SCENARIO: You are going through lots of changes right now, in your personal and professional life. You are pretty sure your team members are also in some transition right now. After all, the only constant in life is change.
MANAGER ACTION: Start your next team meeting by asking: “What roles or responsibilities are you adapting to right now? Either here at work or at home?”
MAKE IT VISUAL: Draw a picture of a chameleon and then record answers all around the reptile (or you can use my drawing).
INSPIRATION: In middle school, I saved up all of my babysitting and birthday money to buy a chameleon. I found out a little too late that I would need to feed it live crickets.
Now I was also stuck caring for and touching crickets. Gross. Crickets whose cage I dropped not once, but TWICE and they escaped everywhere. Through streaming tears, I had to chase them around and recapture them, one by one.
Definitely a damper to the whole “I have a chameleon” excitement.
Anyway, my cat must have sensed my distress because after a couple months she wrangled out the pen of the chameleon’s cage and batted him around until he turned black and promptly died. Problem solved, no more crickets needed.
I’m sure there are many lessons to be learned in this, but I’ll just point out: this is one of the beautiful things about using visuals; it opens the conversation so you can share different pieces of you and others can do the same.
Vital Bee Creative 