Leadership is not rocket science

Why has leadership not improved?

In yesterday's post, I said that we haven't really improved our leadership over the last few decades.  So where did that come from?  Simply put, from the data.

If you look at studies on leadership and on how effective leaders are, there hasn't been a significant improvement in leadership, at least from the view of the 'followers' over the past few decades.  Yes, we've talked about it a lot, and we've bought a lot of books, but  there really hasn't been a whole lot of change in behaviour.

If we want to change and reach a goal, we have to be honest with ourselves about where we are.  Only then can we really move forward.

I think the major reasons things haven't changed are the systems - or to put it in plain English, it doesn't count.  What drives almost all organizations, public and private sector both, are the financials.  Did it make budget?  Was it profitable?  What was the return to shareholders?

Financials are only part of the picture, and if you take the balanced scorecard viewpoint, they are all about history, not about future performance.  In addition to lagging indicators like financials that show you the past, you need leading indicators that will predict future performance, like leadership and corporate culture.  Yet how many organizations annually measure leadership with 360-degree surveys.  And of those that do, how many make it count as much as the financials?  When push comes to shove, when it comes to making the quarterly dividends/budget or doing the right thing, the dividends win.  How can we hope to have any change in those circumstances?

If we're truly going to change things, we have to be honest about where we are, measure where we are and where we're going, and make those measurements count.  There's huge potential in this new year and to take advantage of that potential, we have to do things differently.  If we want to grow leadership, we have to measure it, and hold people accountable for it.

That's my two cents.  What do you think?

Thank you, Molly

What a wonderful way to finish off the year and start 2009.  This was posted a month ago, but I just discovered that Molly DiBianca listed this blog as one of the 100 leading blogs on leadership in the Delaware Employment Blog here.

Thank you, Molly, and thanks to all of you who read this blog.  All the best to you for 2009!

A year of opportunity in uncertain economic times

This is a time of incredible opportunity - a perfect storm, if you will, that is clearing the way for something new to emerge in leadership and the business landscape.  Yes, there is chaos and turmoil for many, and that, in some ways is what is ensuring that real change will happen.

There's an old story of a dog that sat on a porch every day whining.  After hearing for many days, a new neighbour finally went and asked asked the dog's owner why it was always whining, and the owner said the dog was sitting on a nail.

"Sitting on a nail?  Why doesn't he move?" asked the neighbour.

"Doesn't hurt enough," said the owner.

Like the dog, if it doesn't hurt enough, we can put up with a lot.  We've known how leadership in many organizations has, for lack of a better word, sucked over the past few decades, but we've put up with a lot because while it's bad, it's not that bad.  It doesn't hurt enough.  It may get worse a little bit at a time, and we can put up with that.

People call it the comfort zone.  Well, it's not always comfortable.  It's just familiar. That's why I call it the familiar zone.

Well, that nail is now being driven up through the deck to drive us way out of our familiar zone and force us to move.  Today's uncertain economic times have caused chaos in the markets worldwide and have brought longstanding businesses to the brink of bankruptcy (or over the brink).  The uncertainty in the economic climate is moving us globally into recession.  We are about to move into a massive labour shortage as the boomers who are still working are about to start retiring en masse, with far too few people to take their places.  The new workers have zero tolerance for the nail protruding even the slightest - they don't like autocrats, bureaucrats  or unions.  We have only a matter of years to change the way we live and do everything we do before we potentially wipe out the ability of this planet to sustain human life.

The rules they are-a-changing.

Yes, there is likely to be turmoil.  And at the same time, there is now likely to be change.  We move toward pleasure or away from pain, and it's moving away from pain that seems to have more impact ('creating a burning platform' as some put it).  Well, depending on which metaphor you want, the nail is sticking way up or the flames are now surrounding us.  It's time to move.

And that's the opportunity.  We have the chance to really shift the leadership we accept and raise the bar so we're actually leading and not managing.  And that would be pretty cool.

Those are my two cents.  What do you think?

How to turn crazy ideas into workable innovation

Your ‘blue-sky’/dreaming/brainstorming/divergent thinking sessions should generate a number of way out there ideas.  Remember that the sign for success of that type of thinking is the number and the craziness of the ideas, not their practicality.

 

Once you have a list of ideas, you need to pick the ones to develop into action plan. Approaching a problem with traditional, linear, left-brain thinking would start by looking at what was practical right away.  The key to creative thinking is combining this logical, left-brain thinking, with your intuitive, emotional, right-brain thinking to develop a truly creative solution.

 

Since all your ideas from the first stage should all be impractical, crazy ideas, you can’t really decide on the basis of practicality – that would defeat the whole cause of creative thinking.  What you need to use to select those ideas you want to develop is energy.  Do they annoy you?  Do they make you laugh with their silliness?  Do they push or pull you in some emotional way?  What you’re looking for is those ideas that you react to emotionally, whether that emotion is laughter about the stupidity, or being annoyed and irritated at how impractical the idea is.

 

The emotion that you feel is your intuitive, emotional right-brain and your unconscious mind communicating with you.  These two aspects of you see patterns and connections that a logical, linear approach would not see.  It’s like the Sony engineer who saw kids on roller skates and skateboards and saw kids listening to music, and thought ‘music on wheels’ to come up with the Walkman.  It seems obvious now, but back then, it was a revolutionary breakthrough.

 

We’re very good in our society at thinking logically and rationally with our left-brain.  Many of us have to learn to communicate with our right brains, and this emotional reaction is a first step.  What it’s telling you is that, at some level, you’ve seen a pattern or the essence of a solution that your logical, rational brain simply can’t see.  Those are the ideas you need to grab on to and work with to create the truly breakthrough ideas to take you a quantum leap beyond where you are now.

 

What you have to do to move from the crazy idea to the solution is find out what the essence of the idea is and find a way to make that workable.  You’re not going to literally make the dreams happen, but how could it be ‘as if’ you did?  How could you make the essence of the dream workable?  That is the breakthrough that creative thinking allows you develop – it takes you to a place you could never otherwise have reached because you allowed yourself to dream first.

Forced relationships drive innovation

Forced relationships take you where you might not otherwise have gone before, to look at your problem in new ways and from new perspectives.  This process basically involves linking the problem you’re working through with anything that’s not directly related to it.

 

If you’ve reached a block in coming up with ideas, think of how your favourite cartoon character would deal with the situation.  Or how could you use a tree to solve an unhealthy relationship between two departments?  What sort of feat would a ‘Lord of the Rings’ character have to perform to convince your customers of the effectiveness of your product?

 

There’s no logical connection between these pairings, and that’s the point.  By stepping out of logic, you get out of the way of your anal-ytical left brain and allow your intuitive right brain and your creative unconscious mind to bring you ideas you might otherwise have censored without knowing you were doing that.

Using checklists to innovate

In his book, Applied Imagination, Alex Osborn, the father of modern creativity, proposes the idea of using a checklist of verbs to change the way you look at a situation.  These verbs can include ‘magnify’, ‘reduce’, and ‘backwards’.  If, for example, you’re looking for a new way to produce a certain type of report, start with ‘magnify’ and think of what you’d do if you had to write every report in the organization.  How would you make that work?  Or, if you were to apply ‘reduce’, think of how you could give the essence of the report in one sentence, or even one word, or one number.  Applying ‘backwards’, how would the process work if you had the people for whom you’re preparing the report do the actual writing, so that they submitted it to you?

 

By ‘stretching’ the problem in these improbably ways, you’re forced to look at it in new ways, and in so doing, you can come up with ideas you may not otherwise have generated.  That’s the key to creativity – seeing things in new ways.

How to really make brainstorming work

One way to take brainstorming a step further is to come up with the absolute ideal solution to your problem if you had all the time, money and other resources in the world and absolutely no restrictions.  What do you wish you could do?  Don’t worry about constraints or limits.  Just create the absolute, ideal solution that you could dream of.

 

Once you’ve got that, then look at the ideas you’ve generated and see how you could make the essence of them work.  For example, you might not be able to take your staff to a different country every month to treat them to a different cuisine each time they beat a target, but you could take them to different ethnic restaurants in the city to reward them for hitting key milestones.

 

Like brainstorming, this is a free form process, and you need to let all the ideas you can think of out before you start looking at how you can make it workable.  If you reserve your judgement and wait until after all the ideas are out, and then look at how you could make the core of the idea workable, then you’ll generally find that you’ll get a lot further compared to being ‘practical’ up-front.

How to think up

Ever since Alex Osborn launched the modern wave of creative thinking in business with his 1942 book, How to Think Up, we've known that effective creative problem-solving techniques need divergent, impractical thinking before developing a practical solution.  The problem with accepting ideas that make sense right away is that the reason they make sense up front is that they are based on what you are already familiar with and what you already know from the past.  At best, you’ll improve your productivity or effectiveness a few percent with the ‘innovation’, and that’s just not good enough for the rate of change that we’re living in today.  To create the tens or hundreds of percent improvement in results we need in today’s world, we need those ideas that seem absolutely ridiculous or unachievable at first.  That is where the breakthroughs come from.

 

Critical to this process is deferring judgement and allowing ideas to come forth freely, no matter how ludicrous or impractical they may seem.  Often we are embarrassed to come out and state these outrageous ideas simply because they are outrageous, and yet that’s where real innovation comes from.  Take a look at the history of innovation and invention and you’ll see that it’s true.  Being practical first has never generated any real breakthroughs.

What are you expecting?

Today's economic climate is certainly affecting some sector strongly.  However, many business leaders I've spoken to aren't yet feeling any impact in their businesses - but they're expecting it.  So they're cutting back, trimming down, just in case.  That seems prudent, but what message is it sending to their people?  Generally, fear in the leader will ramp up in the employees, and that fear and uncertainty will produce exactly the drop in productivity that the leader is expecting.

The organizations I see performing well are those who are pulling their people together to co-create a plan to move forward despite the uncertainty, who are investing rather than cutting back, who are creating focus in the uncertainty instead of succumbing to worry and fear.

Which do you choose?

What if...?

What would change if we said what we meant and if we did what we said? What are we afraid we'd lose?