Doing what you say

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We go through our lives saying yes to a lot of things and making commitments we don’t keep. This does two things – it 1/ erodes confidence in ourselves and 2/ diminishes trust with those we’ve made the commitments to. On the flip side, when we deliver on what we say we’re going to, the effects are quite the opposite. Delivering sends us into positivity and build our reputation with ourselves, friends, families and co-workers.

There is an entire movement behind keeping your word – https://becauseisaidiwould.org/.

So don’t just say you’ll do it – deliver.

Getting beyond hierarchy

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Are there organizations that operate as true meritocracies? While many espouse to be, fundamental things get in the way – like ego, habits, biases, personalities, nepotism, favouritism … the list goes on. One of the key things that gets in the way of open dialogue and the right people contributing to problems is hierarchy. Titles and rankings, while they can be well deserved badges of achievement, they can also feed egos and drive insecurities.

Consider the scenario where 5 directors are working on a problem / program. One director decides to invite the sr. manager from their because of a specific expertise. The other directors, feeling it unfair their sr. managers didn’t get invite, won’t have it and invite their people as well.  An efficient working team of 5 has now grown to 10, not because of contribution, but because of the seeming need to be “fair”. In the case – the platform for fairness is a ranking.

This has many negative impacts to the organization:

  • It’s inefficient – too many cooks in the kitchen (especially ones not contributing) slow things down – leading to….
  • It’s costly – piling on resources to a problem doesn’t help it get solved any more quickly. The number of bodies in a room is directly related to burn
  • It reinforces egos – condoning this behaviour perpetuates the ego underneath the rankings and titles
  • It drives lower performance – by bringing in potentially irrelevant voices, the discussion cannot get to a higher level

I don’t have a solution for this deeply embedded behaviour other than to call it out when it happens and changing my own behaviours and decisions to focus on merit, capability and experience over titles, rankings and ultimately ego. How would you handle these scenarios?

Parallels

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Questions I have tonight as I think about what it means to be a parent.

  • How do you create a system for your child to learn how to be organized AND be creative?
  • How do you accept who they are – their unique operating model AND teach them life skills when you see things going sideways?
  • How do you refrain from imposing your operating model on the amazing person they are going to become?
  • In what situations do carrots work better than sticks?

If I changed the subject from a child to my team, I may ask the same questions. Interesting parallels in the universe.

How to create game changing programs

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What happens when you meet a team that is truly inspiring? I’ve just come from 2 days of coaching where the entirety of the schedule was so well structured and flawlessly executed. My perspective has shifted in how I would develop programs for my team. This includes:

  • Being clear about expectations. We often do a terrible job at setting parameters, making assumptions that our teams already know things they would have no way of knowing.
  • Be obvious. Related to the above, when giving instructions, be specific and clear about what you are asking the team to do. I often say the words amazing, great and awesome. These are no where near the specificity needed
  • Walking the talk. Once you have defined expectations – as a leader, you need to also act in the way we want our teams to behave.
  • Create a safe environment. I don’t think I fully understood what this meant until these past two days. The coaches I worked with truly made our cohort of very different people feel like we could speak up. There was feedback but without judgement. They were kind and open and truly embodies the values they espoused. They emphasized how important it was to make the audience of your messaging feel safe with simple techniques. Tell them where you’re going. Give them guidance.
  • Techniques to cope with stress. Our teams faces unexpected situations. As leaders, we’ve likely faced these before. When creating programs, identify the potential challenges and develop simple ways to cope with examples.
  • Have a clear structure. Each part of a program needs to make sense and have significant value. Each needs to have a core set of simple components so teams can easily digest what it means for them. And … the key is that the sum of the parts needs to be greater than the whole
  • Create moments of buy in along the way. No one likes a process being forced down their throats. Use social engineering tactics to create the build connectors. Simple things like – a pledge, key markers / rules (being on time and lights flickering), repeating principles and living them through examples, creating demand to want to learn more – eg – creating master classes once team members reach a certain level.
  • Building in small touches. The extras add value to en environment. Toiletries in the bathroom, thoughtful snacks at each session, printouts, lanyards, water bottles. Small touches can elevate an experience in many ways
  • Measure and improve. Poll your teams on their experience of the program. Gather feedback and when it makes sense, adapt programs to the feedback.

These are just a few of the things from my experience these last two days that I will use in building any program in the future.

Curveballs vs Flips

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Life is going to throw all kinds of stuff our way. From the small to the life changing. I’ll call the small ones curveballs and the life changing ones flips. Here’s how I’m starting to make sense of their distinction.

Curveballs are temporary – events that change the course of a few days or weeks. We all have them. My current curveballs are a termite infestation ( gross but manageable ) and a complete change in week end plans to help a friend in need.

Flips are longer term, more dramatic and longer term changes to life context. An example parents can relate to are the changing perspectives required as your children age. When they’re young, you want to protect and nurture them. As they get older, the approach needs to flip to encouraging independence.

Why do we care about these distinctions? Because it’s important to understand what is temporary and what is permanent. The temporary are things we can let slide and roll with the punches. We deal with them as they come but they don’t have a lasting impact on how we live. The more permanent however, are fundamental changes to how we need to approach the world because the world has literally changed.

Both require a growth mindset, but the mental toughness required to rewire your approach to the world requires 10x the effort. Once you recognize which you’re dealing with, you can allocate proportionate energy.

Why organizations spin

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In my experience, most people have the best of intentions at work. They see problems at work and want to solve them.  They create strategies, work plans and activities to try to fix the problem within their specific context.  While they get an A for effort, the reality is they may do more harm than good. Why?

  • Organizations are systems. The problem is that most issues are connected to other parts of the mothership. When a process breaks down in one area, trying to fix that area on its own could be a short term solve, but it could break or slow things down in other areas. A classic example is optimization of a single task – say call centre. We want to decrease the time on call at help desk. We may try to fix that by passing them off to another group or by speeding up the solve on the phone. But if we try to fix the system, we create resources so the call doesn’t happen in the first place.
  • People want to feel like they’re making a difference. They hear of an issue and set about trying to fix it without communicating or asking if other people are working on it. They forge ahead but often don’t know what they don’t know. This leads to …
  • Many programs, one goal. The number of projects and programs spun up to tackle and organizational priority can be astounding. It’s so rampant in large companies there are often additional projects to gather the activities so they are aligned. If I had to guess, any one organization has a multitude of innovation, onboarding, data projects, new customer etc. underway trying to solve the same or similar problems.

The result is wasted effort and, more importantly, time that could have been spent driving a new product forward, or on other valuable company projects. So how do we get beyond the spin? Organizations need to:

  • Declare – at the top of the house the strategy, workstreams and how is leading
  • Define – the activities for each workstream and who is leading
  • Drive – move with speed so people see results and don’t spin up more work

Purpose. Clarity. Speed. Seems easy, but we all know it’s not. With a leadership team open to exploring, talent that is keen, smart, creative and passionate and a dose of structure, you’re that much closer to solving the things that are important for your organization.

When things are hard

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I’ve been thinking a lot about doing things that are hard things lately.  Over the past decade+, I’ve been on a journey from being an entrepreneur (which was hard but fun), to taking a career sabbatical (which was fun but hard for someone who really likes work) to my current role as a corporate executive (which is mostly hard and a little fun – so far).

While everyone has a set of things they find hard, the following seem to ring true as the causes for things being hard. People may …

  • Lack the capability (don’t have the skills)
  • Lack of experience (don’t have mental model)
  • Lack of practice (haven’t built the muscle)
  • Things are too ambiguous (no goalposts)
  • Lack of drive (no passion or desire)
  • Lack of perspective (no understanding of why)
  • ….

When encountering hard things, I find shifting my mindset works well to reduce the stress (of which there is plenty!). This looks something like:

  • I love hard things – they push me to learn and gather new experiences
  • Learning this new thing will help me prepare for future events
  • The greater purpose of getting through this is _________________
  • ….

My son is going through his own “hard things” phase with the start of a new school year. We talked about mindset, changing the way we look at the world and he had an epiphany. 

We can do anything except if we do nothing.  

It’s hard to argue with that kind of wisdom and clarity.

8 tips to design your next brainstorm

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I spent the majority of my day at a company offsite today. Picture a room with 25-30 well meaning executives at a large organization. The topic of discussion – how do we win more customers in an increasingly competitive environment where we are already a market leader? The day invariably kicks off with context setting and numbers – what did we commit to, where are we today and how far do we need to go – followed by break out sessions to brainstorm ideas. As the day went on, I took on the role of corporate ethnographer (as I often do) and stepped out of body to observe the room. What did I see?

Facilitators of ideation

  • Cross functional – multidisciplinary teams. Creating the setting for openness and multiple perspective is critical. To set this up for success, there needs to be some teaming or common goal setting …see next
  • Setting the stage. People need to know why they are there, the goals of the day and what we want to walk out of the day(s) with. This helps to structure mindset and also develop guardrails and openness to new ideas
  • Ice breakers to get everyone speaking. This is for all teams whether they know each other or not. An important aspect of ideation is trusting the people you’re ideating with so you can feel open to speak. This is very difficult in multi-team environments where people may be worried about post session impacts
  • Feeding and hydrating participants. This is a given. Hungry and thirsty people don’t ideation very well.

Blocks to ideation

  • A lack of insights or stimulus. This is by far the most important ingredient to ideation. In conjunction with prompts and solid activity structure, insights help to provide aha moments and starters to ideation. Stimuli – via examples or new mental models put participants in different frames of mind to open the door to ideation. Without these, there is a natural reliance on falling back to 1/n=1 experiences and 2/ideas that are comfortable and likely already brought up in previous brainstorms.
  • Flat and unfocused facilitators. Choosing who runs these sessions is critical. Part smarts, part energy and the ability to coax teams to action is important. Facilitators also need to have the confidence to guide sr. leaders and push back. The mark of unskilled or inexperienced facilitators is runaway conversations
  • Topics that are too broad or too specific. Developing working sessions is an art. Landing on the right level of specificity on a topic is as important as the topic itself. Too broad and teams will feel like they are boiling the ocean and won’t land in action. Too specific and the ideas end up being narrow.
  • Too many participants. Today was a clear example of many strong voices vying for airtime. The result was a lot of discussion and talking but without much depth. Fewer people run in a series of brainstorms would have yielded richer and more focused ideas

If you’ve experienced a well facilitated session, you exit feeling energized, filled with ambition and a drive to get things done. In a session that isn’t as well done, participants often come out exhausted, unclear and ambivalent.

Working sessions are a great way to achieve ambitious goals. Time is the scarce resource none of us have in abundance Make the most of it with your leaders, peers and teams through thoughtfully designed and delivered offsite and brainstorms.

How to define what’s important to your organization

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In the world of organizational strategy,  brand and employee experience, companies trying to figure out who they are can be an infinite loop. Between strategy, vision, mission, purpose, values, principles, culture, models and many more,  where does a leader even begin? Let’s start with definitions  (Source: adapted from Google).

  • Strategy: a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim
  • Mission: a strongly felt aim, ambition, or calling
  • Vision: the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom
  • Purpose: the reason for which something is done, created or for which it exists
  • Principles: a fundamental attribute determining the nature of something; an essence
  • Values: principles or standards of behaviour;  judgment of what is important in life
  • Culture: the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a group
  • Model: a system or thing used as an example to follow or imitate

Looking at this list, a picture of a Venn diagram is beginning to emerge where Purpose overlaps with Mission, Strategy with Vision, Principles with Values (it has the world principles in it for crying out loud). And culture – well culture is just a part of everything so it’s the ultimate container. So – why do organizations feel like they need to check all the boxes and create bodies of work behind each of these? The answer is – they don’t and shouldn’t.

As we define the companies we build and lead, we need focus on what matters – the core and content in how we deliver on how we show up day to day. Let’s get back to the fundamentals of  Why (Purpose / Mission), What (Strategy  / Vision) and How (Culture / Values / Principles). Use whatever label you like,  but keep it to 3 and have each one clearly defined so they can be easily communicated and delivered.

Personally like using Purpose, Strategy and Culture to describe the big O (overall organization) and principles to get to specificity.