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Founded in 2002, the blog here continues to be a space of daily conversation about the science of mind and its implications and applications
In "Screw emotional intelligence - Here's the key to the future of work," Natalie Fratto writes about perhaps the most relevant talent intelligence: our Adaptability Quotient. The rate of change today favors the adaptive, and best of all, adaptability is something we can grow as a conscious competence.
Adaptive teams manage three things better than non-adaptive teams: expectations, feedback and working in sync.
We grow the growth-vital experimenting mindset in two ways.
When something goes well - a new initiative, project, week or month - we can reflect on what contributed and see these as experiments we attempted. This makes them the source of learning, not just lag metrics.
When talking about what matters to us going forward, we can consider what we can and want to experiment with.
These both inspire and energize and grow growth mindsets.
One of my recent Uber drivers is retired from a career of corporate leadership work, where now, finally, he can honor his entrepreneurial spirit. With his inquiry into my work, he quickly reflected that all of business is the business of people. If you don't get the people side right, everything else suffers. When you get the people side right, everything good flourishes.
Tech startup ace Doug Craver does stage hiring. He knows from many rodeos that companies go through stages of growth and development and each stage needs its own chemistry of talent.
This is the opposite of mature company institutional hiring with no regard for stage-specific talent engagement. It requires a different protocol of hiring questions, onboarding and ongoing coaching. When done well, it is vital to the trajectory of the business.
We are optimally nimble as teams when our differences are aligned in a common sense of the future we want to see possible.
It's the synergy of differences and alignment that empowers us in our creative and mindful responsiveness to emergent market and value opportunities. The more we understand and grow our differences and alignment the more nimble we become.
There is a world of difference between the social unconsciousness of greed and self-interest at the cost of the wellbeing of others and consciousness of humility and generosity. It would be realistic to argue that the former is essentially social unconsciousness and the latter social consciousness.
We need to stop referring to socially unconscious people who hold authority positions as leaders. They are not. Social unconsciousness is a form of social parasitics. We need to do everything we can to only support people in leadership who are socially conscious.
In her TED talk, Amy Edmondson talks about teaming. This is the focused convergence of diverse talent around a complex opportunity. The group doesn't necessarily have the luxury of shared experience or established divisions of power. And yet they do amazing things. Because they engage each other in relentless humility, curiosity and generosity. Implying we need more teaming than teams.
Whatever narratives we spin to explain, attack or justify any form of gender inequities, they will only be changed when everyone learns how to dialogue in ways where no one feels more or less in charge of the whole, where everyone feels engaged and valued for their contributions.
This means everyone needs to experientially learning this.
It would take the average Wal-Mart wage earner, who scrapes together a living, often needing two jobs, over a thousand years to make what their CEO makes.
I've worked with a fair share of Fortune 100 companies over the years and have seen who makes companies grow and succeed. It is a collective effort. The higher up in the organization you go, the higher your compensation and meetings, and the less unique and disproportionate value to deliver. With over 80% disengagement worldwide, these over compensated leaders have a distinct competency in creating daily disengagement.
This is an actionable problem.
Shared trust grows when we work from aligned expectations. Aligned expectations are mutually clear and confirmed expectations about any aspect of work. These are particularly useful relative to areas like communication, assignments and assistance.
We create aligned expectations by checking out our assumptions about each other. It begins with the each of us offering the questions: "Do you expect me to (be able to)...?" and "What brought you to this expectation?"
This is followed up with clarifications of what we believe we can and can't do relative to these questions, when we can and can't, and why we think we can and can't. Where it becomes clear that certain expectations require action from each of us, we can invite agreements with the question: "Can we agree that...?" If it would help to test the agreement before firm mutual commitments, we can test and critique them and move forward with what we learned from the experiment.
Another key dimension of expectations are those we have about feedback. The feedback conversation begins with sharing what each of us is working on (getting better at.) We then ask for the feedback we would find most useful relative to these growth areas as well as when and how we would prefer to receive feedback. We ask each other if other feedback is welcome, when and how and offer what else could be shared. We confirm everything by summarizing the feedback expectations.
At the intersection of Martin Parker's "Why we should bulldoze the business school" and Umair Haque's "Capitalism is obsolete" is the question of what the next generation of leaders need to learn.
Both articles question the future viability of the current practices of capitalism that make greed the ultimate good of those who own power and wealth in increasingly disproportionate scales. Just as tribalism and feudalism advanced societies, capitalism has had its place on this continuum.
That said, the complexity and velocity of the present and future will require economies that go beyond capitalism and our leaders must be prepared to help innovate this next phase.
In Buddhist psychology, now supported in the neurosciences, it's a basic tenet that at the root of human suffering is being self-serving instead of generous. Generosity creates meaning instead of suffering. It is now clear that there is more life meaning in being a contributor than consumer. The most thriving organizations get this and make contribution most possible.
Shared dreaming and working by agreements. These move the team from a power-divided to a power-shared culture. Everyone shows up as adults. No one needs parenting. Everyone wins.
In any team or household, there are inevitably tasks everyone or no one wants to take on because they are intrinsically satisfying or dissatisfied. The only equitable approach is regular rotation. Everyone shares.
It simply depends on the leadership talent they bring to the table. Years of public service is not an accurate basis for this assessment and accompanying expectations. We can expect more of those who demonstrate explicit passion for learning and growth. Expecting anything else leads to a compromised civic space.
In a nimble team culture, people initiate their daily contributions according to the talents they bring to the table. These include things like their education, training, experience, knowledge, skills and growth mindset. As these differ, so can pay levels. It's a supportive system if everyone has equal opportunities to grow their value.
The stress management movement has been around for some time and continues to receive unwarranted enthusiasm and support by often well-meaning leaders.
What I mean by this is that when we make stress sign personal efficiency requiring personal responsibility it exacerbates the problem. Not only do people have the original stress but now they have the stress of guilt and obligation to get rid of their own stress through techniques provided to them by their leaders.
It is far more accurate and effective to understand stress as the logical experience of a toxic team and organizational culture. This is a culture where people do not feel valued, connected or free to do their best. It is a culture of approval and permissions and focus on deficiencies, weaknesses and failures.
Stress logically decreases when the culture becomes healthier. Culture is the effective point in context for intervention. And best of all it doesn't require a change management program because we all intrinsically long for healthy team and organizational environment.
Found time is the unplanned windows of time that come and go in our work and lives. They can be windows of 20 minutes or 2 hours Three things happen with found time.
1. We use it for a today to do
2. We use it to waste time
3. We use it to work on a dream or learning question
Option 3 means always having dream or learning questions to work on. Just leveraging found time, we can make all kinds of unplanned and unpredictable progress on even the most extraordinary dreams or learning ventures. We don't have to postpone traction on initiatives
I have written a book a year several times simply by using found time. That's the simple power of found time.
Momentum happens in many timeframes: today, the next two weeks, months, quarters and years. Momentum means that in each timeframe, we have four kinds of tempo: things we have yet to begin, things we are beginning, things we're making progress on and things we're completing. It's the mix of tempos in timeframes that gives momentum its character.
The power of momentum is how it creates energy that supports our efforts and actions. Without momentum, we have to manufacture energy, which is a Catch-22 because we have to have enough energy in the first place to manufacture energy for effort and action. This is one of the secrets to high performance.
Regardless of one's location in an organization, each of us has answers to questions that emerge. When questions are new and good, no one has instant answers. Moving forward means learning together. New problems are not solved by old answers, only by new questions. When leaders add value here, it's often the contribution of new questions more than new answers.
