Embrace Ambiguity and Grow With It
Filed under: Career, Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Performance, Professional Growth, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Another one of my nearly endless and on-going leadership experiments deals with ambiguity in all of its forms and fashions. Many of my exchanges sound like the following, where I annoyingly (to the questioner) dodge giving the answer.
“What do you think I should do?”
Me: “I don’t know, what do you think?”
“How do you want the presentation formatted?”
Me: “Format it so that it clearly communicates your key points.”
Same person: “How many pages should the report be?”
Me: “I don’t know. How many will it take to concisely and clearly communicate your key points?”
What should we do?”
Me: “I’m going to go get a cup of coffee. What are you going to do?”
My wife: “Where should we go out to eat?”
Me: “I don’t know honey, where would you like to go.”
OK, the last one usually doesn’t fly, but the other ones are all valid. These questions come from students and direct reports, and I’m willing to be that you hear variations of these from time to time as well.
Many people fear ambiguity and/or they don’t trust their own ability to create or solve a problem, so they respond with a question that delegates the thinking to someone else. That’s a bad habit, and if the workplace or college classrooms were refereed events, those “you do my thinking for me so I don’t have to be creative or take a risk” questions would be infractions.
The Power of Silence as a Teaching Tool:
One of my own favorite lessons in ambiguity occurred a few years ago in an executive workshop at Kellogg. It was day one of the program on “Reinventing Leadership,” and a group of executives ranging from Director to CEO had just concluded presenting the results of our first breakout and case. I noticed that the two instructors were fairly critical of the less than creative problem-solving and uninspired presentations, and after some coaching with an edge, they proceeded to the next case. We broke back out into our work groups and came back in the room to run the teach-backs, and this is where everything changed.
After the first few report-backs, the instructors quit responding. They sat there and glowered at the room in silence. No other groups were called and you can imagine the fidgeting and palpable increase in tension in the room. Several people tried asking questions and were met with stern, stone-faced glares.
After what seemed like an eternity, one CEO stood up and said, “This is B.S., I’ve got better things to do,” and grabbed his papers and jacket and started to leave. Another participant stopped him and said, “Let’s figure this out…don’t let these guys beat you.” That statement was the turning point.
Slowly people came to life and recognized that we were being played…deservedly so, for delivering uninspiring solutions to vexing issues in our cases, and that the message here was dig deeper and do better.
Instead of reverting to our prior work groups, a new social order emerged with several people taking charge, organizing work teams, clarifying the problems and objectives and others joined in to facilitate solutions. Before you know it, the room was humming with creativity as the instructors continued glaring at no one in particular. Basically, we ignored them.
The exercise continued as each new work group presented suggestions and through another round of integration of ideas, we came up with what we all agreed was an inspired, novel set of do-able solutions for the problems at hand. No instructor involvement required.
Now it was our turn. We all sat down and silently stared back at the instructors. And finally of course, they broke their vow of silence with big grins, apologies and their heartfelt praise. The lessons were powerful and plentiful from that example, not the least of which was how to turn brutal, crushing ambiguity (the silence) into a creative outcome. This week-long program continued with other powerful exercises, but none that left such a strong impression as the few hours of silence.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Whether you are a leader or a contributor, recognize that ambiguity is an invitation to pursue creativity. If you are fortunate enough to work for a boss that encourages free-thinking and that doesn’t mandate explicit compliance on tasks, take advantage of this environment to see what you are capable of creating. If you are the manager, quit answering these questions and teach people to think for themselves.
One of the joys of working is the opportunity to create and the benefits derived from the powerful learning experiences that accrue in the process. Quit asking, start thinking and you’ll surprise yourself.
Leadership Caffeine: It’s Vuja De All Over Again
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Performance, Professional Growth, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
With apologies to Yogi Berra for borrowing and twisting his classic phrase, a little Vuja De in your daily leadership life might just be the prescription to turbocharge team and individual performance.
I’m re-reading Tom Kelley’s outstanding book, “The Ten Faces of Innovation,” based on his experience with design firm IDEO, and came across his wonderful use of the term, Vuja De (the opposite of that feeling we call Déjà vu) in the chapter on acting as an anthropologist to observe people’s true behavior.
With attribution for the concept ascribed to the late comedian George Carlin, “Vuja De is a sense of seeing something for the first time, even if you have actually witnessed it many times before.” Kelly goes on to describe how anthropologists develop the ability to see what’s always been there but has gone unnoticed—what others have failed to see or comprehend because they stopped looking too soon.”
In my experience, too many leaders give up on the power of observation once they’ve formed initial impressions. They stop looking for opportunities and start managing based on perceptions and all of the inherent biases that go into forming these perceptions.
Stop looking too soon, and you’re liable to miss some remarkable opportunities.
It’s time to walk into your workplace with a freshly scrubbed mind in search of new opportunities and insights. While it is admittedly difficult to flush personal experience and opinions from our minds, imagine the power of walking into your office today without all of the perceptions, preconceived notions and outright biases that govern your behavior towards others.
If you were seeing your team members for the first time, you would not have the bias baggage that weighs us down as we come to know people. You would have a fresh start, and you would not assume that Bob was a lousy negotiator or that Mary was the rising star or that Sam’s tattoos reflect values that you don’t support. Instead of the negatives and the biases guiding your decisions and interactions, you would look for the talents and importantly, the opportunities.
12 Questions to Ask Yourself as a Leadership Anthropologist:
- How do people interact?
- What obstacles do they have to navigate around to get work done?
- How comfortable are they being creative?
- How do they deal with each other when it comes to performance on teams?
- How do people deal with their bosses?
- Where do ideas come from?
- How do new ideas turn into solutions?
- Who is respected and not respected on the team? Why or why not?
- What motivates people?
- What activities suck the life out of people?
- What work goes on that seems to contribute to nothing?
- How many things are done because “they’ve always been done.”
The Bottom-Line for Now:
From an article in Fast Company, “So if you want to find untapped innovation opportunities, watch the world around you with “fresh eyes.” Go for a sense of Vuja de, and then ask yourself why things are the way they are.”
As a leader, you can practice this same “innovator’s secret,” and periodically challenge yourself to step back and assess why things are the way they are on your team. And again, I don’t doubt the difficulty of this assignment, however, the alternative is for you to continue leading from a shrinking and grossly biased view of your workplace and the people around you.
Remember, it’s your job to create success, not manage to minimize failure. Just for today, quit talking too much, start asking, listening and importantly, start observing. What you see might just surprise you.
February Leadership Development Carnival
Filed under: Career, Fresh Voices, Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Carnivals, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Management Education, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Thanks to Mark Bennett and the great people at Talented Apps for hosting the February, 2010 Leadership Development Carnival. Take a stroll through the Carnevale di Venezia Edition (you’ll have to click over to understand the creative tie-in to the Carnival in Venice) and check out some truly intriguing, inspiring and compelling posts from bloggers old and new. OK, instead of old, perhaps I should say familiar!
I’m honored to be a part of the Carnival and grateful to Mark and team for all of their effort in bringing us this outstanding content from some of today’s most exciting leadership thinkers and writers.
Enjoy!
Leadership Caffeine-It’s Time to Get Serious About Learning from Your Twenty-Somethings
Filed under: Current Affairs, Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leading the Generations, Management Education, Management Innovation, Social Commentary
One of the recurring themes in my writing and teaching activities is the importance of blending the generations in the workplace. I’ve been a cheerleader for this cause for the past few years and I truly believe that good managers everywhere must find opportunities to leverage the unique perspectives of experience, pragmatism and idealism available from this fascinating mix of time travelers.
I’ve now moved beyond my polite encouragement for managers to find ways to adapt and cope with what seem to be the foreign habits and foreign viewpoints emanating from the more youthful in the workforce. It’s time to get serious about learning and benefitting from this younger generation. What has been treated in the media as a mostly fun topic that describes the foibles of “Helicopter Parents” and the endless flood of childhood “Participation Trophies,” is now a critically important issue and opportunity.
Consider:
- We now live and work in a networked, always-on and increasingly virtual world. For those of us with experience, this is new and exciting, yet in many instances, we struggle to make sense of it, particularly as we seek to develop strategies based on yesterday’s thinking in a world that we no longer recognize. Alternatively, the generation that is coming of age right now understands this world as their own. They are comfortable in its complexity and “virtualness” and capable of moving and navigating seamlessly through it, focused on their mission and not awestruck by its complexity and speed of change.
- Experience is a powerful teacher for all of us, and yet, we are tackling tomorrow’s challenges with yesterday’s solutions. And yes, those that don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it, but we face all new problems that demand newly created solutions using technologies and approaches that have no historical equivalent.
- From the school of the obvious, in yesterday’s world, you could choose to ignore much of the globe. Alternatively, today’s world is filled with unimaginable perils and nearly infinite possibilities. Technology brings the people of the world closer together and there is no group of people better prepared to leverage the new tools and work across cultures with others to solve problems, create new offerings and serve customers. Remember, this young generation plays video games with their friends around the globe, understands how to manage complex social networks in real time from the tips of their thumbs and has grown up in an always-on environment. Talk about some great training for success!
- And while I hesitate to offer social commentary, I can’t help but observe after spending a few years in classrooms with both graduate students and undergraduates in several great institutions in Chicago, that the biases and prejudices of our parents and grandparents seem to be melting into the past. One can hope that I’m right in this observation. I see no evidence of the youth that I work with caring about color or creed. It is my observation that they care about people and each other and evaluate each other on merits and insights and skills. This is as it should be.
Challenges and Opportunities:
- We are running today’s business and dealing with tomorrow’s problems with yesterday’s management approaches. The science and art of management must advance to both cope with the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities of this new world. As a side-note, ask a twenty-something to design the style of organization that will work best in this emerging world, and I’ll guarantee that it won’t include functional silos.
- Age and experience count, but those fortunate enough to have both don’t necessarily have all of the right answers. However, with age and experience comes wisdom, and this valuable resource when combined with the fresh perspectives of youth should be a dangerous combination for solving problems and creating opportunities.
- In my opinion, much of the training that needs to take place is not for the twenty-somethings, but rather for the tremendous number of 30 to 60-somethings that are fearful of or paralyzed by new technologies and new social conventions. If you are old enough to remember life before e-mail, you are also old enough to have lost your edge in learning to leverage new tools. I’ve written this before, but if you don’t know what twitter is, don’t read or write blogs, think social networking is a cocktail party, and have no idea why anyone would play a video game on-line, then you need help. Stat.
The Bottom Line for Now
It’s time to quit talking about the trophy kids and the oft-repeated stereotypes that are dogging the millennial generation. It’s up to those of us that currently hold the reins of leadership to recognize this opportunity for what it is and to get on with the business of preparing to turn over those reins. Judging by the condition of things in the world today, this group has arrived just in the nick of time.
Team Stuck in the Creativity Deep Freeze? Try “Why Not?” to Start the Thaw
Filed under: Career, Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Management Education, Performance, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Without exception, the healthiest businesses that I work with are those that offer a workplace environment and atmosphere that encourage a free-flow of ideas ranging from outlandish to “I can’t believe we didn’t think of that before.” It is the part of the natural culture of these firms to think in terms of “What if?” and “Why not?”
Creativity is part of the fabric of these firms, and you see and hear and observe it on display in all roles and at all levels. Whether by design or more by a natural evolution fed by leaders that share a similar sense of curiosity and a genuine interest in and respect for the ideas of their employees, the processes and practices of creativity flourish in these environments.
Alternatively, the less than healthy firms that I encounter share many failure attributes, including a complete dearth of creativity and no visible signs of creativity-inducing practices and processes. Walk into one of those firms and you sense it immediately. Spend some time there and the silence from the lack of creativity or the quiet compliance in response to leader mandated creativity is simply deafening. It’s the corporate equivalent of being locked inside a sensory deprivation chamber.
If you have the misfortune to be stuck inside one of those unhealthy firms, or, better yet, if you have the good fortune to be stepping in to turn the firm around, you might start with focusing on reacquainting people with the philosophy of “the possible.”
As an aside, I’m convinced that almost every person in a bad business has a store of ideas on improving things just waiting to get out. You can break the spirits of people through lousy leadership, but the brain keeps working and ideas flow internally, usually straight into the brain’s deep freeze bin, waiting for a future thaw.
Suggestions for Waking the Creative Giant Hiding Inside Your People and On Your Team:
- Start by using the two words, “Why not?” Environments where creativity has been bred out of the culture are filled with people used to understanding what they cannot do. It’s your job to seize every opportunity to draw forth even the simplest of novel ideas and the “why not?” approach is a helpful tool. Respond to the conditioned phrases of, “We can’t,” or “If we could,” or my favorite, “That’s not how we do it here,” with this phrase, and listen patiently as people stammer and struggle to come up with an answer to that question that even they believe.
- Follow-up with, “How would you?” and then shut up and listen. Expect some silence in return as neurons start firing and long-dormant brain connections are made and people slowly realize you are asking them how THEY would do something.
- Finish-up with, “What do you need from me?” and expect to suffer through a minor period of disorientation as people process on the reality that you, the boss, the person in charge, the person that is in their minds supposed to tell then what to do, just turned the entire equation around. Expect some surprised smiles.
- Loop-back with positive feedback. Pay attention, offer encouragement, add support where needed, and in this instance, use liberal amounts of genuine, positive feedback blended with selective coaching to support the effort.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
I run into people all of the time that challenge my basic premise that creativity is rocket fuel for firms and leaders. Last week, I raised the specter of an alternative form of leader identification and selection particularly powerful and useful for project teams, and I took a pretty good beat-down here on my own blog. I met last night with a talented group of young professionals and I received some good-natured challenges as to why one might not be able to apply the creative processes of the design firm, IDEO, to almost any type of firm and environment. Thematically in these posts here at Management Excellence, I’m calling for a quiet, professional revolution in how we lead and manage and run our businesses. The “experts: are quick to point out all of the reasons why these ideas might not work.
My response: “Why not?”
If you’ve lost the sense of adventure in business and in leadership to pursue “Why not?” it’s time to get it back or give it up.
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