make it better by making it happen. This kind of gesture can let your managers see you as a leader and as someone who thinks ahead, which might give you more autonomy and more/cooler responsibilities in the future

And now, to purge the burnout

I must start by thanking everyone who continues to come here week after week and read whatever I've written (or in the last few weeks, not written). I truly appreciate the questions and thoughts I receive. I must confess though that in the press of the last few months, I've found myself increasingly burned out. One of my friends who went to grad school to be a therapist called my recent state "central nervous system fatigue or overload". It's a condition he sees in elite athletes and bodybuilders; the patient works out so much and doesn't allow time to recover, and consequently they exhaust easily in terms of physical and mental performance. The same can happen when you work week after week and month after month at 50 or so hours a week. I have interns in my office right now who are younger than me but experiencing this as well. 

What it takes to exhaust you is based on the individual. I can do more than some people my age (37) and less than others. I could do more when I was 30 than I can now. However, the most important two things to remember about fatigue at work are these:

1. Know your limits and the signs of your fatigue. Don't let people put more on you than you can get done in the time allotted, especially if the piling-on is a continuous affair (I.e., it goes on for more than a month). Also, know when the workload and pressure is getting to you: do you get snippy? Have frequent nightmares or sleep poorly in general? Lose or gain a lot of weight?
2. Tell someone that this is happening and take steps to get rest as soon as you can. Your manager can't help you unless s/he knows you're drowning in work or stress. They may be able to get you help or help you prioritize what needs to be done when so that you don't feel overwhelmed. Furthermore, give yourself the physical and mental breaks you need as soon as you can get them. I didn't follow that advice, and by the end of my deadlines, I was shouting the f-word at my boss. Not something I recommend,

I'll do my best to keep posting advice, thoughts, and questions for y'all as I'm able this summer, but I do need some rest. I don't want to just slap any old bunch of writing up here in the name of posting every week. I want to do well thought out and researched posts for y'all, and that takes energy. And I do hope all of you have some fun trips or breaks planned for the summer!

More random weblinks for the end of a busy month

As my project team and I wrap up a deadline-laden May, I'm finding it hard to focus and bring it into the home stretch. So the focus of today's random weblink post is, well, focus, along with a side order of motivation, in the creative world.

Motivating creative people--or any people for that matter--is a lot tougher than it sounds, says this coach.  I intend to read his entire series on the different types of motivation and how that works with creative work (when I finally am not working every weekend).  So far, I find myself nodding along with the idea that, while you can't really "motivate" people, you can sure as hell demotivate them.  That's good advice for me as a manager.

Depending on the task, being "unfocused" can help, such as when trying to improvise lyrics in a rap. Allowing the brain to relax can allow for even better results in creative attempts and results.

Speaking of results, we get results based on what we focus on.  This TED talk from a psychologist who works mostly with 20-somethings discusses how important it is that people make the most of their 20s--develop a life, career, interests, relationships, good habits, etc.--because it sets the stage for the rest of their lives.

And finally, a reminder from this Buddhist blogger that what we focus on and give our energy to is what we become.

Random weblinks for another busy week

In the spirit of being lazy with my blog so I can be busy as hell at work, I bring you a few more links today. This week's theme is optimism, especially as it relates to architecture.

Is it finally a good time to be an architect? Maybe, says this article.

More interns are getting licensed and employed these days, or so the figures are showing.

In other news, compliments may have a similar effect on a person as giving them cash. While on the face of it, that doesn't sounds like good news, it means that your firm can't just throw money at you and hope you'll be quiet and happy--they're actually going to have to treat you like a human being. Money in the form of raises, bonuses, and additional paid time off can bost morale, but it only goes so far. Research shows that at some point, people feel like they're being bought off, and morale dips again.

Deadline after deadline...

Please forgive the recent silence, especially because it's going to be quiet here for all of May. My project has three deadlines in the next five weeks, so I'm pretty slammed of late.  (And my staff, God bless them, have been handling the relentless deadlines pretty well, even when I haven't been terribly pleasant.)  So instead of making a real post, I'm just going to post a few interesting links now and then.

Today's theme: abandonment (since that's what I'm going to have to do to Intern 101 until my deadlines are over in June):

First, actual abandoned architectural structures that look like something out of a sci-fi movie.

Speaking of abandoned buildings, this photographer takes pictures of elegant, abandoned buildings in Europe and produces some amazing images.

Then, a British mental hospital that was closed and is being turned into apartments--talk about adaptive reuse! But is this the right reuse for this type of building, especially one with a mixed history in a community?

Of Millennials and mentorship

A recent online article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek related the differences in mentoring the Millennial generation. The article stated some familiar yawn-inducing ground (the younger generation uses multiple mentors to get ahead instead of sticking with one main person with whom to connect) and brought up some new problems for the mentor-mentee relationship (the mentee is better at certain tasks, especially those pertaining to technology, than the mentor, and all the mentor's clients want to work with the mentee instead). It was a decent article, to be fair, but like many articles about generational differences, it makes me want to barf in my recycling bin.

When I discussed mentoring interns at the 2010 and 2011 national AIA conventions, one of the primary points of my presentation is that, while generation can affect a person's behavior more than race or gender, it is one's humanity that affects one most of all. Mentors in this article who felt irritated by a mentee's behavior in a meeting or calling or texting them late at night regarding routine questions seemed to  be complaining that it was the mentee's youth that made this a problem.  I dare say the root of the problem is a basic one that plagues even my colleagues from my same generation (Gen X, to be precise): not everyone was raised at your house.  I've had interns look bored and text their friends in meetings with consultants, and I've had other interns sit in those same kinds of meetings and take notes, ask questions, and contribute ideas. These interns all had similar levels of experience--the difference was the kind of person they were and the kind of intern--and architect--they wanted to be.

To me, it makes absolute sense for an intern--and in fact anyone regardless of age--to have more than one mentor in one's career.  If an intern was thinking about changing jobs, I might not be the best person to talk to about that, since I've only worked at one firm for 13 years. However, if an intern had an ethical situation to deal with, I might be just the right person. Further, in a work world that is increasingly about who you know, then it makes sense to just know more people. Putting all your eggs in one mentorship basket is a pretty risky bet.

Overall, it sounds to me like Millennials are embracing a changing work world while older workers (including many Gen Xers) are not, and there's a little bitterness there, perhaps being taken out on the Millennials as a bit of shooting the messenger.  However, there are still "old-school" habits and practices that still work in the workplace, like not bothering your coworkers on the weekends, paying attention in meetings, dressing professionally, and listening in a conversation instead of waiting for your turn to speak.  These are things that appeal not to Boomers or Xers or Millennials, but to humans.

A note about external links from Intern 101

I recently had a request for the link to the 2011 AIA Compensation Report be reconnected/updated.  This was a link provided by a commenter, not by me, so I really can't fix it.  When readers and commenters send me external links, I check them at the time of posting to make sure they work, but I must rely on whoever posted the link to maintain it. (In the meantime, those looking for the report are probably better off looking for the 2012 version. It'll be more relevant to your present situation.)

I do appreciate outside links sent to me by readers.  When you find something funny, interesting, or helpful, I check the link out for myself before posting it (or not). Feel free to send along those items, but please note that I can't maintain links that are posted in the blog--I can only change where a piece of hyperlinked text goes.  If you find a non-functioning link on the sidebar of this blog, do let me know. (And if you have a corrected link, it's very much appreciated.)