Leadership Caffeine-Stuck in a Rut? Try These Ideas On for Size
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Management Innovation, Performance, Professional Growth
Note from Art: application of the ideas in this post has been known to stimulate creativity in some office environments. In a limited number of cases, use of these ideas or concepts has caused distress mostly due to failure to properly follow instructions or, because grumpy bosses just didn’t get it. Use at your own risk. Effects can be habit forming. Test on a small sample before applying to a larger area. And under penalty of law, do not tear the label off of your office furniture.
There’s a bad case of the “serious” malady running through our society right now, and for just a moment, we all deserve to unclench our jaws, breathe and even form that rare but powerful facial expression, the smile.
Consider this my attempt (albeit a weak one, I’m certain) to take a little of the seriousness out of your day while offering ideas that might just have something to them. Or, they might not, but, I’ll leave that for you to judge.
I spend a great deal of time talking with you about driving change. We’re forever prattling on about developing leaders, developing ourselves, developing strategies that hunt and generally living at the intersection of Noble and Pursuit. To heck with that (for today).
Let’s focus on where the rubber meets the road or our posteriors meet our desk chairs and contribute some ideas that will help us energize our teams, create a bit more personal energy and maybe, just maybe, send us back tomorrow towards Noble and Pursuit reinvigorated in pursuit of our journeys.
7 Ideas of Varying Quietly to Mix Things Up and Energize Yourself and Your Team:
1. Day filled with meetings? Show up early and remove the chairs from the conference room. Don’t spend anytime explaining why you did this. Conduct your meetings with a renewed sense of energy and enjoy the benefits of oxygen flowing freely to the brains in the room. And the looks on the faces of people as they enter the room are priceless.
2. Need a personal change. Take advice from one of my good friends and mix things up. Drive your spouse’s car to work (for the thrill seeker, do this without telling him/her), park somewhere far away from your usual spot and walk to your desk a different way. Continue your “day of different” by changing as many parts of your normal routine as possible. Remember to order something completely different for lunch.
3. Turn on your senses. Feeling like you’re just moving blindly through your days. When you get to work, try and remember and write down 10 items or landmarks that you pass every day during your commute. Add 2 items per day for a week to this list.
4. Turn on your senses, part 2. Without cheating, write down your company’s mission, vision and values statements. At last count, only 4 people in the western hemisphere were capable of completing this exercise accurately. Do this for several days and once you get them, start working them into office conversations. Observe how your co-workers react.
5. Cancel 50% of your meetings and try to fill the time with things you’ve been meaning to do. See if anything dire happens by not attending those meetings.
6. Plan ahead to become social anthropologists. Schedule customer visits and instead of a talking head trip, try to work it out with your customer where you will be able to see and hear from the people that use your offerings in their natural setting. Fire up those powers of observation and look/listen for problems and ideas. Compare notes with team members when you get back and vote on the top three items to pursue.
7. If all else fails, take a lesson from George Castanza and mentally declare it opposite day. This famous character on the sitcom Seinfeld discovered that he had remarkable fortune only when he would do the exact opposite of what his gut told him was the right thing to do.
While this one may prove a bit risky, start small. Change up your lunch choice. When people ask for decisions, suggest that they make them on their own. If you would normally chair an ops meeting, delegate it to someone else. Skip the brainstorming session and let your team run through it. If you think that social media is a waste of time, ask a group to come up with ideas for using it to compete. If you are used to asking the boss for permission for everything, skip this a few times and just do the work.
(Dedicated Seinfeld viewers may recall that George also found another way to dramatically increase his IQ. He gave up amorous activities. I’m not ready to suggest that one for you at this time, but if you fail to find something creative from this listing, it’s next up in the batter’s box.)
The Bottom-Line for Now:
One of my favorite signs in a great bakery in Mt. Prospect, IL reads, “Life is short, eat dessert first.” While we are all part of some form of regimen in our work and in our lives, there are ample opportunities to mix things up, get the oxygen and blood flowing and add some creativity and fun into our days. If you don’t like my ideas above, generate your own. Just make certain to share them here with our readers!
It’s Summer on My Calendar-Friday Shorts are Back!
Filed under: "To Do" List, Decision-Making, Leadership, Professional Growth
I don’t care that my calendar marks a day later in June as the official start of Summer. Memorial Day has passed, the temperature and humidity in Chicago are rising and tennis with my sons is a regular evening activity. Oh, and the list of outside chores is now long enough to choke the proverbial horse. (Note: no horses were choked in the writing of this post.)
Given the shift in seasons, I’m excited to bring back my Shorts feature here every Friday from June until the end of August.
This Week’s Shorts:
Business Beach Reading
For those interested in improving creativity, planning and decision-making, I’m recommending: Six Thinking Hats by Edward De Bono. If you’ve not read it, or it’s been awhile, my Blue Hat Self is suggesting that this is required reading. The approach is compelling and easy to grasp. Putting the Six Thinking Hats technique to work requires discipline and a good facilitator to manage, but the concept is most definitely enhanced by learning about it under a beach umbrella with your favorites cold drinks close at hand.
Leadership Tips of the Day:
I published my Mea Culpa on my challenges in managing two formal blogs (one here at Management Excellence and the other at my Building Better Leaders site) and am now focused on a Leadership Tip of the Day approach over at BBL. In cased you missed these relatively short (for me) posts, here they are:
- 10 Things You Must Know About Feedback
- If the Boss Asks You the Time, Don’t Tell Her How to Build A Watch
- The Nine Credibility Builders of Effective Leaders
- Boost Your Effectiveness at Work by Creating the Time to Think
Great Resource of the Week:
Author Steven Pressfield’s website/blog. Pressfield is one of the great historical fiction writers of our day and for anyone with an interest in history or writing…or just reading great posts from a super-smart and engaging individual, I highly recommend this site. And if you’ve not read his phenomenal The War of Art and taken to heart his powerful advice for overcoming resistance in your life, this book is an absolute must read.
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Enjoy your weekends! I’ll see you next week with a fresh cup of Leadership Caffeine!
-Art
Boost Your Effectiveness at Work by Creating Time to Think
Most people that I know rush through their days from meeting to meeting, filling every possible gap in their schedule either with meetings or operational activities. Lunch is either a hurried affair at the desk or possibly a fast dash with a coworker or two to the local sandwich shop.
And while that is the nature of work in this world, the one thing that suffers is finding a few spare moments to think and process on how to deal with a problem or leverage an opportunity.
As challenging as it sounds, it’s important for you to find 10-minutes in your workday to block out or step away from phones and e-mail and all of the other activities that keep your brain completely occupied, and just think.
I’ve made a habit of this over my entire career and I almost always come back from my ten-minute brain break with some fresh ideas on a vexing issue. In comparing notes with colleagues, most have indicated that they have some sort of quick-refresh process that they strive to fit into their days.
5 Suggestions to Help You Create Time to Think
- Hit the stairs. If you live in a multi-story building, grab an opportunity to step into the stairwell and hike some flights.
- Walk around your office complex-weather dependent of course.
- Turn off your phones and your computer, close your door and just think. One colleague meditates and another puts on Mozart and soaks it up.
- Find an empty meeting room with a white-board and map out your ideas in living color.
- Take ten to read something. It doesn’t matter what…just something that will allow you to focus.
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Regardless of your choice, your brain and with some of the ideas above, your waist-line will thank you. Happy thinking!
Apply Distance and Anonymity to Improve Idea Generation
The default approach in most organizations and on most teams for idea generation is to conduct a brainstorming meeting.
You know the drill. A meeting notice is sent out, and everyone assembles at the appointed time, prepared to “ideate.” The moderator reminds everyone of the rules…no criticism, build on ideas of others, wild ideas are encouraged and so forth. The issue is framed, a scribe, timekeeper and possibly a rules enforcer are identified and away you go. Somewhere.
While there are some obvious potential social benefits from this type of team gathering and work, there’s no formal evidence that traditional group brainstorming is any more effective than other group or individual techniques for generating either more ideas and/or higher quality ideas. In fact, there’s a hefty body of evidence that the dynamics in the live group setting may well contribute to stifling creativity or directing conversations down paths that are less than ideal for the issue at hand.
Researchers have long observed social issues, including distraction, social loafing (the tendency of some members of a group to work less due to the group), production blocking and evaluation apprehension as factors that impact both the quantity and quality of idea generation in brainstorming sessions. If you’ve participated in more than a few of these meetings, you’ve definitely observed all of these in action at some point.
An interesting and potentially beneficial approach is to add a step into the process that encourages individual brainstorming and that offers a degree of anonymity.
Add a Step or Two to Improve Idea Generation:
As the facilitator, you frame out the brainstorming question/issue and allow people working on their own to generate and then return to you a list of ideas. You roll-up the ideas (without attribution) and return the compiled list to the individuals with instructions to clarify (add more detail), build-on and even potentially to sort the ideas into different buckets.
At some point, the group assembles face-to-face, with the ideas and content generated thus far visible to all. The facilitator helps the group work through additional discussions and add-ons, as well as evaluation and prioritization.
The delayed face-to-face work doesn’t completely eliminate the opportunity for the social problems identified above, but it does potentially allow everyone to move further through the process before these biases or opportunities for derailment enter the picture. The hoped-for outcome is that people focus more on generating, clarifying and extending ideas without concern for source or agenda, versus the purely live format.
There are of course a variety of additional approaches and techniques ranging from the structured and anonymity focused Delphi technique to brain writing and others that can help mix things up as you search for a better flow of quality ideas. The suggestion above is one simple, easy to implement twist to your current brainstorming approach.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
In a world where gaining an edge is increasingly a function of responding to or anticipating customers needs in unique ways, creativity is priceless. The topic is also nearly endless, involving issues of culture, leadership, input sources and group-make up, voice of customer, lateral or divergent and convergent thinking, and of course, human psychology.
Regardless of the complexity or the nearly infinite opportunities for inspiration and idea generation, try breaking away from the formulaic approach to brainstorming that is so widely and frequently used. The results might surprise you.
Creativity and the Leader
A Fast Company article entitled, “The Most Important Leadership Quality for CEOs? Creativity” (referenced by SmartBrief on Leadership), indicates, “For CEOs, creativity is now the most important leadership quality for success in business, outweighing even integrity and global thinking, according to a new study by IBM.”
As you might imagine, creativity as a quality supplanting integrity and honesty is generating a fair amount of controversy in the comments section. The article and comments and debate are fun to read, and while I don’t believe for a second that the laws of gravity and the attributes of effective leaders have been suspended, I have no qualms supporting the notion that creativity in this era is an increasingly important attribute for any leader and any professional.
Environmental complexity, the constant threat of marketplace disruption, the pace of change and all of the other powerful forces at work in our world, demand creative responses and (ugh…pardon the phrase), “out of the box” ideas and thinking.
Creativity comes in many sizes and flavors, and is an elusive quality to get your arms around. One cannot mandate that a group or an individual start thinking creatively and then expect a bevy of new ideas to come forth and reshape the business.
While I admire creativity in leaders, I mostly admire leaders that are creative enough to understand and help form a workplace atmosphere that encourages fresh ideas, experimentation and learning.
Rare is the company that has the lone-wolf, genius CEO capable of providing all of the creativity that the firm can consume. I will place my bet every day on the firm that is led by an individual of integrity and character that gets that the value of having people is to tap into the rich veins of creativity that lie just below the surface.
Leader, let our creativity flow!
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