Today we’d like to introduce you to Sharon Weber.
Sharon, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I believed “do what you love and the money will follow” and discovered not much money follows modern dance choreography. My best friend from grade school was an executive at a training and management firm and suggested I attend one of their business development sessions to get some ideas to market my dance program. To my shock, I love it! I wanted in. My friend was willing to make a call on my behalf, halfheartedly, “I don’t know what to do with her, and she’s a dancer and wants to be a training facilitator.” After a few stressful, discouraging years of getting trained, receiving lukewarm feedback and no requests for my services as a contractor, I got a break. Big Bear grocery chain was looking for customer service training. It involved a lot of travel through off the beat locations through West Virginia, Pennsylvania and upstate New York, and they weren’t paying a competitive fee. A long way of saying nobody else wanted it.
After a few weeks on the road, tired, lonely, discouraged with trying to be something other than myself, I decided to start doing these trainings not the way I was supposed to but my way. If it worked out, great, if not, I’d figure something else out. I realized how critical authenticity is to success and wrote my first award-winning book, Hot in the Pot, A Survival Guide for the Real You in the Corporate World. That was twenty years ago and I’ve had the honor, joy and privilege to consult with over 30,000 team members from Fortune 100 companies like Deloitte, American Express, Merck, MetLife and fast growing startups like Fitbit, Carbonite and TripAdvisor.
Five years ago I was driving home from delivering a two-day coaching session and feeling heavyhearted that the managers were working so hard to learn feedback sharing techniques, creating motivating development plans, providing coaching, etc. A frequent question I was getting in these leadership trainings was how to motivate staff. On the other hand, I would occasionally get people in my sessions that would show up wide eyed and bushy tailed. They love work and not because they were making any more money than others nor had sexy job titles, they just love work. I wondered if we could learn how to show up to any job and love today, everyday.
I decided to research what it was that explained their ability to create and sustain passion for their job. I spent two years researching job lovers and wrote my second award-winning book, Work It! Five Simple Steps to Loving Monday Mornings. The program developed from the concepts of Work It! is called Passionize Your Workplace. We are on a mission to reinvent how people experience the work week. No more Monday morning blues, Tired Tuesday, Wednesday Hump Day etc. We are transforming the workplace to be a place to learn, grow and make a difference regardless of where one is on the spectrum of right fit. I am as committed to how people show up to work as I am to how they arrive home. It’s a win for everyone, the team member is empowered to create a work life he/she loves living, the company culture is positive and energizing and teams are more collaborative, innovative and produce results. #loveWhatYouDo
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
No. First trying to transition from being a modern dance choreographer to a corporate training facilitator was a steep learning curve and my colleagues had degrees, masters and PhDs in Occupational Development, Training Design and Development. Companies did not have confidence in me to come in and lead trainings for their teams. Ironically, being a dancer when I was starting out was something to downplay, after ten years, once I developed a client base, it was something to highlight.
Being a speaker/facilitator is live. We are in front of audiences eight hours a day and it is unpredictable. Not to mention you are getting feedback in real time everyday from twenty five people. No matter how positive the feedback is, I always bum out from the one that wasn’t positive.
Also, Passionize Your Workplace is a revolutionary approach to what Gallup Poll has declared an “employee engagement crisis.” Companies are investing in coaching, flexible hours, perks, bring your dog to work, but no one is treating passion for work as a skill that can be learned, practiced and mastered. It is a challenge to educate and influence Learning and Development executives to try something innovative and take the chance.
SHW Global Worklife Talents – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
SHW Global, Worklife Talents is on a mission to support team members with the nuanced skills that are critical to success and don’t get much attention. Being able to create and sustain passion for their role, having courage to speak up with confidence, emotional intelligence, knowing how, when and where to ask what question, being resilient and agile in times of change or disappointment, cultivating positivity in the face of mistakes, scope changes, surprises, contributing to a complaining-free zone, and other challenges that can derail a team member or the team.
I asked a CEO of a hip successful startup how he handles the low times and I was struck by his candor, “Actually, I’m not good at it, it often takes my girlfriend and partner to help me to move on.” Some people are more finessed than others, but when a team has mastery of these skills, the productivity, transparency, communication, collaboration, innovation and results all benefit.
We provide training and coaching to enlighten and empower team members to take full ownership of their work life experience. They learn the power of mindset management. This technology we all got born into called our bodies comes with a “choose your own mindset app” and attendees learn how to be skilled in using it. Our motto is “how you think triggers how you feel, how you feel, triggers how you behave (right down to the micro muscles on your face and your tone of voice) and how you behave shapes your life experience.” So why would anyone choose a mindset that triggers anger, resentment, embarrassment, shame, anxiety? Because people don’t know how to reset and commit to a mindset that enlivens, engages and inspires them to learn, be grateful, and be forward looking. And, this blind spot cost companies billions in low productivity, turnover and incompetence.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
It’s hard to put the pride I experience into one moment. I guess when I shared Passionize Your Workplace with a team of project leaders from a training company (so they see a lot of training) and the Director of Product Development asked me if I’d be interested in developing the program as a product for the company. But, there have been times where people have shared with me that learning how to change a mindset in ninety seconds (a game called The Three Peeze Game) has transformed a mother’s relationship with her daughter. A client texted me a year after a session to tell me that she was on vacation for the first time without her whole family because her son was in college and rather than having that bring her down she was grateful to have the special time with her daughter, her daughter’s friend and her husband. That’s why I say this is as much about how people show up to work as it is about how they arrive home.
Contact Info:
- Website: shwglobal.com
- Phone: 781-424-0442
- Email: sharon@shwglobal.com
- Facebook: @shwglobal
Getting in touch: BostonVoyager is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
