Your Custom Text Here
Founded in 2002, the blog here continues to be a space of daily conversation about the science of mind and its implications and applications
Fast Company reports on 5 superskills for the future of work: personal brand, digital fluency, a tribe, making sense of complexity and resilience.
I would add three to this worthy list:
These are valuable in a world where the winners are those with growhth mindsets, unpredictability is the new certainty and new possibilities will only be discovered through new lenses.
The Amazon narrative on the power of the long view is based on two simple principles.
1. Focus direction on something that won't change in 20 years, or more
2. Tinker and test your way in that direction, leveraging uncertainty as your greatest asset
This is the Amazon formula for success. Focus on delivering the best and most affordable options in the shortest amounts of time. This keeps them agile and open to every new tool and resource they invent and discover in this direction.
Short view goals, like any from 2-5 years implies predicting what's going to happen within and beyond this window, which is not possible. Predictability is most reliable 2 quarters out.
So, given this intrinsic uncertainty, what should we be doing each 2 quarters? Experiment in our committed direction of contribution.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is not your typical leader. Still inspired by a deep meditation practice he spends his days in the largest Silicon Valley tech company making sure culture, trust and transforming neighborhoods supersedes greed-based growth. He believes that enlightened companies succeed only when they help everyone in their communities and companies succeed.
As he says in a NY Times interview:
Having a beginner’s mind informs my management style. I’m trying to listen deeply, and the beginner’s mind is informing me to step back, so that I can create what wants to be, not what was. I know that the future does not equal the past. I know that I have to be here in the moment.
Going out 20 years in planning is not everyone's jam. Some people are more comfortable and interested in the translated near term sense of the future.
The value of the long view is that the depth of our aspiration, alignment and agility is equal to the length of our vision. The longer our view, the less our vision is limited by self-interest and constraints. The shorter our view, the more we will sustain different versions of the status quo. In the long view, we can create a future different from the past.
Current research by behavioral scientists Dr. Vohs and Dr. Hafenbrack indicate that meditation diminishes motivation at work.
But on the face of it, mindfulness might seem counterproductive in a workplace setting. A central technique of mindfulness meditation, after all, is to accept things as they are. Yet companies want their employees to be motivated. And the very notion of motivation — striving to obtain a more desirable future — implies some degree of discontentment with the present, which seems at odds with a psychological exercise that instills equanimity and a sense of calm.
To test this hunch, we recently conducted five studies, involving hundreds of people, to see whether there was a tension between mindfulness and motivation. As we report in a forthcoming article in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, we found strong evidence that meditation is demotivating.
What's interesting is how mediation is distinctly different from mindfulness. I would argue that mindfulness is a strong driver of motivation and performance.
Thinking about engagement as shared responsibility, contrasting with leader bottlenecked responsibility, it's interesting that the more people experience a sense of shared responsibility for belonging and impact, the more mindful they are in their work. They are more in sync, proactive, resilient and attentive to detail.
It's interesting possibly paradoxical that giving more voice to people who usually don't can lead to others needing to navigate the new dynamics, possibly feeling excluded as others are more newly included.
It's a call for the team learning new ways of making everyone feel heard and valued. Structurally the use of small group conversations makes this more possible. It's a learning curve for all.
One of the more interesting and mindful ways to engage our creativity and collaboration in problem solving is to understand any problem as a constellation of questions unfolding one question at a time. The key is to never get stuck on the first question that emerges. It changes everything.
There is no end to the possibilities of preparing people to share company ownership and governance. On the short list of habits to learn and master:
Making decisions together
Working with inItiative, inclusion and integrity
Working from shared expectations
Creating a shared sense of the future
Sustaining a thriving culture
Working from growth and entrepreneurial mindsets
The more people master these, the more prepared they are for new ways of owning and running companies.
In "Why do so many incompetent men become leaders" Thomas Chamorro-Premuszic argues that this trend is primarily the result of male leaders confusing confidence for competence. What causes leaders to be effective is humility not hubris.
"There is now compelling scientific evidence for the notion that women are more likely to adopt more effective leadership strategies than do men. Most notably, in a comprehensive review of studies, Alice Eagly and colleagues showed that female managers are more likely to elicit respect and pride from their followers, communicate their vision effectively, empower and mentor subordinates, and approach problem-solving in a more flexible and creative way (all characteristics of “transformational leadership”), as well as fairly reward direct reports. In contrast, male managers are statistically less likely to bond or connect with their subordinates, and they are relatively more inept at rewarding them for their actual performance. Although these findings may reflect a sampling bias that requires women to be more qualified and competent than men in order to be chosen as leaders, there is no way of really knowing until this bias is eliminated."
It's possible that the strategy of worker coops is one of the most radical disruptors to market greed that further deepens the wealth divides.
Educators, funders and civic program leaders need to focus efforts and investments in these. They are not risks as much as viable ways to make equity possible. Anything less is complicit loyalty to market greed.
At the heart of coaching is the discovery of new distinctions. Agile planning, engagement, habit building, growth mindset, mindfulness and momentum are a few of the endless distinctions that support growth.
Behind every gain in growth is working from new distinctions. They are intrinsically interesting and useful. They have more power than the belief we must know and remove our weaknesses.
Our ability to be creative, especially together, is more possible when we visualize ideas, even if only in words on cards or on a drafting space.
There is something about the visual anchors that stimulate new options, versions and perspectives. Far more powerful than trying to work with words floating in our heads.
New School professor and author Trebor Sholz is a champion of platform cooperatives. These are worker owned platforms that engage gig-economy people in work that is qualitatively more equitable and sustainable. It is a disruptor to abusive companies and the vulnerabilities of self-employment.
Deloitte's 2018 report on the top business trends globally indicates that the top trend across continents and industries is the Symphonic C-Suite.
As the business environment becomes more competitive and digital disruption continues, organizations have become more team-centric, networked, and agile. While these approaches are taking hold in sales, operations, and other functional areas, a big problem remains: The C-suite must change as well. Rather than behave as independent C-level functional experts, the C-suite itself must now operate as a team. We call this trend the “symphonic C-suite,” and our respondents viewed it as the most pressing human capital issue facing organizations today.
Another reason for an Agile culture.
Eric Garton of Bain & Company talks about the adoption of agile methodologies by senior teams in organizations.
Treat your enterprise priorities as a managed backlog. At the enterprise level, think of all of your corporate initiatives as a backlog, just like software developers think of future product features as a backlog. See your leadership team as an agile Scrum that prioritizes the backlog based on importance, then tackles them in sequence until completed. Reprioritize your enterprise backlog when new initiatives are added. This helps maintain focus and velocity while stopping initiative proliferation. Systematic Inc., a 525-employee software company, began applying agile methodologies in 2005. As they spread to all its software development teams, Michael Holm, the company’s CEO and cofounder, began to worry that his leadership team was hindering progress. So in 2010, Holm decided to run his nine-member executive group as an agile team. The group started by meeting every Monday for an hour or two, but found the pace of decision making too slow. So it began having daily 20-minute stand-ups at 8:40 a.m. to discuss what members had done the day before, what they would do that day, and where they needed help.
This is supported and envigorated by turning many decisions unto rapid velocity test and learn iterations where decisions are made by experiential learning rather than death by committee discussions.
Author and activist, Brett Henning in his TED talk reminds us that the Greek originators of democracy practiced sortition, where part of the governing body was a random selection of citizens. Who, importantly, represented real peoplem without the corruption of position purchase and protection. Henning seeks to get this converation to scale. I would argue the experiment applies equally to organizaitional governance.
Qualtrics, the customer, product, brand and employee experience software development company gives its employees experience bonuses to the tune of $1500 for each of their 1700 people.
They can use it for any, often bucket list style, experience that has personal meaning for them. It is a classically innovative way to invigorate a culture of passion.
It's a complex issue.
Not everyone knows what their best is. What some people think is their best has much or little to do with the expections for best. People who are burned out don't feel they have enough energy to do their best. Some feel they're already doing more than they signed up for or are being compensated for. People who don't feel connected, valued or free don't feel motivated to do their best. People more focused on constraints than progress don't engage their best.
If given the choice to do their best, many people would choose that over alternatives. Each would have their own reasons for the choice. In the most sustainable examples, people make the choice because of how it makes them feel valued, connected and free in their work.
It's interesting across domains of performance, learning happens predominantly through feedback. Coaches facilitate the awareness and use of direct feedback in endless iterations of small experiments inspired by progress. The purpose of any tips, tricks or stories is to inspire the creativity and permission for experimenting. The best are those that bring about the most useful feedback.
Direct feedback is feedback from action. It's seeing the direct result of what we do. It's not the assessments and opinions of performers or coaches.
