Author / ericfridman

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Posts by ericfridman

I'm the founder of Fridman Associates LLC, an executive coaching firm. I also teach graduate students in the Masters of Science in Learning and Organizational Change program at Northwestern University.
by ericfridman

What AI Can Teach Us About Work and Identity

As I continue to process Jack Dorsey’s announcement last week that his fintech company, Block, would immediately lay off 40% of its 10,000 employees because of the company’s aggressive adoption of AI, I’m reminded of an important lesson I’ve learned from working with dozens of executives over the years.

It’s easy – but risky – to confuse what we do with who we are.

When we confuse our doing with being, we often find ourselves compelled to meet others’ expectations of what work we should pursue rather than finding work that’s deeply meaningful to us. To borrow Mark Nepo’s metaphor, our professional lives come to resemble a speeding train that is running on tracks laid down by others. Our careers accelerate, our lives become a blur, and we miss the subtle hues and textures of life, the beauty and the mystery of the world around and inside us that is our inviolable birthright.

After one of my clients lost his job and became desolate because of the length of his job search, I suggested he take a pen and piece of paper and complete the sentence beginning with “I am…” as a homework assignment.

He later admitted to me that this was the most difficult sentence he had ever written. It had taken him two weeks to complete a first draft. Finally, when he read me the sentence he had written, he broke into tears. He feared, he confessed, the regret that might consume him at the end of his life from not pursuing work that reflected his most deeply-held values.

“What am I longing for?” is a question Susan Cain, in her most recent book “Bittersweet,” suggests we ask ourselves as a way to discover what’s most meaningful to us in life.

It’s a powerful question to ask when we find ourselves feeling adrift after a layoff, or when we voluntarily leave a job after realizing we can no longer work for an abusive boss or a company whose values we can no longer support.

Reorganizations and layoffs will accelerate in the weeks and months ahead as, in Dorsey’s words, AI tools enable “a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.”

Now is the time to pause and ask ourselves, “What am I longing for?” Now is the time to remind ourselves that the work we do should serve who we are, not who other people believe we should be.

by ericfridman

When Work Becomes Play

In a recent Wisdom Circle session, participants discussed various strategies we can employ for making our day-to-day work lives more engaging – without changing jobs or companies.

One key insight that’s especially relevant for today’s job huggers: Making our jobs more fulfilling isn’t just about what we do at work. It’s also about how we do it.

Psychologist Peter Gray, in a Substack post titled “When Work Is Play,” notes that if we can find ways to bring more choice and flexibility into our work, craft our jobs in ways that make them more creative and self-directed, and design our work tasks so that they become more intrinsically motivating, we can reframe our job tasks from “have to do’s” to “get to do’s.” We can transform the work we do from toil into play, making our jobs less burdensome and more satisfying.

Another insight that emerged from last weekend’s conversation is that we should at all costs avoid multi-tasking, which makes us less productive and degrades the quality of our work.

While we might convince ourselves that we’re getting more done by performing multiple tasks in parallel, our brains are in fact moving quickly back and forth between tasks, which increases our cognitive load because of the time it takes to reorient ourselves back to working on the previous task. Instead of multitasking, we should focus our attention on performing one single task at a time as well as we possibly can so that we can minimize distractions and bring more creativity to our work.

If we can find ways of making our daily work tasks more playful and focus our full attention on one task at a time, we’re much more likely to experience what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow experiences,” which can become a powerful source of happiness and meaning at work

by ericfridman

Analysis and Synthesis

Analysis and synthesis. Teasing apart and stitching together. These two primal push and pull forces shape our days and transform our lives as we make our way through the world.

As we live, so we work.

We begin our careers as analysts, breaking down complex questions into smaller, more manageable questions that are easier to solve. Over time, as our careers progress to include formulating policy and inspiring people, the nature of the work we do changes. We start to focus more on discerning the invisible relationships between apparently unrelated data to create a deeper understanding of our organization and the context in which it operates.

As we grow into leadership roles, we transition from analysis to synthesis, from asking “how” to asking “why.”

And as we work, so we live. As our leadership responsibilities at work expand, we coincidentally become adults in the truest sense of the word. We become less preoccupied with accumulating credentials and meeting others’ expectations. We become more concerned with reclaiming our original identity.

Less distracted by the imperatives of “should” and “ought,” we pause to reflect on how we have become who we are today. We might recall the superheroes of our childhood and the values they embodied, because their values are, in a very real sense, our values, too. They are who we hoped to become one day

by ericfridman

Life and Death at the Movies

This past weekend my wife and I watched “Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning” in our local movie theater. I’m not a big Tom Cruise fan – I saw his first movie and never went back for seconds. Still, this was a movie my wife really wanted to see, so I tagged along.

After the movie, we had dinner at a nearby Thai restaurant, and she asked me what I thought of the movie. The only word I could come up with was “interesting.” As its name unintentionally suggests, the plot of “Mission Impossible” is so implausible that at times I caught myself laughing out loud. Worse, I couldn’t escape the experience of sitting in a room, watching a series of translucent images flicker across a screen. The movie never carried me outside of myself.

I judge the quality of a movie by how disoriented I feel when I walk out of a theater and back into the light of day. Filing out of the theater after watching a great movie, I’m unsure, for a second or two, about where truth lies. Is the movie I just watched still my reality, or is my reality now the line of people waiting to buy popcorn and Twizzlers?

I’ve noticed a similarly disorienting experience sometimes when I’m working. I’m focused on a task – responding to an email or sending out invoices – when suddenly I’m hijacked by a train of thought that comes out of nowhere. I swing like a monkey from one thought to another, only to fall from the trees when something draws me back to my desk. Then, I recognize that as real as my stream of consciousness felt in the moment, it was merely an enchanting dream born of neurochemical processes we have yet to fully understand – but a dream with which, for a short period of time, I identified completely.

“I think, therefore I am,” Descartes suggested. It’s true: what we think shapes who we are. For better and worse, thinking pulls us out of the world and into the land of abstraction. Lost in thought, we die a little death, but as soon as we’re able to return to the light of day – just like we do when we step out of the movie theater – we’re resurrected and brought back to life. Unlike the prisoners in Plato’s cave, we no longer harbor the illusion that the random, unsolicited images our minds endlessly propagate are reality and the means of our salvation.

Neuroscience researchers estimate that our brains operate at least half the time in what’s called the default mode, during which we replay past experiences, fantasize about the future, ruminate over how we’ve been wronged and how we might exact revenge, and otherwise wallow in self-referential thinking. The price of admission to the default mode movie?  Lots of lost productivity on the job, for sure – but also fewer opportunities to experience joy in our work, since we can experience joy only when we’re truly alive, living and breathing in the present moment.

by ericfridman

There’s no crying in finance

Or anywhere else in business, we’re told. It’s inappropriate behavior for serious people dealing with serious matters.

And yet, crying is the one experience we share with others that can communicate the full emotional impact of both the joy and the tragedy of our human experience.

That serious enough for you?

One of the after-effects of my recent bone marrow stem cell transplant has been graft vs. host disease (GvHD), a war between my donor’s immune system and my own. Fortunately, my symptoms have for the most part been limited to my eyes, where a severe case of dry eye is the result of my eyes’ inability to produce tears. My tear ducts are toast and will be forever.

It’s not that I no longer experience the wide range of emotions – joy, grief, sadness, awe, even anger – that used to bring me to tears. I still experience these powerful emotions fully, but at the very last moment they fail to express.

The result? I feel like an incomplete human being, since emotional connection to others seems to me to be what being human is all about.

When we discourage the full expression of our response to life’s unexpected joyful or distressing events at work, we repress the full expression of our humanity. This includes our creativity, curiosity, compassion, and our capacity to think intelligently about the complexities that ensue when imperfect people try to work together in dysfunctional groups to solve wicked organizational problems.

I’m not advocating for loud, dramatic public displays of uncontrolled emotion. I am advocating for – in fact insisting on – the freedom to shed a few tears discretely with close colleagues with whom we feel safe when life overwhelms us.

We’re under the misimpression that tears at work mean we have lost control of our emotions, that we’re acting irrationally. And of course, as we all know, workplace behavior is nothing if not rational.

Just kidding. My experience has been that workplace behavior is mostly irrational, and that fully expressing our emotions is one of the most rational things we can do to make sense of behavior that, left unprocessed, leaves us at a loss as to how to move forward in life.

The real reason there’s no crying at work is that many of us feel profoundly uncomfortable when others express powerful emotions in our presence. We don’t know how to manage all this messy psychic energy people are throwing our way when they’re brought to tears at the office.

In 2023, Gallup reported that only 33% of US-based employees reported feeling engaged and enthusiastic about their work. That’s a sad commentary on the quality of our work lives. When we insist that others repress their emotions at work, we’ll never know what they’re really thinking, and over time we’ll lose trust in each other. If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last 50 years about optimal organizational performance, it’s that trust is the essential foundation of every high-performing team.

by ericfridman

An open letter to my 28-year old daughter


This clearly is the Year of the Woman. I can feel it. Hilary Clinton’s DNC keynote last night was compelling and inspiring, and Michelle Obama’s speech was – at least in my opinion – more impassioned than Barack’s, who has deservedly been described as one of the greatest presidential orators of our time.

Hilary and Michelle owned the room last night in Chicago. So, who’s flying to FL to give the big guy the bad news? Women are on the move, and they’re done taking “no” or “not yet” for an answer.

Kamala Harris. Taylor Swift. Caitlin Clark. Beyoncé. Amy Edmondson (humor me, Francesca, she’s one of my professional heros), Simone Biles, Maggie Haberman, Greta Gerwig, and MacKenzie Scott, to name just a few of the many powerful women who are moving us forward. They’ve all assumed their rightful places on the world stage of politics, sports, journalism, culture, business, and philanthropy. Each is leaving her mark on the world.

Powerful, intelligent, and courageous women with fierce minds, kind hearts, and brave spirits are leading the way.

The world is changing, and despite the toxic diet of vitriol and violence the media feeds us on a daily basis, let’s not forget that in many ways it’s also changing for the better. I sense more empathy, more compassion, and more courage to raise our voices and speak our truths. In many cases, we have women to thank for this long-overdue transformation of our culture.

Ride the wave, Francesca. You’ve been blessed and privileged to have been born at exactly the right place, at exactly the right time, with exactly the right constellation of passion, skill, knowledge, and street smarts that will serve you well throughout your life.

Now find your rightful place on the stage, make your own mark, and ride the wave.

by ericfridman

Success

How do you measure the success of your career?

Maybe I’m stating the obvious, but each of us chooses the work we do for different reasons. That’s why each of us alone bears sole responsibility for whatever professional success we might or might not enjoy along the way.

Let that sink in for a moment. Success is a choice we make.

We choose the industry or profession we work in – healthcare, education, professional sports, or law.

We chose the organizational context within which we work – profit or non-profit, large corporation, start-up, or independent practice.

We also choose the kinds of tasks we perform within these industries and organizational contexts – engineering, marketing, quarterbacking, or consulting.

It’s not so surprising, then, that we might each measure success in different ways.

Some of us define success in terms of how much money we bring home at the end of the month. For us, the work we do is primarily an economic transaction.

Others of us measure success in terms of how much we enjoy spending time with our colleagues. We view work primarily as a social transaction.

Finally, some of us measure success by the extent to which the work we do is aligned with deeply-held personal values. For us, our work is what we might call a matter of the heart – a commitment we make not to a particular industry, organization, or discipline but to some sense of purpose larger than ourselves.

Ideally, we work for some combination of these three reasons. But even if our work life is less than ideal, it’s important to acknowledge that any one of these three ways of justifying the work we do is perfectly acceptable. No one is more noble than another. There is no one “best” reason to work.

And yet…

Human development theory suggests that we pass through a series of developmental stages as we mature and become well-functioning adults. Two of these stages include a phase in which we default to others’ measures of success and a subsequent phase where we become the authors of our own definition of success.

Research also suggests, sadly, that nearly half of us will get stuck in the first stage without ever making it to the second. We live our lives according to who others – parents, peers, or the culture-at-large – expect us to be, doing the kind of work they expect us to do.

The result? At the end of the day – and maybe even at the end of our lives- we feel empty, unfulfilled, and resentful, lacking any sense of purpose or satisfaction.

That’s why it’s not so much our personal definition of success – be it economic, social, or purpose-based – but instead how we arrive at that definition that matters most. It’s the “how,” not the “what,” of the way we measure success that gives our life meaning and determines whether, in the end, we can conclude that we’ve enjoyed a whole life well lived.

by ericfridman

Everything happens at once

Years ago, during my first stint as a graduate student, I came across the following reflection etched into the wall of a bathroom stall in the basement of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School:

“Thank God for time, otherwise everything would happen at once.” 

For this would-be philosopher, everything apparently did happen at once, which is how he came to be sitting in this particular place at this particular time. More importantly, what he hints at is revealing: even allowing for the existence of God, everything we experience in life happens at once, right here, right now, simply because it can’t happen anywhere else. 

We live only in the present moment. Past and future are figments of our imagination, narratives our minds fabricate to promote the illusion of a permanent, predictable self-identity we would like to believe persists, unchanged, over time. 

For those of us planning our careers, I think our lavatory philosopher’s observation begs an important question. If everything happens at once – as it unquestionably does – why plan anything at all, since the future is an illusion, and an unpredictable illusion at that? 

We make plans to wrestle the chaos of the world into some kind of coherence that helps us get things done. Planning allows us to feel as though we’re being productive, that we’re in control. But our plans offer us at best a false sense of security, since the rug can be pulled out from under our feet at any moment. 

Plans lead us to believe that what we want to happen really will happen. Of course, what we want to happen occasionally does happen, though not nearly as often as we’d like. 

Oliver Burkeman, in his brilliant book “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” argues that the greatest source of our unhappiness in life comes from the simple fact that while our time on this planet is limited to 4,000 weeks on average, the different ways we might spend our time and the different choices we might make are unlimited. 

This tension, aggravated by the omnipresence of social media, has created the professional scourge of our time – the fear of missing out. 

What should we make of this? Here’s my take: let’s accept the fact that the future is an unpredictable fantasy in which anything can and will happen. We should plan our careers to the best of our ability, certainly, but we should hold our plans lightly. We should allow enough space in our plans for unanticipated miracles to occur. 

The most influential people in our lives always seem to show up unexpectedly, at exactly the right time. They were never part of our plan, but we welcome them into our lives graciously nonetheless. 

People who hold their plans lightly are often people whose lives follow the course of a meander, rather than a steep trajectory up and to the right. They leave room for the unexpected and the unforeseen. They’re by far the most interesting people I know and also, from best I can tell, the happiest.

by ericfridman

She’s all in

In August 2021, I underwent a stem cell transplant as treatment for bone marrow cancer. Last weekend, I met my stem cell donor, Lauren – a 24-year-old speech pathologist from Columbus, Ohio – for the first time via Zoom. 

Lauren, it turns out, is a kind, smart, young woman with an engaging sense of humor and a heart that’s always aching for others who are suffering. After finishing her master’s degree in speech and language pathology, she now works with grade school kids in the Columbus public school system who have speech disabilities. 

Lauren explained to me how she had registered as a stem cell donor with Gift of Life in college. Her sorority membership included a social responsibility requirement, and by registering as a prospective stem cell donor, Lauren partially fulfilled that requirement. She then went on to create a Donor Circle of friends who have also registered as prospective donors. 

Then things got real. Lauren was contacted by Gift of Life, notifying her that she had been identified as a perfect match with a 68-year-old cancer patient in Chicago looking for a suitable stem cell donor.

Her family, she confided to me, expressed concern, naturally, about the safety of the procedure. But Lauren never gave it a second thought. It was, she told me, “absolutely the right thing to do.” 

“I’m in!” she replied, without hesitation. 

Evolution has hard-wired us to believe that it’s better to be safe than sorry. This bias provided our ancestors with a powerful defense against predators and famine, among other existential threats. While few of us face these same risks today, it’s still easy to fall into the trap of believing that there’s a catastrophe waiting for us around every corner. 

Evolution has no interest in our happiness, contentment, or joy – its only concern is that we get our genes into the next generation. For those of us like Lauren, however, who insist on living a fully human life – a life filled with compassion, love, and concern for others – it’s imperative that we learn how to swim upstream, against the current of evolution. 

Like Lauren, we need to stand up and shout, “I’m in!” Go to https://lnkd.in/gXiPesja to join Lauren’s Donor Circle and register as a prospective bone marrow stem cell donor today.

by ericfridman

Will you lead?

Senior executive coaching client

After having lunch recently with an executive team I’d been coaching, I wrote the following email to each of the team members the following day. 

“Thanks for your time over lunch yesterday and your willingness to speak candidly about the current state of your team. I hope you won’t mind if I share a few final thoughts and a question or two with you before your dinner out together tonight. 

“Your success as a team will depend almost entirely on how much you come to trust each other. 

“Will you honor, and find ways to accommodate, each other’s different wants, needs, and expectations with kindness and compassion? Will you care – truly care – for each other’s learning and well-being? 

“This takes enormous courage because our egos are so fragile. We will do whatever it takes to defend them when we feel threatened by others’ opinions and beliefs, especially when they’re different from our own. 

“One thing I’ve learned as a coach is that the most important leadership quality of all is not strategic thinking, financial acumen, or communication skill. It’s humility, coupled with the capacity to care about the well-being of the people you lead. It’s a kind of open-heartedness that encourages us to let others into our lives, without pre-conditions or judgement. 

“This is not something you learn in business school. You can’t teach people how to care about others. And you can’t inspire people who don’t care about you to work together toward a common goal. 

“So, will you lead? Will you choose curiosity over righteousness? (There’s nothing wrong with being right, of course. It’s our need to be right all the time that can trip us up.) 

“Will you choose humility over ego and arrogance?

“Rise to the challenge of leadership. Make a special effort to build a personal relationship with the one member on your team whose wants, needs, and expectations are most different from yours. Ask a lot of questions about where they’ve been and where they want to go. Start to construct your relationship from the ground up, with sincere and open curiosity about the other and how they’ve become the remarkable person they are today.

“Will you lead?”