Good Intentions Pave the Way to Innovation Hell

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The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and nowhere is that more true than in innovation.

Good Intentions Pave the Way to Innovation Hell

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

That’s one of the insights I took away from InnoLead’s Q1 report on corporate innovation priorities.  The report is an eye-opening look at the impact of AI on corporate innovation as experienced by corporate entrepreneurs themselves.  But before deep diving into that topic, the report’s authors shared intriguing data about member companies’ innovation structure, leadership engagement, organizational connections, and results. Nestled amongst the charts were several that, when taken together, got my Spidey senses tingling.

61.0% of innovation teams are “directly under a high-visibility leader with a broad company focus.”

This is great because innovation needs senior leaders’ support and active engagement to survive, let alone survive for long enough to produce meaningful results. Add this to the fact that 45% of senior leadership teams frequently discuss the “progress and value of the innovation program,” and all signs point to innovation as a strategic priority.

But (you knew there was a but, didn’t you)…

If “broad company focus” means “no P&L responsibility,” we have a problem.  In every for-profit company I’ve worked for and with, people with P&L responsibility have greater power, influence, and access to resources than people without a P&L.  This division may not feel fair, but it makes sense – the people who bring in profit and revenue will always be more influential than people who represent “cost centers.”

You can see the impact of P&L owners who are, understandably, focused entirely on delivering short-term results throughout the report – 75% of companies have shifted their focus more towards near-term priorities, and 61% shifted their innovation portfolio away from Horizon 3 (also known as radical, breakthrough, or disruptive innovation).

As for all those discussions, it’d be great if they focused on walking the talk of innovation. But suppose it’s only innovation platitudes or, worse, questioning innovation’s ROI. That doesn’t bode well for the “high-visibility leader with broad company focus,” the innovation team, or the company’s culture.

71.2% of innovation teams’ customers or business partners are unaware of the team’s existence, don’t engage, or engage only occasionally.

Welcome to Innovation Island!  Where the cool people work on cool things in cool offices while all you drones slave away doing the same thing you’ve always done and making the money that pays for the cool people to do cool things in their cool offices.

I’m sure this isn’t the message the innovation team intends to send, but it’s the one received by most organizations.

When arguing for Innovation Island, managers often point to the organizational antibodies likely to swarm and kill H3/radical/breakthrough innovation and even some H2/adjacent innovations.  They’re right, and those innovations must be “protected.” But not every innovation needs protection.  H2 and certainly H1 innovations, where most portfolios are now, should be shared with the core business because the core business will eventually run them.

The bigger problem, in my opinion, is that innovation teams don’t seem to be reaching out to others in the organization.  Like the P&L owners they report to, people in the core business are busy running the business and generating revenue.  Very few have the time or energy to seek out the innovation team to discuss and explore innovation.  Companies that want to build a culture of innovation need to turn their innovators into evangelists, not residents of an island connected to the mainland by a single drawbridge.

23.4% of innovation teams are considered outsiders or actively undermined by other functions and business units.

This may not sound bad, but add to it the 55.0% that are “somewhat integrated with occasional collaboration” with other departments and business units, and you may be tempted to believe that Innovation Island would be wise to invest in a surface-to-air missile defense system.

Sadly, this perception of the innovation team as “The Others” isn’t surprising when considering that the most important tactic for building a relationship between innovation and the functions or business units is already having strong relationships and interpersonal trust (75.3% of respondents).  The least effective (4.7% of respondents) is “writing down shared objectives and expectations.”  So, no, the email you sent is not enough to win friends and influence people.

Bottom line

Well-intended companies appoint a senior executive to lead the innovation team because they’ve been told that doing so is powerful proof that innovation is a strategic priority.  They hire outsiders to inject new thinking into the organization because they know that “what got you here won’t get you there.”  They cordon the team and their work off from the rest of the organization because they read that separation is essential to preserving innovation’s disruptive nature. 

But if the senior executive doesn’t have the organizational power and influence that comes with P&L ownership, the team doesn’t have strong personal relationships with others in the business, and other functions and business units don’t know the team exists or how to interact with it, innovation will go nowhere.

But that’s better than where it could go.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Transformation is Human Not Digital

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Transformation is Human Not Digital

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

A decade ago, many still questioned the relevance of digital technology. While Internet penetration was already significant, e-commerce made up less than 6% of retail sales. Mobile and cloud computing were just getting started and artificial intelligence was still more science fiction than reality.

Yet today, all of those things are not only viable technologies, but increasingly key to effectively competing in the marketplace. Unfortunately, implementing these new technologies can be a thorny process. In fact, research by McKinsey found that fewer than one third of digital transformation efforts succeed.

For the most part, these failures have less to do with technology and more to do with managing the cultural and organizational challenges that a technological shift creates. It’s relatively easy to find a vendor that can implement a system for you, but much harder to prepare your organization to adapt to new technology. Here’s what you need to keep in mind:

Start With Business Objectives

Probably the most common trap that organizations fall into is focusing on technology rather than on specific business objectives. All too often, firms seek to “move to the cloud” or “develop AI capabilities.” That’s a sure sign you’re headed down the wrong path.

“The first question you have to ask is what business outcome you are trying to drive,” Roman Stanek, CEO at GoodData, told me. “Projects start by trying to implement a particular technical approach and not surprisingly, front-line managers and employees don’t find it useful. There’s no real adoption and no ROI.”

So start by asking yourself business related questions, such as “How could we better serve our customers through faster, more flexible technology?” or “How could artificial intelligence transform our business?” Once you understand your business goals, you can work your way back to the technology decisions.

Automate The Most Tedious Tasks First

Technological change often inspires fear. One of the most basic mistakes many firms make is to try to use new technology to try and replace humans and save costs rather than to augment and empower them to improve performance and deliver added value. This not only kills employee morale and slows adoption, it usually delivers worse results.

A much better approach is to use technology to improve the effectiveness of human employees. For example, one study cited by a White House report during the Obama Administration found that while machines had a 7.5 percent error rate in reading radiology images and humans had a 3.5% error rate, when humans combined their work with machines the error rate dropped to 0.5%.

The best way to do this is to start with the most boring and tedious tasks first. Those are what humans are worst at. Machines don’t get bored or tired. Humans, on the other hand, thrive on interaction and like to solve problems. So instead of looking to replace workers, look instead to make them more productive.

Perhaps most importantly, this approach can actually improve morale. Factory workers actively collaborate with robots they program themselves to do low-level tasks. In some cases, soldiers build such strong ties with robots that do dangerous jobs that they hold funerals for them when they “die.”

Shift Your Organization And Your Business Model

Another common mistake is to think that you can make a major technological shift and keep the rest of your business intact. For example, shifting to the cloud can save on infrastructure costs, but the benefits won’t last long if you don’t figure out how to redeploy those resources in some productive way.

For example, when I talked to Barry Libenson, Global CIO of the data giant, Experian, about his company’s shift to the cloud, he told me that “The organizational changes were pretty enormous. We had to physically reconfigure how people were organized. We also needed different skill sets in different places so that required more changes and so on.”

The shift to the cloud made Experian more agile, but more importantly it opened up new business opportunities. Its shift to the cloud allowed the company to create Ascend, a “data on demand” platform that allows its customers to make credit decisions based on near real time data, which is now its fastest growing business.

“All of the shifts we made were focused on opening up new markets and serving our customers better,” Libenson says, and that’s what helped make the technological shift so successful. Because it was focused on business results, it was that much easier to get everybody behind it, gain momentum and create a true transformation.

Humans Collaborating With Machines

Consider how different work was 20 years ago, when Windows 95 was still relatively new and only a minority of executives regularly used programs like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. We largely communicated by phone and memos typed up by secretaries. Data analysis was something you did with a pencil, paper and a desk calculator.

Clearly, the nature of work has changed. We spend far less time quietly working away at our desks and far more interacting with others. Much of the value has shifted from cognitive skills to social skills as collaboration increasingly becomes a competitive advantage. In the future, we can only expect these trends to strengthen and accelerate.

To understand what we can expect, look at what’s happened in the banking industry. When automatic teller machines first appeared in the early 1970s, most people thought it would lead to less branches and tellers, but actually just the opposite happened. Today, there are more than twice the number of bank tellers employed as in the 1970s, because they do things that machines can’t do, like solve unusual problems, show empathy and up-sell.

That’s why we need to treat any technological transformation as a human transformation. The high value work of the future will involve humans collaborating with other humans to design work for machines. Get the human part right and the technology will take care of itself.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Dall-E via Bing

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The Innovation Enthusiasm Gap

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The Innovation Enthusiasm Gap

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Getting new innovations launched within companies of any significant size typically requires buy-in from a number of different people and groups around the organization.

And moving towards a “culture” of innovation that the most successful companies create definitely requires that there be a critical mass of people with common understanding of the value of innovation.

Different Attitudes Towards Innovation

In any given enterprise there are generally many people who are hungry for the excitement of innovation and at the same time there are often many people who are resistant. Innovation, after all, inherently means change. And while change is viewed by some as exciting, challenging and fun, others view change as risky, scary and something to be avoided wherever possible.

Understanding how to segment your key stakeholders at all levels of an organization based on their appetite and attitude towards change is very helpful in devising a plan to “bring along” as many people as possible on the innovation bandwagon. All people are unique and hold certain beliefs and attitudes for a variety of reasons including their personality, past experiences, and reward constructs. But we’ll talk about one high level trend that we have found to apply in most cases regarding how to gauge the likelihood that people will have initial enthusiasm for innovation based on their level in the organization. This is not the only way of slicing the onion to predict who will favor vs resist innovation, this is just one model, but it’s the one we’ll focus on in this article.

The Innovation Enthusiasm Inverted Bell Curve

The Inverted Bell Curve

While we have no quantitative research to support this, we have generally observed an inverted bell curve trend as it applies to “Innovation Enthusiasm.” Let’s consider three basic groups:

  1. The company leadership team: Primarily the CEO, but also the other members of the leadership team (CFO, COO, COO etc) who are held directly responsible for the company’s success.
  2. The “troops”: The bottom couple of tiers of the organization that typically make up 90% of the employees
  3. The managers: Specifically the middle to upper level managers. These may be department heads, marketing executives, product managers — people who have achieved some level of status and success within the organization’s hierarchy but who are not at the top level.

So lets take these groups one at a time.

CEOs Like Innovation

The vast majority of CEOs of large enterprises recognize that innovation is essential to their company’s success and consequently essential to their success and continued tenure as CEO.

Why is this the case? A CEO’s job is to grow a company. In most cases, A CEO whose company is not growing is a CEO who is soon to be fired. And growth almost always requires innovation. Why? Well let’s be a bit simplistic and say there are two primary market conditions in which a company can find itself — a market which is not fundamentally growing and one which is.

In a market that is fundamentally not growing, the three main ways that a company can grow would be for it to:

  1. Out-innovate competitors so as to take their share
  2. Move into new product categories or businesses
  3. Acquire competitors

All three of these require some level of innovation. Number one is obviously about innovation. Number two requires a healthy amount of innovation around creation of new capabilities. And even number three, the seeming least innovative of the three, still usually requires innovation from a scale management perspective.

In a market that is fundamentally growing, sitting back and riding the “rising tide” is not necessarily the key to growth. Innovation is also critical for a company to grow in the midst of a strong market. Successfully riding the rising tide requires innovation. Why?

  • Substantial scaling requires innovation – As markets increase in size, a company may find that in order to take full advantage of the scale of the opportunity they need to be able to serve 2x, 10x, even 100x the customers or orders they did previously. That level of scaling generally requires a substantial change to how business is done. Apple has had to be just as innovative in their supply chain and distribution approach as they have had to be with their product development in order to capitalize on the success in the growing market for mobile devices.
  • Growing markets attract disruptors – If the market demand for a product or service is surging, that tends to attract investment and competitive innovation. If the market is growing but a competitor out-innovates you, you might find yourself shrinking even though the market is growing. Consider Research in Motion.

So a CEO has every reason to like innovation. Does a CEO have any reason to fear innovation? Not much. Innovation isn’t always successful, however most boards are far more patient with a CEO who is innovating and not finding success than they are with a CEO who isn’t innovating at all. Furthermore, even unsuccessful innovation gives a CEO something to tell his board and investors to keep them optimistic about the future, so even innovations that are unsuccessful in the market can, for a while at least, keep a stock price up which is, after all, a CEO’s main performance metric.

The Troops Like Innovation

We’ll call the 90%+ of employees of a given company, the “troops”. While of course nothing is absolute, troops, on the whole, tend to like innovation. Why?

  • They want the company to be successful – They can see that changing with the times and bringing new products to market will help the company. They take pride in the brand and they know that financial success and growth means job security and raises, and that their long term job security will be in danger if the company doesn’t keep up with the times.
  • It can help them serve the customer better – Troops who face customers directly most of the time want to do their job as well as possible since part of their job satisfaction can be the direct and immediate feedback they get when interacting with the end-customers.
  • It creates opportunity – For ambitious people lower down in the organization, change creates new needs and new opportunities which could accelerate their rise.
  • Its exciting and interesting – Lots of jobs are boring. Change creates interest.

There are certain types of change that can be threatening to the Troops; such as innovation via overseas outsourcing or automation that eliminates employees, so those are exceptions. There definitely are also members of the troops who tend to fear and resist change as a first reaction, however at most companies these are the minority. Properly communicated innovation initiatives that don’t have an obvious or direct threat to employees job security is generally embraced by the majority of the troops.

Managers Don’t Really Like Innovation

So if The CEO’s like innovation, and the troops like it, whats the problem? You have both the top leadership of the company and the overwhelming majority of the employees ready to embrace innovation, surely that should be enough, right? It’s not. We see over and over again CEOs who feel stuck because they are asking their “people” to innovate and its just not happening. What we find at many companies is that despite being encouraged by the CEO and top management, most middle and upper-level managers have limited reasons to be motivated to truly innovate in a dramatic way. Why is this the case?

Change creates risk. Middle and upper-level managers have the most “stake” in the status quo – they have the most to lose. Middle and upper-level managers tend to own processes and products. When new processes and products arise to potentially replace their existing fiefdom, managers will often do their best to ensure that they wind up with the same scope of responsibility, the same budget and the same number of direct reports. While its possible for managers to move up in a new order, very often a “bird in the hand” mentality among managers encourages a stance which is about defending the status quo and supporting “innovations” which inherently work within the existing structure. Ultimately, this often means only very incremental innovations.

One might think that middle and upper managers have the same loyalty to the company and shared interest in the company’s overall success, but in our experience this is not quite so. Individuals generally rise to these ranks because they are fairly savvy and that savviness generally extends to the recognition that their personal career success is not necessarily tied to the company overall. For example a product manager with a successful product at a company which overall is going down the tubes can, at the right moment, jump ship and leverage their demonstrated track record of success. However an individual who becomes marginalized by change at their current company (or simply winding up with reduced responsibilities), while they certainly can still move to another position, is all of the sudden playing defense.

Furthermore, that mindset of innovation “within the current structure” is then telegraphed to their team members. Its common for the troops to realize that the CEO wants dramatic improvements based on his communications, however if lower level employees also perceive that the head of their department is looking to not rock the boat too much, the troops may ultimately shift their loyalty to the manager who conducts their performance evaluation, decides their increases and determines promotions.

The truth is that collectively within an organization, while the CEO might be the single most powerful individual in terms of influencing the organization, the middle and upper-level managers are the most powerful layer, so if they are not embracing of innovation, they can stifle it fairly easily, no matter what the CEO’s and troops’ wishes may be.

Rogues

However, we do see in most organizations that there are “rogue” upper and middle managers who buck the trend. They are either passionate about the company or just turned on by the new and innovative to such an extent that it makes sense for them to take the risk and go “all in” in support of massive innovation. We see that typically about one in twenty middle and upper-level managers are of this type. These individuals can be a key to turning the tide, however there is great risk that these mavericks will face such pressure from their peers in an organization that they either stifle their own tendencies, or more likely, leave for an organization where the culture is more welcoming of innovation. By allowing this “weeding out” of the true innovators at the middle and upper-level management layer, the ratio of rogues can drop from one in twenty to one in a hundred or even less.

Summary

Here is a summary of the attitudinal tendencies. Remember, there are always outliers, this model is only meant to help provide understanding around how different circumstances and levels of risk and reward from change influence people differently at different levels.

CEO + Leadership Team​

Leadership TeamAttitude: Favor innovation that drives up stock price. Often has sense of urgency.

Risk: The risk is not innovating. CEOs must drive growth which usually requires innovation. If the CEO does not drive growth he, and his immediate reports, are likely to be looking for new jobs.

Reward: Even the appearance of innovation (say, an improved product pipeline) can give a CEO room to breathe with a board and investors as it creates optimism. True innovation at the Apple or WalMart level of course creates superstar CEOs.

Troops

TroopsAttitude: Tend to be open to the idea of innovation except when it is targeting outsourcing, staff reductions, or automation which risks their job.

Risk: The biggest risk in typical organizations is that “getting involved” with innovation projects might be seen as negative by the middle and upper managers by whom troops are evaluated.

Reward: The rewards are greater job security if innovation is successful as it helps the whole company as well as the ability to better serve customers an

Middle-Upper Management

ManagersAttitude: Tend to resist innovation or seek to compartmentalize innovations that do not jeopardize the organizational structure

Risk: The risk is that true innovation might change the organization so completely that their current position or its level of power, budget or scope would be jeopardized.

Reward: The potential exists for a middle/upper manager to “break out” and prove themselves a superstar by innovating. However most innovation requires collaboration with peers and if they cannot find willing partners in their peers their likelihood of failure is so high that the rewards seems unattainable. For middle/upper managers who are naturally inclined towards innovation despite the risks, the rewards are more emotional—they thrive on either improving things, helping their company or being a part of something new and exciting.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Howard Tiersky

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Easter Sale on Charting Change

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Easter Sale on Charting Change

Wow! Exciting news for Easter!

My publisher is having a 24 hour flash sale that will allow you to get the hardcover or the digital version (eBook) of my latest best-selling book Charting Change for 50% off to slide nicely into the Easter basket of someone you love!

I created the Human-Centered Change methodology to help organizations get everyone literally all on the same page for change. The 70+ visual, collaborative tools are introduced in my book Charting Change, including the powerful Change Planning Canvas™. The toolkit has been created to help organizations:

  • Beat the 70% failure rate for change programs
  • Quickly visualize, plan and execute change efforts
  • Deliver projects and change efforts on time
  • Accelerate implementation and adoption
  • Get valuable tools for a low investment

You must go to SpringerLink for this Cyber Sale:

  • The offer is valid until April 1, 2023 only using code 50off

Click here to get this deal using code 50off

Quick reminder: Everyone can download ten free tools from the Human-Centered Change methodology by going to its page on this site via the link in this sentence, and book buyers can get 26 of the 70+ tools from the Change Planning Toolkit (including the Change Planning Canvas™) by contacting me with proof of purchase.

*This offer is valid for English-language Springer, Palgrave & Apress books & eBooks. The discount is redeemable on link.springer.com only. Titles affected by fixed book price laws, forthcoming titles and titles temporarily not available on link.springer.com are excluded from this promotion, as are reference works, handbooks, encyclopedias, subscriptions, or bulk purchases. The currency in which your order will be invoiced depends on the billing address associated with the payment method used, not necessarily your home currency. Regional VAT/tax may apply. Promotional prices may change due to exchange rates. This offer is valid for individual customers only. Booksellers, book distributors, and institutions such as libraries and corporations please visit springernature.com/contact-us. This promotion does not work in combination with other discounts or gift cards.






It is Possible to Have Too Much

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It is Possible to Have Too Much

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When your best isn’t good enough, how do you feel? When your best isn’t good enough, what do you do? But more importantly, when your best isn’t good enough, what does that say about you?

If your best used to be good enough and now it isn’t, there are three possible explanations:

  1. Expectations increased and your performance is unchanged.
  2. Expectations increased and your performance increased less.
  3. Expectations increased and your performance decreased.

If expectations of your performance haven’t increased over last year, I want to work where you work because your company is an oasis (and an aberration). Since nearly all industries and occupations are governed by the unnatural mindset of growth-year-on-year-no-matter-what, it’s highly likely your performance expectations have increased. There’s no need to review this scenario.

In scenario one, your performance is unchanged. Why? Well, you may have tried to increase your performance but issues unrelated to work have consumed huge amounts of your emotional energy, and this new drain on your emotional energy consumed the energy you needed to increase your performance. A list of such issues includes global warming, deforestation, plastic in our water supply, COVID, political unrest, and the regular issues such as medical care for aging parents, death of your parents, inevitable health issues related to your aging. What does that say about you?

In scenario two, your performance increased, but the increase was insufficient. Maybe your performance would have increased quite a bit, but the special cause issues (COVID, etc.) along with the common cause issues (you and your parents get older every year) impacted your performance in a way that lessened the increase in your performance. Without the special causes, you would have met the increased expectations, but because of them, you did not. What does that say about you?

In scenario three, even though expectations increased, your performance decreased. In this case, it could be that political unrest and the other special causes teamed up with the common causes (stress of everyday life) to reduce your performance. What does that say about you?

In thermodynamics, there’s a law whose implications make it certain that there’s a limit to the amount of matter (stuff) you can put in a control volume (a defined volume that has a limit). That means that if every year you add air to a balloon, eventually it pops. Even the strongest ones. And when you extend this notion to people, it says that no matter how much pressure you apply to people, there’s a limit to what they can achieve. And if you apply pressure that overcomes their physical limit, they pop. Even the strongest ones. Or, maybe, especially the strongest ones because they try to take on more than their share.

People have a physical limit, and people cannot indefinitely support a mindset of growth-every-year-no-matter-what. No matter what, people will pop. It’s not if, it’s when. And add in the special causes of COVID, political unrest, and environmental problems and people pop sooner and cannot do what they did last year, no matter what.

And what does all this say about you? It says you are trying harder than ever. It says you are strong. It says you are amazing.

And what does it say about growth-every-year-no-matter-what? It says we should stop with all that, at least for a while.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Do What’s Right, Even if It is Not Expected

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Do What's Right, Even if It is Not Expected

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Often, it’s just a tiny bit more effort.

Not long ago, I wrote an article and created a video on Doing More Than Expected – even when it’s not included in your job description. I used the example of the server at a restaurant who ran outside during a storm to move the outdoor furniture blowing across the patio to a safer, more secure spot. He returned to the restaurant, drenched from the rain, to applause from the guests. I jokingly asked him, “Was moving patio furniture included in your job description?” He said, “I just do what it takes.”

That’s a great attitude to have. First, you have to be the kind of person who innately knows you should do something right, even if it isn’t expected. Second, you have to be empowered to make those choices and act on them.

I’m reminded of an employee who fixed things around the office. If he saw something that wasn’t right, he made it right. For example, we had a frame with a motivational quote that we changed every week. One week later, the quote and picture frame were crooked. I noticed it, and while it bothered me a bit, it wasn’t worth saying anything about it. By the end of the day, it was fixed.

If I don’t do it, who will?

I knew who did it, but I still asked loud enough for others to hear, “Who fixed the weekly quote?” The answer, of course, was the same guy who fixed everything around the office. I thanked him and asked him why he handles things like this. He said, “If I don’t do it, who will?”

I love those seven words. “If I don’t do it, who will?” is right up there with “I just do what it takes.” These are the mindsets of people who go the extra mile, and by the way, it’s not really an extra mile. Often, it’s just a tiny bit more effort, if any. It’s just doing it because, “If they don’t, who will?”

When someone comes to work for you, whatever their role and responsibility, you hope they are good at it. If all they do is that role and don’t care to do anything else, such as fixing a crooked piece of art in a frame, you would still be happy with their work. But what if another employee did the same and, in addition, was willing to fix the metaphorical piece of art in a frame, even without being asked? Who would you rather have working for you?

Your answer is most likely the second option. That employee is the type of team member who will do whatever they can to take care of their internal and external customers. Why? Because they do what it takes and know, “If I don’t do it, who will?”

Image Credits: Shep Hyken, Unsplash

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Five Ways to Make People Feel Heard

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Five Ways to Make People Feel Heard

GUEST POST from David Burkus

One of the most common complaints among disengaged employees is about not feeling heard, not being seen or recognized for what they do, who they are and what they are experiencing. As a leader, a lot of this frustration may stem from you. When people approach you with their problems and you jump right to give advice, you may feel you’re helping their problem…but you’re not helping them feel heard. And if they don’t feel heard, they’re not really hearing your advice anyway. Other times people speak up to share a new idea and get met with a quick retort about lack of budget or previous, similar ideas that didn’t work. You may think you’re helping move the conversation along, but you’re more likely causing team members to want to move along to find a new leader.

In this article, we’ll outline how to make people feel heard through five actions leaders can take to send the message that they are listening and respecting the contribution every member of their team is making.

1. Model Active Listening

The first way to make people feel heard is to model active listening. There’s no faster way to make someone feel ignored than to…ignore them. But in an era of constant distractions fighting for our attention, it can be difficult to focus in on someone sharing, and even more difficult to communicate that you are focused. That’s where active listening comes in. Make sure you’re truly centering your attention on them, receiving what they have to say. In addition, demonstrate your attention through non-verbals like nodding and gesturing. Before you take a turn responding, try to summarize what you heard and check for understanding. As you demonstrate active listening, you’ll find your team members feel more heard, but also that they hear each other better as well.

2. Praise The Contribution

The second way to make people feel heard is to praise their contribution, even if you disagree with their idea. Recognizing and appreciating their willingness to share their thoughts fosters a sense of validation and encourages continued participation. Highlighting the positive aspects of their contribution is crucial in creating an inclusive environment. By focusing on what they did well, you acknowledge their effort and encourage them to further develop their ideas. Moreover, praising contributions can also inspire others to share their thoughts and opinions. When individuals witness positive reinforcement, they are more likely to feel comfortable expressing their own ideas, leading to a more diverse and innovative team dynamic.

3. Challenge Assumptions, Not Ideas

The third way to make people feel heard is to challenge assumptions, not ideas. There may well be ideas shared in team meetings you want to push back on or challenge. But it’s important to maintain that feeling that you’re hearing and considering those ideas. So instead of criticizing the person or the idea directly, a more constructive approach is to question the assumptions behind their ideas. This allows for a deeper understanding of their thought process and encourages open-mindedness. Avoiding personal criticism is essential in maintaining a respectful and inclusive environment. By focusing on the assumptions, you shift the conversation towards exploring different perspectives and finding common ground. Asking questions to delve into the assumptions behind the idea not only demonstrates a genuine interest in understanding their viewpoint but also encourages critical thinking and fosters a culture of collaboration.

4. Questions Before Advice

The fourth way to make people feel heard is to ask questions before offering advice. Before providing advice, it is crucial to focus on understanding the problem at hand. By asking questions, you allow the person to feel heard and understood, creating a safe space for them to share their thoughts and concerns. Asking follow-up questions helps to delve deeper into the situation, uncovering underlying factors that may not be immediately apparent. This thorough understanding enables you to provide more relevant and effective advice. Show empathy throughout the conversation, acknowledging their emotions and experiences. By creating a safe and supportive environment, individuals are more likely to open up and engage in meaningful dialogue.

5. Addition Before Subtraction

The final way to make people feel heard is to add before you subtract, meaning build upon their existing idea or comments before challenging anything you heard. When offering feedback or criticism, it is essential to always start by highlighting the positive aspects of what was shared. By acknowledging the strengths and value of their contribution, you create a more receptive atmosphere. Even better, when you build upon the idea you demonstrate how much you value it. If you must offer constructive feedback and suggestions for improvement, focus on growth and development rather than solely pointing out flaws. This approach encourages individuals to embrace feedback as an opportunity for growth rather than feeling discouraged. Building on strengths and encouraging growth fosters a positive and supportive environment. By emphasizing the positive aspects, you inspire individuals to continue sharing their ideas and contribute to the team’s success.

Making people feel heard is a fundamental aspect of effective leadership. By modeling active listening, praising contributions, questioning assumptions, asking questions before offering advice, and focusing on addition before subtraction, leaders can create an inclusive and empowering environment. When individuals feel valued and understood, they are more motivated to contribute their ideas, leading to better outcomes and improved team culture. By implementing these tactics, leaders can foster a culture where everyone can do their best work ever.

Image credit: Pexels

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on July 10, 2023

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Challenging the Assumption of the Status Quo

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(A Lesson Learned from Yogurt)

Challenging the Assumption of the Status Quo

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

In September 2006, I moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, on a temporary assignment with BCG.  As one does when arriving somewhere for an extended period, I went to the grocery store to stock my kitchen. 

Since the grocery store was on the ground floor of my building, I bought enough food for a few breakfasts and dinners, made note of the other offerings for future trips, and learned through painful public embarrassment that one must purchase grocery bags (and those bags are nowhere near the checkout lane).

The following day, yogurt was on the menu, and I grabbed the first of the three options I had bought the previous day – a small container of strawberry yogurt.

My heart sank when I peeled off the top.

Instead of super healthy, organic, natural (I’m in Scandinavia, for crying out loud!) yogurt, the stuff in my cup was a rather suspicious beige with dark brown flecks.

Stifling my instinct to dry heave, I chucked the cup into the garbage, along with the five other cups in the clearly spoiled pack, and pulled Brand #2 out of the refrigerator.  Surely, this strawberry yogurt would be safe to eat.

But it, too, was beige.  A lighter beiger and without the disturbing brown flecks.  But still beige.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered.  Admittedly, the grocery store was more of a glorified convenience store, but c’mon, how hard is it to keep track of Sell By dates?

Into the garbage, it went.  Out of the refrigerator came Brand #3 (Yes, I take a portfolio approach to innovation AND food purchases)

Closing my eyes and saying a quick prayer to both the grocery and yogurt gods, I peeled open the yogurt. Not beige but a slight hint of pink, just enough to reassure me that it contained strawberries and hadn’t curdled but not so much that I suspected an American-amount of food coloring.

Later that day…

At lunch, my new colleagues asked how I was settling in.  I regaled them with my “bumbling American experiencing culture shock in a country where she looks (and is initially treated like) a local” stories. 

As we gathered up our dishes and returned to the kitchen, I commented that I was surprised that my local grocery would keep expired products on the shelf.  When they echoed my surprise, I told them about the spoiled yogurt and that 2 of the three brands I purchased were bad.

Based on the glances they exchanged, I knew I had another story to add to an already uncomfortably full book.

It turns out that. The “good” yogurt I ate that morning was from the lowest quality brand, one that no self-respecting Dane would consider eating but that is sold to unsuspecting foreigners (Hi, that’s me).  The “bad” yogurt was from respected all-natural brands.  All yogurt, they explained, falls somewhere in the spectrum from white to beige or even tan. That’s why they print the flavor name and a picture of the fruit on the label.

How often do we make the same mistake?

How often do we reject something because it’s not what we expect to see?  Because it’s not what we’re used to?

Maybe not often when it comes to yogurt, but what about other more important things, like:

  • Trends
  • Technologies
  • Ideas
  • Business Models
  • Startups
  • People

And what happens when we don’t have people willing to point out that we’re no longer in a place where our status quo applies?

Image credit: Pixabay

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Why More Women Are Needed in Innovation

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Why More Women Are Needed in Innovation

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Every once in a while I get a comment from an audience member after a keynote speech or from someone who read my book, Mapping Innovation, about why so few women are included. Embarrassed, I try to explain that, as in many male dominated fields, women are woefully underrepresented in science and technology.

This has nothing to do with innate ability. In fact, you don’t have to look far to find women at the very apex of innovation, such as Jennifer Doudna, who pioneered CRISPR or Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who received the Breakthrough Prize for her discovery of pulsars a few years ago. In earlier days, women like Grace Hopper and Marie Curie made outsized impacts.

The preponderance of evidence shows that women can vastly improve innovation efforts, but are often shunted aside. In fact, throughout history, men have taken credit for discoveries that were actually achieved by women. So, while giving women a larger role in innovation would be just and fair, even more importantly it would improve performance.

The Power Of Diversity

Over the past few decades there have been many efforts to increase diversity in organizations. Unfortunately, all too often these are seen more as a matter of political correctness than serious management initiatives. After all, so the thinking goes, why not just pick the best man for the job?

The truth is that there is abundant scientific evidence that diversity improves performance. For example, researchers at the University of Michigan found that diverse groups can solve problems better than a more homogenous team of greater objective ability. Another study that simulated markets showed that ethnic diversity deflated asset bubbles.

While the studies noted above merely simulate diversity in a controlled setting there is also evidence from the real world that diversity produces better outcomes. A McKinsey report that covered 366 public companies in a variety of countries and industries found that those which were more ethnically and gender diverse performed significantly better than others.

The problem is that when you narrow the backgrounds, experiences and outlooks of the people on your team, you are limiting the number of solution spaces that can be explored. At best, you will come up with fewer ideas and at worst, you run the risk of creating an echo chamber where inherent biases are normalized and groupthink sets in.

How Women Improve Performance

While increasing diversity in general increases performance, there is also evidence that women specifically have a major impact. In fact, in one wide ranging study, in which researchers at MIT and Carnegie Mellon sought to identify a general intelligence score for teams, they not only found that teams that included women got better results, but that the higher the proportion of women was, the better the teams did.

At first, the finding seems peculiar, but when you dig deeper it begins to make more sense. The study also found that in the high performing teams members rated well on a test of social sensitivity and took turns when speaking. Perhaps not surprisingly, women do better on these parameters than men do.

Social sensitivity tests ask respondents to infer someone’s emotional state by looking at a picture and women tend score higher than men. As for taking turns in conversation, there’s a reason why we call it “mansplaining” and not “womansplaining.” Women usually are better listeners.

The findings of the study are consistent with something I’ve noticed in my innovation research. The best innovators are nothing like the mercurial, aggressive stereotype, but tend to be quiet geniuses. Often they aren’t the kinds of people that are immediately impressive, but those who listen to others and generously share insights.

Changing The Social Dynamic

One of the reasons that women often get overlooked, besides good old fashioned sexism, is that that there are vast misconceptions about what makes someone a good innovator. All too often, we imagine the best innovators to be like Steve Jobs—brash, aggressive and domineering—when actually just the opposite is true.

Make no mistake, great innovators are great collaborators. That’s why the research finds that successful teams score high in social sensitivity, take turns talking and listening to each other rather, rather than competing to dominate the conversation. It is never any one idea that solves a difficult problem, but how ideas are combined to arrive at an optimal solution.

So while it is true that these skills are more common in women, men have the capacity to develop them as well. In fact, probably the best way for men to learn them is to have more exposure to women in the workplace. Being exposed to a more collaborative working style can only help.

So besides the moral and just aspects of getting more women into innovation related fields and giving them better access to good, high paying jobs, there is also a practical element as well. Women make teams more productive.

Building The Next Generation

Social researchers have found evidence that that the main reason that women are less likely to go into STEM fields has more to do with cultural biases than it does with any innate ability. For example, boys are more encouraged to play with building toys during childhood and develop spatial skills early on, while girls can build the same skills with the same training.

Cultural bias also plays a role in the amount of encouragement young students get. STEM subjects can be challenging, and studies have found that boys often receive more support than girls because of educators’ belief in their innate talent. That’s probably why even girls who have high aptitude for math and science are less likely to choose a STEM major than boys of even lesser ability.

Yet cultural biases can evolve over time and there are a number of programs designed to change attitudes about women and innovation. For example Girls Who Code provides training and encouragement for young women and UNESCO’s TeachHer initiative is designed to provide better educational opportunities.

Perhaps most of all, initiatives like these can create role models and peer support. When young women see people like the Jennifer Doudna, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and the star physicist Lisa Randall achieve great things in STEM fields, they’ll be more likely to choose a similar path. With more women innovating, we’ll all be better off.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Dall-E via Bing

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Innovation is Effectal

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Innovation is Effectal

GUEST POST from Dennis Stauffer

We all learned quite early in life that the world around us works according to cause and effect. That things move in predictable ways. There are reasons why things happen and our actions have consequences.

Scientists call this determinism, and most would argue that it governs the universe. That everything has a cause and an effect. When you can identify those causes, you can predict the effects.

However, innovation works a bit differently. Rather than causal, Innovation is effectal. (Yes, that’s a made-up word.) Cause and effect still holds. But that’s not what matters most. Success is determined not by prior causes, but by outcomes.

For example, when a scientist forms some new theory, and conducts experiments to test that theory, who came up with it, and who did the experiment doesn’t matter much (other than to give credit where it may be due). What matters is whether the experiment turns out as predicted—it’s effect. That’s what determines whether the theory is correct and what enables further progress.

In nature—which is arguably the ultimate innovator—random mutations cause organisms to change. Those changes are frequently harmful, but occasionally one enhances survival and gets passed along to future generations. It doesn’t matter which organism had the mutation (unless you’re that organism). It just needs to occur somewhere in a population. What determines the success or failure of that mutation is how it turns out—its effect.

When a new product is developed, it can be the most amazing technology, created by brilliant engineers. But what determines success or failure is how customers respond. Do they buy it? That effect is what matters. Remember the Segue Transporter? Fascinating self-balancing technology that was supposed to revolutionize transportation—except that very few people wanted to pay for one.

The central question in all these cases is not whether some new possibility has been invented. It’s, does anyone care? What’s its practical effect? Does it work? It’s a reality worth keeping in mind whenever you face any challenge in life. What you care most about is how things turn out.

Innovation isn’t just about imagining great new ideas, or even about acting on those ideas. It’s about determining whether those ideas work. Do they create value? The most successful innovators are brutally pragmatic, always checking to make sure their ideas fit the environment, align with the larger realities around them, and serve some useful purpose. Because if they don’t, nothing lasting will happen.

Whenever you seek to find solutions, make improvements, or invent new possibilities, the imperative is to find out whether it works. “What’s the effect?” is the crucial question you need to answer—because innovation is effectal.

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