Tag: leadership development

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Picasso, Windex, and Creative Leadership

Yesterday morning I washed windows. A cold winter led to a decision for inside storms on interior windows that border an unheated porch. Washing the windows wasn’t a big deal, but a job I put off. Then, an email announced the upcoming installation and a reminder that clean inside windows mean no need to remove the new storms anytime soon. I grudgingly left my desk, and got the Windex and paper towels.

Pablo Picasso reminds us it takes a long time to become young. I think I just learned something important about what he meant.

As I was spraying the Windex, I suddenly remembered how, as a young child, I begged my mother to let me wash the glass front door, and I turned it into a host of games.

I was a friend of Elroy on the “Jetsons,” and the Windex was my ray gun. I was Dale Evans, working with Roy Rogers to protect the Double R Bar Ranch from bandits. I was a museum employee, polishing the glass on a great work of art – and it needed to be spotless. I was a scientist doing important experiments: how long before the paper towel became too wet to clean without smudges? How much Windex was required to do the job without being wasteful? We had the cleanest front door in town! My mother was happy. And I had a blast.

So, yesterday I enjoyed the childhood recollections and spritzed away the morning with a smile. I played scientist again, and developed my own data-based tricks to maximize speed and quality – windows warmed by the sun needed a different wiping pace than the cold ones; cold windows needed drier paper towels than the warm; the edges of the panes needed special care and thorough drying, while clean damp centers seemed to take care of themselves. I complimented my inner child on her experimental design and mindfulness– and kept happily spritzing.

During rests, I took in the views. I watched a young mother stop and carefully lift her child from a carriage to look at an evergreen bough blowing in the wind. I saw how well the new robotic arm on our town’s garbage truck emptied the neighborhood’s heavy cans – saving, I’m sure, the precious backs of many a sanitation worker. I enjoyed two spirited Golden doodles romping down and around the sidewalk, repeatedly tangling their leashes to their walker’s dismay.

Then I suddenly found myself thinking in new ways about a grant application I was writing: phrases and data to include started to come freely. The idea for this blog post emerged, as did a playful list of leadership wisdom – useful ditties such as,

  • It’s more efficient to clean things up from the top down: dirty drips make a mess for the bottom and lead to a lot of wasted time and effort.
  • Sometime just in time is just fine.
  • Figuring out what’s on your side of the glass and what’s on the other is critical: if it ain’t your dirt to clean, you can polish to your heart’s content to no avail.

Play is the well-spring of joy and creativity for children and adults. It activates different parts of the brain, relaxes our defenses, and frees us to think outside current cognitive constraints.

There is plenty of research on the links among play, creativity, successful entrepreneurship, and the development of 21st century organizational skills. More than forty years ago, organizational guru Jim March  – in an extension of his work on decision making with Nobel Laureate Herb Simon — advocated for the vital role of playfulness in his landmark book with Johan Olsen, Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations.[1]  Play, according to March, is an antidote to the natural limits in how humans think: we may think we are  looking at all our options, but we only see those that fit within our mental models and beliefs about what the world is and how it works.

Escape is possible, continued March, if we let ourselves play — deliberately embrace “the power of sensible foolishness” in order to open our minds to new ways of thinking and being.

Play gets a negative rap in the adult world – “grow up,” “stop being such a child,” “quit playing around,” and the like.  Play, however, is a critical leadership skill when viewed as an essential complement, not an enemy, of rational thinking – a kind of “Mardi Gras of reason” that affords our minds a planned occasion for creative experimentation, relaxed reflection, free and unrestricted associations, and openness to innovative solutions just waiting to be found. 

How are you going to productively play today?  What project could use some innovative thinking?  What will enable you to free your creative mind?

[1] March, J. G. (1976). “The Technology of Foolishness” in March, J. G. and J. Olsen (ed.). Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations. Bergen, Norway: Universitetsforlaget.

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How Great Leaders Think: Gray and Free

It’s not that I’m so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.[i]

― Albert Einstein

One of the most useful and innovative leadership skills I know is the ability to think gray and free. The idea comes from the late Steven Sample, engineer, professor, and successful, long-term president at the University of Southern California who transformed the institution during his nineteen years in office.

I love the process of thinking gray and free – it’s not easy but it works, is supported by neuroscience, can be taught, and stretches everyone’s creative potential. And it’s fun! Can’t get much better than that!

The rationale for learning to think gray and free goes something like this:

Problems are problems because what has usually worked in other situations does not work with what you now face. Those are the times you need to harness your creative best for breakthroughs in your thinking so you can identify fresh options. You need ways to break out of your cognitive ruts, but human nature doesn’t make that easy!

Under stress and in the face of major challenges, it is easy and almost automatic to rush to judgment in dealing with new information or situations by labeling them good or bad, right or wrong, true or false. We want fast and decisive action to relieve our stress. But snap judgments in difficult times can put you on a dead-end road. Thinking that you are right, you keep doing what you’ve always done: the problem continues, frustration mounts, stress levels rise, and you double down on what you’ve always done. You can see where all that will land you!

Not anymore! Here’s where thinking gray and free[ii] comes into the picture.

When asked, leaders and managers often say that they try to “consider all the options” before reaching a difficult decision. Steven Sample disagrees. They may consider all their options, but do so within the constraints of their current thinking patterns and approaches. Learning to think gray and free is “an unnatural act” that forces you to remain unresolved and open to fresh solutions beyond your comfort as a way to tap into unused cognitive pathways. That’s what can lead to your greatest insights, free you from the bounds of convention, and allow your natural creativity and intellectual independence to shine. As you move beyond the temptation to plow ahead and fix things quickly, you will also see more clearly what matters – and doesn’t.

Sample’s favorite way to stimulate that kind of thinking is to contemplate problems from absolutely outrageous positions and in impossible ways. Literally!  The process of arriving at his highly successful patent design for a dishwasher control reads like something from a Charlie Chapin movie: Sample crawled on the ground to contemplate the controls from different angles and forced himself to imagine the dishwasher was being controlled by a French horn, sofa, ladybug, electrons, hay bale, and more. This thinking was so difficult that he could only sustain it for about ten minutes at a time. But after a few of these thinking sessions, he suddenly could see in his mind’s eye the complete circuit design – and a way to do it he had never contemplated before.

Innovative ideas come when you challenge your assumptions and allow yourself to revel in blue-sky moments when anything is possible.

Steven Sample used various techniques to stretch his capacities to think gray and free. Two favorites are described below[iii]. Try one!

Resist the temptation for binary thinking: Force yourself to read an article, listen to a news report, or engage in a conversation with another and suspend all judgments: don’t believe or disbelieve, or classify anything as right or wrong. Listen and keep telling yourself, “that’s really interesting.” If you find you can’t, then write down your first impression about the matter, and force yourself to not think about it until a later time (or ever again). Training your mind to “bend over backwards by thinking gray with respect to a few everyday matters” is an excellent way to overcome your natural inclinations to speed judge and to think right-wrong/yes-no.

Contemplate the outrageous together: Bring a group of people together who have widely varying perspectives and a common goal. Ask each individual to propose an “off-the-wall idea” for achieving the goal, with the proviso that every other person in the group must respond with at least two reasons why the idea will work. There is benefit in forcing yourself to learn to think positively and deeply about an idea you’d rather quickly reject.

Great leaders think is broad, deep, and creative ways.  How can you expand your capacities to do the same?  

[i] http://amorebeautifulquestion.com/einstein-questioning/#jp-carousel-4256

[ii] Steven B. Sample (2008). “Thinking Gray and Free.” In Gallos, J. V. (Ed.) Business Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

[iii] The ideas in this blog are adapted from the skills tutorial appearing in Part II of Lee G. Bolman and Joan V. Gallos (2016). Engagement: Transforming Difficult Relationships at Work. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

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Inquiry: The Art and Benefits of Asking Good Questions

Always the beautiful answer/Who asks a more beautiful question.[i]

― e. e. cummings

Inquiry is a vastly under-appreciated skill, yet foundational for learning, problem solving, and relationship building. Good questions change lives and the course of history, and the resolution of big thorny problems requires them. Few are taught in their professional training to ask good questions. Journalists may be the rare exception.[ii]

Inquiry seeks to discover or learn what others think, know, want, or feel.

How can you foster better exchanges and relationships with important people in your life using inquiry? Fine-tune your inquiry skills to strengthen your capacity to lead?

The basic inquiry skill is knowing how to ask good questions. Good questions typically begin with words like how, why, or what. They go beyond requests for a yes or a no response. Instead they encourage people to think and talk: to provide information, describe and unpack their thinking, explore ideas, share their perspective, or consider new possibilities.

Good inquiry is necessary for testing ideas, seeking feedback, learning from others, and accurate situational diagnoses.

Tightly connected to good inquiry is active and attentive listening. The benefits of inquiry are lost if others see it as manipulative technique and not a route to your deeper understanding.

Edgar Schein introduces the concept of “humble inquiry,”[iii] defined as the fine art of asking others questions based on your curiosity and sincere interest in them. The purpose is to draw others out and into a closer and more trusting relationship. Schein sees humble inquiry as an investment of your time and attention to build foundations for effective teamwork – at work or home.

Inquiry is a habit of the mind that does not come easy to many, especially in a “tell” world that values experts who “already know.” Business organizations and “let’s get on with it” cultures often view questions as “inefficient” and the antithesis of action, task completion, and forward momentum, according to Clayton Christensen,[iv] an advocate of good questions as a way to foster disruptive innovation.

The culture of the charismatic extrovert – someone who speaks out and speaks up with clarity and drive – still dominates everyday beliefs about effective leadership; and more than a century after Dale Carnegie launched his first public speaking course at a New York City YMCA, his best-selling book How to Win Friends and Influence People is still a staple on airport bookshelves and business best-seller lists[v].

So how can you enhance your inquiry skills?

There are two places to start: (1) increase your use of questions, and (2) ask better questions. Where do you stand on each?

In our book, Engagement: Transforming Difficult Relationships at Work, Lee Bolman and I provide a tutorial on inquiry. You may want to try these recommendations from it:

Compare your advocacy and inquiry counts: Over the course of the next week, be mindful in your conversations with others about the balance between your advocacy (telling people something) and your inquiry (asking them a real question). Take time after a number of selected conversations to think about: How many questions did you ask the other vs. how many statements did you make? How often were questions real requests for information vs. rhetorical devices and advocacy in disguise? Tracking your ratio of advocacy and inquiry allows you to work on changing the balance.

Descriptive questions: Take as a goal for a day or a time period to avoid asking questions that evoke a yes or no answer. Substitute instead questions that begin with how, why, or what. How easy is that for you? How does that change the tenor of your conversations? Why do you think that is? What have you learned about others as a result?

Successful leadership is steeped in the search for information and learning – about others, the situation, and the best steps forward. How can improving your inquiry improve the impact of your efforts?

[i] e. e. cummings. Introduction to New Poems. Accessed December 12, 2015 at http://poems.writers-network.com/pdf/article-662.pdf

[ii] Warren Berger (2014). A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas. New York: Bloomsbury.

[iii] Edgar Schein (2013). Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

[iv] Clayton M. Christensen (2011). The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business. New York: Harper Business.

[v] Susan Cain (2013). Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking. New York: Broadway Books.

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Grow Your Brain: Lead Yourself to Increased Leadership Capacities

Research, published in the new book The Emotional Life of your Brain by Richard J. Davidson (with Sharon Begley), has good news. We can change our emotional styles and become more self-aware, attentive to context, and resilient – core skills for surviving and thriving in the rough-and-tumble leadership world. All it takes is systematic mental practice.

I’ll let you read the neurophysiology and brain science and just cut to the chase here. By thinking – and thinking alone – adults can expand areas of the brain to broaden their cognitive and emotional capacities.

This gives us more control than previously believed over what Davidson and Begley call the Six Key Elements of Emotional Style: our resilience in the face of disappointment, outlook on life, self-awareness, social intuition, attention, and sensitivity to context.

To quote the authors: “Mental activity, ranging from meditation to cognitive-behavior therapy, can help you develop a broader awareness of social signals, a deeper sensitivity to your own feelings and bodily sensations, a more consistently positive outlook, and a great capacity for resilience.”

Too negative an outlook on life or situation? Embrace the essentials of “well-being therapy” and focus on ways you can be more grateful, generous, appreciative, and upbeat. You’ll have significant growth in the brain areas used, giving you quicker and more automatic access to these positive responses over time.

Not very self- or other-aware? Slow down and ask yourself to focus on the feelings, discomfort, or concerns of another. It’ll increase activation of the circuitry involved in taking in pain and distress more carefully and broaden your capacities to see life more richly and compassionately.

Too self-aware and filled with the internal chatter and self-evaluations that keep you spinning your wheels? Learn to observe your thoughts or feelings non-judgmentally and choose to put them aside.

Mindfulness and meditation help here. [See the blog archives for past posts of mindfulness and the work of Ellen Langer.] With practice, you’ll develop the hard-wiring and self-control needed to pause, acknowledge a setback or disappointment, have a good laugh at how quickly your mind wants to perseverate and magnify a mere bump in life’s road, and stop yourself from spiraling downward.

The authors claim that locating the base of emotions at least partly in the brain’s seat of reason is a major break from conventional wisdom in psychology and neuroscience.

I’m thrilled their work affirms human capacities to develop the emotional and cultural intelligence needed for effective leadership in an increasingly diverse world. How do you want to lead? Respond? Be? Make it happen. That’s hugely empowering – and productive for us all!

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Leaders, Boost Your Creativity in 2012: Five Suggestions for the New Year

It’s resolution time. I’ve made my list and share five suggestions for yours to boost creativity in 2012.

Times are tough, and every industry is rethinking how it does business. Creativity and the capacity to think deeply and flexibly can pull an organization ahead of the crowd. How can you enhance your capacities and help your organization claim its competitive advantage?  Suggestions to boost your innovation brainpower:

1.  Read more fiction. There are plenty of benefits. Build new neuronal circuits. Deepen your knowledge of the human condition – and learn about yourself as your reflect on your responses. Improve your vocabulary, beef up those communication skills. Expand your cultural intelligence. Leadership is all about influence, communication, relationships, and seeing the simplicity on the other side of complexity. 

No time for major tomes? Try The Art of the Novella Series: short novels by some of literature’s greatest – Melville, James, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Twain, and more. The tiny classics tuck easily into a brief case, purse, or pocket – and their colorful contemporary covers are great conversation starters.

My first was a holiday gift – The Dialogue of the Dogs by Cervantes. Turns out the creator of Don Quixote also wrote the first talking-dog story. Ever wonder what your pet is really thinking, and what Fido can teach you about ethics and fairness?  I loved it: a quick read and deep ideas. I was hooked on the novella.

The Duel by Heinrich von Kleist (a 19th century German author I knew nothing about) was next. Read it, and let me know how your thinking about loyalty, everyday assumptions, and trust have changed.

I’m on The Lifted Veil by George Eliot now — her only work in the first person with eerie similarities to  Eliot’s claiming her public identity as a woman author. Next in line The Lemoine Affair by Proust — and a look at why humans are so easily conned!  Think shades of Bernie Madoff. 

2.  Discover the power and joy of quiet. We live in a world of 24/7 stimulation and news. We text, email, surf, and sit in front of screens (computer and TV) more and more (and Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains paints a dire portrait of the neurological, intellectual, and cultural consequences). Creativity requires quiet – the time and space to think. Find ways to build that into your day. Mindfulness is not a luxury for strong leadership.

3.  Break the work addiction. All work and no play makes for dull, burned-out people – and maybe even dead ones. The Chinese pictograph for “busy” is two characters: “heart” and “killing.” Loving your work isn’t the same as being a slave to it. You’ll work better and smarter when refreshed. Play is productive.

4. Think gray. It’s simple and counter-intuitive: train yourself to not make decisions quickly. You’ll fall into your regular thinking patterns easily: you need to push yourself to think slowly and carefully about what you’re not thinking about. That’s where you’ll navigate through the shades of gray to identify the best course of action. It’s hard to think gray: humans love binary, right-wrong, yes-no, black-white thinking. The concept comes from Steven Sample (the highly successful president emeritus of the University of Southern California) and is developed in his chapter in Business Leadership.

5. Embrace the novice role. Experience the world with new eyes. It’s good for mind and soul. A good way is to try something you’ve never done but have always wanted to or that you know you don’t do well. The process of learning slows life down, encourages mindfulness, and fine-tunes your skills as a reflective practitioner – a definite leadership plus. You might discover a new talent or passion in the process. 

Onward to a creative 2012 for us all! 

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Leadership Best Practices from Ronald McDonald

Every year the Hay Group does a study of the Best Companies for Leadership. I wasn’t expecting to find McDonald’s high on their list (#7).

Mea culpa, I wasn’t associating serious things like leadership best practices with Ronald McDonald. I stand corrected. We can all learn from looking at McDonald’s recipe for assuring the right leadership at all levels of the operation. The company emphasizes:

1. teamwork

2. proactive performance management with clear and consistent expectations and high standards

3. attention to education, training, coaching, and leadership development, and

4. leadership continuity through an impressive retention rate of over 95% of the graduates from the company’s internal accelerated leadership program.

The result is a strong, consistent corporate culture, with reliability in product delivery and innovation to stay ahead of the competition in a globalized, customer-centric, fast-changing, fast-food market.

How are you doing on important dimensions like teamwork, performance management, leadership education and training, and retention in your business? What could you be doing more or better?

To get you thinking, here are excerpts from the Hay report on how McDonald’s talks about the issues.

What are the leadership practices that differentiate McDonald’s?

It starts with having high standards. Performance management is at the core: we employ a 20/70/10 performance distribution model across the organization: 20 per cent at the exceptional level, 70 per cent significant and then 10 per cent needs improvement. We make sure we keep these standards high. Also, around talent, when we talk about people being ‘ready now’ and ‘ready future’, the ‘ready now’ candidate has to be someone who can be better than the incumbent over time. And, if every time you have an opening you put somebody in that’s stronger, you’re going to increase your organizational capability.

How is McDonald’s adapting to all the shifts that are happening in demographics, globalization and technology?

We’re a very team-based environment. So whenever we have a business issue, our natural inclination is to put together a team of people to look at it. It’s typically cross-functional and in some cases cross-geographic as well. This focus on team goes back to the restaurants. All you have to do is walk into a restaurant during the lunch "crush" and see 15 or 20 people working hard together. The whole culture revolves around working as a team. We’re preparing leaders for what they will face in the future, with two accelerated development programs for different levels of leader. There’s a heavy emphasis around technology, globalization and speed of change. The programs include a business simulation component; an action learning component, a lot of coaching, assessment, self insight and awareness.

Can you talk a little about what you’re doing on the goal setting and coaching side?

We have a pretty good process of cascading our major business goals to our business units. If there is one thing important at McDonald’s, it’s having this alignment of business strategies. I think our team-based approach helps immensely in this regard. We actually hire and promote people based, in large part, on their ability to be able to work effectively in teams. People are generally working at McDonald’s over the long haul. It’s not uncommon to find people at McDonald’s that have been with us 35, 40 years starting out at the restaurant level. So, I think the combination of all of these things drives a lot of alignment.

Beyond core financial results, how do you track the success of leadership programs?

We look at retention, which at 95 percent plus, is where we want it to be. And we look at the percentage of people who are promoted that come out of the accelerated development programs. This program has a big impact on retention. It’s actually one of the most visible signals of how much we are investing in you.

What are you working on for the future of leadership at McDonald’s, say 10-15 years from now?

Our CEO and COO have put together five strategy teams that we believe are going to help us continue our performance run. One is on talent management. We have a cross-geographic, cross-functional team that’s looking in particular at strategic workforce planning – anticipating what resources are going to be required to deliver against our business plans. We also plan to work more collaboratively as a senior team on developing top talent proactively. Third, we want to make sure that whenever we fill key jobs that we put a lot of discipline and rigor into the process. This helps us to improve our ability to make the right call on filling critical jobs – there is nothing more important than this. So far, this team’s work is paying off.