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In the Age of Uncertainty: Creativity Trumps Traditional Leadership Talents

IBM recently interviewed senior executives about their work, talking with more than 6,600 in 75 countries across 60 industries for the company’s newly-released C-Suite Studies research series. Three findings are of particular note:

  • 80% of the CEOs saw their world becoming increasingly complex
  • 51% of those in the C-Suite – CEOs, CFOs, CIOs – felt unprepared for the rising uncertainty
  • 60% of those interviewed identified creativity as the most important leadership trait for top leaders over the next five year, trumping traditional managerial skills like influence, global thinking, and integrity.

What did creativity mean to the executives interviewed? It translated into traits and talents like “operational dexterity,” speed in understanding and taking action, a willingness to experiment, the capacity to create flexible and responsive organizations, resourcefulness, innovative outreach and customer service, imaginative problem solving, and more. Are you ready for the challenge?

You can enhance your leadership creativity with some diagnosis and scenario building: get a handle on your possible futures and anticipate how your organization (and your competitors) might get ahead of the crowd. Here are five key questions to launch the process:

  1. 1. What are the major challenges or changes you see coming down the pike in the next five years for your organization? For your industry? In your key markets?
  1. 2.  How do you anticipate your competitors will respond?
  1. 3.  What could your organization do to respond more effectively?
  1. 4.  How easy would that be given your organization’s history and current culture?
  1. 5.  What can you do to help your organization turn the potential threat of change into a positive business opportunity?

Play out different ways that your organization could respond and how you might facilitate that and see what the consequences of each strategy might be. It’s easier to manage uncertainty and make good executive judgments when you’re feeling confident that you’ve already thought deeply about your options.

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The Sexual Politics of Materialism and the Good Life: The Case of the Little Third

Along with growing economic and social opportunities in China is the rise in divorce and philandering. There’s an equal opportunity explanation for both.

A mistress – or a “little third” as she is known in China – now seems de rigueur for men of rising affluence and status. China Daily and the New York Times reported, for example, that 90% of provincial- or ministerial-level officials found guilty of corruption in the past seven years also confessed to having engaged in extra-marital affairs – and some cities have even ordered their officials to stay faithful to their wives.

Young women see a married lover as a way to a better life: cash, a car, and a condo. The stars have aligned for trysts – but wives are finding out, getting mad, and wanting back their fair share of their misspent common assets. Rapid social change and economic gains are making for strange bedfellows in China today, literally.

China is in the process of revising its marriage law in response; and we’ll soon know the soap opera-like details as to whether a wife can sue her husband’s mistress to recover goods, the mistress can sue her lover if he reneges on financial promises, or the wayward husband has any recourse in any of this.

It’s an interesting case history about culture and change in China, but the story also raises larger questions for us all. Why the interplay between materialism and sexual politics?  What does it mean? Where have we seen it before?  And how in our own countries and cultures do we play out the same dynamics in our bedrooms? In our boardrooms?

Are sexual liberation and exploitation bourgeois sports: predictable activities fueled by affluence and the growing desire to consume – things and people? Do they feed the development of a distorted sense of power, property, and entitlement – or vice versa? Do they warp our shared views of responsibility, professionalism, and an ethic of care?

The case of the “little third” is raising debate across China about the erosion of traditional values with the pursuit of materialism — about the definition of a good life and the costs to a nation and a culture in pursuing unbridled economic prosperity and material comforts at a head-spinning pace.

What’s the good life for you today? What are the costs? Any internal debates about that?

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Leading Up: Managing the Bosses

Leadership is often equated to managing those who report to you – or influencing others predisposed to follow because of your title or position. But savvy leaders understand that leading up is as important as anything else they do. Their capacity to make a difference depends on support and mandates from those above.

Wise leaders, therefore, attend carefully to relationships with more powerful players, pursuing goals of partnership, open communication, and credibility. How well developed are your skills and strategies in doing that?  Here are five guidelines[1] to get you started:

1. Look within. What’s your motivation? Set out to wow folks at the top or push your own agenda and you’re on the road to disaster. Leading up is all about partnerships and reciprocity: you deliver for your boss, and your boss is likely to do the same for you.

2. Build credibility. It has two, equally important components: expertise and trustworthiness. You can have solid business acumen, but if people don’t believe in you, they’ll ignore your message. Credibility comes from consistently demonstrating integrity and reliability in achieving or exceeding your goals.

3. Speak up. A common reaction to authority is overdependence – responding to those above you in a fearful or overly-compliant manner. Bosses are not infallible or well served by anyone who hesitates to tell the truth about potential fallout from their judgments and decisions. An important test of leadership capacity is the willingness to speak truth to power. Are you willing and able to do that?

4. Give solutions, not problems. Make your boss’s job easier and use her time judiciously. Arrive with well-researched solutions. When you say "Here’s what I see, what I’ve done, and what I’ve learned. Here’s my plan. What do you think?", you keep the boss in the loop without putting more problems on her plate.

5. Avoid surprises. Never let your boss be blindsided!  Partnerships take time to develop, but they can unravel quickly. And it goes without saying, but is important enough that it can never be said too often: all your choices should be clear, clean, and ethical.

[1] See Lee G. Bolman and Joan V. Gallos (2011). Reframing Academic Leadership (Chapter 11). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass for more details and additional suggestions.

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Power is Good: Are You Willing to Claim Yours?

Do you like power? Are you willing to claim yours? Your answers say something important about your capacity to lead.

Leaders need power, and effective leaders understand and are comfortable with that. Power is the ability to mobilize resources and support to get things done. Do you have the power you need to advance your mission?  If not, how can you get it?

We always have more power than we think we do or use. I’m surprised how often experienced managers and leaders at all levels forget that. I know I do.

Power is the property of interpersonal relationships, and others will see you as powerful for a variety of reasons: your title, position, expertise, experience, personal style, charisma, attractiveness, valuable information – or control of it, communication skills, networks and relationships, proximity or access to influential others, powerful allies – or just lots of regular ones, control of rewards or punishments, ability to frame (or reframe) a situation, political savvy, and more.

What are your current sources of power? Which ones do you use? Which ones are you apt to overlook? How could you increase your sources of power?  Take stock of your power situation, be strategic in enhancing your influence, and you’ll take better control of your professional life. 

Bottom-line, we lead best from the head or the foot of the table when we know clearly what we are bringing to the party. 

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What is Watson?: Eight Steps to Wisdom and Executive Judgment in a Fast-Changing World

What is Watson? Jeopardy and computer fans know the answer to that question.

Watson is the IBM computer that beat two human Jeopardy mega-champions at their own game. The implications are amazing. For years, IBM and artificial intelligence scientists have been working to create a machine that can understand the nuances of naturally spoken human language and respond accurately. Watson’s victory signaled they are getting there – and thinking creatively about the widespread uses for the increasingly sophisticated technology.

The New York Times reported on February 17, for example, that IBM has announced a collaboration with Columbia University and the University of Maryland to use the technology for the creation of a cybernetic physician’s assistant. The service could be available to physicians in as little as 18 months, revolutionizing medical education and healthcare delivery worldwide. IBM also envisions a version of Watson to assist consumers in buying decisions and in meeting technical support needs. The possibilities are endless.

All this should give us pause. We’ll never rival a computer like Watson for encyclopedic knowledge, but we can develop what successful leaders and professionals know is their competitive advantage – wisdom and executive judgment.  How do we do that?

We are wise in making good judgments when we . . .

1.  bring a strong knowledge base and disciplined thinking to our decisions

2.  assess the advice we get – and the quality of the character of our advisors

3.  work to see more and more deeply into situations 

4.  learn to see systems – how things connect and impact each other

5.  can envision multiple alternatives – and avoid feeling stuck in any one of them

6.  anticipate the consequences of our actions before we act

7. have insights into our purpose for leading – and the values that drive it

8.  employ our moral compass often, asking “Would I want this discussed on the 6 o’clock news?”

Leadership gurus Warren Bennis and Noel Tichy remind us of a powerful truth in their book on judgment: “With good judgment, little else matters. Without it, nothing else matters.”

What are you doing to develop your capacities for wisdom and executive judgment?

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Sleep on It

Here’s a professional effectiveness tip I can really embrace. Sleep – with a clear directive to my cortex before I nod off to coordinate with my hippocampus while I peacefully slumber. Let me explain.

Research has long confirmed the vital role of sleep in mental functioning. Sleep is the time when the mind moves short-term events and memories into long-term mental storage. New research has found, however, that the process is not automatic. It works best when we explicitly direct our mind to do its thing because we know we’ll want to use the information in the future.

New research by six German scientists published in the Journal of Neuroscience and reported in Newsweek, explains why this is so. My take on the science: expecting to use information later primes the mind for a deeper kind of sleep where slow electrical waves cause the hippocampus to replay the information and bursts of electrical energy – the researchers call them “sleep spindles” – prime the cortex to receive the hippocampus’s data and to store and integrate it into existing knowledge for easy retrieval.

So no more sleepless nights for me before a keynote or big presentation, tossing and turning and rehearsing the material in my mind. I’m going to sleep my way to a memorable performance.

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Joy Makes its Way to Business School

The merits of joy have been promoted in this blog [see past posts of raising your joy quotient]. I am  pleased to announce that joy has reached the hallowed halls of our top business schools.

Stanford Business School Marketing Professor Jennifer Aaker was profiled in the March edition of Fast Company for her popular – and one would assume joy-filled – course on the use of joy and happiness to increase employee productivity and market share.

Aaker, whose research focuses on how people find, maintain, manipulate, and use happiness to their advantage, has worked with AOL, Adobe, Facebook and other companies of the issue. “The idea of brands enabling happiness and providing greater meaning in the world is powerful,” she concludes.

Four suggestions for your joyful leadership that can be drawn from Aaker’s work:

  1. 1.  Create a happiness plan for your company or department. What would add more joy to the work day for you? For others?  How’s the predicted impact on productivity and on sales?
  1. 2.  Probe what makes you happy. Aaker, for example, asks her students to take a photo of a happy moment each day for 30 days and then to analyze the pattern in their pictures.
  1. 3. Recognize that there are generational differences in happiness. Younger people equate happiness with excitement, older people with peacefulness.  Respecting that difference has huge implications for personnel policies, marketing, and corporate strategy.
  1. 4.  Think about the use of social media technologies to pass on the joy – and its association with your product or service. Coke, for example, released a video of its “happiness machine” – a vending machine installed on the campus of St John’s University during exam time that dispensed (and recorded student reactions to) surprises like bouquets of flowers or a box of pizza instead of the expected can of soda. The video went viral with 2 million hits.
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The Soul of Principled Leadership: The Road to Success and Significance

I spent a day earlier this week reading and providing feedback to a colleague on a book manuscript dealing with leadership and spirituality issues. In the academic world, that’s what professors do for one another. It’s always a plus when we learn something important from the collegial support.

The book basically asks readers to think about the inner growth needed to drive principled, high-impact leadership. I’m not doing justice to the complexity of the work because it triggered a number of profound questions that have stayed with me all week.

What are the leadership contributions that I hope to make over the course of my lifetime – the things that I want to accomplish so as to have made a real difference by the time destiny comes calling? How do my hopes fit my true leadership gifts? What do I need to do to stay focused and balanced as I steer through these uncharted waters?

These are not simple questions, and we can never answer them fully. But grappling with the larger life issues implicit in them gives us the best shot at designing and managing a career that we can be proud of and that is both successful and significant.

We live at a time that predisposes us to gloss over the need for this kind of deep reflection. There is growing research on the long-term decline in happiness in increasingly affluent and democratic societies where people are misled by a materialist culture to put money and possessions at the center of our lives. They equate success with big paychecks and ignore the growing evidence that those who focus their lives on tangible goods grow demonstrably more miserable over time than those who set out to make other, deeper contributions – and profit from the success of their energizing efforts.

If you have ever felt the golden handcuffs of a well-paying job that drained a little bit of your soul everyday – made going to work as exciting as pushing heavy rocks uphill – you know exactly what I am talking about.

Striving to make a difference feeds the soul, and nothing is more energizing. Successful business leaders confirm that inner growth matters.[1]

So, what are the contributions you want to be remembered for? What are your gifts and talents – the things you do well and really enjoy? How can you fashion your life and work to stayed focused on all that?

Answer those questions, and you are well on the road to a career of success and significance.

[1] See Andre Delbecq, Nourishing the Soul of the Leader: Inner Growth Matters, in J. Gallos (2008). Business Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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Leading in a World of Social Media Technologies

The happenings in the Middle East say much about the power of social media technologies. They are revolutionizing the practice of leadership.

Followers need a simple cell phone to organize a groundswell in support or opposition to any leader, product, or cause. Huge crowds can be assembled with a simple text message and that powerful contemporary closer: “Pass this message on.”

Strangers with shared interests or common beliefs forge virtual communities and become cyber allies through vehicles like Facebook and Twitter. Building solidarity, commitment, and shared purpose no longer require face-to-face meetings – or even residency in the same nation or on the same continent.

A twitter revolution or a smart mob a la Howard Rheingold is no novelty. Social media technologies created the conditions to topple a controlling, military-backed, thirty year regime in a seemingly stable country like Egypt; and they continue to send aftershocks through a host of other nations. They will continue to do so.

What does all this mean for contemporary leadership?  What is important to remember? 

1. Leadership is vital. At its core, leading is a social process rooted in relationship, collaboration, and mutual interest. Advances in technology and the ease of electronic communications and social networking provide additional tools for building the networks of relationship and shared purpose needed for success.

At the same time, they also expand the need for leadership. We have mind-boggling capabilities at our finger-tips to forge global alliances, further causes, and foster organizational agendas – to create, in the language of super-blogger Seth Godin, tribes of ten or ten million who care passionately about the same things that we do. All these new groups need direction, cohesion, and contribution. They need leadership from people like you or me.

2. Leaders know and respect their followers. Perhaps there were times in history when leaders could ignore the needs and collective power of their followers. Those have passed. Then President Mubarak, sitting in his palace telling world leaders that the disturbances in Egypt will pass, is a symbol of a leader in denial and out of touch. Leaders know their followers well. Social technologies can help them in this.

3. Leaders listen to, learn from, use, and manage the social groundswell. Contemporary leaders need to take their heads out of the sand about social media technologies. They are powerful and here to stay. When United States senators twitter their constituencies, and the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies talk to their constituents through Facebook, something about leading has definitely changed.

Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff provide a wealth of strategies for working the groundswell,using it to inform and energize your leadership and organization, and turning the power of social media to your advantage. I’ve learned a lot from their book, appropriately titled Groundswell. 

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Bernie Madoff and the Complicit: Willful Blindness and the Fear of Loss

In his first prison interview, Bernie Madoff dropped a bomb. He was sure a number of banks and hedge funds were “complicit” in his fraud – “willfully blind” to the discrepancies in the information available to them and living a version of I’m not going to ask and please don’t tell. Madoff’s admission to the author of an upcoming book[1] on his 16 year long Ponzi scheme – the fancy shell game that cost investors $20 billion in cash and another $65 billion in lost paper wealth – is different from his earlier claims that no one knew of his illegal shenanigans.

It’s easy to look at the “complicit” and wag a judgmental finger. We’d all like to believe that, if we had been in the shoes of the “willfully blind,” we’d have blown the whistle. The $64,000 question is, what would we have done? What would you have done?

How many times have you had real questions about someone or some situation and let it ride? Decided not to get involved? Worried about being wrong? Passed the buck – figured that someone else would notice the problem if it really exists and take corrective action?

It’s easy to conclude that the complicit bankers and hedge fund executives just wanted money. But stop there, and you’ll miss an important leadership lesson.

Those bankers and financial managers feared loss – loss to their clients, companies, loved ones, and selves.

Loss of the ability to provide good returns to their clients which could lead to loss of those clients. Loss of their seats at the bountiful Madoff table that others in their business would gladly take and use to bring good returns to clients – maybe the very clients they had just lost.

Loss of clients could mean loss of a job, reputation, career trajectory. A job loss brings income loss and inability to sustain a current lifestyle. That might mean loss of a home, community, good schools for the kids, maybe even loss of a marriage under the strain. And the list goes on.

And as their fears mounted, those bankers and hedge fund managers faced the ultimate loss: their ability to make sound executive judgments and to see life beyond the fear of loss.

How are you going to prepare yourself for the next time you need to stand up for what’s right? Will you be ready?

 

[1] Diana Henriques (2011). The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust. New York: Times Books.