|
Kim Scott, co-founder of Candor, Inc., has built her career around a simple goal: Creating bullshit-free zones where people love their work and working together.
The single most important thing a boss can do, Scott has learned, is focus on guidance: giving it, receiving it, and encouraging it. Guidance, which is fundamentally just praise and criticism, is usually called “feedback,” but feedback is screechy and makes us want to put our hands over our ears. Guidance is something most of us long for.
At First Round's recent CEO Summit, Scott shared a simple tool for ensuring that your team gets the right kind of guidance — a tool she calls 'radical candor.'
It sounds so simple to say that bosses need to tell employees when they're screwing up. But it very rarely happens. To help teach radical candor — this all-important but often neglected skill — to her own teams, Scott boiled it down to a simple framework: Picture a basic graph divided into four quadrants. If the vertical axis is caring personally and the horizontal axis is challenging directly, you want your feedback to fall in the upper right-hand quadrant. That’s where radical candor lies.
“The vertical axis is what I call the ‘give a damn’ axis,” Scott says. “Caring personally makes it much easier to do the next thing you have to do as a good boss, which is being willing to piss people off.”
That’s right, the horizontal axis is what Scott calls the “willing to piss people off” axis. Challenging others is difficult for many people; saying anything short of positive feels impolite. But once you become a boss, it’s your job to do be equally clear about what’s going wrong, and what’s going right.
I would argue that criticizing your employees when they screw up is not just your job, it's actually your moral obligation. Radical candor, then, results from a combination of caring personally and challenging directly. But what does it look like in practice? Scott has created an acronym to help people remember:
HHIPP: “Radical candor is humble, it’s helpful, it’s immediate, it’s in person — in private if it’s criticism and in public if it’s praise — and it doesn’t personalize.”
Four key things that any manager can do to create an environment of meaningful guidance:
- Find opportunities for impromptu feedback
- Make backstabbing impossible
- Make it easier to speak truth to power
- Put your own oxygen mask on first
|
To drive relevant and sustainable change within their organizations, CEOs must help their executive leadership team (and their direct reports) overcome long-outdated leadership practices. Adopting these 8 shifts could serve a means to modernize your leadership.
- Engage and Empower…instead of Command and Control. Leaders must focus on inspiring and informing employees to improve the myriad of ongoing decisions being made across their organizations.
- Learn and Adjust…instead of Strategize and Plan. Leaders need to stop viewing customer insight as a set of market research projects, and treat it as part of the core organization to enable a continuous flow of customer-insightful decisions.
- Detect and Disseminate…instead of Amass and Review. Companies must tailor market insights for each part of the organization; providing the right information at the right time to fuel the decisions being made by employees with different roles.
- Observe and Improve…instead of Measure and Track. Leaders should spend time understanding how things are getting done.
- Purpose and Values…instead of Goals and Objectives. Leaders must take the time to communicate the organization’s mission and its values.
- Strengths and Appreciation…instead of Problems and Solutions. Leaders must consistently find ways to show their appreciation for employees’ strengths.
- Culture and Behaviors…instead of Process and Projects. Leaders need to invest more effort in the culture they create, which will shape how employees think and act.
- Experience and Emotions…instead of Price and Features. Leaders must add customer emotion to their corporate vocabulary.
If you’re a corporate leader operating under outdated management assumptions, then it’s time to change your approach. While traditional management thinking may have succeeded in the past, future leaders will need to adapt to these 8 critical shifts to become a modernized leader.
|
Whether in media or design or industrial machinery, the need to foster and harness the creativity of individuals working in teams has never been more urgent. The problem, however, is that large, complex, multinational organizations are often much better at stifling creativity than fostering it.
The best place for your business to create and “make tomorrow” — is in a sandbox. Think about it. Sandboxes are venues that bring together all kinds of kids in an open but finite space that encourages exploration and interaction with little threat of harm.
The idea of a sandbox provides an apt metaphor for the type of collaboration and interaction that should take place in the open, communal office spaces, virtual meetings, management retreats, and other places where we work now. When you create successful conceptual sandboxes in the workplace, you can eliminate organizational silos, allowing your workers to better understand what their colleagues do and more fully grasp what your business is trying to achieve.
To make the most of the experience, every sandbox needs four key features:
- Connectors. Every major challenge has three critically important lenses that must be aligned in the right way in order to help usher in true innovation and industry disruption: the business, experience, and technology lenses. A successful connector can bring in specialists who can focus those lenses to forge the products, services, and experiences of the future. Put another way, they are the people in your workforce who can seamlessly connect the dots between business, tech, creative, and experience.
- Framing. Real-world sandboxes need well-defined frames — otherwise the sand leaks out. In the business context, sandbox designers have to construct a virtual and conceptual frame by setting the proper context to solve for your business issue.
- Space. The biggest value sandboxes hold for organizations is that they enable employees throughout the workforce to see, feel, and operate in a collaborative state. When companies replace meetings and phone calls with an environment in which employees can actually participate in how their colleagues work, employees broaden their understanding and acceptance of different individuals’ skills.
- Speed. According to PwC’s January 2016 U.S. CEO Survey, 78 percent of U.S. CEOs are somewhat or extremely concerned about the rapid pace of technological change. Too many organizations still operate under the handoff method, where different parts of the workforce are pulled into projects at different times. The beauty of the sandbox approach is that it provides a holistic vision of the product road map, allowing organizations to move at the speed of tech.
In today’s mobile- and social-first world, as we adapt to fundamentally different ways of working, organizations will need to mirror the dexterity and fluidity of their workforce. Though the sandbox is as old as play itself, its principles of interaction, collaboration, freedom, and safety are perhaps even more applicable to digitally native workers than to their predecessors. The sandbox approach has the potential to become the center for how successful companies operate, ultimately eliminating the need for innovation projects or investments and simply spreading innovation throughout the organization.
No comments:
Post a Comment