Before Christmas, I went with my partner to her "works do".  I was invited last year, and went, feeling a bit out of place and awkward, not really knowing anyone and having to exchange chit-chat, which generally I loathe.

This year's entertainment - also as last year - was an employee talent show.

The organisers staged a whole array of talent, from a very brave (and young) man doing stand up, to three rather stately ladies from housekeeping performing line dancing, to some wicked satirical songs.  All were cheered, clapped and wolf-whistled, in particular the final act, which was a striptease by the organisers to Tom Jones' You can leave your hat on. 

And as the evening drifted ever more drunkenly on, I felt rather envious. 

As a freelance for the last 14 years, I don't often get to work with a team of people.  While this suits me a lot of the time, being on your own can get a little lonely.  Working with other people - notwithstanding the arguments about whose turn it is to make the tea - gives comradeship, the opportunity to brainstorm with others to create better ideas, and frankly, a laugh when it's raining on a dark Tuesday afternoon in February.

The also gives you, I realised watching people roll around laughing at the in-jokes - is shared meaning.  Jargon may have a dark side, obfuscating definitions and being unfriendly to newcomers, but it also creates belonging, illustrates shared history and experience.

And it's this sharing which made me slightly jealous.  Performers on stage were supported, regardless of how bad they were, and probably, regardless of how well people knew them.  They knew of them, they were 'one of us' and as a result were wildly cheered on.   It was a generous atmosphere, with all critical faculties suspended for the evening. 

As a result of this sense of loss, I'm slowly gathering around me a group of people in the same boat as I am.  People I can talk to, whose opinion I trust and who can spare time to work with me on new ideas and approaches to the work I do.   It's reciprocal - I can offer my thoughts on their work, and to date I have helped with editing, offered additional information, and done some much needed proof-reading.  On the other side of a cup of coffee, I can share gossip, a laugh and give enthusiastic support.

Who knows - we might end up working together, bringing me full circle!

Not Panto? Oh yes it is!

As part of the Christmas festivities, my family and I went to the Hackney Empire to see the panto, which this year was Dick Whittington.

Now as part of my mongrel career, I have worked backstage at my local theatre, and one of the best shows to work on was panto.  The children in the audience, and their reactions to the actors gave each performance unpredictability and even a sense of danger.  I've seen kids protect the heroine by kicking the baddie in the balls (in this case, the wolf in Red Riding Hood), cry uncontrollably when told a joke by the hero, and watch their pee trickle down the raked stage into the orchestra pit. Not to mention some astonishingly blue jokes from eight-year olds.

I was mostly on follow-spot (or limelight) juggling with pink, straw and green gels for picking up the heroine, principal boy and the villain, wearing headphones and getting the cues from the stage manager. Although I left the theatre many years ago, I have very happy memories of working backstage and was therefore really looking forward to the panto at Hackney Empire. And although I'm a regular visitor at the theatre, it must be twenty years since I last saw a panto.

So while some things were the same - kids almost sick with excitement, grandparents struggling to keep control, bored-looking older siblings - there were some changes.

A preponderance of bustiers was the first thing I noticed - on all the dancers, all the actors.  Had I looked, I felt sure the band would also be wearing them.

Also, we had an Asian fairy godmother, who cracked jokes in Hindi with some sections of the audience (an interesting position to be in as a white audience member) and a West Indian King Rat.  The comedy was more political (well, Boris Johnson IS a godsend) and the songs a bit more hip hop than I remembered.

And none of these changes made me enjoy it any less.  It was great to see panto shifting with the times, reflecting the audiences who would see it, and still eliciting the same kind of response - Oh yes, it does!

Which made me think that essentially, kids don't change all that much.  They want a goodie, a baddie and some certainty about the story.  And although adults can't always provide this, I did find myself wondering if we provide children with too much realism, too much subtlety, too many choices, when what makes them happy is simplicity.

About time - paying attention to a precious resource

Today, I deleted someone from my phone book and erased their address from my contact book. 

I sent her a text wishing her well, and telling her that this was the last time I would contact her. The person who's no longer on my list of Christmas and birthday cards and has been taken out of my iPhone hasn't been in touch for a couple of years now.  I've tried numerous times to raise her, not just at Christmas when most people guiltily realise that we've not been in touch since last Christmas. I've texted, emailed, phoned and written, with no response.  And so now, sad but resigned, I've decided to make the effort no longer.

I don't do this often.  I'm generally of the view that there's some resolution for arguments, some method of fixing a broken relationship, and so it's very rare indeed that I give up, and stop the communication.

While this is undoubtedly a failure on my part to patch things up, it has also felt oddly liberating. In fact, I'm going to be looking through my ancient address book and making further decisions like this.  This will give me more time to spend time with people I care about, people who care about me.  People who love me, value me.

My mum is someone who suffers from my pre-occupation with work and friends.  This has happened all my life on the basis that to my mind, mum would always be around.  After all, I'm her daughter and she is almost obligated to be there when I call.

Except now, she's older.  Looking at it dispassionately, I have less time with her than I did last year, and the year before that.

Time, once in plentiful supply - despite the plethora of technology to enable us to do more, more quickly - is now becoming a very precious commodity.

So in 2013, I will concentrate on spending my time with people and family who desire my company, rather than trying to coax a relationship out of those who have other things to do.  Time is priceless - I will stop frittering mine away.

Nothing to see here...

I'm uneasily aware that my blog has slipped to the bottom of my agenda.  No posts since August.

This is of course, one of the golden rules of blogging - make it regular. So if I know this, and really would like people to be interested enough to read it- what's going on?

If people recognise that what they're doing is not the way it should be, feel guilty but still don't change what they're doing - there's a reason.  Maybe not an acknowledged reason - I can make all the excuses I like about being busy, or uninspired - but a reason that, twisted though it might be, is stopping you doing what you know would give you more success.

So - what are my reasons for failing to blog? I have been busy, that's true. And on holiday.  But I find time to watch my favourite TV programmes or shout at the TV during BBC Questiontime. So really, I know that these aren't my reasons.

And I might well have been uninspired - although as mentioned, current affairs still stir me to action in terms of tweeting. So that's demolished that excuse.

So what is the reason I'm not tweeting regularly? Am I lazy? Unreliable?

Excuses - or 'reasons' - as we re-label them, are often a smokescreen for what's really going on.  And I think the real reasons why my blogs aren't regular, is that actually I am butterfly-minded, easily distracted and at the beginning, I have loads of enthusiasm, but not the discipline to maintain momentum. Plus, my time management can be appalling.

And if I'm honest, I suppose that sometimes, I see all the intelligent comments made by other bloggers, and wonder if what I think about the world is worth reading.

All bad habits begin like this, I think. We find justification for our actions, whatever they are, and on the surface, they satisfy us.

But scratch that surface, go a little deeper, and the reasons are different, often very different. A little self analysis often reveals more unflattering 'reasons'.  And once you acknowledge the true reasons for your unhelpful behaviour, then you can start to tackle them. And ultimately change them.

The death of an author - an unknown friend

I learned a liitle while ago that one of my favourite authors - Diana Norman - had died. I suppose my shock was linked to the idea that - although she didn't know me from Adam - she and I were somehow connected, and I feel I should have been told, personally, of her death.

I remember feeling something similar when I heard of the death of Robertson Davies, whose intricate, clever, sometimes labyrinthine novels had kept me so entertained while I was in my thirties.  It was a sense of loss, of disappointment, of something unfinished.

And so it was with Diana Norman. As an author she had enthralled me, seduced me with a heroine who was sharp, clever, brave, who said witty things and did stupid things. Much indeed, like a big chuck of humanity. When I last read of Adelia, she was - I hope - about to save her lover from the wounds of a fight he had just fought. I hoped all would be well, and that he would continue to irritate her through further novels. 

And then - nothing.  No further book releases. When I finally put her name into Google and came cross the notice of her death from cancer, I felt bereft. Not only because I had lost a source of great pleasure, but because I felt I had lost a friend, a confidante.  And I never had the chance to tell her that I loved her work, because I never managed to get round to it. 

While this is completely academic and of no use at all to Barry Norman, her husband, it taught me a valuable lesson.  It is never too soon to tell someone how much you value them, or their work.  It is always urgent.  

It has also made me think about the impact I might have on people. If an author I've never met can evoke such feelings of warmth, perhaps I - in other ways, maybe - should make the effort to do the same to people I do know?   

         Diana Norman, who wrote under the pen name Ariana Franklin died in January 2011.

Sshh! don't mention your pay!

I invariably enjoy the Birkbeck Business Week because it brings me up to date with the latest research interests of the school and fires up the Quattro grey cells.

This year was no exception – there were sessions on the impact of induction on employee identity and a session on the current darling of the consulting world, employee engagement.  Being the critical sort – Birkbeck had taught me well! – I was pleased to see Teaching Fellow Richard Williams was as healthily sceptical as I was.

But one of the most interesting session for me was Julie Dickinson’s presentation of project work on pay secrecy.

Academic research here is scarce – well, it is secret – and Julie gave some of assumptions about the potential pros and cons of keeping pay under wraps.

It doesn’t seem to be a uniform phenomenon; the well paid would rather keep their payslips close to their chests; the less well-paid appear to talk more openly about it – possibly to complain?

The research – such as it is – is not only contradictory but also fairly difficult to compare.  Studies look at perceptions and employee outcomes from pay secrecy, but they look at slightly different variables.  And therefore reach different conclusions.

A lively discussion pondered whether pay secrecy isn’t more about the inability of organisations to properly define the value produced by different jobs than it is about a need to keep compensation private – although obviously privacy does come into it.  Some people thought that openness about pay may lead to “poaching” key staff – although a recruiter in the audience said that it was rare that she saw people being overpaid against the market average when pay secrecy was written into their contracts.

A key point about pay secrecy was the opportunity it gives for increasing pay inequality by the back door. There was a lot of discussion about the transparency supposedly inherent in the public sector (every senior civil servant had their salary published in bands, someone pointed out) and lacking in the private sector.

My own view was that inequality in pay seems to be in place regardless of how transparent pay is – there are plenty of women in the public sector who are paid less for doing more work than their male colleagues….

An interesting discussion, even without the solid empirical evidence.  Perhaps because of it!

Coaching - fixing leadership vulnerability in secret

I've been an executive coach for about eighteen months and I love the work.  I've been lucky in that my clients and I have worked well together, identifying the real issues at play (often not the presenting ones) and stretching towards solutions that my clients can sustain without any further intervention from me.

Having got a few senior assignments under my belt, I now am looking - in a crowded marketplace - to grow this side of my business.  I'm thrilled that all of my clients so far have been happy to recommend me, and have written some rather humbling testimonials.  I had one this week from a client I worked with for six months, which completely lit up my day:

Karen's coaching has been genuinely life-changing for me.  She has a friendly, positive, upbeat manner combined with an assertive approach which does not let you get away with anything. Karen listens, asks  powerful questions, offers alternative ways of seeing situations and makes the coachee responsible for their own career.  She also records conversations and sends you incredibly helpful and eye-opening summaries of what you said and what this might mean, which really highlight where you might be stuck.  Having worked with Karen for six months, I feel so much more confident.  I have my work-life balance in check, I am much more assertive, I am really enjoying my job and people keep telling me how great I  look!  I'd highly recommend Karen as a coach.

I was about to post this glowing comment on a well-known business networking site, when she asked me not to as a number of her own work colleagues were also on the site, she said.

Obviously, this doesn't mean I'm any less delighted with the testimonial, but so many people have also given me testimonials but then limited their circulation, I'm starting to wonder if coaching is something people want to hide.  A bit like treatment for an unmentionable disease.

Which in turn led me to wonder if vulnerability in leadership is so unacceptable that to admit you're having a bad time is career-limiting. As is having coaching, which may imply there's something to fix.

Earlier this year, I conducted an interview with a very senior executive in a European company. He told me that when he arrived at his new post, the first thing he had to do was to restructure, putting 40% of the workforce out of a job.  As we talked about this experience, his voice cracked and he became noticeably upset.  He told me that he had personally been involved in talking to all those made redundant.  He told me how painful it had been.  He told me that he had, in effect, behaved "unprofessionally" by letting his people know, in an all-company meeting, that he was at the end of his tether, and walking out.

He told me, that as he sat back in his office, alone and in silence, wondering if he should tender his resignation, email after email began to appear in his inbox.  They all said that they had known their pain, but now they understood his.

While I was setting up the interview, his personal assistant told me just how inspirational she found her boss, and how, two years after he had taken the role in the company, everyone liked and admired him.

Now - is this a coincidence?  To be openly public vulnerable, to show feelings as a leader, and to be admired by his people?

Latterly, I don't think so.  And yet, a leadership position often seems to mandate a patina of invincibility to be painted over your personality, and it cracks at your peril.

So I wonder if acknowledging coaching is an admission of weakness that few leaders - at whatever level - are willing to make.   And I expect that, until leaders are allowed to be human and be vulnerable, and until coaching is seen as development rather than "fixing", most of the testimonials I'll get will be anonymous.