Most people I talk with describe weak leaders as those who are typically not facilitators, not decisive and not influencers. They are often nice people with good hearts and bring valuable knowledge and experience to the table. They are not a problem with groups that take a self-organized approach to their working together. These groups leverage the resources and freedom they have to organize themselves in meaningful and productive action and impacts. They engage each other well, stay focused though their questions and grounded in their facts and principles. They have a bias for vision and action and tend to be more inclusive and collaborative than isolated and competitive.
Mandatory Research For Creativity & Innovation
Everyone participating in any meeting or process aimed at creativity or innovation should be expected to do at least a couple hours of research on all the amazing things happening in design, technology and the sciences around the world. As it's always been, the future is already here in the Internet of things where your plants text you when they need water, robot bees are replacing the serious worldwide crisis of bee decline and living tissue and organs are being 3D printed. The more we're explosed to the so-called impossible, the more freely we invent and improvise new perspectives in whatever contexts we're engaged in.
The Command & Control Illusion
The old command and control illusion was simple: if people meet the numbers dictated to them, it's proof they did their individual and collective best. Seeing how people perform when they are empowered brings this assumption into question. I have typically seen empowered self-organizing groups outperform their histories and peer groups. We need to start designing and redesigning organizations to along with these new realities.
Of course it takes a whole different genre of leadership, and many leaders are smart enough to quickly learn approaches that work.
Short & Long Stories
In the Agile Canvas process, we create success stories that we aim at achieving. We develop short and long stores, stories intended to deliver more immediate and longer term outcomes. Think of short stories as measured in days and weeks not months or years.
The purpose of short stories is to get quick wins in the forms of early results, learning and paybacks from our efforts that can support the next iterative levels of longer stories. We can concurrently to short stories work on long stories, and short stories become vital to the success of the group and its ultimate impacts.
Reverse Development
In the old community conversations, developers would come in to push their revenue generating projects in ways that usually divides the community in support for further taxing the community for these projects. This is a classic case of a push approach. What if we did the opposite pull approach? The community gathers bi-annually to generate and timestamp a list of desired projects, then invites developers to bid on multiple projects the community then financially supports with state and federal funding. This would make a world of difference and would actually build rather than divide the community.
The Dismantling Of The Corporation
A trend in corporate structure that has been emergent and compelling for years is now getting scale and press. It's the de-hierachicalization of the corporation. This is the distribution and alignment of power within and across organizations. One of the more salient features: people decide what they're going to do, who they're going to work with and how to measure their success. We're seeing it at large multinationals like Semco and Gore as well as places like Morning Star and Valve. It's not restricted to single sectors like technology but cross-sectors.
We've had evidence that this approach works and the evidence is even more compelling lately with the data about the profound growth and profit implications of engagement. As it turns out, nothing engages people like being empowered.
It does take careful design and support to transition from conventional to empowering cultures. It's more process and practice than edict. Every organization on the planet needs to consider some application.
Are "Personality" Strengths Constraints Or Assets?
I just reviewed a new extensive study of engineer personality strengths. Engineers apparently are high in intellect and theorizing, low in innovation and reliability. We could see the same skewed results for other professions like sales, medicine, construction, librarians and teachers.
The reality is that by the time we get into grade school, we have the behavioral basics of every personality type in our young repertoire. This becomes evident every time I coach someone and find that the fact that they don't often express certain personality skills is not a lack of ability but an issue of habit with it. They are just more accustomed to the habit of certain personality behaviors.
Add to this the neuroscience that there are no permanent structures in the brain meaning anyone can learn anything as long as it's physical possible to engage and express.
We empower people when we ask them to do things within their skill zone but perhaps not their familiarity zone. We depower them by expecting they are equal to their personality test profiles.
The Power Of Gratitude
When people share gratitude they form a positive bond that strengths trust and everything good that comes from trust. We can ask people to regularly voice their gratitude for others in the group, for people outside the group who benefit the group and for significant serendipitous events the achievements. Gratitude diminishes and protects a sense of deficiency that erodes happiness, passion and meaning. It is also a practice of happiness, according to my worldwide research and most happiness research. It takes very little time for people to express thankfulness and creates a world of positive energy and impact.
PowerPoint. Really?
Anytime someone says they're doing a slide presentation, my question is: Why? If they want to leave information behind, then do that with handouts. If they don't know their content, then learn it. If people expect to be disengaged, meaning not engaged in dialogue, change that and design the experience for dialogue rather than monologue. If they want to get people up to date on something, post it in a shared doc in real time where it belongs anyway.
It you must use slides, follow two rules.
- Have no more than two lines of content per slide
- Have more slides with just images than content.
The most influential media are stories, not lists of content bullets. And while you're at it, If you can't say something in 10 minutes, no one's going to be moved to action by it.
The Walking-Creativity Connection
Stanford just published research indicating that people are twice as creative walking than sitting. This seems also intuitively true for those of us who relish walks to stimulate and incubate new ponderings. It also explains why the preponderance of sitting brainstorming meetings yield less than optimum outcomes. The implication is clear. When any kind of walking space is available, get small groups of 3 out walking and recording.
How The Agile Canvas Keeps People On The Same Page
The simple power of the Canvas is that it gets and keeps people literally on the same page. Usually, people work without a robust model like the Canvas.
As a result, people are not all and always on the same page. Some people know some of the questions and facts people have. Some questions and facts are recorded in a fragmented mix of meeting documentation and emails that not everyone has. Not everyone's principles and stories are expressed and documented. Not all of everyone's available time, talents and resources are engaged through the process.
These dynamics lead to the fact that people are continuously not exactly on the same page and the efforts and results reflect that. The Canvas changes all this. Everything is captured, archived and engaged in the process. People stay on the same page and the efforts and results reflect that.
3 Things Leaders Should Do When They Exit
When leaders exit leadership positions there are at least three things they should consider doing to support the transition:
- Empower and equip the team to handle as many routine decisions as they can
- Introduce team members to any key external people with whom the leader had significant relationships with
- Document through various media, especially video and audio, any important information the leader would otherwise exit with
Obviously these are things leaders can work on during their entire tenure to leave a positive legacy
When Does A Startup Become A Business?
I would suggest that a startup becomes a business as soon as it starts delivering value to customers, whether this value is customer purchased or underwritten by third-party funds. By that point the organization should have a basic foundation of systems and growth plans. In this context, the startup phase is everything that precedes the launch of value delivery.
Network-Hostile Leaders
When it comes to growing flourishing networks, there are two kinds of leaders. Network-friendly leaders actively add to the growth of networks by continuously connecting people to openly share ideas, help, information, support and resources. Others are major barriers. Network-hostile leaders become the greatest barriers to the growth of networks & collaborations by demanding to never be the last one to know, or to be never left out of collaborations. Some organizations actually sustain explicit expectations that leaders be network-hostile by embarrassing them any instance where their people have more communication going on than any single leader does or ever could be capable. Holding leaders accountable for knowing more than a network is, aside from completely unrealistic and ridiculous, destructive to the dynamic and growth of self-organizing networks.
Organizations clear on the power of networks only support leaders who support the growth of networks across the organization vertically and horizontally, internally and externally.
Meaning At Work
Interesting piece by The Purpose Economy author Aaron Hurst on meaning at work, which as it turns out has more to do with the quality of engagement than in the type of work. People working in non-profits dedicated to social causes are often as unengaged in their work as their corporate employee peers. Meaning at work is about engagement and believing you're making some kind of difference in the lives of others which can happen in many kinds of work, not just work for social causes.
Yet another case of why organizations of all kind need to explore the new territory of engagement.
The Place Of Experts
The more people feel unempowered, the more they long for heroes. Experts are one form of such hero. In this context there is a fine line between the distinctions of expert and authority. My writing and research over the past few decades positions me frequently to offer expertise to groups and leaders across a variety of contexts. I am part of the genre of experts who see an authetic expert as one who has asked and continues to ask more questions than most people in whatever domain of expertise we practice in.
The work of authetic expert is about engagement and empowerment, not domination and colonization.
Giving Up Controlling People
The idea of leaders controlling people extends back in history as far as it's been told. It comes from a simple premise:people are better when they're controlled. This is the first era where we have research to indicate otherwise. The pro-controlling propaganda cites results in the absence of cited costs. For the past decade that we've been measuring, corporations have grown in productivity and profits at the cost of 70-80% disengagement and unknown personal, social and cultural costs.
Intrinsic to the cult of control is making sure people are never invited to dream. As soon as people dream, they become free of control. I witness this frequently as I hear controlling leaders wince at the idea of inviting people to dream. If we want to work from the science, we will do everything we can to create space for people to dream.
Putting A Premium On Quality Of Relationships
Most leaders in organizations have no training in assessing or growing relationships. As a result they don't how that quality of work deeply reflects quality of relationships in organizations. They naively believe that individual skills and traits play a larger causal role in work quality because they haven't been trained otherwise. When leaders get it, they spend as much time paying attention to and fostering quality of relationships at work as they do with quality of work products, outputs and outcomes. They monitor and facilitate peer communication across isles, floors, buildings and time zones. They help people collaborate and create spaces for real time sharing of knowledge and resources. They eliminate and prevent walls dividing people.
How Time Factors Into Group Productivity
Productive groups keep a balanced sense of time. They pay attention to past, present and future throughout their conversations.
- Past is about past successes and lessons. When people are past focused, they're intersted in measuring and assessing things.
- Present is about current trends and action. When people are present focused, they're interested in discovering what's going on and doing something in response to their discoveries.
- Future is about possibility and anticipating. When people are future focused, they're interested in visioning and planning.
Groups get bogged down when they get stuck in one or two timeframes instead of sustaining a balance of all three dimensions. This balance can be created even in single conversations especially those we call meetings.
(Un)Common Courtesies
People feel most engaged to the extent they feel most welcome. Feeling welcome is a function of common and uncommon courtesies. The most important part of making courtesies possible is inviting the conversation in the first place. This is the question of what kinds of courtesies people want to share together. Here's a short list of options to consider.
- Greeting anyone who walks into a conversation
- Inviting anyone exiting a conversation to share requests, offerings and takeaways
- Letting people finish their thought before interrupting them with a response or reaction
- Responding to differences with questions before judgements
- Asking people to verbally express nonverbally expressed emotions
- Giving people space to have needed silence to reflect or regroup
- Creating physical comforts when people are in any way uncomfortable
- Giving people freedom to engage or disengage for their own reasons without pressuring engagement
- Allowing people to authentically say no as freely as they might say yes to anything