What skills do you bring from your passion into your work?
Most of us work on more than one thing at a time. I am not just talking about the multiple projects we take on at work. At TeamFit I generally have three or four projects running at any one time, but I also work on some external projects.
Please take our short survey on skills in 2016
These external projects bring new ideas, connections and skills to my day job.
I manage the LinkedIn Design Thinking Group (57,000 people and growing). This gives me a lot of insight into trends in the wider design world, not to mention the stress of managing a fractious, opinionated community. I also collaborate with my wife Yoshie Hattori on her photo blog It Is. Apart from some technical skills I pick up doing this, mostly on media cataloging, the study of her art work opens large contemplative spaces in my week that are important to my own creativity.
What do you do outside work that builds your skills, feeds your passion, and opens you up to new people and ideas? Send us an e-mail and we will share your ideas in a future post.
Other people at TeamFit have varied activities. Designer N-Q Chang is involved in building and supporting a community of young professionals from Korea, helping them build their own networks and adapt to Canada. She is also an accomplished choral singer (Vancouver seems to be a hotbed of choral groups, they are one of those quiet networks that knits people together).
David Botta, who is leading a lot of our data visualization work (you will see this in the platform later this year) is a very accomplished artist, working in code, game design (games can be subverted into art) and sculpture. He is also a practitioner of Tai Chi and brings that body awareness into his thinking about design.
I see the same pattern all around me. The people who bring the in the best ideas and spark change are passionate about more than work. Of course it is not enough to have a passion and follow it. You have to bring those new skills to bear on work as well.
Companies need to be open for this to happen. Open here means a couple of things.
That people have time in their lives to pursue things outside of work
That the workplace is open to new ideas and new perspectives
That there are ways to connect people and skills in surprising ways
If your company is not making some formal efforts to do these things it is narrowing its future opportunities and failing to take advantage of the full range of skills of its people.
Does your company use Slack? If it does encourage people to use the #Random channel to share new ideas and curiosities from outside the company. Here is a fascinating little piece on Stereotomy I found on our Slack #random channel this morning. It opened my mind to new ways of thinking about perspective that we can apply to user interfaces.
For those on TeamFit, have people add in projects from outside their normal work. I even have a project record for the work I do on It Is!
Top image from Yoshie Hattori’s It Is blog.