25 Secrets to Growing Leaders

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25 Secrets to Growing Leaders

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

1. If you want to grow leaders, meet with them daily.

2. If you want to grow leaders, demand that they disagree with you.

3. If you want to grow leaders, help them with all facets of their lives.

4. If you want to grow leaders, there is no failure, there is only learning.

5. If you want to grow leaders, give them the best work.

6. If you want to grow leaders, protect them.

7. If you want to grow leaders, spend at least two years with them.

8. If you want to grow leaders, push them.

9. If you want to grow leaders, praise them.

10. If you want to grow leaders, get them comfortable with discomfort.

11. If you want to grow leaders, show them who you are.

12. If you want to grow leaders, demand that they use their judgment.

13. If you want to grow leaders, give them just a bit more than they can handle and help them handle it.

14. If you want to grow leaders, show emotion.

15. If you want to grow leaders, tell them the truth, even when it creates anxiety.

16. If you want to grow leaders, always be there for them.

17. If you want to grow leaders, pull a hamstring and make them present in your place.

18. If you want to grow leaders, be willing to compromise your career so their careers can blossom.

19. If you want to grow leaders, when you are on vacation tell everyone they are in charge.

20. If you want to grow leaders, let them chose between to two good options.

21. If you want to grow leaders, pay attention to them.

22. If you want to grow leaders, be consistent.

23. If you want to grow leaders, help them with their anxiety.

24. If you want to grow leaders, trust them.

25. If you want to grow leaders, demonstrate leadership.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of October 2023

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of October 2023Drum 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 October’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. A New Innovation Sphere — by Pete Foley
  2. Thinking Like a Futurist — by Ayelet Baron
  3. Crossing the Possibility Space — by Dennis Stauffer
  4. Twelve Digital Disruptions of Your Sales Cycle — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  5. How to Fix Corporate Transformation Failure — by Greg Satell
  6. The Biggest Customer Service Opportunity — by Shep Hyken
  7. Do You Prize Novelty or Certainty? — by Mike Shipulski
  8. What Pundits Always Get Wrong About the Future — by Greg Satell
  9. The Biggest Challenge for Innovation is Organizational Inertia — by Stefan Lindegaard
  10. What Company Do You See in the Mirror? — by Mike Shipulski

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

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 three years:

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Culture Secrets for Attracting and Keeping the Best Employees

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Culture Secrets for Attracting and Keeping the Best Employees

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

What’s happening on the inside of an organization is felt on the outside by the customer. It is more important than ever to create a culture that attracts and retains the best employees. Good or bad, the culture and employees operating within it will influence the customer experience. That’s why today we’re going to dive into creating a workplace culture that gets and keeps your best people.

“Toxic workplace” is a common buzzword in today’s society. An article in Business Insider says nearly 30 million U.S. workers think their workplace is toxic. However, toxic workplaces don’t usually start out that way, and if they do, they find it difficult to survive in today’s hyper-competitive landscape. So, assuming the path is paved with good intentions, what goes wrong along the way?

While many companies are founded upon core values, rarely are those values consistently seen throughout the organization’s leadership. The two keywords in this statement are consistent and leadership. If your organization’s leadership and management aren’t representing its stated values, how can you expect their supporting employees to do so? Moreover, if the leadership isn’t consistently representing the company values, their actions can be even more polarizing.

Like it or not, humans remember bad memories longer than good memories; it’s a scientific fact that leads back to evolutionary behaviors. That means if your leaders are not consistently, meaning always, acting with the organization’s core values in mind, they aren’t representing the values at all. This will be noticed and remembered by employees. And, you can’t expect your people to act any differently than the leaders they are supposed to follow and admire.

So why implement a corporate culture in the first place? Jonathan Keyser, the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of You Don’t Have to Be Ruthless to Win, states, “A good culture equates to so much more than just an enjoyable workplace or a happy team. A strong culture acts as a safeguard to protect your business’s most valuable resources. When companies do not focus on their culture, they are prone to significant setbacks, including a loss of brain trust, costly recruiting fees, training and development time, and stunted interpersonal collaboration, which all equate to a financial loss.”

When Keyser is not out speaking to organizations about how to create the culture of selfless service that gets employees to stay, he’s running a successful commercial real estate company. USA Today calls Keyser “The Commercial Real Estate Industry Disrupter.” I had a chance to meet with Keyser to discuss his book and he shared five steps to creating a healthy workplace culture:

1. Reflect – Keyser asks, “What type of employee do you want to attract?” You start by creating a mental persona for that individual. You want to define the behaviors and attitudes you are seeking. You also want to know what would attract that person to your organization. That will be reflected in your organization’s behavior. Keyser adds, “Once you define what’s important to your employees, follow the same process for your clients.”

2. Specify – Keyser says, “The problem with most corporate values is they are ambiguous. Companies will write words and phrases like integrity, teamwork and hard work on their office walls and don’t give context as to what those words truly mean within the workplace.” Go beyond the writing of the words and add simple and clear definitions or descriptions of how they are to be used at work. Start with your core value key phrases—what do they mean in relation to how your team interacts with each other and the outside world?

3. Differentiate – Is the culture you are implementing different enough from your competitors to win the attention of recruits? If not, you’re just like any other employer. You want to find your difference. For example, one of Keyser’s core principles is to be bold. Plenty of companies claim to be bold. However, Keyser takes it one step further and clearly defines what this means in his company. He says that they do not punish mistakes, because fear of mistakes keeps a person from being bold and willing to take massive action, which is where value is created.

4. Implement – This goes back to the second step, specify. One toxic person can destroy a culture, so it’s crucial to be specific when you outline what type of behavior is expected of your team and what corrective action should be taken if you find misalignment. The words you “write on your walls” must come to life.

5. Realign – The question isn’t if you’ll go out of alignment with the culture you’ve created (or want to create), it’s when. Keyser suggests constantly monitoring and evaluating the culture. Speak to members at the top and bottom of your organization, have your HR team conduct exit interviews, and check online sources like Glassdoor regularly. Keyser says, “A toxic workplace can spread like wildfire, so it’s your job to investigate proactively and realign when necessary.” I refer to this as defending the culture, which may be one of the most important jobs of a leader.

A toxic workplace will challenge the company to keep not only employees, but also customers. The leaders’ ability to define core values, as well as live and demonstrate them to employees is the key to creating an enduring, positive culture. These five steps to creating a healthy workplace culture will also help you prevent a toxic culture so you retain your best employees—and your best customers.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

Image Credits: Shep Hyken

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AI and Human Creativity Solving Complex Problems Together

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AI and Human Creativity Solving Complex Problems Together

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

A recent McKinsey Leading Off – Essentials for leaders and those they lead email newsletter, referred to an article “The organization of the future: Enabled by gen AI, driven by people” which stated that digitization, automation, and AI will reshape whole industries and every enterprise. The article elaborated further by saying that, in terms of magnitude, the challenge is akin to coping with the large-scale shift from agricultural work to manufacturing that occurred in the early 20th century in North America and Europe, and more recently in China. This shift was powered by the defining trait of our species, our human creativity, which is at the heart of all creative problem-solving endeavors, where innovation is the engine of growth, no matter, what the context.

Moving into Unchartered Job and Skills Territory

We don’t yet know what exact technological, or soft skills, new occupations, or jobs will be required in this fast-moving transformation, or how we might further advance generative AI, digitization, and automation.

We also don’t know how AI will impact the need for humans to tap even more into the defining trait of our species, our human creativity. To enable us to become more imaginative, curious, and creative in the way we solve some of the world’s greatest challenges and most complex and pressing problems, and transform them into innovative solutions.

We can be proactive by asking these two generative questions:

  • What if the true potential of AI lies in embracing its ability to augment human creativity and aid innovation, especially in enhancing creative problem solving, at all levels of civil society, instead of avoiding it? (Ideascale)
  • How might we develop AI as a creative thinking partner to effect profound change, and create innovative solutions that help us build a more equitable and sustainable planet for all humanity? (Hal Gregersen)

Because our human creativity is at the heart of creative problem-solving, and innovation is the engine of growth, competitiveness, and profound and positive change.

Developing a Co-Creative Thinking Partnership

In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review “AI Can Help You Ask Better Questions – and Solve Bigger Problems” by Hal Gregersen and Nicola Morini Bianzino, they state:

“Artificial intelligence may be superhuman in some ways, but it also has considerable weaknesses. For starters, the technology is fundamentally backward-looking, trained on yesterday’s data – and the future might not look anything like the past. What’s more, inaccurate or otherwise flawed training data (for instance, data skewed by inherent biases) produces poor outcomes.”

The authors say that dealing with this issue requires people to manage this limitation if they are going to treat AI as a creative-thinking partner in solving complex problems, that enable people to live healthy and happy lives and to co-create an equitable and sustainable planet.

We can achieve this by focusing on specific areas where the human brain and machines might possibly complement one another to co-create the systemic changes the world badly needs through creative problem-solving.

  • A double-edged sword

This perspective is further complimented by a recent Boston Consulting Group article  “How people can create-and destroy value- with generative AI” where they found that the adoption of generative AI is, in fact, a double-edged sword.

In an experiment, participants using GPT-4 for creative product innovation outperformed the control group (those who completed the task without using GPT-4) by 40%. But for business problem solving, using GPT-4 resulted in performance that was 23% lower than that of the control group.

“Perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, current GenAI models tend to do better on the first type of task; it is easier for LLMs to come up with creative, novel, or useful ideas based on the vast amounts of data on which they have been trained. Where there’s more room for error is when LLMs are asked to weigh nuanced qualitative and quantitative data to answer a complex question. Given this shortcoming, we as researchers knew that GPT-4 was likely to mislead participants if they relied completely on the tool, and not also on their own judgment, to arrive at the solution to the business problem-solving task (this task had a “right” answer)”.

  • Taking the path of least resistance

In McKinsey’s Top Ten Reports This Quarter blog, seven out of the ten articles relate specifically to generative AI: technology trends, state of AI, future of work, future of AI, the new AI playbook, questions to ask about AI and healthcare and AI.

As it is the most dominant topic across the board globally, if we are not both vigilant and intentional, a myopic focus on this one significant technology will take us all down the path of least resistance – where our energy will move to where it is easiest to go.  Rather than being like a river, which takes the path of least resistance to its surrounding terrain, and not by taking a strategic and systemic perspective, we will always go, and end up, where we have always gone.

  • Living our lives forwards

According to the Boston Consulting Group article:

“The primary locus of human-driven value creation lies not in enhancing generative AI where it is already great, but in focusing on tasks beyond the frontier of the technology’s core competencies.”

This means that a whole lot of other variables need to be at play, and a newly emerging set of human skills, especially in creative problem solving, need to be developed to maximize the most value from generative AI, to generate the most imaginative, novel and value adding landing strips of the future.

Creative Problem Solving

In my previous blog posts “Imagination versus Knowledge” and “Why Successful Innovators Are Curious Like Cats” we shared that we are in the midst of a “Sputnik Moment” where we have the opportunity to advance our human creativity.

This human creativity is inside all of us, it involves the process of bringing something new into being, that is original, surprising useful, or desirable, in ways that add value to the quality of people’s lives, in ways they appreciate and cherish.

  • Taking a both/and approach

Our human creativity will be paralysed, if we focus our attention and intention only on the technology, and on the financial gains or potential profits we will get from it, and if we exclude the possibilities of a co-creative thinking partnership with the technology.

To deeply engage people in true creative problem solving – and involving them in impacting positively on our crucial relationships and connectedness, with one another and with the natural world, and the planet.

  • A marriage between creatives, technologists, and humanities

In a recent Fast Company video presentation, “Innovating Imagination: How Airbnb Is Using AI to Foster Creativity” Brian Chesky CEO of Airbnb, states that we need to consider and focus our attention and intention on discovering what is good for people.

To develop a “marriage between creatives, technologists, and the humanities” that brings the human out and doesn’t let technology overtake our human element.

Developing Creative Problem-Solving Skills

At ImagineNation, we teach, mentor, and coach clients in creative problem-solving, through developing their Generative Discovery skills.

This involves developing an open and active mind and heart, by becoming flexible, adaptive, and playful in the ways we engage and focus our human creativity in the four stages of creative problem-solving.

Including sensing, perceiving, and enabling people to deeply listen, inquire, question, and debate from the edges of temporarily hidden or emerging fields of the future.

To know how to emerge, diverge, and converge creative insights, collective breakthroughs, an ideation process, and cognitive and emotional agility shifts to:

  • Deepen our attending, observing, and discerning capabilities to consciously connect with, explore, and discover possibilities that create tension and cognitive dissonance to disrupt and challenge the status quo, and other conventional thinking and feeling processes.
  • Create cracks, openings, and creative thresholds by asking generative questions to push the boundaries, and challenge assumptions and mental and emotional models to pull people towards evoking, provoking, and generating boldly creative ideas.
  • Unleash possibilities, and opportunities for creative problem solving to contribute towards generating innovative solutions to complex problems, and pressing challenges, that may not have been previously imagined.

Experimenting with the generative discovery skill set enables us to juggle multiple theories, models, and strategies to create and plan in an emergent, and non-linear way through creative problem-solving.

As stated by Hal Gregersen:

“Partnering with the technology in this way can help people ask smarter questions, making them better problem solvers and breakthrough innovators.”

Succeeding in the Age of AI

We know that Generative AI will change much of what we do and how we do it, in ways that we cannot yet anticipate.

Success in the age of AI will largely depend on our ability to learn and change faster than we ever have before, in ways that preserve our well-being, connectedness, imagination, curiosity, human creativity, and our collective humanity through partnering with generative AI in the creative problem-solving process.

Find Out More About Our Work at ImagineNation™

Find out about our collective, learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack, is a collaborative, intimate, and deeply personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, which can be customised 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 focus, human-centric approach, and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation, and upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness, within your unique innovation context. Find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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LEGO Knows Why Companies Don’t Innovate

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LEGO Knows Why Companies Don't Innovate

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“Lego’s Latest Effort to Avoid Oil-Based Plastic Hits Brick Wall” – WSJ

“Lego axes plans to make bricks from recycled bottles” – BBC

“Lego ditches oil-free brick in sustainability setback” – The Financial Times

Recently, LEGO found itself doing the Walk of Atonement (see video below) after announcing to The Financial Times that it was scrapping plans to make bricks from recycled bottles, and media outlets from The Wall Street Journal to Fast Company to WIRED were more than happy to play the Shame Nun.

And it wasn’t just media outlets ringing the Shame Bell:

  • “In the future, they should not make these kinds of announcements (prototype made from recyclable plastic) until they actually do it,” Judith Enck, President of Beyond Plastics
  • “They are not going to survive as an organization if they don’t find a solution,” Paolo Taticchi, corporate sustainability expert at University College London.
  • “Lego undoubtedly had good intentions, but if you’re going to to (sic) announce a major environmental initiative like this—one that affects the core of your company—good intentions aren’t enough. And in this instance, it can even undermine progress.” Jesus Diaz, creative director, screenwriter, and producer at The Magic Sauce, writing forFast Company

As a LEGO lover, I am not unbiased, but WOW, the amount of hypocritical, self-righteous judgment is astounding!  All these publications and pundits espouse the need for innovation, yet when a company falls even the tiniest bit short of aspirations, it’s just SHAME (clang) SHAME (clang) SHAME.

A LEGO Atlantis 8073 Manta Warrior (i.e., tiny) bit of context

In 1946, LEGO founder Ole Kirk Christiansen purchased Denmark’s first plastic injection molding machine.  Today, 95% of the company’s 4,400 different bricks are made using acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), a plastic that requires 4.4 pounds of oil to produce 2.2 pounds of brick.  Admittedly, it’s not a great ratio, and it gets worse.  The material isn’t biodegradable or easily recyclable, so when the 3% of bricks not handed down to the next generation end up in a landfill, they’ll break down into highly polluting microplastics.

With this context, it’s easy to understand why LEGO’s 2018 announcement that it will move to all non-plastic or recycled materials by 2030 and reduce its carbon emissions by 37% (from 2019’s 1.2 million tons) by 2032 was such big news.

Three years later, in 2021, LEGO announced that its prototype bricks made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles offered a promising alternative to its oil-based plastic bricks. 

But last Monday, after two years of testing, the company shared that what was promising as a prototype isn’t possible at scale because the process required to produce PET-based bricks actually increases carbon emissions.

SHAME!

A LEGO Art World Map (i.e. massive) amount of praise for LEGO

LEGO is doing everything that innovation theorists, consultants, and practitioners recommend:

  • Setting a clear vision and measurable goals so that people know what the priorities are (reduce carbon emissions), why they’re important (“playing our part in building a sustainable future and creating a better world for our children to inherit”), and the magnitude of change required
  • Defining what is on and off the table in terms of innovation, specifically that they are not willing to compromise the quality, durability, or “clutch power” of bricks to improve sustainability
  • Developing a portfolio of bets that includes new materials for products and packaging, new services to keep bricks out of landfills and in kids’ hands, new building and production processes, and active partnerships with suppliers to reduce their climate footprint
  • Prototyping and learning before committing to scale because what is possible at a prototype level is different than what’s possible at pilot, which is different from what’s possible at scale.
  • Focusing on the big picture and the long-term by not going for the near-term myopic win of declaring “we’re making bricks from more sustainable materials” and instead deciding “not to progress” with something that, when taken as a whole process, moves the company further away from its 2032 goal.

Just one minifig’s opinion

If we want companies to innovate (and we do), shaming them for falling short of perfection is the absolute wrong way to do it.

Is it disappointing that something that seemed promising didn’t work out?  Of course.  But it’s just one of many avenues and experiments being pursued.  This project ended, but the pursuit of the goal hasn’t.

Is 2 years a long time to figure out that you can’t scale a prototype and still meet your goals?  Maybe.  But, then again, it took P&G 10 years to figure out how to develop and scale a perforation that improved one-handed toilet paper tearing.

Should LEGO have kept all its efforts and success a secret until everything was perfect and ready to launch?  Absolutely not.  Sharing its goals and priorities, experiments and results, learnings and decisions shows employees, partners, and other companies what it means to innovate and lead.

Is LEGO perfect? No.

Is it trying to be better? Yes.

Isn’t that what we want?

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Sometimes You Should Collaborate Instead of Compete

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Sometimes You Should Collaborate Instead of Compete

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Boeing and Airbus are arch-rivals, competing vigorously over decades for supremacy in the global aviation market, much like DowDupont and BASF do in chemicals. Yet all of these companies, along with many others, collaborate at places like the Composites Institute (IACMI). They do this not out of any altruism, of course, but self-interest.

It is at places like the Composites Institute that profit-driven companies can explore the future with top notch scientists from places like Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Michigan State University and Purdue as well as dozens of smaller companies active in the space. To not participate would be to risk being cut out of important developments.

This type of activity is not entirely new. In the 80s, semiconductor firms, along with the Department of Defense, created SEMATECH to regain competitiveness against foreign competition, while still fighting it out in the marketplace. The truth is that sometimes you need to collaborate and sometimes you have to compete. Here’s how to know the difference.

The Value Chain and Competitive Advantage

In Michael Porter’s landmark book, Competitive Advantage, the Harvard professor argued that the key to long-term success was to dominate the value chain by maximizing bargaining power among suppliers, customers, new market entrants and substitute goods. The goal was to create a sustainable competitive advantage your rivals couldn’t hope to match.

Porter’s ideas dominated thinking in corporate strategy for decades, yet they had a fatal flaw that wasn’t always obvious. Thinking in terms of value chains is viable when technology is relatively static, but when the marketplace is rapidly evolving it can get you locked out of important ecosystems and greatly diminish your ability to compete.

To understand why, consider open-source software. When Linux first rose to prominence, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called it a cancer. Yet more recently, its current CEO announced that the company loves Linux. That didn’t happen out of any sort of newfound benevolence, but because it recognized that it couldn’t continue to shut itself out and compete.

To thrive in an ecosystem driven world, you must constantly widen and deepen connections. Instead of always looking to maximize bargaining power, you need to look for opportunities to co-create with customers and suppliers, to integrate your products and services with potential substitutes and to form partnerships with new market entrants.

A New Era Of Innovation

The philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that technological advancement is a process of revealing and building. Scientists reveal new phenomena through exploration and experiment and then later engineers figure out how to channel these phenomena to some specific use. For example, the advancements in theoretical physics revealed in the 1920s and 30s were channeled into transistors and microchips later on.

Eventually, the new technology and its implications are understood well enough to support broad adoption and a transformational period ensues. The need for revealing lessens greatly and value shifts towards building rapidly for use. We have seen much of this in the last 30 years as the digital revolution has shifted its emphasis toward skills like rapid prototyping and iteration.

Yet every technology eventually hits theoretical limits and that’s where we are now with respect to digital technology. The fact is that atoms are only so small and the speed of light is only so fast. So that limits how many transistors can fit on a silicon wafer and how fast we can compute by zipping electrons through them. Make no mistake, the future will not be digital.

So we need to embark on a new cycle of revealing and building in areas like quantum computing, synthetic biology and materials science. These things cannot be rapidly prototyped because we simply don’t understand them well enough yet. We need to explore them to reveal and, eventually, to begin building in earnest once again.

Emerging Platforms For Collaboration

Now we can understand why Boeing and Airbus are happy to join organizations like the Composite Institute. Both need to explore and neither can go it alone. They need partners, like research universities, government labs and other firms to help them uncover new things. As open source enthusiasts are fond of saying, “with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

Yet the Composites Institute is just one node in the network of Manufacturing Institutes set up under the Obama Administration to support this type of collaboration. In areas ranging from advanced fabrics and biofabrication to additive manufacturing and wide-gap semiconductors, firms large and small are working with scientists to uncover new principles.

To understand how different this is from earlier eras, consider the case of IBM. When it developed the PC, it did so largely in secret with a skunk works the company set up in Florida. With quantum computing, however, it has built up an expansive network of collaborators, including labs, customers and startups.

They don’t do this out of any newfound altruism, but because it significantly speeds up the exploration process. As George Crabtree, Director of JCESR, a consortium of national labs, research universities and private firms developing advanced battery technology, put it to me. “Usually discovery propagates at the speed of publication, but here, we can operate within the time frame of the next coffee break.”

Innovation Is Never A Single Event

All too often, we view innovation as the work of a single genius who, in a moment of sudden epiphany, conjures up an idea that changes the world. In reality, things never work like that. Innovation is never a single event, but a process of discovery, engineering and transformation, which usually takes about 30 years to create a significant impact.

It’s important to note, however, that in no way means it takes 30 years to develop an innovative product. Far from it, in fact. What it means is that the next big thing is usually already about 29 years old! The truth is that the next big thing always starts out looking like nothing at all. That’s why it is crucial to invest in exploration to reveal it.

As we have seen, exploration is best done in numbers. Businesses today, such as in the semiconductor industry, that rely on the principles of quantum mechanics revealed in the 1920s and 30s were in no way harmed by the fact that those discoveries were published openly and taught in universities. In fact, they greatly benefitted from it.

Yet the products built on those principles are highly proprietary and the secrets behind the design of those products are closely guarded. That’s the key to navigating collaboration and competition. You collaborate to reveal, but compete to develop and build. To build a great enterprise, you need to learn to do both zealously.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credit: Unsplash

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Innovativeness = Effectiveness

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Innovativeness = Effectiveness

GUEST POST from Dennis Stauffer

What makes you effective? Is it your knowledge and experience? Is it your commitment? Is it perhaps luck sometimes? Simply put: Being effective is about making what you want to happen, happen. It’s about shaping the world around you to fit your hopes and dreams, and aspirations. About creating your desired future. That means something needs to change, or why bother, right? And when something needs to change, what you’re really doing is a form of innovation.

Your innovativeness and your effectiveness are closely intertwined. Becoming more innovative makes you more effective and therefore more successful. Both personal attributes are enhanced as you become more creative, imaginative, resourceful and observant. As you become more skilled at managing the inevitable changes we all confront, you’re better positioned to find—and lead—your way through them.

Innovation and effectiveness both demand that you’re able to somehow account for the realities you face, while at the same time shifting those realities. This world is a dynamic place, it’s always fluid and evolving. You need to align with those changes, even as you attempt to make changes.

Whether you’re launching a new product or venture, trying to advance your career, or maybe start—or repair—a personal relationship, your challenge is not to just go do what needs to be done. It’s to figure out what needs to be done, to get to where you want to be. In other words, effectiveness and innovativeness are complementary. To be effective, you need to be innovative, and the more innovative you are, the more effective you’re likely to be.

Here is a video version of this post:

The Innovator Mindset YouTube channel brings you weekly tips, tricks and insights into how to be more creative, innovative, resourceful imaginative and open–all the things that innovation requires, and that you need to be effective.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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The Discomfort Caused by a Diversity of Perspective

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The Discomfort Caused by a Diversity of Perspective

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When your organization doesn’t want to hear your truth because it contradicts a decision they’ve already made, that’s a sign of trouble. It’s a sign they’re going to do what they’re going to and they don’t care all that much about you. But, what if they’re wrong? And what if your perspective could snatch victory from the flames of an impending train wreck? As someone who cares about the company and thinks it would benefit from hearing what you have to say, what do you do?

When you have a culture that makes it clear it’s not okay to share divergent perspectives, you have a big problem.

In domains of high uncertainty, increasing the diversity of perspective is the single most important thing we can do to see things more clearly. In these situations, what matters is the diversity of culture, of heritage, of education, of upbringing, and of experiences. What matters is the diversity of perspective; what matters is the level of divergence among the collective opinions, and what matters most is listening and validating all that diversity.

If you have the diversity of culture, heritage, education, and experience, congratulations. But, if you’re not willing to listen to what that diversity has to say, you’re better off not having it. It’s far less expensive if you don’t have it and far fewer people will be angry when you don’t listen to them. But, there’s a downside – you’ll go out of business sooner.

When you have a perspective that’s different than the Collective’s, share it. And when there are negative consequences for sharing it, accept them. And, rinse and repeat until you get promoted or fired.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Why Employees Must Do More Than Expected

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(Even When It’s Not in Their Job Description)

Why Employees Must Do More Than Expected

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

As customers, we appreciate it when someone we’re doing business with does more than we expect. Even if we don’t consciously recognize it when it’s happening, the value of that “something extra” makes us enjoy the experience and want to come back.

The same thing happens with employees inside an organization. You can usually find someone who seems to be doing more than expected – something that’s not in their job description.

The other night I was at a restaurant that had an outside patio. It looked like it was going to rain, so we opted to eat inside. About 20 minutes later, the sky opened up, and it didn’t just rain. It stormed. The wind blew over the tables and chairs, and one of the umbrellas blew onto the street. Without hesitation, our server, who was dressed neatly in black slacks, a dress shirt and a tie, ran outside in the pouring rain and moved the umbrella and all the tables and chairs into a covered area of the patio. He came back drenched. As he walked through the restaurant, all the customers who had been watching him through the window gave him an enthusiastic round of applause. I also noticed that the manager thanked him for being the “hero of the moment.”

When our server had dried off and returned to our table, I had to ask him, “When you applied to the job, was moving patio furniture in the rain included in the job description?” We laughed, and he smiled and said, “I just do what it takes.”

I loved that answer.

Doing More Than Expected Shep Hyken Cartoon

How many employees do what it takes? This comes in many forms, from working a little later when needed, coming to the office over the weekend if necessary or doing anything outside of a typical job description. By the way, I’m not suggesting employees should not be appropriately compensated for their hard work. They should be. And there’s nothing wrong if employees do only what you hired them to do, especially if they’re really good at it. You don’t want to lose them, so don’t expect them to do more and don’t be upset when they don’t. If you expected more, that should have been discussed and agreed upon when you hired them.

The point is you’ll find people willing to go above what’s expected and those who won’t. As a customer, which employee would you want to do business with? As an employer, which employee would you prefer to be taking care of your customers?

Image Credits: Shep Hyken, Pixabay

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Four Ways to Build Inclusive Teams

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Four Ways to Build Inclusive Teams

GUEST POST from David Burkus

At the core of teamwork is the need to solve problems. And when generating solutions, the more diverse a team you have, the more ideas you can generate. Sort of. The rationale behind diversity being a strength on teams is solid. When you’ve built a team of various perspectives, experiences, skills, and abilities, each person brings that variety into discussions and more diverse ideas get generated. More ideas mean a better chance of finding the perfect solution.

But that’s not always what happens.

It turns out that diversity alone is not enough to turn a team of very different individuals into a very effective one. In fact, research suggests diversity alone on a team can actually diminish performance. It’s diversity, paired with a feeling of that diversity being valued that matters. In other words, its diversity plus inclusion.

In this, article, we’ll outline four ways to build inclusive teams to turn diversity into the strength we know it can be.

1. Share Information

The first way to build inclusive teams is to share information. There is no easier way to make people feel excluded than to give them the impression that others on the team or in the organization are getting access to more information and opportunities than they are. Saying that a certain bit of intel is on a “need to know” basis immediately makes people question why they “don’t need to know.” But the opposite is also true, when people receive what they perceive to be privileged intel, they feel like they matter and that they’re included.

For leaders, this means the goal should be to share information as liberally as possible. It means the default reaction to receiving new information should be to share it with your team. Obviously, there will always be information you receive and aren’t permitted to share. But unless it’s expressly stated that something is off limits, seek to share it on your team. Likewise, encourage others to share, and even over-share, information they receive. This not only helps the team feel more inclusive, but it also helps everyone make better decisions as well.

2. Build Trust

The second way to build inclusive teams is to build trust. Without trust, a team isn’t really a team. It’s just a bunch of strangers who work alongside each other. And without trust, there’s no way to foster inclusivity because there’s no one willing to be vulnerable, share differing opinions, or admit mistakes. Inclusive teams bring out the best ideas because people feel that they can be themselves—and that requires some level of prior trust built up before the act of expression.

For leaders, building trust often requires you to go first in being vulnerable. When you’re willing to admit mistakes (or even just that you don’t know) and when you share unknown qualities about you, the people on your team recognize that you are trusting them with that information. And some of them will respond in kind—and then when they’re vulnerable, others will respond in kind as well. Eventually, through this cycle of vulnerability and acceptance—you’ll take the trust on your team to a whole new level.

3. Train Respect

The third way to build inclusive teams is to train respect. It’s not enough just to be vulnerable and step out in trust. That act of vulnerability needs to be met with acceptance. In other words, people need to feel their trusting moment was respect. They need to feel that their opinions are respected, that their ideas aren’t quickly judged, and that their self-expressions aren’t being ridiculed. Some on the team may unconsciously signal respect already, but some may unconsciously signal disrespect, judgment or worse. Many times, people don’t know the response they make is perceive as disrespectful to the person who was vulnerable.

For leaders, this means modeling the way by demonstrating what respectful responses look like. Research suggests the number one reason for incivility in the workplace is leaders NOT being enough of a positive role model to train others. When teammates are sharing opinions—model active listening. When people share differing ideas—ask them questions inside of making judgements. Recognize when someone is stepping out in trust and meet that trust with respect in a way that all can see. Because when they can see you respecting others, they learn how to respond themselves.

4. Create Safety

The fourth way to build inclusive teams is to create safety. Safety here doesn’t refer to creating a “safe space.” There are no safe spaces—only safe people. Safety refers to psychological safety—a climate where team members feel safe to express themselves and take risks. (You could almost say that inclusion and psychological safety are synonymous—almost.) And while trust and respect make up a lot of psychological safety—how teams and individuals respond to setbacks, mistakes, and failures is a third crucial element. For people to feel accepted and included, they must know that you include their occasional failures and mistakes. And more importantly, creating psychological safety helps teams adopt a growth mindset and share in lessons from those mistakes as well.

For leaders, responding to failures happens in two different ways. The first is how you admit mistakes to your team. Do you seek to blame someone on the team, organization, or environment? Or do you take ownership and also share what you learned? The second is how you respond to mistakes on your team. Do you ask questions to find the learning moments, or do you focus solely on how the team can “make up for it”? Creating safety requires re-framing failure as a learning moment—your failures and also the team’s failures.

Speaking of failures, there will be some failures along the way toward building a more inclusive team. It’s going to take time. But as these four methods become habits, the team will rise in trust and respect and so will the feeling of inclusion. And when they’re feeling included, the whole team will be able to do their best work ever.

Image credit: Unsplash

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