We all see and feel the challenges facing companies of all sizes in today’s business landscape. We see it across all of our business verticals and within our own walls. As an agency with 27 years in the business we have also seen that challenges like this often beget opportunity IF you can embrace it with the right mindset.
In order to grow our agency and navigate this ever-evolving industry, we believe being proactive and investing in our leadership is essential to our success. We launched a new program called the Make Life Better Leadership Series and though this inaugural workshop may be the first in a new series, it’s really the embodiment of a larger initiative at Schaefer called Schaefer University. It started with a need to gather training documents for onboarding and best practices and has grown into a philosophy of continued learning and exploration for the whole agency. We strive to be experts in our field, and in that effort, we have to be open and curious about the “what” and “how” we pursue knowledge.
Schaefer University acts as a platform for exploration, training and teaching. It keeps each of us focused on the pursuit of better instead of simply complacent with what’s been done. It’s a reminder for each of us to look for ways to learn and step into challenges with curiosity and humility. If we want to provide a dynamic environment for people to work, we have to embrace this mindset of pursuing knowledge and sharing experiences.
This workshop was created with the goal of making our purpose as an agency – to Make Life Better – tangible, and we set out to empower and equip our leaders, partners and a few clients to step into some of the shared challenges of this industry with a shared goal. We saw it as an incredible way to create opportunities to collaborate from a space of shared experience.
We had the pleasure of hosting Kristen Hadeed, author of Permission to Screw Up, and hearing her vision for the future of work. Our team unpacked these ideas with our very own Doug Austin, who facilitated a discussion around how these ideas are relevant to our business.
The workshop brought new ideas to the table, affirmed some of our current efforts and opened our thinking to how we can improve and refine our processes for developing talent.
We partnered with the TCU Department of Design, holding the workshop in the heart of the Fine Arts Building and Red Productions to capture video and photography from the event.
“Career Cushioning, Quiet Quitting, Conscious Quitting, Quiet Promotion, and the impending Silver Tsunami are contributing to a very interesting workforce landscape, especially as it relates to tomorrow’s leadership formation.”
Kristen Hadeed
Kristen’s book, Permission to Screw Up: How I Learned to Lead by Doing Almost Everything Wrong, is a memoir that details her journey as a young entrepreneur who started her own cleaning company while still in college. In the book, Hadeed candidly shares her many mistakes and failures as a leader, and how she learned and grew from them.
Through her personal anecdotes, Hadeed provides valuable insights on leadership, including the importance of building a strong company culture, giving employees the freedom to make mistakes, and learning to lead by example. She also emphasizes the value of persistence and resilience, and the importance of taking risks and embracing failure as part of the learning process.
Permission to Screw Up is a refreshing and honest take on leadership, presented in an engaging and relatable way. It serves as a source of inspiration for anyone looking to become a more effective leader, and highlights the power of learning from one’s mistakes and embracing failure as a necessary step toward success.
Kristen’s live message centered on 4 key areas that lead to employee engagement: passion, growth, freedom and belonging. We explored finding the sweet spot where your motivations and talents combine, talked about career growth and the difference between rock stars and superstars, investigated what it means to have freedom at work and renewed our call to maintain our authentic culture of belonging at Schaefer.
This time with Kristen was an experience like no other and was incredibly valuable time spent focusing on leading as our most authentic, human selves.
