#37: Juliet Funt (CEO of WhiteSpace at Work) — How to Combat Overload and Overwhelm
Do you ever feel overwhelmed and overloaded with what seems like busy work? Ever wonder whether there is a smarter, healthier, and more sustainable way to work? If so, you are going to love my guest on the podcast this week.
Juliet Funt is the CEO of WhiteSpace at Work, a training and consulting firm that helps organizations, their leaders and employees flip the norms of business in order to reclaim their creativity, productivity and engagement. With thought-provoking content and immediately actionable tools, she has become a nationally recognized expert in coping with the Age of Overload in which we all live and work.
Juliet helps professionals learn the pivotal difference between activity and productivity. She teaches them a streamlined method for personal process improvement – leading to more creativity and engagement. She helps executives, managers and teams answer the critical question “What thoughts deserve my full attention today?”
Juliet regularly wows audiences as a high-impact, high-energy speaker, including multiple speeches at the Global Leadership Summit. Yet her deeper mission is to show organizations how WhiteSpace® can change the negative patterns and behaviors that prevent them from achieving optimum results. Her clients include a number of Fortune 100 companies and span a wide array of industries, from financial services to technology, manufacturing to the military, and executive workshops to audiences as large as 7,000.
Incredibly intuitive, Juliet successfully blends highly customized content with a keen understanding of clients’ needs in her programs and consulting work. With a unique blend of charisma, humor and tough love, she has the uncanny ability to connect with people at all levels, compelling them to make real, lasting change. Yet beneath her powerful assets, she is both authentic and accessible. As a busy corporate speaker and consultant, business owner, wife, and mother of three young boys, she practices on a daily basis the WhiteSpace® concept she shares with clients. Juliet Funt is a force for change in organizations around the world, helping them find their WhiteSpace, recharge their people and reclaim their passion for work. Juliet is a graduate of Northwestern University.
On this episode we discuss [time is from audio version]:
Her journey and how this concept of WhiteSpace was conceived [4:00]
“We have a very passionate belief that there is an element called white space that is missing from work, and white space is the time—the open, thoughtful time that used to exist in between things.”
Discovering the beauty of white space late at night when her children were very young [5:45]
“What I found was that trapped in that really dark, white space, all sorts of interesting things started happening because I couldn’t use a fix of any kind of activity to get my brain distracted. I felt feelings. I designed products. And I clarified things in my marriage, and I gave myself executive feedback.”
Even though people agree that busy work is a problem, why are we not making more progress in this area? [7:25]
“There is a worship of busyness and a fear of openness. The fear is that openness equals nothingness. The fear is that when you are not being active you are not being productive.”
“That all speaks to an enormous lack of trust in the value of thinking.”
Quantifying the negative impact of busy work on organizations [10:30]
“We usually see about one million dollars of annual waste for every fifty people in a group.”
“It exhausts people. It keeps them farther away from the meaningful work that inspires them.”
“Strategically, it creates enormous amounts of re-work and wasted time.”
“A Bloomberg article just came out that said that 45% of workers are burned out 6-8 weeks into COVID, and the work day is 3 hours longer.”
How to begin shifting to a more productive way of working [15:15]
“A mindset shift if more important than a tactical shift.”
“Common sense and common practice are two different things.”
“The most important mindset that you are going to want to start talking about is called a reductive mindset.”
“A reductive mindset is mathematical. This sense of removing items. Most companies and organizations have an additive sense. They just add and add and add.”
“Where can you cut? Where can you strip? Where can you delegate . . . postpone? Where can you consolidate? Where can you take reporting that was weekly and make it monthly? Can you take monthly and make it quarterly?”
Thoughts on a reductive or additive mindset in the military [20:00]
Distrust vs. trust of white space in leaders [22:30]
“What if my mind knows where it is heading? What if my mind is chewing on something, cooking something, that is eventually going to pop into a relevant business contribution?”
Whether white space is urgent [24:00]
“White space can be recuperative or constructive . . . that recuperative white space is pretty urgent.”
How to make emails and meetings more productive [24:30]
“90% of the time email is a request for action and not a request for observation.”
2D vs. 3D communication and communication mediums [28:15]
During the interview, Juliet offered the opportunity for your team to take the following survey to assess how each member is doing.
Watch this video to learn more about the great work WhiteSpace at Work is doing:
Visit WhiteSpaceatWork.com to learn more about the great work Juliet and her team are doing.
Connect with Juliet by sending her an email at juliet@whitespaceatwork.com or follow her on LinkedIn or Twitter. Juliet tweets @whitespaceatwrk.
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