Category Archives: Management

Back to Basics for Leaders and Managers

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Back to Basics for Leaders and Managers

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Imagine that you are the CEO working with your CHRO on a succession plan.  Both the CFO and COO are natural candidates, and both are, on paper, equally qualified and effective.

The CFO distinguishes herself by consistently working with colleagues to find creative solutions to business issues, even if it isn’t the optimal solution financially, and inspiring them with her vision of the future. She attracts top talent and builds strong relationships with investors who trust her strategic judgment. However, she sometimes struggles with day-to-day details and can be inconsistent in her communication with direct reports.

The COO inspires deep loyalty from his team through consistent execution and reliability. People turn down better offers to stay because they trust his systematic approach, flawless delivery, and deep commitment to developing people. However, his vision rarely extends beyond “do things better,” rigidly adhering to established processes and shutting down difficult conversations with peers when change is needed.

Who so you choose?

The COO feels like the safer bet, especially in uncertain times, given his track record of proven execution, loyal teams, and predictable results. While the CFO feels riskier because she’s brilliant but inconsistent, visionary but scattered.

It’s not an easy question to answer.

Most people default to “It depends.”

It doesn’t depend.

It doesn’t “depend,” because being CEO is a leadership role and only the CFO demonstrates leadership behaviors. The COO, on the other hand, is a fantastic manager, exactly the kind of person you want and need in the COO role. But he’s not the leader a company needs, no matter how stable or uncertain the environment.

Yet we all struggle with this choice because we’ve made “leadership” and “management” synonyms. Companies no longer have “senior management teams,” they have “senior/executive leadership teams.”  People moving from independent contributor roles to oversee teams are trained in “people leadership,” not “team management” (even though the curriculum is still largely the same).

But leadership and management are two fundamentally different things.

Leader OR Manager?

There are lots of definitions of both leaders and managers, so let’s go back to the “original” distinction as defined by Warren Bennis in his 1987 classic On Becoming a Leader

LeadersManagers
·       Do the right things·       Challenge the status quo·       Innovate·       Develops·       Focuses on people·       Relies on trust·       Has a long-range perspective·       Asks what and why·       Has an eye on the horizon·       Do things right·       Accept the status quo·       Administers·       Maintains·       Focuses on systems and structures·       Relies on control·       Has a short-range view·       Asks how and when·       Has an eye on the bottom line

In a nutshell: leaders inspire people to create change and pursue a vision while managers control systems to maintain operations and deliver results.

Leaders AND Managers!

Although the roles of leaders and managers are different, it doesn’t mean that the person who fills those roles is capable of only one or the other. I’ve worked with dozens of people who are phenomenal managers AND leaders and they are as inspiring as they are effective.

But not everyone can play both roles and it can be painful, even toxic, when we ask managers to take on leadership roles and vice versa. This is the problem with labeling everything outside of individual contributor roles as “leadership.”

When we designate something as a “people leadership” role and someone does an outstanding job of managing his team, we believe he’s a leader and promote him to a true leadership role (which rarely ends well).  Conversely, when we see someone displaying leadership qualities and promote her into “people leadership,” we may be shocked and disappointed when she struggles to manage as effortlessly as she inspires.

The Bottom Line

Leadership and Management aren’t the same thing, but they are both essential to an organization’s success. They key is putting the right people in the right roles and celebrating their unique capabilities and contributions.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Science Says You Shouldn’t Waste Too Much Time Trying to Convince People

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Science Says You Shouldn't Waste Too Much Time Trying to Convince People

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Experts have a lot of ideas about persuasion. Some suggest leveraging social proof, to show that people have adopted the idea and had a positive experience. Others emphasize the importance of building trust and using emotional rather than analytical arguments. Still others insist on creating a unified value proposition.

These are, for the most part, constructive ideas. Yet they are more a taxonomy than a toolbox. Human nature can be baffling and our behavior is rarely consistent. Sometimes we’ll dig in our heels on a relatively minor point and others we’ll give in on a major issue relatively easily, often without any constable rhyme or reason.

Yet consider this one simple science-based principle that explains a lot: The best indicator of what we think and what we do is what the people around us think and do. Once you internalize that, you can begin to understand a lot of otherwise bizarre behavior and work to spread the ideas you care about. Often it’s not opinions we need to shape, but networks.

Majorities Don’t Just Rule, They Also Influence

Consider a famous set of conformity studies performed by the psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s. The design was simple, but ingenuous. He merely showed people pairs of cards, asking them to match the length of a single line on one card with one of three on an adjacent card. The correct answer was meant to be obvious.

However, as the experimenter went around the room, one person after another gave the same wrong answer. When it reached the final person in the group (in truth, the only real subject, the rest were confederates), the vast majority of the time that person conformed to the majority opinion, even if it was obviously wrong!

The idea that people have a tendency toward conformity is nothing new, but that they would give obviously wrong answers to simple and unambiguous questions was indeed shocking. Now think about how hard it is for a more complex idea to take hold across a broad spectrum of people, each with their own biases and opinions.

The truth is that majorities don’t just rule, they also influence, even local majorities. So if you want people to adopt an idea or partake in an action, you need to take into account the communities they are already a part of—at home, at work, in their neighborhood and in other aspects of their social circles. That’s where their greatest influences lie.

The 3 Degrees of Influence Rule

In 1948, Congress authorized funding for the Framingham Heart Study, which would track the lifestyle and health habits, such as diet, exercise, tobacco use and alcohol intake, of 5209 healthy men and women. It was originally intended to last 20 years, but the results were so incredibly useful, it lasted for decades and even included the children of early cohorts.

More than a half century after the study began two researchers, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, began to suspect that the Framingham Heart Study could be used for a very different, but important purpose. What they noticed was that the data included not only information about people’s habits, but their social networks as well.

So they set out to see if they could identify causal links between people’s health and their social connections. Using 32 years of data, they were able to establish a strong effect in areas as diverse as happiness, smoking and even obesity. As it turns out, the people around us not only help to shape our opinions, but our health as well.

The really astounding discovery, however, was that the effect extended to three degrees of influence. So not only our friends’ friends, influence us deeply, but their friends too—people that we don’t even know. Wherever we go, we bring that long, complex web of influence with us and we, in turn, help to shape others’ webs of influence too.

So when set out to shape someone else’s opinion, we need to account for social networks. We may, for example, be able to play on a target’s emotions, give them all the facts and evidence and demonstrate strong social proof, but their communities — extending out to three degrees of influence — will always factor in. While we’re working to persuade, those invisible webs of influence may be working against us.

Thanksgiving Dinners And Earnings Guidance

There is no greater American tradition than the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving dinner. No matter what your political persuasion, you are bound to have some relative who holds very different opinions than the rest of the family and who feels no compunction about making clear to everyone at the table exactly where they stand.

As should be clear by now, the reason our crazy uncles are so impervious to persuasion is that we aren’t actually arguing with them at all, but the totality of their social networks. Their friends at work, buddies at the bar, people in their neighborhood and everybody else who they interact with on a regular basis, all get a say at our holiday table.

In much the same way, there isn’t any real reason for CEOs to provide earnings guidance for investors. Steve Jobs refused do it and Apple’s stock during his tenure. Same thing with Unilever under Paul Polman. In 2018, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and uber-investor Warren Buffett wrote a strong Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal urging CEOs to end the practice.

During the pandemic many companies stopped giving earnings guidance to investors but, as soon as things began to stabilize, they started up again. It seems incredible, because all of the experts, even McKinsey, have advised against it. Still the vast majority of CEOs are unconvinced, despite all the contrary evidence. Could their networks be playing a role?

Don’t Try To Shape Opinions, Shape Networks

We like to think we can shape the ideas of others. It can sometimes seem like a puzzle. How can we conjure up the right combination of value proposition, analysis, emotive argument and social proof, to persuade our target?. There is, in fact, an enormous communication industry dedicated to exactly that proposition.

Decades of scientific research suggests that it’s not so easy. Our thoughts aren’t just the product of neurons, synapses and neurotransmitters reacting to different stimuli, but also our social networks. The best indicator of what people think and do is what the people around them think and do. While we’re trying to score debate points, those complex webs of influence are pushing back in often subtle, but extremely powerful ways.

We need to be far more humble about our persuasive powers. Anybody who has ever been married or had kids knows how difficult it is to convince even a single person of something. If you expect to shift the opinions of dozens or hundreds—much less thousands or millions—with pure sophistry, you’re bound to be disappointed.

Instead of trying to shape opinions, we’re often better off shaping networks. That’s why we advise our clients pursuing transformational change efforts to start with a majority, even if that majority is only three people in a room of five. You can always expand a majority out, but once you’re in the minority you’re going to get immediate pushback.

Rather than wordsmithing slogans, our time and efforts will be much better spent working to craft cultures, weaving the complex webs of influence that lead to genuinely shared values and shared purpose.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pexels

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Leaders’ Responsibility is Their Response

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Leaders' Responsibility is Their Response

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When you’re asked to do more work that you and your team can handle, don’t pass it onto your team. Instead, take the heat from above but limit the team’s work to a reasonable level.

When the number of projects is larger than the budget needed to get them done, limit the projects based on the budget.

When the team knows you’re wrong, tell them they’re right. And apologize.

When everyone knows there’s a big problem and you’re the only one that can fix it, fix the big problem.

When the team’s opinion is different than yours, respect the team’s opinion.

When you make a mistake, own it.

When you’re told to do turn-the-crank work and only turn-the-crank work, sneak in a little sizzle to keep your team excited and engaged.

When it’s suggested that your team must do another project while they are fully engaged in an active project, create a big problem with the active project to delay the other project.

When the project is going poorly, be forthcoming with the team.

When you fail to do what you say, apologize. Then, do what you said you’d do.

When you make a mistake in judgement which creates a big problem, explain your mistake to the team and ask them for help.

If you’ve got to clean up a mess, tell your team you need their help to clean up the mess.

When there’s a difficult message to deliver, deliver it face-to-face and in private.

When your team challenges your thinking, thank them.

When your team tells you the project will take longer than you want, believe them.

When the team asks for guidance, give them what you can and when you don’t know, tell them.

As leaders, we don’t always get things right. And that’s okay because mistakes are a normal part of our work. And projects don’t always go as planned, but that’s okay because that’s what projects do. And we don’t always have the answers, but that’s okay because we’re not supposed to. But we are responsible for our response to these situations.

When mistakes happen, good leaders own them. When there’s too much work and too little time, good leaders tell it like it is and put together a realistic plan. And when the answers aren’t known, a good leader admits they don’t know and leads the effort to figure it out.

None of us get it right 100% of the time. But what we must get right is our response to difficult situations. As leaders, our responses should be based on honesty, integrity, respect for the reality of the situation and respect for people doing the work.

Image credit: 1 of 900+ FREE quote slides available at http://misterinnovation.com

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Do We Really Need Managers?

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Do We Really Need Managers?

GUEST POST from David Burkus

There have been SO many articles and books about this idea of flat organizations. No managers, no bosses, just passionate people solving problems and collaborating at ease.

Sounds great, right? Well, not if you’re a manager, obviously. But the concept sounds great, right? Less oversight, more trust, more autonomy, we all want that!

What these articles get wrong is this: the idea of managers, especially middle managers, being senseless buffoons or mere pawns with all the authority of a mall cop has gone too far. And the role of a middle manager needs a refresh, not an elimination. Middle managers are the unsung heroes of organizations. But these managers need to be leaders, not just human project management tools.

Where do we stand with managers, today?

The workplace changed a lot during the pandemic. We all came together, huddled from home, turned our kitchen table into a workstation, then our guest room or a corner in our living room to our home office, and overall, stayed productive. In the end, a lot of us felt we didn’t need a person hovering over our shoulder to keep us on track and working. So, logically, a lot of us felt we didn’t need a manager, and a lot of senior leaders felt maybe we could cut out some middle managers.

A survey by GoodHire in 2022, of workers in a variety of fields including education, finance, health care, marketing, and even science- found that 83% of American workers said they could do their own job without their managers. But paradoxically, GoodHire also found that 70% of American workers strongly enjoy or somewhat enjoy working for their manager. This finding is backed up by Pew Research which just released data in late 2023 finding that “a majority of workers give their boss high ratings.”

So, people like their bosses, but could do without them. What’s really going on here?

Why do we hate managers? (or think we do)

The brainless middle manager trope. It’s an old one. They’re in our shows, our movies, our social media posts. And, yeah, in our lives too. They show up late, leave early. They scrutinize everything you do. Track your tasks. Track your productivity. Track your success. Track your failures.

Middle managers today are basically glorified task managers, and that really must change. But…why are they glorified task managers in the first place?

Gallup just published the results of a massive study on managers. A key finding was that, right now, managers have more work to do, on a tighter budget with new teams. Managers are more likely to be burnt out, disengaged, and looking for a new job.

More work: Remember the remote and hybrid culture you probably had to facilitate from scratch with no experience with video software like Zoom and Webex? That was a huge undertaking. Managing people’s well-being wasn’t in the managerial job description before. Adding it may be long overdue, but it was still a task that managers feel ill-equipped to take on officially.

Less budget: The economy was a roller coaster for all industries over the last 4 years. And in response a lot of budgets froze or got tightened. Your company was probably hit in negative ways that affected resources that make your role easier.

New teams: There was a lot of quitting, layoffs, hiring, and job hopping that happened. Now, teams are shaken up, gone, or brand new.

When all these things compound, it makes sense middle managers are feeling squeezed, as Gallup put it.

And when you’re burnt out, disengaged, and looking for the next place to work, you’re going to become the bare minimum “glorified task manager” just making sure the wheels are spinning.

A manager should be a leader. Plain and simple. This isn’t just semantics. A leader is an inspirational figure that facilitates great work. Tools like Jira, Trello, Asana, they can keep track of tasks and you can check them from time to time. But it shouldn’t be the first thing a manager does: check the management software. Instead, check on the people!

What About Manager-less Companies?

It’s worth stating here that, none of this is new. The discussion about whether managers make a difference has been going on for a while, with both sides citing examples to suit their opinion.

On the manager-less company side, Washington-based Valve Software gets cited often. If you’ve ever played some of their most critically acclaimed video games like Half-Life and Portal, you’ve probably heard of them. They also created the Steam platform, which, again if you’re a gamer, you know well. Valve was started by two former Microsoft employees in the early 1990s and began, from the start, as a flat company. No managers, beyond the executive c-suite level. People decided what to work on, what to prioritize, and the company became a huge success. By a lot of metrics, it’s been a success. A little late on deadlines for game releases, but because they are so good, they’re often forgiven.

But here’s where it fell short. Priority is only given to what the majority of the organization prioritizes. At Valve, it was the product, the critically acclaimed games and the Steam platform. What wasn’t prioritized? Diversity. Even for a tech company, even for a gaming company, the demographics are predominantly white and male. This discrepancy came to a boiling point in 2020 when the executive leaders were blindsided by rising social issues and criticized for their silence both internally and externally.

Other companies like Medium and Zappos rolled back their manager-less structures. At Medium, they said the structure-less structure impacted the ability to scale and the time-consuming nature of it all. It also negatively affected recruiting. It all seemed cool, but risky. Zappos said it took the attention away from the customer, and customer service was what they were known for.

These aren’t the only organizations to have ever tried manager-less organizational designs. There’s a whole organization that catalogs them. In total, about 250 companies use a manager-less structure. But most of them have under 50 employees. And nearly all of them started as a manager-less company-they didn’t just wake up and decide their thousands of employees could suddenly manage themselves.

I should be clear: I’m rooting for those places and others to work. I’m in favor of any organization that helps people do their best work. I just personally believe it’s better to bet on talented people and great teams than on a seemingly perfect organizational design.

Managers have a great impact, good and bad

When you think about who your mentors are or people who have impacted you the most in life, outside of your family, I bet you’re thinking of a teacher that really inspired you early in your life, maybe your first basketball coach, or some other authority figure that took the time to understand you and teach you some valuable skills. In other words, you think of a manager.

In organizations, managers make up about 70% of the variance in team engagement. They have a tremendous impact on whether companies succeed or fail. 82% of American workers said they would potentially quit their job because of a bad manager. The impact and stakes are REAL.

Like it or not, the work we do in our lives defines a big chunk of who we are. And managers really hold the power in making our work fulfilling, or a mindless grind. Right now, things are bleak. The more work, less budget, brand new teams, the burn out. The ripple effects that come from the manager level go so far and so wide. But there is a way to help them.

Employees need more training and paths upward

People who are promoted to managers often are promoted because they are really good at their individual contributor skillset, and the only way to climb the corporate ladder is to get promoted and manage people. Hard truth here: not everyone is cut out to be a manager; not everyone even wants to be a manager.

Gallup found that only 48% of managers strongly agree that they currently have the skills needed to be exceptional at their job. And only three in 10 hybrid managers have received any formal training on leading hybrid teams.

Authors and McKinsey consultants Bill Schaninger, Bryan Hancock, and Emily Fieldhave an interesting thought about this in their newest book. Instead of promoting someone who is really good at their craft to a management role, there should be master tracks for technical areas. And putting your best technical person in a management role might drain them of that fire that made them so good in the first place.

Moving up in your company should not be tied exclusively to managing people. And if you promote people to those roles, you need a plan to train them. In fact, before promoting them it’s worth creating a trial project they can manage or put them in charge of interns for a summer. As Bill Schaninger said, “The first time someone does something shouldn’t be after they’ve already gotten the job.”

As a manager, it’s also part of your job (I know, another task, but it’s important) to develop members of your team. Maybe they’ll be managers one day, maybe they’ll even be your manager one day if you train them well enough. Your team is on a path in their career. Their jobs will fluctuate, people will move on, move up, change course, and so coaching them is crucial. Remember, the impact of a manager on someone’s life can be huge. There’s a lot of influence here.

Managers are not task managers, they are leaders.

Focus on the team, not the individual

Now, if you are a manager, it’s imperative that you resist the tendency to micromanage-the feeling of every little task being tracked is likely what created the motivation to fire managers in the first place. So, focus on the team as a whole, not the individual. Great leadership is about letting the team hold itself accountable.

You need to do your one-on-one meetings to check-in with your people and make sure there’s not any glaring individual performance issues. But great leaders are about teaching the team to hold itself accountable. Great leaders often come off more as facilitators who are there to guide and support the team as they divvy up tasks and co-create the best strategy.

Even when you’re doing your individual check-ins, I recommend a 10–10–10 format. If you have 30 minutes to check in with each person every other week, then spend only 10 minutes of that time focused on their actual performance as an individual. Spend the next 10 minutes focused on the team, how the team is supporting them, and how they are contributing to the team. Then spend the final 10 minutes on how you’re doing as their manager. Ask where you could improve and what support they need from you.

No one wants a 30-minute discussion around their performance flaws, but most people respond positively when the bulk of the time is spent focused on how their team and their boss can help them.

Final Thoughts

So, do we really need managers? Yes, but in a capacity that reflects the evolving needs of modern workplaces. As we look ahead, let’s champion a new breed of leaders-managers who not only oversee projects but also empower people, shape culture, and turn challenges into opportunities for growth.

Image credit: Pexels, Pew Research

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on April 16, 2024.

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3 Secret Saboteurs of Strategic Foresight

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3 Secret Saboteurs of Strategic Foresight

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You’ve done everything to set Strategic Foresight efforts up for success. Executive authority? Check. Challenging inputs? Check. Process integration? Check. Now you just need to flip the switch and you’re off to the races.

Not so fast.

While the wrong set-up is guaranteed to cause failure, the right set-up doesn’t guarantee success.  Research shows that strategic foresight initiatives with the right set-up fail because of “organizational pathologies” that sabotage even well-designed efforts.

If you aren’t leading the right people to do the right things in the right way,  you’re not going to get the impact you need.

Here’s what to watch out for (and what to do when it happens).

Your Teams Misunderstand Foresight’s Purpose

People naturally assume that strategic foresight predicts the future. When it doesn’t, they abandon it faster than last year’s digital transformation initiative.

Shell learned this the hard way. In 1965, they built the Unified Planning Machinery, a computerized forecasting tool designed to predict cash flow based on trends. It was abandoned because executives feared “it would suppress discussion rather than encourage debate on differing perspectives.”

When they shifted from prediction to preparation, specifically to “modify the mental model of decision-makers faced with an uncertain future,” strategic foresight became an invaluable decision-making tool.

Help your team approach strategic foresight as preparation, not prediction, by measuring success by the improvement in discussion and decision-making, not scenario accuracy.  When teams build mental flexibility rather than make predictions, wrong scenarios stop being failed scenarios.

People are Paralyzed by Fear of Being Wrong

Even when your teams understand foresight’s purpose, managers are often unwilling  “to use foresight to plan beyond a few quarters, fearing that any decisions today could be wrong tomorrow.”

This is profoundly human.  As Webb wrote, “When faced with uncertainty, we become inflexible. We revert to historical patterns, we stick to a predetermined plan, or we simply refuse to adopt a new mental model.”  We nod along in scenario sessions, then make decisions exactly like we always have.

Shell’s scenario planning efforts succeeded because it made being wrong acceptable. Even though executives initially scoffed at the idea of oil prices quadrupling, they prepared for the scenario and took near-term “no regrets” decisions to restructure their portfolio.

To help people get past their fear, reward them for making foresight-informed decisions.  For example, establish incentives and promotion criteria where exploring “wrong” scenarios leads to career advancement.

Your Culture Confuses Activity with Achievement

Between insight and action, the Tyranny of Now reigns.  In even the most committed organizations, the very real and immediate needs of the business call us away from our planning efforts and consume our time and energy, meaning strategic foresight is embraced only when it doesn’t interfere with their “real” jobs.

Disney’s approach made strategic foresight a required element of people’s “real jobs” by integrating foresight activities and insights directly into performance management and strategic planning. When foresight teams identified that traditional media consumption was fracturing in 2012, Disney began preparing for that future by actively exploring and investing in new potential solutions.

Resist the Tyranny of Now’s pull by making strategic foresight activities just as tyrannical – require decisions based on foresight insights to occur in 90 days or less.  These decisions should trigger resource allocation reviews, even if the resources are relatively small (e.g., one or a few people, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars).  If strategic foresight doesn’t force hard choices about investments and priorities, it’s activity without achievement.

How You Lead and What People Do Determine Strategic Foresight’s Success

Executive authority, challenging inputs, and process integration are necessary but not sufficient.  Success requires conquering the deeper organizational and human behaviors that determine whether strategic foresight is a corporate ritual or a competitive advantage.

Image credit: Pexels

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Making it Safe to Innovate

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Building Emotional Safety

Making it Safe to Innovate - Building Emotional Safety

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

When my husband and I became accredited as foster parents for children in need, I thought my skills as a trainer and facilitator would help me navigate the challenges we faced. I quickly discovered that when children arrived at our home late at night, often physically injured and emotionally distraught due to a tragic accident or being separated from their families, their primary need was for emotional safety. This began my long and enlightening quest into what it truly means for someone to develop both emotional and psychological safety. To discover and explore why both emotional and psychological safety are crucial for people to survive, innovate and thrive in the post-pandemic, unstable, and uncertain world.

The whole issue of “safety” is a crucial one. Causing many people, especially those in the change, learning and coaching space, to stop, pause, retreat, and reflect upon how to personalize and contextualize it for ourselves and others we care about and interact with. Yet so few people understand the importance of creating safe environments, especially today when there is so much hatred and violence happening on many of our streets.

We all deserve to, and are entitled to, feel emotionally safe and secure in all aspects of our lives.

What does it mean to be safe?

Because safety: the condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury, impacts everyone and everything in our entire world system. It is an essential element required for our survival, growth, and ability to navigate and innovate in the post-pandemic era. Safety is critical in enhancing people’s capacity to connect, belong, and engage in purposeful relationships, build happy families and secure communities, as well as produce creative, inventive, and innovative work that helps make the world a better place.

What is emotional safety?

Emotional safety exists in an environment where individuals feel valued, respected, and heard, regardless of their values, beliefs, or religious or cultural origins. It involves allowing people to feel safe and secure, nurturing vulnerability, and sharing personal thoughts and feelings without fear of having their words judged as “bad” or “wrong.” Without facing punishment, discrimination, persecution, diminishment, blame, shame, hatred, or violence by others.

It’s a space where it’s safe to say “I don’t know” or “I made a mistake” without being labelled as incompetent or “lacking” in some vital way.

  • Improving well-being, engagement and productivity

Emotional safety is a vital element of an emotionally and mentally healthy environment that fosters well-being, boosts engagement, and enhances productivity. In such an environment, individuals feel secure enough to express, explore, and share their thoughts and feelings about themselves, their colleagues, managers, leaders, and even their organization as a whole. People feel respected and trusted to share ideas, establish boundaries, and be accepted for who they are, what they believe in, flaws and all. 

  • Building mutuality

The intention is to build mutuality, defined by the American Psychological Association as:

“The tendency of relationship partners to think of themselves as members of a dyadic relationship rather than as distinct individuals. As close relationships, particularly romantic ones, develop over time, partners display increasing levels of mutuality, which may influence their affect, cognition, and behavior. In interdependence theory, the tendency of partners to depend equally on each other’s behavior for the attainment of desirable outcomes”.

We live in an interdependent, globalized world where developing emotionally safe, positive, and interactive mutual relationships across geographies, technologies, demographics, and functions is more important than ever. Mutuality lays the groundwork for creating a shared understanding that fosters a safe and open space for learning and effective interactions, based on cooperative, co-petitive, and collaborative relationships in the workplace.

  • Becoming attuned

Emotional intelligence, empathy, trust, and effective communication are vital for fostering emotional safety and form the basis for developing effective emotional regulation and management strategies. This enables us to attune to and connect with others with whom we wish to build relationships.

According to Dr. Dan Seigal:

“When we attune with others, we allow our internal state to shift, to come to resonate with the inner world of another. This resonance is at the heart of the important sense of “feeling felt” that emerges in close relationships. Children need attunement to feel secure and to develop well, and throughout our lives we need attunement to feel close and connected.”

As a foster carer, my ability and willingness to attune with them represented the most important gift I could offer the children. It allowed them to feel close and connected to someone who genuinely cared for them by simply providing the most basic essentials. With no judgement or strings attached, and with both detachment and empathy, it also provided them with crucial evidence that this could indeed continue to be possible for them in their future lives.

As a trainer, facilitator, and coach, these are the key ingredients for establishing an emotionally safe and effective learning intervention, particularly about the people side of innovation and in building an organization that fosters a culture of failure. 

Developing a psychologically safe culture

Emotional safety is closely linked to psychological safety, which is the belief that individuals can be themselves at work and share their opinions and ideas without fear of negative repercussions.  According to Dr Timothy Clarke at the Leaderfactor, psychological safety empowers individuals and teams to reach new levels of creativity, collaboration, and innovation by nurturing a culture of inclusion and vulnerability. It is a social condition where people feel accepted and secure enough to learn, contribute, and question the status quo, free from fear of embarrassment, marginalization, or punishment, by creating an environment founded on permission, safety, and trust.

  • Embodying a way of being

Creating this emotional state or culture is much harder than most people think. Most organizations believe it’s something they must achieve through process and system changes, rather than by embodying it as a way of being a manager, leader, trainer, or coach who creates:

  • Sanctuaries of inclusion—a space where individuals feel safe and are encouraged to express their feelings, thoughts, opinions, and ideas, fostering a profound sense of inclusion, connection, and belonging.
  • Safe containers – a space where individuals confidently disrupt conventional or habitual ways of doing things, step outside their comfort zones, and challenge the status quo, allowing dissonance, contradiction, paradox, and conflict as sources of creative tension to disrupt, differ, and deviate from the norm. 
  • Collective holding spaces—where individuals accept responsibility, take ownership, and are trusted to contribute to the entire system. By fostering co-creative, interdependent relationships both internally and externally, we work towards achieving the team’s and organization’s vision, mission, purpose, and collective goals.
  • Incubators and accelerators of innovation—where team members are free to emerge, diverge, and converge possibilities. They are empowered, enabled, and equipped to transform these into creative ideas and opportunities. Individuals and teams feel safe in unlearning, learning, and relearning new ways of being, thinking, and acting. This environment challenges the status quo by encouraging disruptive questions, taking calculated risks, and experimenting with new ideas within an authentic, fail-fast culture that promotes quick learning.

Benefits of emotional and psychological safety

  • Enhances individual, team, and collective engagement, connection, and belonging. It establishes a foundation for harnessing and mobilizing people’s collective intelligence in line with the organization’s vision, mission, and purpose. 
  • Promotes effective team collaboration, where individuals feel at ease sharing their ideas, opinions, and concerns. It cultivates an environment where diverse perspectives can be openly discussed alongside differing views: 
  • Inspires people to be emotionally energetic, agile, and adaptable in the face of uncertainty and chaos, as well as in a rapidly changing business landscape.

AI will continue to disrupt job stability and security.

Developing emotional and psychological safety is a key success factor that underpins a culture of innovation, as it creates the essential space for individuals to think and act differently. This is achieved through experimentation, learning from failures, and exploring new methods that lead to breakthrough ideas and innovative solutions, enabling individuals to survive and thrive in the age of AI.

  • Both job losses and opportunities

Fast Company shares that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has a stark warning for the developed world about job losses resulting from AI. The CEO told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. This could result in a 10% to 20% rise in the unemployment rate over the next one to five years, Amodei says. The losses could come from tech, finance, law, consulting, and other white-collar professions, with entry-level jobs being hit the hardest.

Just as the children we fostered needed emotional safety, we all require emotional safety when walking our city streets. Similarly, while at work, we all need a psychologically safe working environment rooted in mutuality and trust. This is what allows individuals to attune to each other, feel secure, bonded, and connected, fostering a sense of belonging and unity. This requires investing in the co-creation of emotionally and psychologically safe spaces that attract and retain top talent, enabling individuals to feel valued, as they truly matter, and helping them adapt, innovate, grow, perform and thrive in a post-pandemic, unstable, and uncertain world.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in late 2025.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Strategic Foresight Won’t Save Your Company

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But Ignoring Strategic Foresight Will Kill It

Strategic Foresight Won't Save Your Company

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Are you spooked by the uncertainty and volatility that defines not just our businesses but our everyday lives?  Have you hunkered down, stayed the course, and hoped that this too shall pass? Are you starting to worry that this approach can’t go on forever but unsure of what to do next?  CONGRATULATIONS, consultants have heard your cries and are rolling  out a shiny new framework promising to solve everything: Strategic Foresight.

Strategic foresight is the latest silver bullet for navigating our chaotic, unpredictable world.

Remember in 2016 when Agility was going to save us all? Good times.

As much as I love rolling my eyes at the latest magic framework, I have to be honest – Strategic Foresight can live up to the hype. If you do it right.

What Strategic Foresight Actually Is (Spoiler: Not a Silver Bullet)

A LOT is being published about Strategic Foresight (I received 7 newsletters on the topic last week) and everyone has their own spin.  So let’s cut through the hype and get back to basics

What it is:  Strategic foresight is the systematic exploration of multiple possible futures to anticipate opportunities and risks, enabling informed decisions today to capture advantages tomorrow.

There’s a lot there so let’s break it down:

  • Systematic exploration: This isn’t guessing, predicting, or opining. This is a rigorous and structured approach
  • Multiple possible futures: Examines multiple scenarios because we can’t possibly forecast or predict the one future that will occur
  • Enabling informed decisions today: This isn’t an academic exercise you revisit once a year. It informs and guides decisions and actions this year.
  • Capture advantages tomorrow: Positions you to respond to change with confidence and beat your competition to the punch

How it fits: Strategic Foresight doesn’t replace what you’re doing.  It informs and drives it.

ApproachTimelineFocus
Strategic Foresight5-20+ yearsExplore possible futures
Strategic Planning3-5 yearsCreate competitive advantage
Business PlanningAnnual cyclesExecute specific actions

The sequence matters: Foresight → Strategic Planning → Business Planning.

This sequence also explains why Strategic Foresight is so hot right now.  Systemic change used to take years, even decades, to unfold.  As a result, you could look out 3-5 years, anticipate what would be next, and you would probably be right.

Now, systemic change can happen overnight and be undone by noon the next day.  Whatever you think will happen will probably be wrong and in ways you can’t anticipate, let alone plan for and execute against.

Strategic Foresight’s rigorous, multi-input approach gives us the illusion of control in a world that seems to be spinning out of it.

How to Avoid the Illusion and Get the Results.

Personally, I love the illusion of control BUT as a business practice, I don’t recommend it.

Strategic Foresight’s benefits will stay an illustion if you don’t:

  1. Develop in-house strategic foresight capabilities. Amy Webb’s research at NYU shows that companies using rigorous foresight methodologies consistently outperform those stuck in reactive mode. Shell’s legendary scenario planning helped them navigate oil crises while competitors flailed. Disney’s Natural Foresight® Framework keeps them ahead of entertainment trends that blindside others.
  2. Integrate foresight into your annual strategic planning cycle:  Strategic foresight is a front-end effort that makes your 3-5 year strategy more robust.  If you treat it like a separate exercise where you hire futurists, and run some workshops, and check the Strategic Foresight box, you won’t see any benefits or results.

What’s Next?

Strategic foresight isn’t a silver bullet, but it can be a path through uncertainty  to advantage and growth.

The difference between success and failure comes down to execution. Do you treat it as prediction or preparation? Do you integrate it with existing planning or silo it in innovation labs?

Ready to separate the hype from the hard results? Our next post shows you what two industry leaders learned about turning foresight into competitive advantage and how you can use those lessons to your benefit

Image credit: Pixabay

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Optimizing Employee One-On-Ones

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Optimizing Employee One-On-Ones

GUEST POST from David Burkus

One-on-one meetings with employees are a crucial aspect of effective leadership. Organizations spent countless hours, money, and other resources trying to find the most qualified talent on board, and then spent more money to keep that talent motivated and engaged. And yet, the single most time time-efficient and effective way to invest in the growth and development of employees is a simple feedback session with their direct supervisor.

In this article, we will delve into the three main sections that make up a successful one-on-one meeting: expectations, feedback, and growth and development. By following this structure, you can ensure that your meetings are productive and meaningful, leading to improved performance and employee satisfaction.

Expectations

The first part of your one-on-one meetings with employees should focus on expectations. Setting clear objectives and expectations is the foundation of any successful working relationship. During one-on-one meetings, it is essential to discuss and align on these expectations to ensure that everyone is on the same page. By doing so, you can monitor progress, celebrate achievements, and identify any factors that may be affecting performance.

By setting clear objectives and roles, you provide your employees with a sense of direction and purpose. This clarity allows them to focus their efforts on the most important tasks and prioritize their work effectively. Monitoring progress and celebrating achievements not only boosts morale but also provides an opportunity to recognize and reward outstanding performance. Additionally, by identifying factors that may be affecting performance, you can work together to find solutions and remove any obstacles that may hinder progress.

Feedback

The second part of your one-on-one meetings with employees should focus on feedback. Feedback is a powerful tool for growth and improvement. During one-on-one meetings, it is crucial to provide fair feedback that highlights both areas of high performance and areas for improvement. By acknowledging and appreciating the employee’s strengths, you motivate them to continue excelling in those areas. Simultaneously, by providing constructive feedback, you help them identify areas where they can grow and develop.

This section is also meant to be a two-way conversation. This is a time for employees to give you feedback as well. How are you doing as their manager? What resources do they need that you can provide? Encourage your employees to share their thoughts and ideas, and actively listen to their feedback. By fostering a safe and supportive environment, you can build trust and strengthen the relationship with your team members.

Growth and Development

The final part of your one-on-one meetings with employees should discuss the employees’ growth and development. Take the time to discuss their long-term career goals, the skills they want to develop, and potential future roles they aspire to. Understanding your employees’ career aspirations allows you to tailor their development plans and provide them with the necessary resources and opportunities to achieve their goals. By identifying the skills and knowledge they need to grow, you can offer targeted training and development programs. Additionally, supporting employees in their current roles by assigning challenging projects or providing mentorship opportunities can facilitate their growth and prepare them for future roles within the organization.

This section should focus on the real and accurate career objectives of employees. Unfortunately, too often employees who lack trust in their boss or the company invent false ambitions (“I want to be a manager” or “I’m here for the long-term.”) It’s okay if some employees decide their long-term goals will take them away from the organization. Leaders can still invest in their growth, and they can still be high performers in the meantime.

One-on-one meetings with employees are a valuable investment of time and effort. By following the threefold structure of expectations, feedback, and growth and development, you can create a supportive and engaging work environment. Candid and honest conversations in these meetings can lead to faster growth and better results than formal annual reviews or performance improvement plans.

Remember, the order of the three sections is important, as ending on growth and development helps make the conversation forward-looking and motivating. By setting clear expectations, providing constructive feedback, and supporting your employees’ growth, you can foster a culture of continuous improvement and help everyone on your team do their best work ever.

Image credit: Pexels

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on September 18, 2023.

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Building Transformation Momentum from the Middle

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Five Questions to Liz Wiseman

Building Transformation Momentum from the Middle

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Conventional wisdom tells us that transformation flows from the C-suite down because real change requires executive mandates and company-wide rollouts. But what if our focus on building transformation momentum is exactly backward?

Ever since reading Multipliers, where Liz Wiseman revealed how the best leaders amplify their people rather than diminish them, I’ve wondered if, like innovation, organizational transformation and change also require us to do the opposite of our instincts.

I recently had the opportunity to dig deeper into this topic with her, and I couldn’t resist exploring how change really happens in large organizations.

What emerged wasn’t another framework—it was something more brilliant and subversive: how middle managers quietly become change agents, why sustainable transformation looks nothing like a launch event, and the liberating truth that leaders don’t need to be perfect.

Robyn Bolton: What’s the one piece of conventional wisdom about leading change that you believe organizations need to unlearn?

Lize Wiseman

Lize Wiseman: I don’t believe that change needs to start, or even be sponsored, at the top of the organization.  I’ve seen so much change led from the middle management ranks.  When middle managers experiment with new mindsets and practices inside their organizations, they produce pockets of success—anomalies that catch the attention of senior executives and corporate staffers who are highly adept at detecting variances (both negative and positive). When senior executives notice positive outcomes, they are quick to elevate and endorse the new practices, in turn spreading the practices to other parts of the organization. In other words, most senior executives are adept at spotting a parade and getting in front of it! (Incidentally, this is one of several executive skills you won’t find documented on any official leadership competency model.)  If you don’t yet have the political capital to lead a company-wide initiative, run a pilot with a few rising middle managers. Shine a spotlight on their success and let the practices spread to their peers. Expose their good work to the executive team and make yourself available to turn the parade into a movement.

RB: In your research and work, what’s the most surprising pattern you’ve observed about successful organizational transformation?”

LW: As mentioned above, I believe the starting point for transformation is less important than how you will sustain the momentum you’ve generated. Unfortunately, most new initiatives—be they corporate change initiatives or personal improvement plans—begin with a bang but fizzle out in what I call “the failure to launch” cycle. Transformation that is sustained over time usually starts small and builds a series of successive wins. Each win provides the energy needed to carry the work into the next phase. These series of wins generate the energy and collective will needed to complete the cycle of success. As that cycle spins, nascent beliefs become more deeply entrenched and old survival strategies get supplanted by new methods to not just survive but thrive inside the organization.

Each little success requires careful support and an evidence-backed PR campaign to build awareness and broad support for the new direction. Nascent behavior and beliefs are fragile and will be overpowered by older assumptions until they are strengthened by supporting evidence. The supporting evidence forms a buttress around the budding mindset or practices, much like a brace around a sapling provides stability until the tree is strong enough to stand on its own.

RB: How has your thinking about what makes an effective leader evolved over the course of your career?

LW: When I began researching good leadership, most diminishing leaders appeared to be tyrannical, narcissistic bullies. But as I further studied the problem, I’ve come to see that the vast majority of the diminishing happening inside our workplaces is done with the best of intentions, by what I call the Accidental Diminisher—good people trying to be good managers. I’ve become less interested in knowing who is a Diminisher and much more interested in understanding what provokes the Diminisher tendencies that lurk inside each of us.


RB: When you consider all the organizations you’ve studied, what’s the most powerful lesson about driving meaningful change that most leaders overlook?

LW: One of the dangers of trying to lead change from the top is that most leaders have a hard time being a constant role model for the changes they advocate for.  Even the best leaders can’t always display the positive behaviors they espouse and ask their organizations to embody.  It’s human to slip up.  But when behavior change is led primarily from the top, these all-too-natural slip-ups can become major setbacks for the whole organization because they provide visible evidence that the new behavior isn’t required or feasible, and followers can easily give up.  Wise leaders understand this dynamic and build a hypocrisy factor into their change plans–meaning, they acknowledge upfront that they aspire to the new behavior but don’t always fully embody it, yet. They set the expectation that there will be setbacks and invite people to help them be better leaders as well.  They acknowledge that the route to new behavior typically looks like the acclimation process used by high-elevation climbers.  These climbers spend some of their days in ascent, but once they reach new elevations, often have to descend to lower camps to acclimate.  It’s the proverbial two-steps-forward, one-step-back process.  When leaders acknowledge their shortcomings and the likelihood of their future missteps, they not only minimize the chance that others give up when they see hypocrisy above them, but they create space for others to make and recover from their own mistakes.

RB: Looking ahead, what do you believe is the most important capability leaders need to develop to help their organizations thrive?

LW: Leading in uncertainty, specifically the ability to lead people to destinations that they themselves have never been.

I love that Liz’s insights flip the script, calling on people outside the C-Suite to stop waiting for permission and start running quiet experiments, building proof points, and letting success do the selling.

The next time you want a change or have change thrust upon you, don’t look for a parade to lead. Look for one person willing to try something different and get to work.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Three Ways Strategic Idleness Accelerates Innovation and Growth

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Three Ways Strategic Idleness Accelerates Innovation and Growth

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“What will you do on vacation?” a colleague asked.

“Nothing,” I replied.

The uncomfortable silence that followed spoke volumes. In boardrooms and during quarterly reviews, we celebrate constant motion and back-to-back calendars.  Yet, study after study shows that the most successful leaders embrace a counterintuitive edge: strategic idleness.

While your competitors exhaust themselves in perpetual busyness, research shows that deliberate mental downtime activates the brain networks responsible for strategic foresight, innovative solutions, and clear decision-making.

The Status Trap of Busy-ness

At one company I worked with, there was only one acceptable answer to “How are you doing?”  “Busy.”  The answer wasn’t a way to avoid an awkward hallway conversation. It was social currency. If you’re busy, you’re valuable.  If you’re fine, you’re expendable.

A 2017 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research confirmed what Columbia, Georgetown, and Harvard researchers discovered: being busy is now a status symbol, signaling “competence, ambition, and scarcity in the market.”

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: your packed schedule is undermining the very outcomes you’re accountable for delivering.

Your Brain’s Innovation Engine

Neuroscience has confirmed what innovators have long practiced: Strategic Idleness. While you consciously “do nothing,” your default mode network (DMN) engages, making unexpected connections across stored information and experiences.

Recent research published in the journal Brain demonstrates that the DMN is activated during creative thinking, with a specific pattern of neural activity occurring during the search for novel ideas. This network is essential for both spontaneous thought and divergent thinking, core elements of innovation.

So if you’ve always wondered why you get your best ideas in the shower, it’s because your DMN is powered all the way up.

Three Ways to Power-Up Your Engine

Here are three executive-grade approaches to strategic idleness without more showers or productivity sacrifices:

  1. Pause for 10 Minutes Before Making a Decision
    Before making high-stakes decisions, implement a mandatory 10-minute idleness period. No email, no conversation—just sitting. Research on cognitive recovery suggests that this brief reset activates your DMN, allowing for a more comprehensive consideration of variables and strategic implications.
  2. Take a Walking Meeting with Yourself
    Block 20 minutes in your calendar each week for a solo walking meeting (and then take the walk!). No other attendees, no agenda, just walking. Researchers at Stanford University found that walking increases creative output by an average of 60% compared to sitting. The combination of physical movement and mental space creates ideal conditions for your brain to generate solutions to problems you didn’t know you had.
  3. Schedule 3-5 minutes of Strategic Silence before key discussions
    Research on group dynamics shows that silent reflection before discussion can reduce groupthink and increase the quality of ideas by helping team members process information more deeply. Before you dive into a critical topic at your next leadership meeting, schedule 3-5 minutes of silence. Explain that this silence is for individual reflection and planning for the upcoming discussion, not for checking email or taking bathroom breaks. Acknowledge that it will feel awkward, but that it’s critical for the upcoming discussion and decision.

Remember, You’re Not Doing Nothing If You’re being Strategically Idle

The most valuable asset in your organization isn’t technology, capital, or even the products you sell.  It’s the quality of thinking that goes into critical decisions. Strategic idleness isn’t inaction; it’s the deliberate cultivation of conditions that foster innovation, clear judgment, and strategic foresight.

While your competitors remain trapped in perpetual busyness, by using executive advantage of strategic idleness, your next breakthrough will present itself.

This is an updated version of the June 9, 2019, post, “Do More Nothing.”

Image credit: Unsplash, Laura Weiss

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