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Team Motivation Does Not Have to be Hard

GUEST POST from David Burkus

How do you make your team care about the work they are doing?

If you’re a manager, you’ve probably asked that question a few times in your career. And you’ve probably made some attempts at motivating your team already. Did you whip out the company mission statement? How did that go over?

Even if you think your team is doing the most boring work, like turning numbers into different numbers on a computer screen, you can still inspire your team to feel something in their work. This is such a crucial part of great leadership, and it’s not something you can fake or beg people to do.

Employees don’t want mission statements or half-hearted enthusiasm to lift their spirits at work. They want to feel meaning in their work and understand their impact beyond the bottom line or increasing shareholder value.

They want to know “What good is our work doing?”

We want to know our work has a rationale behind it—a purpose, no matter how small. And lack of any rationale or contribution creates a lack of motivation.

The key to motivating your team is to show them the meaning in their work and to help them know their impact. These terms may sound similar, but there are subtle differences that make each important. Meaning is knowing that your contribution counts, that your task isn’t just busy work, and that what you literally do contributes to the larger picture of the business. Impact is knowing who is counting on you.

Most of us think of meaning with a capital M. It’s why we think of doctors, nurses, or firefighters as doing Meaningful work. They’re saving lives. But the research on human motivation and team collaboration suggests something different. It’s okay to offer lowercase m meaning as well. In fact, it’s more than ok. Small m meaning dramatically increases the big M: Motivation.

For impact, well, think about the last time you felt engaged and motivated at work, or the last time you worked on a team that was inspiring and energizing to be a part of. You’re probably not thinking about the last time your boss recited the company mission statement verbatim.

Instead, you’re probably thinking about the last time you got a “thank you” from a client or coworker, or when you found out how your work mattered to someone else.

Taken together – meaning and impact, create what is called a “Pro-social purpose.” And research suggests motivating you team with prosocial purpose leaves them not only more motivated to pursue objectives, but also more likely to work together as a team.

Take KPMG’s approach for instance. Struggling with low morale, they didn’t just throw perks or pay raises at the problem. Instead, they turned to storytelling, launching the “We Shape History” campaign in 2014. The goal of the campaign was to showcase pivotal moments in history that KPMG as a firm was involved in. KPMG managed the logistics of the Lend-Lease Act during World War II, which helped the United States aid the allies. KPMG audited the 1994 South African Presidential Election, which saw Nelson Mandela make history as the first black president. The campaign worked to raise awareness of the impact KPMG’s past work had on history, but what happened next worked even better to raise morale.

After being inspired, employees were then tasked with finding the impact their roles had—at their level. Not a companywide impact, but how their work made an impact from an individual level. They set up an app on the company’s internal website that let any of the 30,000 plus employee submit their own stories. They called it the “10,000 Stories Challenge,” but didn’t take long for them to blow past that target.

Within 6 months, KPMG had collected 42,000 stories, with powerful examples of personal impact like:

“I help farmers grow – because I support the farm credit system that keeps family farms in business.”

“I restore neighborhoods – because I audit community development programs that revitalize low-income communities.”

“I combat terrorism – because I help banks prevent money laundering that can go toward terrorism.”

Leadership at the company got the results they wanted. Employees felt their work made more of a difference. Retention was better. The company became a top place to work.

Purpose became a regular conversation on the individual team level.

Research on Prosocial Purpose

In 2014, researcher Adam Grant and his colleagues were working with their university’s donation call center. These call centers are manned by student workers who are given a list of alumni and a phone and tasked with calling each person and reading from a script that always ends in a request for a donation. The job is boring. It’s draining to be hung up on, yelled at, or worse. It’s relatively thankless. In fact, when Grant and his colleagues showed up, the first thing they noticed when touring the call center was a sign in one student’s cubicle. It read “Doing a good job here is like wetting your pants in a dark suit, you get a warm feeling but no one else notices.”

The researchers wanted them to feel noticed—but obviously not for wetting themselves. They wondered if getting the call center employees to notice the difference they were making would have a motivating effect on them. So, they took the break time student workers received and used it to run an experiment. During a five-minute break, some of the workers were visited by a fellow student who had received scholarship funds raised by the call center and they heard how receiving the funds had positively impacted him.

And when the researchers followed up a month later, they noticed that just that small meeting with a scholarship recipient had a big impact on the callers. The workers who got to meet the people directly served by their work worked twice as hard. They made double the number of calls per hour and spent double the number of minutes on the phone. Their weekly revenue went from an average of around $400 to more than $2,000 in donations.

It’s impossible to overstate how big this effect is.

The workers didn’t get any additional perks or benefits. They didn’t get any training. And they certainly didn’t get asked to memorize and internalize the university’s mission statement. Instead, they got a five-minute chat with someone whose life was made better by the work they were doing.

Putting Prosocial Purpose Into Practice

So, when it comes to motivating your team, the key is to demonstrate to your colleagues the work they’re doing is meaningful and has an impact is a big part of their job. Maybe the most important. Prosocial purpose won’t happen overnight, but here are a few things to bring Meaning to the forefront and have Impact lead the way.

1. Tactic: Make metrics meaningful.

Organizations love metrics. They’re what allow the company to assess the performance of the business and their employees. They can be insightful. They can be cruel. But metrics aren’t meaning. Performance metrics get senior leaders excited when they show business is booming. And managers feel crummy when performance metrics for their team are lagging.

Often the blur of trackable metrics makes it difficult to remember why metrics matter. That’s why you as a leader need to readily remind your team. Use metrics that inspire meaning.

2. Tactic: Share a win every day.

Most organizations celebrate wins, but they’re often limited to the successful end of a project or hitting an important milestone. But on the team level, high-performing teams share wins much more frequently. It may sound like that’s taking too much time for something of too little importance, you’re wrong. People get bogged down on the small tasks that make up the day-to-day experience. You might have established meaning, but it’s like a muscle. It’ll go away if you don’t exercise it. Remind your team. Find wins and express them to the team. And where appropriate, go more public past your team. This sounds simple but imagine yourself in their position. A win is a win, no matter who you are. Wins feel good. Wins create meaning.

3. Tactic: Collect Impact Stories

KPMG was certainly the best example of this. You as a leader need to be on the lookout. Collect threads wherever they come from. Part of being a good leader is keeping tabs on those stories and using them to create that prosocial purpose. And take a note from KPMG to– bring your team into the storytelling process. Have them find impact in their role. But as their manager, keep most of the storytelling work on your plate. Collect them, showcase them, and keep them coming.

4. Tactic: Pause for Purpose

You know – when people talk about jobs with real meaning and impact, we’re quick to say teacher, firefighter, doctors, or nurses. And we’re correct, those are jobs that have and provide a TON of meaning. Do doctors and nurses need reminding of their purpose? Well, consider this: at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the entire team of surgeons, nurses, and support staff pause before every surgery to take a moment to remember the patient they are about to operate on. They break up what would be a routine procedure with a powerful reminder of the humanity behind what they’re doing.

If prominent surgeons are pausing for purpose, you and your team can do this too.

5. Tactic: Outsource Inspiration

Teams, especially at the entry-level, can be put far from the people who they serve. A customer testimonial video or comment only goes so far. Think of this as an extension of the impact story tactic. Bring the story to them. Bring in clients or customers to meet with your team, even just briefly. It only took 5 min for the call center to be inspired. Or if you need to, send them to the story. Take your team out of the office, out of the zoom meeting, and into the world where their impact is. Field trips aren’t just for elementary schools.

Conclusion

On first reading, a lot of this article might sound difficult. It reads like fancy business school jargon on motivating your team. But it’s actually relatively simple. In fact, the entire article can be summarized in just a single sentence.

“People want to do work that matters, and they want to work for leaders who tell them they matter.”

No matter where you get started as long as it’s in the service of one of those things—letting them know their work matters and letting them know they matter to you—you’ll be moving the needle on how much your team feels inspired and how much they feel energized to do work and you didn’t even have to recite the company’s mission statement which is actually a lot harder to remember than anything in this article.

Image credit: 1 of 850+ FREE quote slides available at http://misterinnovation.com

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on March 17, 2024.

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of May 2025

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of May 2025 Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are May’s ten most popular innovation posts:

What Innovation is Really About — by Stefan Lindegaard
‘Stealing’ from Artists to Make Innovations Both Novel and Familiar — by Pete Foley
Benchmarking Innovation Performance — by Noel Sobelman
Transform Your Innovation Approach with One Word — by Robyn Bolton
Building Innovation Momentum Without the Struggle — Five Questions for Tendayi Viki
Change Behavior to Change Culture — by Mike Shipulski
The Real Reason Your Team Isn’t Speaking to You — by David Burkus
The Enemy of Customer Service is … — by Shep Hyken
Three Real Business Threats (and How to Solve Them) — by Robyn Bolton
Better Customer Experiences Without Customer Feedback — by Shep Hyken

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in April that continue to resonate with people:

Transforming Leadership to Reshape the Future of Innovation — Exclusive Interview with Brian Solis
Re-Framing Your Strategy for the Chaos of 2025 — by Geoffrey A. Moore
Innovation or Not – Kawasaki Corleo — by Art Inteligencia
Three Practical Keys to Managing Uncertainty — by Robyn Bolton
Managing Team Conflict — by David Burkus

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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Learn How Your Team Works Best

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Learn How Your Team Works Best

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Assembling a team of talented individuals is only the first step toward success. The real challenge lies in ensuring that this team can work together effectively to meet deadlines and achieve goals. Despite having a roster of skilled professionals, you may find your team underperforming, a situation that can be both perplexing and frustrating. In this article, we’ll examine why some teams don’t work.

The Need For Common Understanding

It’s a common misconception that if each member is clear on their individual tasks, the team will naturally succeed. However, this overlooks the crucial aspect of how team members interact and collaborate with one another.

The reluctance to micromanage may lead managers to adopt a hands-off approach, expecting teams to navigate their dynamics independently. However, this can result in a disjointed effort, with members unsure of how to integrate their work with that of their colleagues. Providing clear guidance on roles and responsibilities is essential, but fostering a culture of empathy and understanding is equally important. This dual focus on clarity and empathy cultivates a common understanding, enabling teams to excel not just in their tasks but in their collaboration as well.

Empathy in management goes beyond simply putting yourself in another’s shoes. It involves actively fostering a team culture where members are attuned to each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and working styles. This was exemplified by Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut, who led a diverse team on the International Space Station. Hadfield prioritized team cohesion. He realized that the mission’s difficulties would not stem from a lack of technical knowledge but rather from the potential clashes arising from differences in personality and work preferences, which tend to intensify over extended periods in close quarters. To foster understanding and unity, Hadfield lived and worked in both the United States and Russia, immersing himself in their respective cultures. He encouraged the team to share their preferences, connect with each other’s families, and engage in role-playing exercises to anticipate reactions to challenging scenarios.

This dual understanding—clarity regarding tasks and insight into each other’s perspectives—proved instrumental in the mission’s remarkable success. Despite spending five months together in the confined quarters of the ISS, the team never experienced heated arguments. They faced unexpected challenges, including the loss of a loved one while in space and a sudden ammonia tank leak, which demanded an urgent spacewalk. However, their thorough preparation and understanding allowed them to navigate these challenges effectively and ensure the mission’s triumphant completion.

Why Empathy Works

Research by Dr. Anita Williams Woolley at Carnegie Mellon University highlights that the success of a team isn’t solely dependent on the intelligence or diversity of its members. Dr. Woolley and her research team tested 152 teams and gave them assignments that required collaboration, creative thinking, decision making challenges and involved planning ahead. Initially, the researchers assumed that factors like intelligence or level of skills specific to the task would best predict which teams performed well. But surprisingly, it was a team’s level of social perceptiveness and ability to work together harmoniously that predicted performance—including high-performance on tasks in which the team had merely average intelligence or no discernable skills for the task. Teams that develop a shared behavioral norm and understand each other’s contributions could tackle any task efficiently. In other words, the more common understanding, the more likely the team was to perform.

How To Build Common Understanding

Building empathy within a team doesn’t require grand gestures but can start with simple, everyday interactions. Here’s a few ways to get started:

Find Free Time:

One of the most productive times for team collaboration is when the team does nothing at all. That sounds counterintuitive, but humans are social creatures and socialization is how we learn about each other best. In times when people aren’t talking about work, they’re usually talking about themselves. They’re describing past experiences, introducing their family, and sharing hobbies and interests that extend beyond their job description and training.

These moments of self-disclosure allow the whole team to understand the person better, and they allow individual teammates to find uncommon commonalities—things that those two have in common, that are uncommon to the rest of the team. These uncommon commonalities are how individuals build bonds and how coworkers turn into friends. A myriad of research suggests having friends at work and on a team makes people more productive, engaged, and resilient.

Some unstructured times happen naturally, like the moments before a meeting when some of the team is in the conference room or on the video call early. But other times may need to be created deliberately, like setting certain days to eat together or creating a calendar of paired “coffee chat” appointments between coworkers. These deliberate times might seem fundatory (mandatory fun that’s not actually that fun), but that’s likely because the team doesn’t know that much about each other yet. As these times continue and as the team grows closer and develops more empathy, they’ll quickly turn into some of the most energizing times on a team’s calendar.

Write Manuals of Me:

Think of this as a user’s manual, like the one you’re handed when you get a new car. Have each person on the team draft a short document telling their teammates more about them and how they prefer to work. These manuals help the team understand why one person always seems overly optimistic and another skeptical, and why one person writes long, contemplative emails and another writes back “Sounds good.” This saves time and confusion and also helps reduce conflict, perhaps better than any over-priced personality test could.

One easy template to start contains four simple statements: I am at my best when __________. I am at my worst when __________. You can count on me to __________. What I need from you is __________.

Send these questions out and ask the team to ponder them for a while before meeting to share answers. If you’re the leader, establish trust by going first (more on that in Part Two). Allow time after each statement for questions and clarification, as people are trying to apply what has been shared to past experiences with that person. Just like team charters, the real value is not in the document, but in drafting and sharing it.

Share Gratitude:

One of the simplest and most powerful ways to build empathy and connection with someone else is to show appreciation. So, it’s not surprising that research suggests high-performing teams express significantly more gratitude to each other than other groups. In addition, increasing expressions of gratitude on a team also increase the openness to helping each other on future projects. The benefits of gratitude aren’t just reserved for the receiver, they’re also gotten by the giver (Please forgive the grammar there in favor of some awesome alliteration).

Taking the time to say “thank you” increases well-being and brain function and reduces impatience and other stressors that get in the way of empathizing with colleagues. Grateful people are more relaxed, more resilient, and earn about seven percent more than their ungrateful colleagues.

Consider starting a few public displays of appreciation on your team. This could be a weekly ritual at the end of a meeting where each person says thanks to someone else on the team (and pay attention, you want to make sure everyone receives at least one kudos). It could also be by creating a “Weekly Praise” email or communication channel where members share what they appreciated about each other this past week. If you need an even smaller start, you could target just one person and pass around a symbol or token when they receive appreciation (the token also nominates them to share next week).

Conclusion

Creating a high-performing team is akin to playing chess, where understanding the unique strengths and roles of each piece is crucial to victory. By fostering a culture of clarity, empathy, and mutual understanding, you enable your team to navigate the complexities of collaboration effectively. This approach not only enhances performance but also builds a resilient and adaptable team capable of achieving its objectives. Remember, the path to a high-performing team is a journey of building understanding and empathy, a strategy that, while it may require time and patience, yields substantial rewards for those willing to invest in it.

Image credit: Pexels

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The Real Reason Your Team Isn’t Speaking to You

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The Real Reason Your Team Isn't Speaking to You

GUEST POST from David Burkus

It’s a common issue in many organizations – teams not voicing obstacles or issues in their work. If you’ve been a leader for a while, you’ve probably experienced it firsthand. Maybe you and your team had a check-in meeting with everyone, and everything was positive. Everyone gives a status update. And no one is asking for help. So, the meeting ended, and everyone went about their business.

But you were suspicious. Your team was saying it was all good. But then they started missing deadlines, or the project came in over budget, or it didn’t come in at all.

You’re not alone. In fact, in many organizations’ failures happen and get covered up at many levels of the organization. It’s not uncommon for senior leaders to be the least informed about what’s really happening in the organization because everyone at every level is trying to minimize failure…or trying to minimize their role in it.

No one trusts each other enough to share their setbacks, so no one knows what’s holding the team back.

But trust doesn’t automatically resolve teamwide issues. Building trust is great, but research suggests that trust alone is insufficient. Instead, teams need to feel psychological safety—a climate of mutual trust and respect that helps team members feel safe to take interpersonal risks. Risks like voicing failures or disagreements, but also risks like sharing their “crazy” ideas that just might be brilliant.

Teams with psychological safety have members who can be vulnerable and authentic with each other. They ask questions or offer ideas that may seem odd but can lead the team’s thinking in new directions. Psychological safety encourages team members to speak up when they disagree, and as a result more diverse viewpoints are shared. Psychological safety reduces failures, because when people feel that they can speak freely they’re more likely to intervene before a team makes a mistake. In fact, research from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who first discovered the power of psychology safety on teams, suggests that on diverse teams, psychological safety determines whether their varied strengths are harnessed or if they perform below their potential.

In her work, Edmondson describes psychological safety as “a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.”

Trust and Respect.

These may seem similar. But they have their differences. The interplay between them is what builds psychological safety. Trust is how much we feel we can share our authentic selves with others. Respect is how much we feel they accept that self. If I trust you, then I will share honestly with you. If you respect me, then you will value what I’ve shared. High-performing teams don’t need to just trust each other, they also need to learn how to respect each other’s contribution.

So how can leaders build a sense of trust and respect on a team? Here’s a few ideas:

1. Celebrate Failures

Celebrating failures on a team doesn’t mean teams throw a party every time they lose, but it doesn’t mean that every loss immediately triggers a round of “shift the blame” or that they forbid each other from talking about “the project which shall not be named.” Failures are inevitable, and often for reasons outside of a team’s control. Clients change their mind. Budgets get cut. Global pandemics disrupt the supply chain and force everyone to look at each other on video calls. To build trust on a team, the team must be comfortable with the idea that they will fail—and that they will learn from failure.

So, taking the time to celebrate what the painful experience taught the team can be a worthwhile exercise. This happens in several ways. You could draft a “failure resume” for yourself and encourage teammates to do the same, listing every job or project that didn’t turn out as hoped. As a team, you could create a “failure wall” with pictures or quotes from projects that blew up or clients you didn’t win. Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, throws regular Oops Meetings, where she admits her own mistakes and encourages the team to do the same. One pharmaceutical company went so far as to create “Failure Wakes” to gather researchers together around a promised but failed compound. The team said their good-byes, and expressed gratitude for the lessons working on that aborted drug taught them. These types of celebrations not only focus the team on lessons learned, but they encourage future risk-taking and keep teams motivated even when those chances of failure are high.

2. Hold After-Action Reviews

One way to at least celebrate learning if not failure is the after-action review. Although unlike clapping or waving, this is a more serious ritual done after the action (hence the name). Originally a military ritual, after-action reviews work well because they force the team to discuss strengths and weaknesses and to dissect past failures (and even successes) for lessons. Just after the team finishes a project, or during an important milestone, gather them together and ask them a few questions:

What was our intended result?
What was the actual result?
Why were they different?
What will we do the same next time?
What will we do differently next time?

The purpose of the meeting is not to find someone to blame, or someone to give all the credit. The goal is to extract lessons from the project about where the team is strong and where they need improvement. When people are open and honest about their weaknesses and contributions to failure, celebrate the vulnerability they just signaled.

3. Model Active Listening

The easiest way to signal disrespect to someone is make them feel ignored. The reverse is true as well. Making people feel listened to and truly heard is one of the simplest ways to signal that you respect what they have to say. Great team cultures are marked by how well they listen to each other and take turns speaking so everyone feels heard. But our natural tendency as humans can make it difficult to show others we’re listening. We want to help people. So, when people come to us with problems, we want to jump in and help right away. For team leaders, this tendency is even stronger. People are supposed to come to us for help, right? So, we start helping…which means we start talking…which means we stop listening.

One simple trick for ensuring you listen longer and help others feel more heard is to get used to saying, “Tell me more.” When someone says something that triggers a thought in your head, and you feel your mouth starting to open so your brilliant advice can greet the world—stop. Instead of whatever you were going to say, just say “Tell me more.” If you want to take active listening even further, consider a useful acronym from communication expert Julian Treasure: RASA. When someone else is speaking, Receive their ideas by paying attention to them as they speak. Appreciate what they are saying by nodding or giving confirming feedback. Summarize what the other person said when they’re finished. Then Ask them questions to explore their idea further. Since respect is a learned behavior, as you model active listening your team will follow your example—and more members of your team will feel heard and respected.

4. Recognize, And Share Credit

Leadership thinker Warren Bennis once noted that good leaders shine under the spotlight, but great leaders help others shine. Teams that share credit and take the time to recognize each other are teams where members feel more respected and more trusted. But teams that fight for credit when a project is finished (or fight over blame when it fails) diminish what little respect they had before. Great team leaders look for as many ways to share credit with their team as they can, even if they desire most of the credit. This can be as simple as taking the time to appreciate each team member’s strengths, or as big as shouting those praises throughout the company. When team members know what you appreciate about them, they know you respect their abilities and their ideas.

In addition, find small wins that can be celebrated more often—hence creating more opportunities to recognize others. Small wins have a big impact on individual and team motivation—and that impact only gets bigger when credit for the win is shared team wide.

Conclusion – The Psychological Safety Cycle

When individuals feel respected, and respectful behavior becomes the norm on a team, trust will naturally increase as well. That ensures that great ideas, and great lessons, get heard and considered. Without respect, that trust you’re building by accepting failures and embracing held-back brilliance from your team, will have a very short half-life. You can’t sleep on respect.

It’s a cycle.

You build trust on the team, which encourages people to take risks (or to risk admitting failures) and if that risk is met with respect…trust grows even more. If it doesn’t, you’re failing even faster.

It’s worth including in the conclusion, that we’re not talking about repeat failures. Psychological safety doesn’t mean there’s no accountability for consistently under-performing. It doesn’t mean that people can get away slacking off or that teams will just keep failing. But it does mean they don’t have to be afraid to ask for help or admit those occasional times when they do fail. It means that they take learning and growth so seriously that don’t hold back talking about their own struggles and their own mistakes.

And that’s why high-performing teams are psychologically safe teams.

Image credit: Pixabay

Originally published on DavidBurkus.com on January 6, 2024

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Building Transformative Teams

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Building Transformative Teams

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

One of the most common questions I get asked by senior managers is “How can we find more innovative people?” I know the type they have in mind. Someone energetic and dynamic, full of ideas and able to present them powerfully. It seems like everybody these days is looking for an early version of Steve Jobs.

Yet the truth is that today’s high value work is not done by individuals, but teams. It wasn’t always this way. The journal Nature noted that until the 1920’s most scientific papers only had a single author, but by the 1950s that co-authorship became the norm and now the average paper has four times as many authors as it did back then.

To solve the kind of complex problems that it takes to drive genuine transformation, you don’t need the best people, you need the best teams. That’s why traditional job descriptions lead us astray. They tend to focus on task-driven skills rather than collaboration skills. We need to change how we evaluate, recruit, manage and train talent. Here’s what to look for:

Passion For A Problem

I once had a unit manager who wasn’t performing the way we wanted her to. She wasn’t totally awful. In fact, she was well liked by her staff, coworkers, and senior management. But she wasn’t showing anywhere near the creativity required to take the business to the next level and we decided to ease her out of her position.

Then a funny thing happened. After she left our company, she became a successful interior decorator. Her clients loved how she could transform a space with creativity and style. She also displayed many of the same qualities that made her so well liked as a manager. She was a good listener, highly collaborative, and focused on results.

So why is it that someone could be so dull and unimaginative in one context and so creative in another? The simplest answer is that she was a lot more interested in interior decorating than she was in our business. Researchers have long established that intrinsic motivation is a major component of what makes people creative.

The biggest misconception about innovation is that it’s about ideas. It’s not. It’s about solving problems. So the first step to building a transformative team is to hire people interested in the problems you are trying to solve. If someone has a true passion for your mission, work to develop the ideas you need to crack the problem.

Collaboration Skills

We often think of high performing teams being driven by a dominant, charismatic leader, but research shows just the opposite. In one wide ranging study, scientists at MIT and Carnegie Mellon found that high performing teams are made up of people who have high social sensitivity, take turns when speaking and include women in the group.

Harvard professor Amy Edmondson has researched the workplace for decades and has found that psychological safety, or the ability of each team member to be able to give voice to their ideas without fear of reprisal or rebuke, is crucial for high performing, innovative teams. Google found much the same thing when it studied what makes great teams tick.

Stanford professor Robert Sutton also summarized wide ranging research for his 2007 book, The No Asshole Rule, which showed that even one disruptive member can poison a work environment, decrease productivity and drive valuable employees to leave the company. So even if someone is a great individual performer, it’s better to get rid of nasty people than allow them to sabotage the effectiveness of an entire team.

The most transformative teams are the ones that collaborate well. Unfortunately, it’s much easier to evaluate individual performance than teamwork. So lazy managers tend to reward people who are good at taking credit rather than those who actively listen and provide crucial support to those around them.

High Quality Interaction

There is increasing evidence that how teams interact is crucial for how they perform. A study done for the CIA performed after 9/11 to determine what attributes made for the most effective analyst teams found that what made teams successful was not the attributes of their members, or even the coaching they got from their leaders, but the interactions within the team itself.

More specifically, they found that teams that work interdependently tend to perform much better than when tasks are doled out individually and carried out in parallel. Another study found that teams that interacted more on a face-to-face basis, rather than remotely, tended to build higher levels of trust and produced more creative work.

While the quality of remote working tools, including teleconferencing apps like Zoom and collaboration tools like Mural and Miro, have greatly improved in recent years, we still need to take the time to build authentic relationships with those we work with. That can include regular in-person team meetups for remote teams or even intermittent relationship building calls unrelated to current projects.

What’s crucial to understand and internalize is that the value of a team is not just the sum of each individual contribution, but what happens when ideas bounce against each other. That’s what allows concepts to evolve and grow into something completely new and different. Innovation, more than anything else, is combination.

Talent Isn’t Something You Hire, It’s Something You Build

The truth is that there is no effective answer for the question, “how do we find innovative people?” Talent isn’t something you hire or win in a war, it’s something you empower. It depends less on the innate skills of individuals than how people are supported and led. As workplace expert David Burkus puts it, “talent doesn’t make the team. The team makes the talent.”

All too often, leaders take a transactional view and try to manage by incentives. They believe that if they contrive the right combination of carrots and sticks, they can engineer creativity and performance. Yet the world doesn’t work that way. We can’t simply treat people as means to an end and expect them to achieve at a high level. We have to treat them as ends in themselves.

Effective leaders provide their teams with a sense of shared purpose and common mission. They provide an environment of psychological safety not because of some misplaced sense of altruism, but to enable honest and candid collaboration. They cultivate a culture of connection that leads to genuine relationships among colleagues.

What’s crucial for leaders to understand is that the problems we need to solve now are far too complex for us to rely on individual accomplishments. The high value work today is done by teams and that is what we need to focus on. It’s no longer enough for leaders to simply plan and direct action. We need to inspire and empower belief.

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

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of January 2025

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of January 2025 Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are January’s ten most popular innovation posts:

A Toolbox for High-Performance Teams — by Stefan Lindegaard
Top 100 Innovation and Transformation Articles of 2024 — Curated by Braden Kelley
The Twelve Killers of Innovation — by Robyn Bolton
Building Trust for High Performing Teams — by David Burkus
Be Ridiculously Easy to Do Business With — by Shep Hyken
Uncertainty Isn’t Always Bad — by Mike Shipulski
The Real Winners of Mega Events — by Shep Hyken
Five Must Reads for 2025 — by Robyn Bolton
Don’t Slow Roll Your Transformation — by Geoffrey A. Moore
Is it Time to ReLearn to Work? — by Geoffrey A. Moore

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in December that continue to resonate with people:

Why Annual Employee Experience Audits Are Important — by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia
Top Six Trends for Innovation Management in 2025 — by Jesse Nieminen
Best Team Building Exercise Around — by David Burkus
You Are Doing Strategic Planning Wrong (According to Seth Godin) — by Robyn Bolton
Artificial Innovation — by Braden Kelley

SPECIAL BONUS: While supplies last, you can get the hardcover version of my first bestselling book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire for 44% OFF until Amazon runs out of stock or changes the price. This deal won’t last long, so grab your copy while it lasts!

Have something to contribute?

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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Building Trust for High Performing Teams

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Building Trust for High Performing Teams

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Trust is the bedrock upon which successful teams are built. High-performing teams are characterized by an elevated level of trust. This trust in high performing teams manifests in four distinct ways: teams trust each other to deliver, they trust that they can share new ideas, they trust that they can disagree, and they trust that they can make mistakes. Each of these aspects of trust contributes to the overall success and productivity of the team.

As a leader, it is your responsibility to set the tone and model trust within your team. This involves creating an environment where team members feel safe to share their ideas, voice their disagreements, and admit their mistakes. By doing so, you can foster a culture of trust that drives your team towards high performance.

In this article, we’ll review each type of trust in high performing teams and offer ways leaders can build each.

Teams Trust Each Other To Deliver

Trust in a team begins with the belief that each member will deliver on their commitments. This trust is built on clarity and understanding of each person’s role within the team. When team members understand how their work contributes to the overall team goals, they are more likely to feel accountable and deliver on their commitments. Lack of trust can manifest when people don’t know how their work fits into the team. This can lead to confusion, miscommunication, and ultimately, a failure to meet team objectives.

Regular team huddles can improve clarity and accountability, thereby fostering trust in the team’s ability to deliver. In huddles, the team meets at regular intervals to review progress, set new priorities, and discuss any potential roadblocks. Doing so as a team not only keeps everyone on the same page, over time it can instill a belief in each person that their teammates can deliver on their promises (assuming, of course, the teammates are actually delivering on their promises).

Teams Trust They Can Share New Ideas

High-performing teams are often characterized by their ability to generate and welcome new ideas. This requires a culture of trust where team members feel safe to share their out-of-the-box thinking. Diversity of experiences and perspectives can lead to innovative ideas that drive the team forward. But only if team members feel safe enough to share the innovative ideas that stem from their diverse perspectives.

Leaders play a crucial role in fostering this culture of trust. By modeling active listening and creating an environment where new ideas are considered and valued, leaders can encourage their team members to share their thoughts and contribute to the team’s innovation. When leaders demonstrate how to respect the new ideas of others, hearing them out fully, and discuss them, they not only teach the team how to do so but they send a message to everyone that “crazy” ideas are welcome here.

Teams Trust That They Can Disagree

Disagreements are a natural part of any team’s dynamics. As teammates from different backgrounds, perspectives or experiences discuss their problems or plan out critical tasks, they’re going to disagree on the best way forward. In low-performing teams, this conflict is often avoided, and ideas suppressed. However, in high-performing teams, disagreements are viewed as opportunities for growth and improvement. Team members trust that they can voice their disagreements and have their ideas challenged in a respectful and constructive manner.

Leaders can foster this trust by setting the tone for disagreements. When teammates speak up to disagree with a leader, it’s an opportunity to model respectful dissent and discussion. When teammates disagree with each other, it’s an opportunity for the leader to “referee” the conflict and establish ground rules for keeping conflict task focused. By welcoming disagreements and ensuring that everyone feels heard, leaders can create a safe space for constructive conflict and continuous improvement.

Teams Trust They Can Make Mistakes

Mistakes are inevitable in any team. Teams will make assumptions about the environment or get hit with unexpected changes. Failure on a team is unavoidable even on the highest-performing teams. In low-performing teams, failures quickly turn into blame sessions, which each member trying to save their own skin. However, in high-performing teams, mistakes are viewed as learning opportunities rather than failures. This requires a culture of trust where team members feel safe to admit their mistakes and learn from them.

In dysfunctional teams, people often hide their failures due to fear of judgment or exploitation. Leaders can counteract this by modeling vulnerability and admitting their own mistakes. This can help to build trust and create a safe environment for team members to learn and grow. When a team witnesses a leader taking responsibility for failure or admitting a shortcoming, they’re more likely to trust that leader in the future—and to trust each other.

Trust is the cornerstone of high-performing teams. It manifests in the team’s ability to deliver, share new ideas, disagree constructively, and admit mistakes. As a leader, it is your responsibility to foster this trust within your team. By setting the tone and modeling trust, you can create an environment where your team can thrive and do its best work ever.

Image credit: Pixabay

Originally published on DavidBurkus.com on October 30, 2023

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A Toolbox for High-Performance Teams

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Building, Leading and Scaling

A Toolbox for High-Performance Teams

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

Together with a client, we are developing a toolbox for building, leading, and scaling high-performance teams. We are about to begin the implementation phase and will share case stories in a few months, as there are valuable learnings in this process.

For now, you are welcome to use this toolbox. See the introduction and images below, and if you see a match, get in touch with your feedback and questions about utilization and implementation within your teams and organization.

Here’s a short overview of the toolbox. The attached images also provide a glimpse (let me know if I should send you an image deck with all of this combined):

Capability Gap Map

The Capability Gap Map tool helps identify and understand the current status, future desired position, and gaps that need to be filled across different focus areas. The key elements are 7-12 indicators that are prioritized, assessed today, and considered for the future position.

Steps for Using the Capability Gap Map:

Identify Indicators: Select 7-12 key indicators relevant to the focus area.
Prioritize Indicators: Rank the indicators based on their importance and impact.
Rate Current State: Assess the current state for each indicator.
Assess Future State: Define the desired future state for each indicator.
Develop Action Plans: Create a one-pager outlining short, mid, and long-term actions to bridge the gaps.

SEBL (Stop, Enhance, Borrow, Learn)

SEBL is a tool to help leaders and their teams understand what to Stop, Enhance, Borrow, and Learn based on the Capability Gap Map. This tool can spur reflections and help drive specific actions.

Steps for Using SEBL:

Stop: Identify and eliminate ineffective practices to free up resources and provide clarity.
Enhance: Improve what’s already working well, capitalizing on strengths.
Borrow: Look outward for inspiration and adapt successful practices from other sources.
Learn: Push boundaries, innovate, and introduce entirely new concepts or skills.

Action Overviews

The Action Overview is a short document for leaders and their teams to create an overview of their upcoming actions. It can be used for individuals as well as teams and is useful for sharing the current focus with team members and stakeholders to get feedback and leverage networks.

Steps for Action Overviews:

Focus & Description: Define your key action and relate it to your team’s objectives.
Expected Outcomes & Metrics/KPIs: Detail what you aim to achieve and the metrics to measure these outcomes.
Resources & Team Collaboration: Identify needed resources and potential for cross-functional collaboration.
Stakeholders: Identify relevant internal and external stakeholders and their attitudes toward the action.
Milestones/Deadline: Break down the action into manageable milestones, each with its own deadline.

Additional Tools

This toolbox is still in the early phases, and we are starting to implement it while developing other tools. If you are curious, we can also develop tailored Team Dynamics Cards, exercises, assessments, and other insights to support the above actions. You can access my library with over 250 images, 50+ cards on Team Dynamics and Leadership Growth, and more than 30 exercises. Custom materials can also be created for your teams or organization.

Feel free to use and share these tools. I look forward to your feedback and questions on implementing them within your teams and organization. If you’d like a complete image deck or more details, just let me know!

Image Credits: Unsplash, Stefan Lindegaard

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Overcoming Team Conflict

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Overcoming Team Conflict

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Conflict on a team is inevitable. On diverse teams, where individuals come from varying backgrounds and possess differing opinions, those opinions will clash often in the form of disagreements and conflicts. Understanding the types of team conflict that can arise in a team setting is crucial for effective management and resolution.

In this article, we will delve into the four types of team conflict: relationship conflict, task conflict, status conflict, and process conflict.

Each type of conflict has its unique characteristics, causes, and potential solutions. By understanding these conflicts, leaders can respond appropriately in the moment, setting the team up to harness the benefits of conflict rather than letting it become a destructive force.

1. Relationship Conflict

The first type of team conflict is relationship conflict. This is a type of conflict that arises from differing personalities, experiences, and identities. This type of conflict can undermine trust and belonging on the team, creating a negative atmosphere. It’s crucial for leaders to address relationship conflicts promptly and effectively to prevent them from escalating.

Resolving relationship conflict requires empathy and understanding. Private discussions between conflicting individuals can help identify triggers and allow for open communication. It’s important to focus on specific behaviors and their impact, rather than making accusations or assuming motives. By addressing the behavior rather than the person, leaders can help individuals understand how their actions affect the team and encourage them to adjust their behavior accordingly.

2. Task Conflict

The second type of team conflict is task conflict. This is a positive type of conflict that arises from differing opinions on how to complete tasks. This type of conflict can be harnessed to encourage discussion and find the best plan of action. It indicates that the team is leveraging diversity for better performance.

When dealing with task conflict, it’s important to avoid personal attacks and assumptions. Instead, leaders should encourage team members to ask intelligent questions about the assumptions behind ideas. By discussing different perspectives openly, the team can increase the chances of finding the best way to achieve tasks. This type of conflict, when managed properly, can lead to innovative solutions and improved team performance.

3. Status Conflict

The third type of team conflict is status conflict. This involves power struggles and hierarchy within the team. Unlike task conflict, status conflict has no positive outcome and can create a toxic work environment. It’s crucial for leaders to address status conflicts promptly and effectively to prevent them from escalating.

Status conflict is about people’s opinions of their position in an invisible hierarchy within the team. To address this type of conflict, leaders can create rituals and experiences that signal equality and discourage status games. It’s also important for leaders to lead by example and send the message that everyone’s opinion is valued equally, regardless of their position in the team.

4. Process Conflict

The final type of team conflict is process conflict. This conflict arises from disagreements about how tasks are delegated and the best process for achieving them. This type of conflict can be resolved by getting to know team members’ strengths and weaknesses and explaining decisions that may go against their preferences.

Process conflict can occur when there are differing opinions on who should do a task or when someone tries to avoid responsibility. By understanding team members’ strengths and weaknesses, leaders can delegate tasks more effectively and prevent process conflicts. It’s also important to explain decisions that may go against team members’ preferences to prevent process conflict from turning into status conflict.

As a leader, understanding the different types of team conflict is crucial for effective conflict management. By responding to each type of conflict in the moment and setting the team up to harness the benefits of conflict, leaders can foster a positive and productive work environment. Remember, conflict isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When managed properly, it can lead to team’s having their best ideas and individuals doing their best work ever.

Image credit: Pixabay

Originally published on DavidBurkus.com on October 23, 2023

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Your Blueprint for Building High-Performance Teams

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Your Blueprint for Building High-Performance Teams

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

What can leaders do to enhance their skills, mindset, and toolbox to build and lead high-performance teams? This is the driving question behind this series of discussions and articles, which together create a blueprint designed to help you and other leaders excel in the competitive arena of team leadership.

The High-Performance Team Blueprint

This blueprint begins with a focus on personal leadership development – assessing your current skills, adopting new mindsets, and acquiring the necessary tools before moving on to actionable strategies for team building.

This phased approach ensures that you first strengthen your own leadership foundations, which is crucial for effectively applying these skills to influence team dynamics and organizational strategies.

Here, I will outline the key components of the blueprint. I encourage you to reflect on these concepts, apply them to your context, and share your feedback, ideas, and perspectives. This collaborative effort will enrich the discussion and enhance the utility of the strategies presented.

The Blueprint Overview

1. Understanding High-Performance Leadership: What Makes It Different?

Explore the unique characteristics of high-performance leadership that set it apart from traditional leadership approaches. This element focuses on the transformative abilities leaders must have to drive exceptional team outcomes, such as fostering a culture where trust, empowerment, and collaboration are the norm. Understand the impact these traits have on organizational success and learn how to cultivate them in your leadership style.

2. Self-Assessment for Leaders: Are You Ready for High-Performance?

Assess your readiness to lead a high-performance team by critically evaluating your current leadership style and capabilities. This section provides tools and frameworks that help you measure your effectiveness in essential areas such as building trust, empowering others, and facilitating collaboration. It also guides you through identifying gaps in your leadership approach and setting goals for improvement.

3. Developing the High-Performance Leader: Mindset and Key Skills

Enhance key leadership skills that are essential for managing high-performance teams. Focus on developing transparency to build trust, fostering autonomy to empower your team, and promoting inclusivity to enhance collaboration. This section offers practical strategies and exercises to strengthen these skills and encourages you to integrate them into your daily leadership practice.

4. Training and Resources for High-Performance Leadership

Discover and engage with training programs and resources that are specifically designed to enhance your leadership in the realms of psychological safety, team empowerment, and effective collaboration. This element helps you navigate the wide array of educational materials and professional development opportunities available, selecting those that align best with your personal and organizational needs.

5. Building Your High-Performance Team: Make It Happen

Put your enhanced leadership skills to the test by forming your high-performance team. This practical guide provides detailed steps for selecting team members who align with high-performance values, defining clear and impactful roles, and setting strategic goals that motivate and challenge the team. Learn how to lay the foundation for effective team dynamics from the outset.

6. Sustaining Team Performance: Cultivating Culture and Engagement

Delve into strategies to maintain and boost team performance over the long term. This section emphasizes the importance of nurturing a culture that values continuous improvement, open communication, and mutual support. Explore ways to keep your team engaged and motivated, ensuring that the high-performance mindset becomes embedded in everyday operations.

7. Scaling High-Performance Practices: Leadership in Action

Explore effective strategies for broadening the implementation of high-performance practices throughout the organization. Learn how to adapt the core principles of trust, empowerment, and collaboration to various team structures and organizational contexts. This element focuses on overcoming challenges associated with scaling these practices, ensuring they enhance productivity and engagement across all levels.

8. Evaluating and Enhancing Team Performance: Tools for Leaders

Master the use of sophisticated tools to monitor and refine your team’s performance. This section teaches you how to implement data-driven approaches for tracking key performance indicators related to trust, empowerment, and collaboration. Gain insights on interpreting these metrics and using them to make informed decisions that drive continuous team improvement and organizational success.

Approach and Progression

This blueprint is structured as a progressive journey designed to enhance your leadership capabilities and equip you to effectively manage high-performance teams.

Here’s how each phase builds upon the previous, guiding you from foundational development to broader organizational impact:

Foundation Phase (Elements 1-4): This initial stage focuses on building the core skills and insights necessary to foster a high-performance culture. It centers on personal leadership development, laying the groundwork for effective team leadership. You’ll explore high-performance leadership traits, assess your current capabilities, develop key skills, and identify valuable training resources.

Implementation Phase (Elements 5-6): During this middle stage, you’ll apply the skills you’ve developed to real-world team settings. This phase is about putting theory into practice by forming and sustaining teams that demonstrate high performance through established trust, clear empowerment, and effective collaboration. You’ll learn to build your first high-performance team and cultivate a culture that supports ongoing success.

Scaling Phase (Elements 7-8): The final stage is about expanding the reach of your successful practices across the organization. You’ll apply proven strategies from your initial team to other parts of the company and employ advanced analytical tools to assess and enhance their effectiveness. This phase ensures that the high-performance practices are sustainable and can lead to lasting improvements across the company.

A structured pathway as this one ensures that your development as a leader is comprehensive and continuous, enabling you to not only learn and grow personally but also apply these advancements effectively to achieve lasting organizational success.

Image Credits: Pixabay

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