Art, Leadership…and the Art of Leadership

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Laura Gibson, the Art Curator at the Center for Creative Leadership provided the following article as a companion piece to her podcast with Ren Washington, a Leadership Solutions Partner at the Center for Creative Leadership, Art, Leadership… and the Art of Leadership. 

Whether on vacation or in professional development, at an office building or a home office, we intrinsically know that our experiences are shaped by our environment. What we don’t often realize, however, is exactly how that plays out. We rarely take the time to ask, what about our environment makes us comfortable? Uneasy? Relaxed? Tense? Things like the chair we sit in, the temperature of the room, and even the art on the walls can shape our sense of time and experience in a particular space.

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people learned that feeling comfortable in their own space played a role in how they fared through a global lockdown. We took stock of our surroundings. We looked over our shoulders and made changes to what became our backdrops for virtual meetings. To make our time working from home more pleasant, we upgraded the things in front of us when we could.

As people now return to working in the office and continue to use home workspaces, employers are recognizing that, more than ever, environment impacts experience.

Connecting Artwork to Development

At the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), we recognize the interconnectivity between creativity, innovation, leadership, and purpose. To that end, we have embraced an element of our environment – the art on the walls of our physical buildings – and its impact on leadership development.

Art is baked into our programs. In fact, one of the exercises we often use with participants is asking them to select an image they feel resonates with where they are in life or represents how they’re dealing with change. Artwork is used as a tool for “mediated dialogue,” and putting pictures in the middle helps people illustrate, then articulate their feelings. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Our Greensboro, N.C., campus has taken this one step further and features the work of local and regional artists to help shape our visitors’ experiences. It began as simply filling a need – we were a brand-new nonprofit many decades ago that lacked art on the walls but had no budget to decorate – but has since become a key part of the culture of our global headquarters.

Art has become a way to welcome the community into our building and learn about what we do, with three local art exhibitions annually, as well as a permanent collection. It has kept the building fresh for employees and supported local businesses. And it’s also a reminder of our commitment to our broader community and the people within it.

What we didn’t realize, at first, was the impact the artwork was having on those who attended our programs. Our in-person program participants often show up on a Monday, not knowing exactly what to expect and usually not knowing anyone in the room. At the end of the week, they are asked to give us feedback on their time with us. Surprisingly, the art surrounding their experience is often at the top of their list. It contributes to a retreat-like environment that provides an opportunity for reflection and development.

One recent illustrative example was a call from a former program participant who wanted to know the name of an artist whose art we had displayed in our buildings during her time at CCL nearly a decade before. During that conversation, she commented on how the art made her feel at home as soon as she saw it, and that she would stand in front of it during breaks. The personal transformation she experienced in the program continued to positively impact her career over the next decade. Now, she wanted a piece of art to serve as a reminder of her time at CCL, the things she learned, and her continued growth. (Thankfully, we had records and could provide her with the artist’s name!)

The environment created with art positively impacts the experiences of our program attendees, during their time with us, and for years beyond.

The Impact of Artwork on Leadership

From altering mindsets and perspectives to creative problem-solving and emotional connection, art may offer aspiring leaders more than they realize and even more than perhaps they thought they needed.

  • Art is an act of perspective-sharing and community- and consensus-building. By taking in another person’s view through their creation, a leader can spend a moment reflecting on a different perspective. You don’t have to LIKE a certain piece of art, but you can certainly learn to appreciate its value as coming from a perspective that is not your own. You can loosen your grip on a single idea as you explore the color of a painting or the curve of a sculpture, and suddenly your mind opens just a bit more to that differing viewpoint. Especially in the equity, diversity and inclusion space, one of the ways we learn about organizations and its people are the cultural artifacts (e.g., the things on the wall in the office, behind our little boxes on Zoom screens) to see the tapestry that weaves us together and informs our path forward.
  • Art can provide a mental “break.” Stepping away from a routine or a problem that is becoming a struggle is important. Many get up from their desk and “walk it out.” Stretching your legs is a proven way to engage the body and let the mind relax. Artwork can serve the same purpose. It offers the brain an opportunity to take a detour, a chance to take in something creative and different. It might be a soft landscape that is a reprieve from stress. It might be a bright abstract that sparks renewed energy. Whatever the response, art can encourage a person to return to a task refreshed.
  • Art is an emotional conduit. Looking at art often creates an emotion. Executives are known to be pragmatic, and emotional reactions may be seen as weakness, although this is far from the truth. As our colleague and CCL faculty member Mike Mitchell, Ph.D., often notes, leaders who are in touch with their emotions can be more self-aware and able to recognize the emotional needs of others. Emotional intelligence is important for effective leadership. Being surrounded by artwork that evokes different emotions allows people the opportunity to recognize an emotional reaction, and deal with it in appropriate ways.
  • Art can be a connection – to your goals, and to others. One of the ways that we bring the hard work of professional and personal development to life is making our goals visual and visible. And by putting them in observable places, whether it’s an image or something that someone sees when they walk into the office, they can spur moments of connection or shared accountability.

Like an artist, a leader must draw on their own unique personality, values, social identity, and vision. As with art, organizations must arouse creative energy, provide inspiration, and promote self-expression and out-of-the-box-thinking by building an inclusive leadership culture of belonging.

Art is just one reflection of how an organization can inspire creativity within its environment to foster a nurturing space for learning, collaboration, innovation, and leadership to flourish.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Laura Gibson is the Art Curator at the Center for Creative Leadership, having taken over the program in 2005. In her role, Laura secures artists for rotating exhibits and receptions open to the public, as well as managing CCL’s permanent art collection. She is passionate about the impact the art has on staff, participants, and the community.

Ren Washington is a Leadership Solutions Partner at the Center for Creative Leadership. In his role, Ren is committed to helping clients address their most challenging and complex issues around organizational change and innovation, equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), executive presence and image, influence, and resilience. 

 

RESOURCES:

Ready to measure your leadership skills? Complete your complimentary assessment through the Innovative Leadership Institute. Learn the 7 leadership skills required to succeed during disruption and innovation.

Check out the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership, Co-creating Our Future via iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify,  Amazon Music,  Audible, iHeartRADIO, and NPR One. Also, stay up-to-date on new shows airing by following the Innovative Leadership Institute on LinkedIn.

The Bonobo Sisterhood: Ape Society’s Lessons for Your Leadership

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Diane Rosenfeld, lecturer on law and the founding director of the Gender Violence Program at Harvard Law School and author of The Bonobo Sisterhood: Revolution Through Female Alliance, provided this article as a companion piece to her podcast The Bonobo Sisterhood: Ape Society’s Lessons for Your Leadership. It is part of the International Leadership Association Series.  This series features guests from the International Leadership Association 2022 Global Conference held in Washington, D.C., in October 2022.

“Women’s leadership means doing what needs to be done without waiting to ask for permission.”

-Diane L. Rosenfeld

This was a quote of mine in Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World by Marie C. Wilson, President of the Ms. Foundation.

In my recently published book The Bonobo Sisterhood: Revolution Through Female Alliance, (HarperCollins, 2022) I make the case for women and girls to learn self-defense and to defend one another, like the our evolutionary cousins the bonobos do. It is the first book to apply the bonobo model of behavior to humans, and it is essentially a hopeful book that invites us to step outside of patriarchy and to create a more peaceful, harmonious social order.

I was invited to the International Leadership Association Conference through my close friend and colleague, Betsy Myers. She moderated a plenary panel on women’s wisdom on which I was honored to sit. The panel turned out to be an example of the power of female alliances; and hopefully we inspired the audience to explore the book to inform their own leadership initiatives, whatever those may be. At the conference, I had the chance to sit down with Maureen Metcalf and talk at length about the ideas in the book.

Having just returned from a two-week stint teaching in Italy, I am now vividly aware of how truly international The Bonobo Sisterhood is and will be. Below is the introduction. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope it leads you to reading the book. Feel free to contact me with your thoughts. I look forward to hearing from you!

 

Excerpt from the introduction of The Bonobo Sisterhood: Revolution Through Female Alliance, (HarperCollins, 2022):

Bonobos are living proof that patriarchy is not inevitable.

Our most closely related evolutionary cousins, the bonobos, are peaceful, loving, food sharing, freely sexual, and xenophilic, meaning they love strangers, they do not fear them. Why? Be­ cause in their female-led social order, they have nothing to fear.

Here’s how it works: If a female bonobo is aggressed upon, she lets out a special cry, and other females-whether they know her, like her, or are related to her-rush immediately to her defense from wherever they are. They form coalitions instantaneously with remarkable speed. Together they fend off the aggressive male, biting his ear or toe, and send him into isolation. When he returns, in a few days or later, they all reconcile, and he does not aggress again. And here is the most significant takeaway: evolutionarily, bonobos have eliminated male sexual coercion.

This model of collective self-defense changes everything.

I first learned about bonobos from Richard Wrangham, a Harvard University anthropologist, when we were on a panel together in 2004. He explained that primates use male sexual coercion to control females as reproductive resources. For example, male chimpanzees batter fertile females; male orangutans force copulation with lone females; male silverback gorillas commit infanticide, abduct the infant’s mother, impregnate her, and add her to their harem. We humans hear about this violence and consider how brutal nature is, but we don’t question its logic because it fits with our expectation of male behavior. We think of male violence as our legacy, our evolutionary destiny. Bonobos invite us to think again. It might be that bonobos prevented patriarchy from ever taking hold. They might represent a “pre-patriarchal” social order that stopped violence from becoming the organizing principle of society. And it produced instead a harmonious, peaceful, cooperative, and joyful community. This book contends that such a society is not only possible, it is proven by the existence of the bonobos. Bonobos look very similar to chimpanzees, so much so that they were not recognized as a separate species until 1929. They are found only in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and are less studied and less well known than chimpanzees. Nevertheless, the fascinating and developing body of work being done around bonobos reveals possibilities for peaceful coexistence between males and females that we might never have thought possible.

To say I was riveted while learning about our bonobo cousins would be a wild understatement. At that point in my career, I had spent more than a decade as an activist legal scholar and lawyer searching for ways to end male sexual violence. I had tried to do this through asking audacious questions to expose the underlying inequalities of our legal system and social order: “Why Doesn’t He Leave?,” for example, became the title of my master’s thesis at Harvard Law School challenging the deeply flawed societal expectation that sending women to battered women’s shelters is an acceptable approach to domestic violence. But my new insights into bonobos opened a whole new world of possibilities to eliminate male sexual coercion and with is the underpinnings that cause, support, and perpetuate patriarchal violence.

Patriarchal violence is the term I use to describe the amount and type of male coercion necessary to preserve a male-dominated social order.

Richard and I were mutually compelled by our respective fields, so we created and cotaught a course on theories of sexual coercion to more fully explore the potential of bonobos to inform human law and society. Teaching this class with Richard gave me the opportunity to test the hypotheses about the power and potential of female alliances to change the world. The book you are now reading is the result of that inquiry.

That the idea of female alliance was born of a collaboration with a male colleague is not ironic – though at first glance it might appear to be. Female alliances don’t exclude males; quite the opposite. And we will see more of how and why in the coming pages, where I invite everyone to join in new coalitionary forces to thwart, once and for all, the power of violence to shape the world. I call these alliances the Bonobo Sisterhood. This sisterhood excludes no one, and all are welcome as long as they abide by the Bonobo Principle. It is a two-part principle, and if you agree with it, you are part of the Bonobo Sisterhood.

The first part, No one has the right to pimp my sister. With pimp I include any form of patriarchal violence from gaslighting to economic, emotional, physical, sexual, and psychological abuse.

The second part: Everyone is my sister.

For now, though, we have to start where we are, in a world saturated with patriarchal violence.

Every day in the United States, three to four women are killed by their estranged husbands or boyfriends. Black women are at a 40 percent higher risk of being killed.  LGBTQ people experience intimate partner violence at rates comparable to and even higher than their heterosexual counterparts.

The National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) conducts a day-long survey once a year to offer a snapshot of domestic violence in the United States. Here’s the snapshot from a single day in 2019: Because of domestic abuse and the threat of domestic homicide, almost 43,000 women and children were refugees from their own homes. They were running for their lives, forced to seek emergency shelter, forced to go into hiding. They were escaping from domestic terrorists who had been holding them hostage with threats and violence. That same day, more than 11,000 requests for shelter services went unmet, and 7,732 of those were for domestic terrorism refugees. Perhaps if we recognized them as refugees, we could see domestic violence as a crisis.

This violence is the backdrop of our everyday lives. Part of why we view patriarchal violence as inevitable is that until now, we have not had a proven way to eliminate it. We’re taught to rely on laws or law enforcement to protect us. But the moment we delegate our safety to someone else, we give up our power to them. Bonobos show us that uniting with other females and allies, coming physically to one another’s defense in numbers, will shut down aggression.  We have a way out.

The anthropologist Amy Parish, a leading expert in bonobo studies, has said, “Bonobo females live the goals of the human feminist movement: behave with unrelated females as if they are your sisters.”

And everyone is your sister.

This approach excludes no one. It includes everyone.

The Bonobo Sisterhood is the missing piece that changes everything. And it’s possible that in a butterfly politics sense, Ashley Judd is the bridge that connects it all. When she courageously came forward publicly against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, she reignited the #MeToo movement. Women from all over the world came forth with their own experiences, showing the extent of the problem, and uniting survivors around the world. The Women’s Marches, the largest in history, showed our willingness to protest this untenable situation. What was lacking was a solution, and that’s what this book proposes: a collective self-defense to protect ourselves and our sisters. This would be unlike anything that has been tried or conceived of to date, at least on a large scale. And it is something we can begin to create tomorrow.

The energy of the Bonobo Sisterhood is palpable, tangible. I had the wonderful opportunity of giving a keynote speech at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in upstate New York. The night before my talk, my Bonobo Sisters and I went out to an Italian restaurant. The women knew one another only through me and had only just met the day before. You would never know that from the intense, ecstatic, joyous, hilarious bonobo bonding that took place at that dinner. We were all supercharged by the excitement of having a new theory of life; a new way to confront the status quo and make it so much better. Everything I learn about bonobos gives me hope, as humans with the capacity for sophisticated language, morality, law, and the ability to articulate rights backed by a collective self-defense. We can choose to be bonobo. We choose love over fear; abundance over scarcity; peace over war; sexual choice and freedom over coercion.

As we embark on this journey, please know that I am coming from a place of inclusion, love, and respect. The frame of patriarchal violence is premised on male supremacy over females. All our gender relationships take place against this background; and all will change when that changes. The Bonobo Sisterhood gives us the framework for comprehensive gender inclusion. And our new lens on equality among women allows us to transcend racial, ethnic, class, geographic, and other divisions. Through this change in focus, we consciously choose to be bonobo; to share in our abundance in creating a new social order.

I offer you this book with the hope that the bonobos light up your inner power to change the world.

Welcome to the Bonobo Sisterhood. Let’s begin.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Diane L. Rosenfeld, JD, LLM, is a lecturer on law and the founding director of the Gender Violence Program at Harvard Law School, where she has taught since 2004. Rosenfeld has appeared in major media outlets, including ABC’s Nightline; Deadline: Crime with Tamron Hall; Katie (with Katie Couric); CNN Headline News; Fox and Friends; the New York Times; the Washington Post; the Boston Globe; the Chicago Tribune; and NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition. She is featured in the award winning documentaries The Hunting Ground; It Happened Here; and Rape Is…

Rosenfeld served as the first senior counsel to the Office on Violence Against Women at the US Department of Justice and as an executive assistant attorney general in Illinois. She is the recipient of multiple awards for her teaching, mentoring, and change-making legal policy work.

She lives outside Boston with her husband and their dog.

Her latest book is THE BONOBO SISTERHOOD: Revolution Through Female Alliance.

 

RESOURCES:

Ready to measure your leadership skills? Complete your complimentary assessment through the Innovative Leadership Institute. Learn the 7 leadership skills required to succeed during disruption and innovation.

Check out the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership, Co-creating Our Future via iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify,  Amazon Music,  Audible, iHeartRADIO, and NPR One. Also, stay up-to-date on new shows by following the Innovative Leadership Institute on LinkedIn.

 

Opportunity in Uncertainty

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Dr. Ciela Hartonov. futurist, organizational psychologist, human behavior expert, writer, and thinker dedicated to reinventing work provided this article as a companion piece to her podcast  Opportunity in Uncertainty.  

 

Lessons on leadership in the wake of crisis

In the 17th century, the Great Plague of London sent Isaac Newton, then in his 20s, home from Trinity College in Cambridge back to the family estate. He stayed home for more than a year, doing some of his best work in mathematics and the study of gravity. He took the moment of pause to advance his profound and groundbreaking work. If Newton’s moment of reflection produced such genius then — given what we’re seeing in our own uncertain times — who knows what we can reimagine? How might we take this moment to see something anew?

I’ve been taking my own pause to look at how the COVID-19 pandemic has shone a spotlight on different leadership styles in ways no one, I believe, could have anticipated. The crisis will turn out to be one of the greatest change agents in our lifetime, giving us license to re-examine several aspects of the way we live, treat one another, and build flourishing businesses and communities.

In the past few weeks we’ve seen leaders rising up who give clues to what leadership traits we may want to embrace in our very near future: Jacinda Ardern with her empathy-driven clarity, Angela Merkel with her science-backed responsiveness. What do all these leaders have in common? They balance crisis management with a deep resonance for the human experience inside the trauma. They are demonstrating, in a word, sensitivity. Not just the emotional equity that is usually associated (and often disparaged) with this term, but the deeper ability to adapt and respond.

Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum says, “We need leaders who are emotionally intelligent, and able to model and champion co-operative working. They’ll coach, rather than command; they’ll be driven by empathy, not ego.” I couldn’t agree more.

We can thrive in uncertainty if we learn to embrace sensitive leadership. Sensitive leadership is the practice of building capacity for responsive action, by using the ability to attune to the nuances of a situation. Leaders with acute perceptual skills (including emotion detection) are the ones who are better equipped to manage through unexpected shifts.

Let’s return to Jacinda Ardern, who has received much press and praise and is a model of sensitive leadership. After the 2019 Christchurch shootings in New Zealand, the public went into a state of shock and uncertainty. Ardern responded with a radical combination of emotional empathy and direct action to an event that was unprecedented but nonetheless required leadership response. As Harvard historian Nancy Koehn stated: “Here is a leader who’s very conscious of both the emotional responsibilities of a leader — to help a nation heal and come together — and at the same time [saying], ‘I’ve got to act.” At this moment, there was no playbook, but Ardern detected what was necessary and took sensitive action.

The Value of Sensitive Leadership

Sensitive leaders understand that trying to control organizations, people or external forces is futile. They move away from a mindset of hierarchy and control to one of embracing the true nature of organization and human systems: they are made of interconnected, interdependent pieces that are always adjusting and adapting. As the saying goes, the sum is greater than the parts.

Our current times are thankfully helping us rediscover this interconnection; when we stay home, we protect others from infection. Our actions have an immediate impact on others. We are remembering that we must not act as individualists, because our fates are linked. Even when it is not blatantly observable, these interconnections are undeniable, both in organizations and society at large.

This is partly due to our biology. We have something called mirror neurons, which allow us to imitate others, reflecting others’ body language and emotions. Mirror neurons are the invisible tissue that are essential for building connections for social life. Part of the reason isolation is so difficult is that we are physically linked to one another. This moment presents the possibility that interconnectedness may not just be a necessity, but may even be our unique human advantage.

According to Yuval Noah Harari, a historian and the author of Sapiens, our species’ ability to adapt more successfully than others is due to our skill in leveraging human interconnection for cooperation. Sensitive leaders accept that this necessary reliance is not a deficit but an organizational truth. It is what can lead to outsized innovations and deep emotional connection at work, where we spend so much of our waking lives. Human wiring grants us the ability to band together, to make sense together, and to create progress.

However, our current organizational systems and traditional leadership practices are not designed to accept, let alone leverage co-creation. Sensitive leaders realize that organizations built on the industrial era tools of hierarchy, goal setting, and efficiency are reaching the end of their utility. This is because the world is increasingly unpredictable and complex. Never has this been more painfully obvious than now.

We are learning that the world works beyond direct cause and effect. A focus on binary ways of thinking — right, wrong; yes, no — have left us struggling to cope with a new reality, one where more unexpected challenges are likely to come. An ever-emerging environment requires increased awareness, consciousness, and cooperative action. These situations call for sensitive leaders: those who can nudge, who are comfortable following non-linear paths, who can make decisions in the absence of clear facts, and who can leverage interconnections to cooperate.

For those of us (leaders or otherwise) who have been told (and who hasn’t?) that sensitivity is a deficiency, this may come as a surprising invitation. The truth is that sensitivity has been associated with irrationality and over emotionality for far too long. Sensitivity can provide us with so much more than empathy. It allows us to more deeply understand a situation and to respond with care and decisiveness. In fact, original references to sensitivity from the 13th Century defined it as the capacity to gain perspectives. It is not a deficit, but rather a unique human super power.

COVID-19 has taught us that we can no longer ignore the presence and power of the unexpected, complex and interconnected. As technological conditions, climate change and interconnected forces are multiplying, we urgently need more sensitive leaders.

How to Build Sensitive Leadership Skills

Leaders can build sensitivity skills by developing the capacity to sense, reflect and respond. Based on my years in the leadership development field, I believe that cultivating and expanding sense-reflect-respond capacities is now the single most important obligation of leadership. Based on the science of managing complex environments, forcing a space between thought and action allows us to see fresh perspectives and ways forward. Practiced over time, we learn to attune to elusive dynamics and subtle clues in unfamiliar territory, to ask new questions to unlock possibility, and to make choices even in the absence of a “right” way.

Here is how the three steps work:

Sense: The first step is absolutely critical and often overlooked. This is the ability to notice weak signals. It may sound simple or trite, but when the world is moving fast and attention is scarce, we often ignore the small signs. In attention-hogging environments, leaders have to work harder to sense evolving dynamics. A sensitive leader notices changes in the environment, reacting to sights, sounds, and smells when others may not. They tune into subtleties with more frequency.

By looking at what is happening within individual thought patterns and also what is going on contextually in the environment, they are able to cue into the need for change before being forced into it by catalytic circumstances. The more we notice and examine, the more able we are to deepen our understanding and create more choices for action. This practice of noticing builds the foundation of sensitive leadership.

Reflect: This is the spot between noticing and action. It creates the necessary liminal space to determine next steps. Highly sensitive individuals process information deeply, which requires reflection and deep questioning. Asking ourselves different questions can reshape how we think.

In the emergent era, one cannot lead unless they are wise, and wisdom comes from integrating across multiple intelligences (rational, emotional, social). Practicing reframing helps us see something in a new light and disrupt our default solutions, coming up with new and creative solutions.

Respond: Responsiveness means altering behavior in the face of changes to the environment. This is not just action-planning; it is about being versatile. Responsive leaders evolve alongside the changing conditions around them and take action in face of uncertainty. We can see new possibilities for action when we break free from the chains of habitual thinking. Leaders who take action while accounting for multiple truths and stories are at once more inclusive and equipped for the future ahead.

This cycle of sense-process-respond can happen rapidly and it must be on repeat. Since the 1990s, brain researchers have come to realize that the brain — even the adult brain — is far more adaptable than anyone ever imagined, and this gives us a tremendous amount of control over what our brains are able to do. We now understand that there’s no such thing as a predefined ability. The brain is adaptable, and training can create skills that did not exist before. We can embolden our powers of sensitivity.

COVID-19 has reminded us, with shocking clarity, that our life and time on this earth are precious. It is neither infinite nor guaranteed. The dangers of today call us to move past complacency and focus on what matters most. We now have the opportunity to quickly prune away the normalized leadership practices that no longer serve us. Let’s take this moment to reimagine what types of leaders we want to follow: leaders who role model sensitive leadership, building the strength to embrace their own senses decisively, and allowing others to do the same.

Maybe this time will give us enough pause, just as it did for Newton, to have a breakthrough. Maybe we can reinvent our relationship to sensitivity — this long overlooked, deeply human, powerful trait.

Enhancing our innate human capacity for sensitivity is a way forward to ensure that our organizations, societies and communities are malleable, emergent and adaptive. We each can take the call to tune into our sensitive nature, so that life both inside and outside of the organization becomes more whole and humane.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr. Ciela Hartanov is a futurist, organizational psychologist, human behavior expert, writer, and thinker dedicated to reinventing work. She helps leaders create a revolution inside the modern workplace, one aimed at breaking a system that promotes work practices that have existed since the industrial era. She was part of the founding team of The Google School for Leaders and Head of Next Practice Innovation and Strategy at Google, where she developed projects designed to shape the future of leadership and work. She currently runs humcollective, a boutique strategy and innovation firm that helps companies, executives, and teams make sense of the forces shaping the future and prepare strategically.

 

RESOURCES:

Ready to measure your leadership skills? Complete your complimentary assessment through the Innovative Leadership Institute. Learn the 7 leadership skills required to succeed during disruption and innovation.

Additional Resources offered by our trusted colleagues and partners

In partnership with the Innovative Leadership Institute, James Madison University will begin The Innovative Leadership Certificate Program on November 1st.  The program prepares participants to understand their vision, values, and strengths as leaders and is a very valuable program for working professionals ready for promotion.  To learn more and register, click here.

Check out the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership, Co-creating Our Future via iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify,  Amazon Music,  Audible, iHeartRADIO, and NPR One. Also, stay up-to-date on new shows by following the Innovative Leadership Institute on LinkedIn.

 

Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash

Expecting the Unexpected: VUCA in Action at Red Roof

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George Limbert, President of Red Roof discusses Expecting the Unexpected: VUCA in Action at Red Roof in his podcast. Chris Nolan, multiple Emmy Award-winning director, creative director, marketing strategist, branding story expert, and author, shares part one of a two-part series focusing on VUCA – The Colatile, Uncertain, Chaotic, and Ambiguous environment leaders are now navigating.

 

IN A CHAOS. THERE IS CREATIVITY. WELCOME TO VUCA MAX… PART 1.

OBLIQUE STRATEGIES

Brian Eno is a brilliant musician and producer of some of the most seminal rock ‘n’ roll albums of the last 40 years, He worked with David Bowie on “Heroes,”. U2 on “Achtung Baby” and “The Joshua Tree,” His work spans rock genres from DEVO to Coldplay.

His secret to catalyzing the greatest musicians to expand themselves and reach creative heights is “creating chaos”.

He is also famous for his Oblique Strategies: Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas” that shake up the creative process.

It’s a deck of cards invented by Eno and painter Peter Schmidt. Each card offers a unique, disruptive strategy: “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.”, “Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them.”, “Make a sudden, destructive, unpredictable action. Incorporate.” Even, “Change instrument roles.”  That’s right –– drummer on the piano.

Eno found the more chaos the greater the creative breakthrough and the greater the masterpiece.

 

INNOVATIVE LEADERSHIP

A McKinsey & Company survey of executives found that more than 70 percent anticipate innovation will be a top driver of growth for their companies.

Yes, McKinsey also found that most of these executives have been disappointed by their company’s innovation efforts.

Now granted creativity is an enigma, and innovation can be a dilemma, so maybe chaos can tell us more about how to get under the hood of creativity.

As a film director for over 25 years and a former Creative Director at the some of world’s most prestigious advertising agencies, I’ve been at the helm of a wide array of diverse extremely talented, creative teams.

Yes, some people are just innately innovative, but I agree Edward de Bono and Steven Kotler that creativity and innovation–– the ability to connect different ideas in a novel way –– is also a learnable skill.

But it is more oblique than obvious.

De bono, regarded by many as the world’s leading authority in the field of creative thinking, also tells is that problem solving is an indirect process involving ideas that may not be attainable using step-by-step logic.  This mean embracing chaos, disruption and the unknown in the creative process.  de Bono called this “Lateral Thinking”. It deliberately forgoes obvious approaches in favor of oblique, outside the box ones.

Lateral Thinking also calls for leaders to give people the permission to contribute and the freedom to explore alternatives to problems without criticism.

 

AWKWARD STRANGERS

Disney is one of the most innovative companies in the world. And when I worked with Disney on innovative initiatives, we’d always included people outside the project team as part of the innovation group, even some contrarians, disruptors or people at different levels.

In his Ted Talk. Tim Hartford talks about the need to disrupt in the creative process and role of what he calls “the awkward strangers”. Eno deck of cards plays this role.

So, one of the ways to jumpstart robust ideation is diversity and different perspectives You want awkward strangers to disrupt the process.

Which is why. the world’s top business experts from Peter Drucker to Marshall Goldsmith tell leaders to flatten the pyramid and get more bottom-up ideation.

A more inclusive “leave no one behind” mindset that includes front line people.

it creates what we call Hero-Archies versus Hierarchies. And deliver Great Loyalty instead of Great Resignation by giving people more purpose and investment in the future.

After all, C-Suite does not stand for crystal ball. No leader can predict the future alone. To innovate for a future moving faster than we can think, we need all the help we can get,

 

ADVERSITY IMMERSION

Brian Eno made creative magic happen by busting comfort zones, flipping familiar habits and taking people to strange, unknown, chaotic places.

He immersed the rockers in adversity.

Now you may think that Adversity Immersion causes stress and stress thwarts creativity when in actuality –– it’s feeling out of control in a situation and not having creative choices causes stress. The key to avoiding stress is to accept that the creative process is chaotic, but you always have choices.

The stories of the greatest accomplishments always great conflict, obstacles and adversity, and they challenge us to make decisions.

In Star Wars, after the introduction of Old Ben Kenobi (the awkward strange), Obi Wan challenges Luke Skywalker to make a choice –– between the complacency of his dull planet and the call to help the intergalactic rebellion.

In innovation like stories, an unexpected inciting incident always disrupts the status quo and upends the familiar, leading to new challenges, problems and bursts of opportunity.

Understanding that chaos and adversity are essential catalysts for breakthrough innovative is important for leaders to understand as we enter the most disruptive era that humanity has ever experienced.

An era we call VUCA MAX.

 

WELCOME TO VUCA MAX

In the documentary IT’S VUCA: THE SECRET TO LIVING IN THE 21ST CENTURY, we set out to explain this critical inflection point in human history.

It’s a pivotal time when we literally face the possibility of two futures: A negative one with colossal consequences or a positive one with transformative opportunities. VUCA is also negative and positive.

The film features some of the world’s greatest VUCA experts: Generals, elite Navy SEALs, Delta Force commanders, Blue Angels, NY Times best-selling authors, neuroscience experts, leadership gurus, and world-renowned futurists.

VUCA is an acronym for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. It was coined by the military in 1987 to explain the uncertainty of the 20th century and is a very apt way of explaining the conditions and environment of the early part of the 21st Century, in which we were witnessing Moore’s Law – every 18 months the power of technology was doubling –– and transforming the world.

It’s why the smartphone in your pocket is now a million times faster, a million times cheaper, and a thousand times smaller than a supercomputer on the 1970s.

When we started filming IT’S VUCA in 2020, a phenomenon predicted by Ray Kurzweil, Google’s head on engineering started to kick in –– creating Massive. Accelerating. Exponential change.

To give you an idea just how fast the future is moving:  In the next 10 years, we will see 100 years of change. In the next 80, we’ll see 20,000 years.

VUCA is now on steroids. It’s VUCA MAX.

As futurist Jane McGonigal at the Institute for the Future, the world’s leading futures organization, tell us: This is a time for both urgent optimism and urgent innovation.

 

CHAOTIC INNOVATION IS NOT CREATIVE

On the flip side, when leadership pursues innovation in a haphazard, piecemeal, one-off fashion it is detrimental to creative efficiency. It has no plan and distracts from innovative momentum.

As Gary Hamel and Nancy Tennant said in their Harvard Business Review article, “IIt takes a systematic approach to build a systemic capability — whether that is Amazon’s logistics prowess or the near-flawless service you receive as a guest at a Four Seasons hotel. So, it is with innovation.”

Systematizing innovation means embracing chaotic principals, which beings a method to madness and the outcomes.

Companies cut their R&D and innovation budgets during the last great recession missed key opportunities. Companies that embraced VUCA and continued to invest in innovation 10xed their businesses and took a front seat in the post-recession economy.

Again, investing in innovation calls for leadership that thinks beyond genetic creativity and playful workspaces. It calls for a deep bench of innovators across your entire organization.

Yes, some people are innately more creative, but a surprising amount of people get more creative when they have intrinsic motivation.

When they think their ideas matter and they have permission to be creative. What’s most important is –– Purpose.  Purpose skyrockets innovation. It calls for strong leadership seeking transformative ideas with greater meaning for humanity and for the planet.

Stay tuned for part two of “In Chaos, there is Creativity”, we’ll explore “Messiness” and “Effective Serendipity”

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR, CHRIS NOLAN:

Chris Nolan is a multiple Emmy Award-winning director, creative director, marketing strategist, branding story expert and author. He brings 25 years of branding, writing, directing and production experience in both entertainment and marketing to his content production company, 90,000 Feet –– working for clients such Disney, Google and Toyota.

He recently directed and co-wrote with Mike Schindler, the documentary “It’s VUCA: The Secret to Living in the 21st Century”. Chris and Mike have followed up the film with a book and an extensive leadership and executive coaching program called VUCA MAX.

To preorder the book or for more information on the VUCA MAX program go to https://itsvuca.com or contact Chris at Chris@itsvuca.com.

 

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE, GEORGE LIMBERT:

George Limbert is the President of Red Roof, an award-winning leader in the lodging industry with over 670 properties in the United States, Brazil and Japan. George joined Red Roof in 2013 as the company’s in-house counsel. Recently, he led a financial and strategic transformation of the business and was appointed President in 2021. George guides an organization that serves millions of guests each year, delivering enhanced experiences and unmatched value. He is the cornerstone in driving long-term strategic planning, improved operational and financial performance, and greater value for Red Roof stakeholders, business partners and guests. George fosters collaboration in communicating brand values, driving business growth and profitability.

George is an Ohio native. He received a degree in business from The Ohio State University and earned his law degree at the University of Dayton. George is also an adjunct professor of Franchise Law at Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Hotel and Lodging Association and the Ohio Hotel and Lodging Association, as well as a member of the Ohio Bar Association. In 2021, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine appointed him to the TourismOhio Advisory Board. He lives in Lewis Center, Ohio, with his wife and daughter.

 

RESOURCES:

Ready to measure your leadership skills? Complete your complimentary assessment through the Innovative Leadership Institute. Learn the 7 leadership skills required to succeed during disruption and innovation.

Check out the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership, Co-creating Our Future via iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify,  Amazon Music,  Audible, iHeartRADIO, and NPR One. Also, stay up-to-date on new shows by following the Innovative Leadership Institute on LinkedIn.

Leading with Care in a Tough World

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Bob DeKoch and Phillip Clampitt share an excerpt from the book Leading with Care in a Tough World as a companion to their podcast Leading with Care (in a Tough World). 

Leaders can communicate about almost anything, but they cannot communicate about everything. Caring leaders recognize that they need to make wise communication choices and not fall into the “communicate, communicate, communicate” trap. They don’t try to communicate about everything. Instead, they robustly communicate about the things that matter. This strategic practice obliges caring leaders to answer three difficult and related questions: 

  • What are the “things that matter”? 
  • How do I “robustly communicate”? 
  • How do I know when I’ve successfully communicated?  

 

The Things that Matter 

Since almost anything might matter, it’s important to know how to winnow down the limitless possibilities. Caring leaders grapple with the “things that matter” question by thinking about two big buckets of potential issues: a) things that matter to the team or organization, and b) things that to matter to the individuals on the team or in the organization.   

Bucket one issues would involve those necessary for the growth, improvement, and survival of the team or organization. If there was some universal definitive list of these issues that applied across all organizations, then we would happily share it. Unfortunately, no such credible list actually exists. The reason? Organizations and teams face a myriad of different issues. What a tech company needs to thrive in a fast-paced changing world differs from what a university finds necessary to survive.  

Bucket two issues often represent a more difficult challenge. To understand what truly matters to employees, leaders much overcome several obstacles. 

First, while some people can candidly and directly identify “what matters” to them, others find it difficult. It’s not that they are inarticulate, it’s that they may be too close to the situation or use overly abstract language in describing what matters to them. For example, when employees say, “we need more communication,” they often put leaders in a bind because it’s difficult to discern their underlying sentiments. We’ve discovered this may actually mean, “show me more respect,” “listen to my input,” or “provide more definitive direction.” Caring leaders adeptly discern these underlying sentiments through proper questioning and listening.  

Second, employees may self-censor because of a working climate riddled with political correctness that stifles discordant views. These employees often fear social pressures to conform with prevailing political sentiments or vocal opinion leaders’ views on any number of issues.  

 

Robustly Communicate 

Caring leaders recognize that the “things that matter” should be vigorously communicated. So, how exactly do you do that? This does not mean getting a bigger megaphone to shout louder than everybody else. Instead, there’s a better, more enduring, and profound way by using three basic tools: Multi-dimension messaging, multi-channel delivery, and multi-direction orientation.  

 

Multi-dimension Messaging 

This messaging means that leaders fully communicate about the “things that matter” from different angles to enrich understanding and support. Too often leaders highlight the most significant features of the change while only broadcasting on the WIFO (What’s in It For the Organization) wavelength. This leaves out several other questions and is likely to result in less employee support. For instance, if leaders in this situation fail to broadcast on the WIFM (What’s in It for Me) frequency, employees will speculate on what it means for them, and rumors will swirl.  

 

Multi-channel Delivery 

Multi-channel delivery occurs when leaders use a combination of communication tools and vehicles. For example, using an email and a single team meeting to communicate can reinforce core messaging for less controversial “things that matter.” That’s the bare minimum, though. Other, more complex, and controversial TTMs (e.g., Things That Matter) will require a colorful palette of tools including social media posts, websites, presentations, town hall-style meetings, emails, and home mailings.  

 

Multi-direction Orientation 

This orientation refers to the leader’s desire to engage in two-way dialogue and conversations about the things that matter. One-way communication from leader to follower about things that matter rarely resonates for very long. Caring leaders might kickstart the communication cycle with an opening speech, a presentation of some type, or a written announcement (one way). To be clear, there is always a place for one-way communication via a speech or a written announcement. But caring leaders never stop there because they want others to be part of the on-going dialogue.  

Why? Because two-way dialogue can quickly clarify misunderstandings or quell unsettled feelings. Two-way communication provides leaders and employees an opportunity to address this often-hidden issue. In addition, two-way discussions tend to enhance support, if for no other reason that people feel that someone respects their opinions.  

 

Verify 

Checking all the robust communication boxes is not necessarily the recipe for success. After all, talented chefs may carefully measure out all the ingredients and faithfully follow the recipe, but they still do a taste test before serving. In the same way, caring leaders verify that the ingredients in their robust communications produce the desired outcome. They do so because they know that often “the message sent does not equal message received” – even robustly communicated ones.  

A disconnect might occur for any number of reasons, such as:   

Trust Deficit – When trust wanes, the likelihood of communication success quickly fades. The credibility assigned to the source of any message influences the degree of receptivity.  

Intervening Events and Opinion Leaders – Gifted communicators are often surprised how their message becomes garbled over time. An intervening event or new opinion leader might emerge that shifts understanding or changes opinions.  

Preconceptions – Sometimes a leader’s messages rub up against someone’s firmly held beliefs. If someone has a strongly held religious belief against certain types of medical care, then it doesn’t really matter how skillfully leaders communicate. Those pre-existing, entrenched views tend to be quite resistant to change. Caring leaders want to discover if they are inadvertently bumping into some deeply entrenched dogmas.  

 

Conclusion 

Musically-inclined leaders would be well served by including Kelly Clarkson’s “Hear me,” Buddy Holly’s “Listen to Me,” or Trisha Yearwood’s “That Ain’t the Way I Heard It” in their playlists. Tracks like these remind listeners across musical genres about the delicate daily challenges of effective communication. Caring leaders use the three-step framework to position themselves to not just “communicate, communicate, communicate” about everything, but to genuinely, thoughtfully, and profoundly communicate about the things that really matter.  

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Bob DeKoch has devoted his entire career to leadership roles, refining his own skills, and mentoring hundreds of aspiring leaders. His passion for people and for extraordinary outcomes is what drives him. Rising to senior executive roles in numerous organizations, Bob has developed and put into practice the many teachings in his books. He has over four decades of experience across major market sectors: the construction services industry and real estate development business, the pulp and paper industry, the beverage industry, and the chemical industry. He has served on boards of US organizations—for-profit and nonprofit—including a major international corporation. This diverse experience has helped him develop unique insight into inspired leadership. Bob is currently the founder of the leadership consulting firm, Limitless, whose services are described at www.lmtlss.biz.

Phillip G. Clampitt (PhD, University of Kansas) is the Blair Endowed Chair of Communication at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay. He was previously designated the Hendrickson Named Professor of Business. Phil has won numerous awards for his teaching and scholarship. His students started calling him “Dr. So What” because he asked, “So what?” so often, as a prod to encourage them to think about the implications of their ideas (see www.DrSoWhat.com). The Wall Street Journal and MIT Sloan Management Review highlighted his work on decision downloading, which details how companies can effectively communicate decisions to those not involved in the decision-making process. Phil has consulted on leadership, communication, and strategic planning with organizations such as Nokia, PepsiCo, The US Army War College, Schneider National, and Dental City.

DeKoch and Clampitt have worked in a partnership for over thirty years. They have coauthored Transforming Leaders into Progress Makers: Leadership for the 21st Century (see www.progressmakers.net) and Embracing Uncertainty: The Essence of Leadership (see www.imetacomm.com/eu). They have a passionate interest in helping others become successful leaders. Their research, writing, and mentoring have helped thousands of people become better leaders.

 

RESOURCES:

Ready to measure your leadership skills? Complete your complimentary assessment through the Innovative Leadership Institute. Learn the 7 leadership skills required to succeed during disruption and innovation.

Check out the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership, Co-creating Our Future via iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify,  Amazon Music,  Audible, iHeartRADIO, and NPR One. Also, stay up-to-date on new shows by following the Innovative Leadership Institute on LinkedIn.

Joy at Work!

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Ed Cook, cofounder of The Change Decision LLC, a change and culture consultancy focused on growing Joy at Work! provided this article as a companion to his podcast with fellow cofounder Roxanne Brown Joy at Work!

The Connex Executive Insights Series provides this article and podcast, produced in collaboration with Connex Partners. This invitation-only executive network brings industry leaders from the worlds of HR and healthcare together. Connex Members are part of a cutting-edge community, finding actionable solutions to their most pressing business challenges via high-value peer exchanges and curated resources, including tools, platforms, partners, and c-suite networking opportunities. Executive Insights Series features highly respected and engaging guests who share novel ideas and practices related to the latest leadership topics.

 

It’s a fascinating exercise to pose the question, “Are you a great Change Leader?”  The personae that tend to emerge break in one of two directions,  Lawyer or Scientist.

The Lawyer will begin with a recitation of presumably amazing evidence underlying their Change Leadership prowess — the project that landed well and the difficult situation that got smoothed over;   the success in personal conflict resolution and the time something else “amazing” happened.  It is all true and valid, an airtight case!

In contrast, the Scientist will pose a question: “How do I know if I am a great Change Leader?”  Evidence will be collected. But, even if done well, it’s not about proving a case but understanding the situation as informed by outside evidence, not inside justification.  That means asking others for assessments of your Change Leader skills.  The Scientist knows that understanding your own success at something can be difficult to judge.  Biases in self-judgment are insidious and difficult to eliminate fully.  The most insidious part? How do you know you are biased?

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Although the path of the Lawyer is tempting and potentially useful in some situations,  like a job interview.  The path of the Scientist will yield results that can be better applied to improving the capabilities of a Change Leader.  The Dunning-Kruger Effect bears this out.  In their 1999 paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the authors showed that people often do a poor job of judging their own competence at a task, particularly at the extremes of competence.  Revealed in their experiments was that those who performed at the low end of the performance scale judged themselves to be better at a task than they really were.  Meanwhile, those at the top judged themselves to be worse.  In a New York Times interview published on March 11, 2011, Dunning described the effect: “If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent … The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.”

The explanation was that the bias results from two different effects. For those at the low end of the performance scale, there existed an internal illusion of their ability.  For those at the high end, there was an external misperception of other’s ability.   In their original paper, they state that “the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”  The solution?  Get an outside perspective.

In addition to simply asking others how you are doing, Dunning and Kruger in later work demonstrate that training in a task can increase the ability of people to judge their competence at the task.  The skill of judging your skills can be learned!  The first condition is understanding the standard of performance for a task.   To know if you have built the competency, you must know what “good” looks like.  For a Change Leader, starting with the purpose of the role is essential to understanding the standard of performance.

The Change Leader’s role is to create the conditions to make it easier for people to do things in a new way that will achieve the value of the change.  –The Change Decision

This definition implies that the role of the Change Leader is about more than just getting the project done or the change completed.  Making it easier for people to do their work is about culture.  To be a better Change Leader is to be better at growing the culture that you want for your organization.  A way of thinking about culture that has benefited many organizations is to grow a culture of Joy at Work.

So how do you grow Joy at Work?  First, a leader needs to lead change…which brings us back to the core question: “Are you a great Change Leader?”

Be a  Scientist

Applying the scientific approach means gathering data.  Following the advice of Dunning and Kruger means assess yourself and also ask others to assess you as a Change Leader.  The following outlines a useful start toward self-assessment for Change Leaders, and also, when recast as a set of questions, others can use the outline to give a Change Leader feedback on how they are doing so that they can improve.

Leadership Skills Questions

Situation Awareness Questions
  • How would I rate my skills in:
    • listening
    • communicating
    • encouraging
    • influencing
    • building partnerships
  • How well am I managing my mood and reactions?
  • How good am I at reading and interpreting the reaction of others?
  • How open and adaptable am I?
  • How self-aware am I?
  • What exactly am I being asked to do?
  • What’s the risk to me personally?  To my team?
  • What’s the ripple effect of that?
  • How confident I am in the initiative?
  • How confident am I in the people I’m dependent on to succeed?
  • What’s the opportunity?

 

After a leader goes through this assessment and gets feedback,  the answer to “Are you a great Change Leader?” will be clearer.  From there, it is a matter of continuing to use the Change Leader strengths that are revealed, finding just one thing to focus on improving.

An important element in this discussion is the use of the term, Leader versus Manager.  There is a broader discussion of the topic here, but in the context of becoming a great Change Leader, the use of “leader” is important.  To be sure, there is a role in managing change.  In fact,  an entire profession is driven by organizations like the Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP) and the Change Management Institute (CMI)  that define the roles and responsibilities of a Change Practitioner.   A Change Leader is a person accountable for the success of an initiative.  Change Leaders define what success looks like,  and although they would be wise to rely on a highly competent Change Practitioner, they also need to contribute to the success of the change effort.  This is not something that can be outsourced or delegated.  Only the leader of the group can play the role of Change Leader.

One Thing

Being a Change Leader can be a daunting task but, with focus,  anyone can improve their competencies and become a great Change Leader.  To do that,  follow the advice that so many have given.  And focus.  Answer this question:

What is the one thing I can do to make my next change initiative easier?

The answer will lead to what you,  the aspiring great Change Leader, need to focus on next.  It might be valuable to find a Coach or Mentor to help guide you.  You can read more about the difference here.  Get regular feedback on how you are progressing and it will only be a matter of time before  you can readily answer  an emphatic, “Yes!” to the question, “Are you a great Change Leader?”

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Edward L. Cook has over 20 years of leadership and analytical experience at Capital One and Corning as well as 10 years of experience as a navy pilot. Ed was mobilized by the US Navy and sent to Baghdad, Iraq where, as CDR Ed Cook, he worked in the Green Zone on the Commanding General’s Staff, at the time Gen. David Petraeus. Ed worked extensively on employment initiatives for the people of Iraq bridging across the US military, the US Embassy, and the Government of Iraq. For his efforts, Ed was awarded the Bronze Star. Ed has implemented large process and infrastructure changes. The culminating effort was in leading the program where Capital One built coffee houses (Capital One Cafés) across the country instead of traditional branches. Today, Ed is the cofounder of The Change Decision LLC, a change and culture consultancy focused on growing Joy at Work. Ed has a BS in Aerospace Engineering, an MBA, and holds a PhD in Systems Modeling and Analysis. He brings his expertise in Decision Analytics to the work of The Change Decision. Ed also employs his analytics expertise as a Visiting Professor at the University of Richmond in both the undergraduate and MBA programs.

Roxanne M. Brown has over 25 years of change experience with Capital One and other companies, focused on leader and team transformation coaching, large-scale change initiatives, culture strategy, communications and training. Roxanne has established a Change Leadership Community of Practice, helped implement the first change management practices, and set the program change management methodology and toolset for organizations. She teaches change management courses, leads discussion groups on the subject, and mentors practitioners. Her specialty is in creating high-performing teams by engaging the unique abilities of leaders and team members. As a result, Roxanne moves the organization beyond just implementation and into culture strengthening. Today, Roxanne is the cofounder of The Change Decision LLC, a change and culture consultancy focused on growing Joy at Work. Roxanne received her bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts, with a focus in Leadership Studies, from the University of Richmond. She brings her unique combination of leadership insight and coaching abilities to guide leaders through not only completing the change by improving their organization’s culture. She is also the past President of the Board of Directors for the Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP).

 

RESOURCES:

Ready to measure your leadership skills? Complete your complimentary assessment through the Innovative Leadership Institute. Learn the 7 leadership skills required to succeed during disruption and innovation.

Additional Resources offered by our trusted colleagues and partners

Check out the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership, Co-creating Our Future via iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify,  Amazon Music,  Audible, iHeartRADIO, and NPR One. Also, stay up-to-date on new shows by following the Innovative Leadership Institute on LinkedIn.

Understanding Employee Experience in Real-Time with Aware

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Greg Moran, a C-level digital, strategy, and change leadership executive with extensive global operations experience provided this article as a companion piece to his podcast What Your Team REALLY Thinks…in Real Time!  

 

Current Challenge

Most companies have no way of understanding how topics, messaging, internal/external events are truly impacting our employees and culture. According to Gartner, 82% of employees agree it is important that their organization sees them as a person, not just an employee.  In order to illuminate this topic, ILI has asked me to provide an overview of Aware’s approach to addressing the challenge of listening and giving a voice to employees.

Why This Matters, Now.

Gartner recently stated that human-centered work design can increase employee performance by as much as 54%. The market is quickly shifting to leverage human analytics to inform practices like performance management, building engagement, enhancing culture and experience, and improving retention.

Current Gaps

Traditional engagement questionnaires and pulse surveys only provide point-in-time insight on specific questions or topics. Without additional solutions, companies will continue to fall short in their ability to understand employee experience in a fully comprehensive and real-time manner. In order to drive faster response and more proactive change, companies require new solutions to close these gaps:

The challenges with a survey-based approach:

  • No comprehensive understanding of what employees are currently talking about and how they talk about specific topics.
  • No ability to look at toxic or disgruntled behavior separately from sentiment (negative sentiment is not always a cause for concern in the enterprise).
  • Lack of data to inform an approach to employee experience
  • Inability to capture a silent majority or know if an issue is brewing before it turns into a larger distraction.

How Innovative Companies are Closing the Gap

Forward-thinking, global companies go beyond pulse surveys, performance reviews, and focus groups. They augment the information derived from traditional sources with a real-time, continuous understanding of employee voice and experience. These companies use technologies that derive authentic insights from conversations already happening naturally within platforms like Slack, Workplace from Meta, Teams, and others.  In the words of one of Aware’s customers “The ability to understand and listen to our partners, and look at sentiment differently, be clear on where we’ve missed something and where we need to lean back in has been incredibly important this last year.  Giving this glimpse into how [employees] are humanly responding to things … has been really supportive of a broader enterprise goal of ‘it’s not an us and them’ piece.’ This is a way we can help them see each other as people.”

The Aware Solution

Your company needs a system in place to understand real-time employee engagement, so you can authentically say, ‘We hear you’. Innovative companies who do this well are adopting platforms such as Aware, which offers best-in-class technology to understand and make sense of employee signals:

  • Derives continuous, authentic insights from conversations, without relying on surveys
  • Understands and treats sentiment and toxic behavior independently
  • Offers automated reporting and alerts that fit within your existing business review framework
  • Provides controls to align with existing data privacy and compliance frameworks
  • Does not require IT resources for implementation and can integrate within minutes

What’s in the Box?

Aware offers a robust platform that solves additional challenges you may face across your business, including eDiscovery, retention, legal holds and compliance monitoring. Aware is committed to providing leading security, compliance, and analytics for collaboration, no matter which tool you use to get work done, now or in the future.

Intelligent Data Fabric

Aware’s data fabric is built to capture unique collaboration characteristics. Securely “listening” to all posts, messages, and shared files, and preserve revision and deletion histories.

Data Retention and Destruction

Reduce the liability of litigation by systematically purging stored conversation data.  Apply records retention policies and automatically purge select content from both the collaboration platform and the data fabric.

Data Holds and Search & Discover

Preserve and protect data from spoliation. Create legal holds, quickly search held data by custodian, date range, and/or keyword.

Privacy and Compliance Monitoring

Confirm that employees remain compliant with industry regulations when communicating on your collaboration platform. Easily fulfill data subject access requests and the right to be forgotten.

To learn more, please visit www.awarehq.com

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Greg Moran is a C-level digital, strategy and change leadership executive with extensive global operations experience. He led corporate strategy for Ford and designed the plan that Alan Mullaly used to turn around the company. Greg held C-level IT positions in app dev, infrastructure and core banking applications at Ford, Nationwide Insurance and Bank One/JPMC, respectively. He began his career in consulting with Arthur Andersen Accenture, working across industries with 100 companies over the course of a decade. He is passionate about leadership and culture and teaches part-time on the topic at Ohio University.

 

RESOURCES:

Ready to measure your leadership skills? Complete your complimentary assessment through the Innovative Leadership Institute. Learn the 7 leadership skills required to succeed during disruption and innovation.

Check out the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership, Co-creating Our Future via iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify,  Amazon Music,  Audible, iHeartRADIO, and NPR One. Also, stay up-to-date on new shows by following the Innovative Leadership Institute on LinkedIn.

The Power of Praise: Making People’s Performance Positive

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Benjamin Marcovitz, a leadership expert and the founder and CEO of the Rise Institute, shared this article as a companion to his podcast The Power of Praise: Making People’s Performance Positive.

Typically, when an underperforming employee isn’t improving despite your best efforts, the next move is to transfer or terminate them. But what if you can’t?

For businesses today dealing with high turnover and struggling to fill job vacancies, firing poor performers in favor of more qualified candidates may simply not be an option. In fact, while quit rates have hit record highs, recent numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that people are being laid off or fired at significantly lower rates compared to the same time period in 2019 and 2020.

So, what do you do if you have employees who are struggling or checked out, but you need to make it work?

Traditional management tactics like constructive criticism or feedback often miss the mark, at best resulting in adequacy over excellence—or, at worst, causing a rift between manager and employee. Plus, one-on-one coaching can take a significant amount of bandwidth while delivering minimal results.

Alternatively, praise is an effective management tool used in many organizations for improving relationships, engagement and satisfaction. Receiving praise can make people feel good and improve morale, which we hope will somehow translate to better outcomes.

However, ordinary praise offers little value in terms of what actually matters here: improving day-to-day performance and changing employee behavior forever. To accomplish these objectives, it’s necessary to go beyond compliments to provide a different kind of recognition.

Reveal and Remark: The Secret to Lasting Performance Improvement

There’s a formula for offering praise that can radically transform behavior and performance permanently. It’s what I call “Reveal and Remark,” and all it takes is pointing out the connection between someone’s tiny, positive choices and better outcomes.

Not only does this simple act improve performance, but it will also increase your leadership influence and improve your relationships with team members. And the best part? It shouldn’t take you longer than 30 minutes per week, max. (Yes, really.)

How it Works

Let’s say you have one employee who always shows up late to your morning kickoff meeting. Maybe it’s the only thing he actually does consistently. But one week, he’s late every day but one. On that day, reveal his choice and remark on it.

Say something like, “I noticed you arrived at our morning meeting on time today. Because you did that, it allowed us to get started earlier and boosted the efficiency and productivity of the whole team.”

To those who are repulsed (Are you kidding? I’m giving props to someone for meeting expectations one time, when he otherwise ignores them?), I’ll say two things. First, don’t heap on the praise—just note the behavior and connect it to a positive outcome. You can do it right then, or later in an email.

Second: note how, with one simple comment, the employee begins thinking to himself:

  • “When I made even a tiny effort to do something better, it was important. Someone noticed. Maybe it’s worthwhile to do that more?”
  • “My boss is paying much closer attention to my contribution than I thought. When I try harder, it’s not a waste of time.”
  • “It felt good hearing that just now. I’d like that to happen again.”’
  • “Feeling like a success versus a failure is that easy? Maybe I should try that again.”

If you were in fact repulsed, that’s normal. It also probably means that this employee knows their behavior displeases you, which probably means they’ve already given up on pleasing you a long time ago. But when you make your approval widely accessible, even to poor performers, more people will start doing more things right. When you’re the boss, the only people not seeking your approval constantly are those who are pretty sure they can’t get it. My advice: prove them wrong.

Why it Works

There is nothing more effective for improving employee performance than the personal experience of doing something correctly. This is what we provide when we reveal someone’s positive choice to them. And there is nothing more lasting than an emotional memory, which is what happens when we remark on the tangible impact of that behavior.

✓ Revealing exposes behavioral choices made in real time, making them easier to repeat.

✓ Remarking turns those behaviors into a positive memory, creating a desire to repeat them.

✓ Doing both consistently and publicly seeds a new identity within strugglers, who begin to view themselves as high performers and strive to live up to the positive reputation they’re earning with their choices.

Adopting this approach isn’t difficult, but there are a few things to keep in mind to achieve the desired impact.

Five Steps to Reveal and Remark Like a Pro

 

  1. Praise behaviors, not people

The power of Reveal and Remark hinges on your ability to pinpoint and praise successful behaviors you’re trying to encourage, and then connect them to a positive outcome. “Good job” just isn’t enough.

  1. Recognize tiny choices

The tinier, the better. This makes them easier for you to identify more often and for employees to replicate. In addition, small behaviors are likely underappreciated, so recognizing them can be even more powerful.

  1. Be specific and authentic

When you’re specific in your recognition, people can tell it’s authentic. And when employees feel genuinely seen, heard and acknowledged by their boss, it builds trust and encourages them to repeat that behavior.

  1. Remark publicly when possible

Before you deliver a remark, ask yourself if there are any other employees who might benefit from seeing it, too, whether in person or by email. Positive peer pressure from seeing a colleague receive recognition creates momentum in others. It isn’t jealousy if they think they can achieve it also.

  1. Do it often

The number one most important factor is to Reveal and Remark whenever you can. But don’t worry—it’s not as big of a time commitment as you might think. A robust frequency for recognizing each person is only once every three weeks, and one comment should take you no more than two minutes total, from inception to delivery. The hard part is prioritizing it.

Here’s a simple system for getting it done consistently:

  • First, create a list of your direct reports and identify the behaviors each person needs to improve in order to succeed habitually.
  • Next, pick a weekly 30-minute calendar slot, and label it “R&R time – Do not skip!”
  • Once that 30-minute window comes around each week, take 30 seconds to two minutes to recognize tiny, positive choices and related outcomes for some or all of the individuals on your list. This can be an email, text or phone call, or a personal aside or even a quick public comment during a meeting.

That’s really it. If you can build the discipline to Reveal and Remark consistently, the rewards are worth the effort. In only a few moments each week, you will have created psychological momentum where none existed before, kicking off a virtuous growth cycle within your underperformers.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Benjamin Marcovitz is a champion for growth, a leadership expert and the founder and CEO of the Rise Institute, which advances the understanding that human beings can grow and develop beyond their estimations, and that expecting radical growth from those who struggle can and should be the norm. Using his expertise in consulting work, background in education and boots-on-the-ground research on human behavior, Marcovitz helps leaders accelerate their work and generate breakthrough performance in their employees. He believes the world will be transformed if people understand and recognize the possibilities for growth within everyone.

 

RESOURCES:

Ready to measure your leadership skills? Complete your complimentary assessment through the Innovative Leadership Institute. Learn the 7 leadership skills required to succeed during disruption and innovation.

Additional Resources offered by our trusted colleagues and partners

Check out the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership, Co-creating Our Future via iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify,  Amazon Music,  Audible, iHeartRADIO, and NPR One. Also, stay up-to-date on new shows by following the Innovative Leadership Institute on LinkedIn.

Long-term Benefits of Mindfulness Intervention to Reduce Stress, Burnout

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Maryanna Klatt, Director of the Center for Integrative Health at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, provided this article as a companion to her podcast Integrating Integrative Medicine in Leadership.

A new study is one of the first to show sustained benefits more than a year after completing a voluntary 8-week Mindfulness in Motion (MIM) intervention program offered by The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center to reduce stress and build resilience among employees.
Study findings are published online in Explore: The Journal of Science & Healing. 
MIM offers small-group sessions teaching health care providers and other interested employees specific techniques in mindfulness and resiliency for the high-stress environment health care can create.
Successful completion of this program has been shown to significantly decrease perceived stress and inflammation, as well as increase sleep quality and work engagement.
“However, you could argue these results mean nothing for the organization if a month after the program ends, usual stress and burnout levels return to base levels,” said Maryanna Klatt, the study lead author and creator of the Mindfulness in Motion intervention, which is the core offering of the Gabbe Health and Wellness Initiative at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center.
“Demonstrating sustainability of the results of an intervention is nearly as important as demonstrating the effectiveness of the intervention, yet this is rarely done. Organizations need to be assured the return on their investment to reduce burnout and build resilience produces results that are maintained long after the intervention ends,” said Klatt, who is a professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. 
Klatt collaborated with researchers with the Gabbe Health and Wellness Initiative and the Division of Health Behavior and Health Promotion at the Ohio State College of Public Health.

Klatt said she embarked on this research to learn if this intervention if worth their time for the individual participants, and worth the money and return on investment for the organization to invest in this program.

“After analyzing date from 66 participants, we found that three of the four outcomes (burnout, perceived stress, resilience) remained significantly improved beyond a year after completing the intervention. Work engagement remained improved, but was not significantly different than baseline levels,” said Klatt, who is now sending former participants “mindful moment” emails on a weekly basis and offering monthly virtual “booster” session to continue to reinforce the mindfulness techniques.

“As a health care organization focused on improving health for patients and communities, we also recognize the importance of prioritizing health and well-being for our faculty and staff. Interventions to address current levels of burnout among health care professionals must demonstrate long term success to help our employees thrive,” said Dr. Hal Paz, executive vice president and chancellor for health affairs at The Ohio State University and chief executive officer at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center. “More than 580 employees have participated in the Mindfulness in Motion program since 2017, and we are proud that this program is strong and growing, despite the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The Ohio Hospital Association asked Klatt if the Mindfulness in Motion intervention could be shared outside of Ohio State; now three health systems across Ohio and the Mercy Health System in Michigan are offering the program to their employees.
The Ohio Hospital Association also partnered with Gabbe Health and Wellness Initiative to share free mindfulness resources and videos that Klatt developed to address provider resilience, especially as the pandemic continues to burden our health care teams.
“We also plan to repeat the sustainability study every other year to see if the positive results may even be sustained longer than the 14+ months we found in this study,” Klatt said.

Article courtesy of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr. Maryanna Klatt is the Director of the Center for Integrative Health at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. Her research examines the impact of mindfulness for people challenged by chronic stress and burnout through her innovative program: Mindfulness in Motion. As a professor of clinical family and community medicine, she promotes whole-person health, creating educational, research, and clinical experiences for future integrative health providers.

 

RESOURCES:

Ready to measure your leadership skills? Complete your complimentary assessment through the Innovative Leadership Institute. Learn the 7 leadership skills required to succeed during disruption and innovation.

Check out the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership, Co-creating Our Future via iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify,  Amazon Music,  Audible, iHeartRADIO, and NPR One. Also, stay up-to-date on new shows by following the Innovative Leadership Institute on LinkedIn.

Your Grit (Perseverance and Passion): 4 Levels

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Jim Ritchie-Dunham, president of the Institute for Strategic Clarity and co-author of Ecosynomics: The Science of Abundance shares this article as a companion to his podcast The Power of Passion & Perseverance: Four Levels of Grit.

In this podcast, Freakonomics UChicago economist Steven Levitt explores “grit” with Grit UPenn psychologist Angela Duckworth. Characterizing grit as perseverance and passion, they explore different ways people think of their own grit. Listening to this podcast, having reading Duckworth’s book, I realized that you could think of grit from an ecosynomic perspective from four different levels.

Noun level, where I focus on agreements based in what is already finished. At the noun level, grit (nGrit) is about my own node, the immediate space around my own self. I have an executable goal that I can achieve with my existing capacities. I have enough grit to read a book today, or climb that mountain this week.

Verb-noun level, where I pay attention to agreements based on what I am developing in relationships and capacities (verbs), as well as the outcomes (nouns). At the verb-noun level, grit (vnGrit) is about my own node and its links to other nodes. I have an intermediate-level, developmental goal, that I achieve as I grow. I have enough grit to strengthen my capacity to read more and more deeply, or climb that mountain, coming out stronger than I started.

Light-verb-noun level, where I focus on agreements based in my beingness, my potential, what I am becoming as I develop relationships and capacities, and the outcomes of that tangibilizing process. At the light-verb-noun level, grit (lvnGrit) is about my node, links to other nodes, and the centers of the circles of linked nodes. I have what Duckworth refers to as a top-level goal, often a deeper shared purpose to which I have the grit to contribute, that is in my potential to grow into being able to achieve. I can see that I will be able to read ever-more challenging books, and even begin to write books. I can see that I could climb ever-more challenging mountains, and maybe in different ways.

Ecosystems-of-sacred-hospitality level, where I focus on agreements based in the deeper purpose I feel called to serve. At the ecosystems-of-sacred-hospitality level, grit (eshGrit) is about the liminal space generated by the double pull of transcendence away from herenow and immanence completely in herenow. In my grit, I have an existential-master goal, which defines and guides every aspect of who I am and what I do. I am in service to reading or climbing, continuously in the process of cotangibilizing my service to that purpose, evolving what I understand is in my potential to realize along the way.

Grit. Perseverance and passion. What that means to me depends on what I see as my reality. Nouns only. Nouns and verbs. Nouns, verbs, and light. Ecosystems of sacred hospitality. Each level of reality engages orders of magnitude more grit, all which is inside of me to choose.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jim is president of the Institute for Strategic Clarity, affiliated with Boston College, Harvard, EGADE Business School, and UPMadrid, co-author of Ecosynomics (2014) & Managing from Clarity (2001). He blogs regularly at jlrd.me. He has a BSPE (UTulsa), MIM (Thunderbird), MBA (ESADE), and PhD Decision Sciences (UTAustin). Ecosynomics: The Science of Abundance shows (1) you prefer abundance-based agreements to scarcity-based ones, (2) lots of people have figured out how to live this way, for decades, with far better results and experiences, and (3) you can choose to shift your agreements, experiences, and outcomes to abundance-based. [Get the book at https://bit.ly/ecosynomicsbook.]

 

RESOURCES:

Ready to measure your leadership skills? Complete your complimentary assessment through the Innovative Leadership Institute. Learn the 7 leadership skills required to succeed during disruption and innovation.

Additional Resources offered by our trusted colleagues and partners

Check out the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership, Co-creating Our Future via iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify,  Amazon Music,  Audible, iHeartRADIO, and NPR One. Also, stay up-to-date on new shows by following the Innovative Leadership Institute on LinkedIn.