Paul's Update Special 2/24

How Microsoft Uses a Growth Mindset to Develop Leaders

How Microsoft Uses a Growth Mindset to Develop Leaders It’s emphasizing learning and creativity.

Research shows that managers see far more leadership potential in their employees when their companies adopt a growth mindset — the belief that talent should be developed in everyone, not viewed as a fixed, innate gift that some have and others don’t. 

Microsoft is deliberately creating a growth-mindset culture and, in that context, rethinking its approach to development. As a result, previously unidentified — yet skilled — leaders are rising to levels they might not have in a traditional development model.

Under Satya Nadella’s leadership Microsoft is emphasizing learning and creativity. Nadella believes this is how leaders are made, and that idea is reflected in several programs, which we’ll describe here.

The hackathons. Microsoft’s annual hackathon offers employees the chance to step outside their day jobs and develop leadership skills like collaborating across disciplines and advocating for ideas. An employee has an idea with business or societal merit — a hack — and then others who share that interest apply to join the team to develop the business plan, create the prototype, and pitch it company-wide. Winning teams are funded to build their projects.

High-risk projects. We also see new kinds of leaders stepping up when risk-taking is explicitly rewarded. Microsoft is now working on the next step: ensuring that smart risks are encouraged and rewarded whether they succeed or not, as long as they yield insights that propel the business forward.

A redefined talent program. In the traditional approach to talent development, a company identifies a pool of future leaders, typically by zeroing in on and measuring key traits. Microsoft is supplementing the traditional approach with a program called Talent Talks. Each year, the CEO and his senior leadership team meet with the heads of each arm of the organization to review their employees, discuss moving people up and across teams, and brainstorm methods of augmenting skills and building experiences. This approach allows Microsoft to reap some of the benefits of early talent identification and development while creating opportunities for everyone to grow.

By giving many more people chances to become leaders, these programs are unleashing greater potential across the company, and may well be instrumental in attracting new people.

If Your Team Agrees on Everything, Working Together Is Pointless

If Your Team Agrees on Everything, Working Together Is Pointless Collaboration requires conflict.

Collaboration’s promise of greater innovation and better risk mitigation can go unfulfilled because of cultural norms that say everyone should be in agreement, be supportive, and smile all the time. The common version of collaboration is desperately in need of a little more conflict.

You’ve probably been taught to see collaboration and conflict as opposites. But, what we need is collaboration where tension, disagreement, and conflict improve the value of the ideas, expose the risks inherent in the plan, and lead to enhanced trust among the participants.

It’s time to change your mindset about conflict. Let go of the idea that all conflict is destructive, and embrace the idea that productive conflict creates value. Collaborating is unnecessary if you agree on everything. Building on one another’s ideas only gets you incremental thinking. 

Here are three specific techniques to help people embrace productive conflict. Carve out some team development time to do these exercises before your next contentious discussion.

First, discuss the different roles in the team and highlight what each role brings to the conversation. As an example, if you are in a cross-functional meeting with sales and production, the production person might be advocating for more standardization, control, and efficiency. The sales person advocates for the exact opposite: more flexibility, customization, and agility. When they are doing their jobs well, the sales and production leads should conflict with one another on the path to an optimized solution. 

Second, use a personality or style assessment tool to highlight differences in what people are paying attention to. In addition to differences stemming from their roles, team members will have different perspectives on an issue based on their personalities.

A third approach to normalizing and encouraging productive conflict is to set ground rules around dissension. Ask your team to define the behaviors that contribute to productive conflict (i.e., conflict that improves decision making while contributing to increased trust) and those that detract from it. Cover as much territory as possible to give people a clear picture of what is, and is not, acceptable behavior on your team.

Even after using these three techniques to change people’s mindset about conflict, you have to go further. Giving people permission to challenge, disagree, and argue isn’t enough. If you want to create productive conflict on your team and use it to generate better ideas, you need to move beyond permission to making productive conflict an obligation. Using these three techniques will be a good start.

9 Traits of Highly Innovative People – Innovation Excellence

9 Traits of Highly Innovative People – Innovation Excellence The Innovation Excellence community is home to innovation articles, webinars, videos, training and education - p...

I’m a big believer in people playing to their strengths, and this includes product team members and others involved in innovation. Not everyone has the same strengths – if we did, that would be a bit boring. Realizing how people approach innovation and their strengths is something Tamara Kleinberg accomplishes. She created a tool, the Innovation Quotient Edge, for identifying your innovation strength, which is why I interviewed her to learn more.

The traits are:

1. Collaborative: constantly tapping disparate people and ideas; creating intersections of random ideas.
2. Experiential: think in motion; bring ideas to life by leaping the chasm from theory to reality.
3. Futuristic: always thinking about what's next; energized by future possibilities instead of today's challenges.
4. Fluid: turn ambiguity into clarity; uncharted territory is the path to new ideas.
5. Imaginative: vivid mind that is always creating new things; ability to turn wild thinking into real world ideas.
6. Inquisitive: highly curious; recognize innovation is in the questions, not the answers.
7. Instinctual: tap the more intuitive part of the mind; connect dots in new and meaningful ways.
8. Risk Taker: adventurous spirit willing to take bold action; willing to pursue unproven yet high potential ideas.
9. Tweaker: always looking for ways to improve and change; give ideas time to grow because they don't judge too early.

(You can listen to the interview here. Taking the test is $13.99. I thought seeing the nine types of innovation identified was an interesting enough start.  Paul)

Paul's Update Special 2/17

The One Big Reason Every Business Needs to Embrace Complexity – Innovation Excellence

The One Big Reason Every Business Needs to Embrace Complexity – Innovation ... The Innovation Excellence community is home to innovation articles, webinars, videos, training and education - p...

The underlying premise of any organization is to create value. Historically, firms have done so through engineering ever greater efficiency. By honing internal processes, optimizing the supply chain and reducing product inventories, managers could improve margins and create a sustainable competitive advantage. That’s created a bias for simple, linear thinking. 

Yet in today’s networked marketplace, agility trumps efficiency. Innovation has become the primary driver of value, which means that you need to constantly identify and incorporate new ideas, many of which do not fit into neat little boxes. That’s why managing complexity is emerging as a core business skill. You can’t create truly new value without it.

The first step to managing complexity is to understand that there are different types of complexity. The first, the complexity of an entity, like steps in a process, almost always should be reduced because simplifying entities makes them easier to understand.

The second type of complexity, that of a system, is unavoidable and often leads to nonlinearity, such as accelerating returns. These often advance at an exponential rate.

The final type, emergent complexity is what happens when chaotic interactions between entities combine to create something completely new and unexpected. We can—and often do—minimize this type of complexity, but we shouldn’t.

While many companies work hard to keep things linear and simple, innovative firms work hard to embrace emergence. 

Products and services are far more than the result of a particular set of inputs and processes, they derive their value by “crystallizing imagination.” To see what MIT’s Cesar Hidalgo, author of Why Information Grows means, take a company like Apple. Its first hit product, the Apple II, crystallized the imagination of not only Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, but also that of the other members of the Homebrew Computer Club, whose meetings they attended.

Innovation is never a single event, but tends to follow a long and twisted path. It’s what emerges when complex networks of ideas combine to solve an important problem. That, in essence, is how value is created.

The need to embrace complexity is fairly obvious in high tech industries, but Zeynep Ton argues in The Good Jobs Strategy that the same principle also holds true in industries that we wouldn’t ordinarily associate with creativity and innovation. Trader Joe’s, for instance, limits the numbers of products it carries, partly because that allows its employees to become experts on the products the store does carry and manage complex customer interactions.

Today, as processes become increasingly automated, gains from efficiency are harder to achieve and the ability to collaborate is becoming a key source of competitive advantage. These days, we need to access ecosystems through platforms. In other words, value is created at the center of complex networks and the center of any network is always a chaotic place.

And that’s why managers need to embrace complexity. Not because it will make their enterprise more efficient—it won’t—but because that’s what will allow them to create maximum value in an increasingly complex marketplace.

When to Set Rigid Goals, and When to Be Flexible

When to Set Rigid Goals, and When to Be Flexible Is your problem motivation or follow-through?

Once people have set a goal, they are much more likely to complete it when the steps to achievement are set out in a rigid, restrictive way. While there’s no doubt that a flexible approach encourages more people to adopt a goal, that same flexibility actually hinderes the goal’s completion. 

But why? The answer, it seems, has to do with the limits of people’s decision-making ability.

According to a variety of sources, we are required to make as many as 35,000 decisions a day. So in the context of an already information-overloaded, decision-fatigued workforce, one thing people will likely appreciate is the need to make fewer, not more, decisions. And that’s exactly what a rigid approach to goal pursuit offers.

This insight sheds light on a dilemma often faced by leaders, managers, and anyone else who has the responsibility for setting and monitoring goals. Received wisdom is that a leader sets goals and then gives autonomy to teams to achieve them. This research suggests the exact opposite: Leaders should be flexible in their approach to setting a goal, but once a direction has been agreed on, they should be rigid with the steps to achieve it. Which is best?

The answer, as is very often the case when it comes to people’s behavior, is that context matters. In situations where the goal that is being pursued is a relatively simple one, and the motivation to achieve that goal is quite strong, this research suggests that taking a flexible rather than fixed approach to the steps required to achieve the goal typically works best. However, in situations where the change required is quite hard, or if a leader believes that the motivation levels in her team might be low, creating a rigid sequence and structure should be more effective.

Adopting this “rigid versus flexible” approach to setting goals could even help when it comes to your own achievements. The next time you set a goal for yourself, or your team, think about whether you’re looking for buy-in or follow-through, and set a path to success accordingly.

Better pond, bigger fish

Better pond, bigger fish Developing future leaders isn’t just about putting them through programs. New research points to the critical im...

Developing future leaders is a need for most organizations, and many have invested in impressive leadership development programs aimed at doing just that. Yet most companies report they lack the leaders they need. Deloitte’s 2016 Human Capital Trends study revealed that nearly 30 percent of organizations have weak or very weak leadership pipelines, and nearly 90 percent of organizations see this as a critical business challenge. The lack of adequate leaders jeopardizes companies’ ability to thrive in fast-changing markets.

Now, our new research offers a refreshing perspective: Leadership development happens most effectively in a business context, not just in training sessions. Our analysis shows that, no matter how much organizations focus on delivering sophisticated leadership programs, if prospective leaders are immersed in a workplace that does not support leadership development objectives, such efforts will likely produce limited returns.

Our Leadership Maturity Model illustrates that the least mature companies rely primarily on formal training programs for leadership development; they generally do not focus on the culture and design aspects of their organization as levers of leadership growth. In contrast, the more mature companies embed leadership growth into their daily work processes and culture. 

The organizations with the strongest results in terms of financial and business outcomes were those that develop leaders by connecting them with other leaders, and providing continuing opportunities for emerging and growing leaders to exchange information, knowledge, and new ideas about the company identity and leadership profile.

The key question to answer, then, is: What are the practices and activities that comprise the right kind of organization to develop the best leaders? Out of 111 potential practices we tested in our survey, the data revealed more than a dozen that were strongly correlated to business and leadership outcomes. Looking closer at these practices, we found five of these critical practices share one underlying theme: Leaders tend to learn best with other leaders and from other leaders—inside or outside of their organization.

1. LET’S TALK ABOUT IT: WHAT DOES SUCCESSFUL LEADERSHIP LOOK LIKE? Many organizations have carefully crafted leadership competency profiles—but relatively few leaders actually know or use them. 
2. HAVE YOU TAKEN A RISK TODAY? FOSTERING A CLIMATE OF EXPLORATION AND EXPERIMENTATION. To work effectively in fast-changing markets and technologies, budding leaders need to build up their risk tolerance.
3. SPREAD IT LIKE WILDFIRE: KNOWLEDGE-SHARING AS A TOOL FOR LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT. A winning business strategy is not enough to stay competitive; business leaders also need to be aware of what’s going on in the larger organization and external environment. 
4. SEE THE WORLD: EXPOSING LEADERS TO OTHER LEADERS, NEW CONTEXTS, AND NOVEL CHALLENGES. One of the key findings of this study is that the learning methodology that is most effective for leadership development is exposure to peers and colleagues, as well as to consumer feedback, new external contexts, and social networks.
5. MAKING CONTACT: THE IMPORTANCE OF STRONG TIES BETWEEN HR AND BUSINESS LEADERS. The most mature companies we studied seemed to have found a way to create a symbiosis in which HR uses its expertise in leadership development to collaborate closely with business leaders, who apply and model leadership learning in the workplace.

The most effective way to promote social leadership is by setting the expectation that leadership happens in social settings every single day. Our research shows that this socialized approach works—and that organizations that use it have more capable leaders and stronger business outcomes.

What It Takes to Truly Be ‘One of Us’

What It Takes to Truly Be ‘One of Us’ In a number of countries, people place a low premium on the importance of being native born to national identity...

The ethnic, linguistic and cultural background of migrants has triggered intense debates over the benefits and the costs of growing diversity and the risk of open borders to national identity. 

Debates over what it means to be a “true” American, Australian, German or other nationality have often highlighted the importance of a person being born in a particular country. But contrary to such rhetoric, a Pew Research Center survey finds that people generally place a relatively low premium on a person’s birthplace. 

These are the findings from a cross-national poll by Pew Research Center, conducted in 14 countries among 14,514 respondents from April 4 to May 29, 2016.

Majorities in every country surveyed say it is very important to speak the dominant language to be considered truly a national of that land. This includes a median of 77% in Europe and majorities in Japan (70%), the U.S. (70%), Australia (69%) and Canada (59%). In addition, sharing national customs and traditions is very important to many people’s sense of “who is us.” 

The survey also asked about the link between religious affiliation and national identity. About a third (32%) of people in the U.S. believe it is very important to be Christian to be considered truly American. This contrasts with 54% of Greeks who say this, but only 7% of Swedes.

Across the countries surveyed, there are significant differences in how the youngest and oldest generations view national identity. In the U.S., people ages 50 and older (40%) are more likely than those ages 18 to 34 (21%) to say it is very important that a person be born in the country to be considered truly American. The generations differ even more sharply over the importance of national customs and traditions. In the U.S., people ages 50 and older (55%) are far more likely than those ages 18 to 34 (28%) to say sharing such cultural elements is very important to being truly American.

In many countries, the debate over national identity is a partisan one. In the U.S., more than eight-in-ten Republicans (83%) say language proficiency is a very important requisite for being truly American. Fewer independents (67%) share that strong belief and even fewer Democrats (61%) agree. Among Republicans, 60% say that for a person to be considered a true American it is very important that he or she share U.S. culture. Only 40% of independents and 38% of Democrats agree that this is very important to being truly American.

A clear partisan split in the U.S. also exists on the importance of being Christian. More than four-in-ten Republicans (43%) say it is a very important part of being an American. Fewer Democrats (29%) and independents (26%) share this view.

Paul's Update Special 2/10

How to Lead with an Open Mind ChiefExecutive.net | Chief Executive magazine

How to Lead with an Open Mind ChiefExecutive.net | Chief Executive magazine True open-mindedness, the kind described by Laszlo Bock, is a critical, but unappreciated component of CEO leade...

As a trait first measured by social psychologists in the ’50s, open-mindedness has not been studied in relation to leadership effectiveness. Here are the key characteristics of open-mindedness and how it can be cultivated by organizational leaders.

What does “open-minded” mean in organizational life?

Open-mindedness means being receptive to new ideas and new information. In organizational life, it has several dimensions:

• An openness to internally generated inspiration or innovation (creative dimension)
• An openness to the ideas of others in the organization (collaborative or team dimension)
• An openness to new trends and needs evident in customers and markets (external sensing dimension)

How to develop open-mindedness

Guided self-reflection can help you cultivate the collaborative dimension of open-mindedness. Either solo or in concert with a coach/thought partner, use the following prompts:

• Are you able to admit you’re wrong? Dissect recent disagreements to examine whether you were appropriately defending your position or shutting out others’ opinions and important observations.
• Can you describe instances where you, as a leader, changed your mind on a fundamental organizational issue?
• Are there key people in your organization whom you turn to because they will give you the “unvarnished truth?”
• Can you describe a time when your team took your initial point of view or decision, reworked it, and came out with a better decision? How did you respond?
• As a leader, do you promote or hinder open-mindedness as part of the culture? As the CEO you can elevate the importance of open-mindedness as both a value and a behavior.

Open-mindedness is foundational to both good decision-making and organization-wide engagement.

How GE Modernized the Annual Performance Review

How GE Modernized the Annual Performance Review The annual performance review is out of sync with markets that change overnight and company goals that evolve ...

GE is currently one of the largest companies trying to modernize their annual reviews to maximize employee motivation and align their goals with FastWorks, the company’s initiative for lean and nimble workflow. 

How to Modernize the Performance Review

• Create a platform for continual assessment. GE managers and employees check in throughout the year, and use a mobile app to provide each other praise and constructive messages. 
• Reward progress, not just being right. Following their initiative to create room for innovation in the company, GE rewards employees for asking questions and learning rather than simply rewarding them for being right. 
• Give rewards throughout the year. 
• Meet for a brief annual summary. In addition to frequent check-ins, managers are encouraged to meet with employees for an annual summary to talk about the feedback they have received throughout the year. 
• Don’t limit employees to a label. Instead of rating employees in five categories ranging from “role model” to “unsatisfactory,” GE managers use the information to look at the bigger picture and evaluate the employee on different capacities such as customer service, problem-solving skills, and improvement throughout the year. 

Takeaway: Provide employees with continuous feedback and reward learning processes and progress to foster adaptability and innovation. 

Innovators: Are You a Challenger or a Defender?

Innovators: Are You a Challenger or a Defender? Understanding your personal strength as an innovator can help guide your career choices.

Take the quiz to find out if you are a challenger or defender.

What Is Critical Thinking, Anyway?

What Is Critical Thinking, Anyway? A long-time faculty member shares the talk he gives to his own students on the first day of the semester.

The longer I teach (I’m now in my 32nd year) the more I’m convinced that the best thing we can do for our students is help them learn to think for themselves. That’s why I recommend talking to students on the first day of class about critical thinking. What is it? Why is it important? How can they learn to do it? 

Critical thinking, as the term suggests, has two components. The first is thinking — applying your brain to the issues at hand, disciplining yourself to grapple with difficult concepts for as long as necessary in order to comprehend and internalize them. 

Actual thinking requires deep and protracted exposure to the subject matter — through close reading, for example, or observation. It entails collecting, examining, and evaluating evidence, and then questioning assumptions, making connections, formulating hypotheses, and testing them. It culminates in clear, concise, detailed, and well-reasoned arguments that go beyond theory to practical application. 

The second component of critical thinking is the critical part. To be “critical” means to be objective, or as objective as humanly possible. Understanding that we’re not objective, by nature, and striving mightily to be objective, anyway, is about as good as most of us can do. To be critical also means to be analytical, to be able to look at a problem or question and break it down into its component parts. Finally to be critical means to be dispassionate, to be able to separate your emotions from the situation at hand. 

What better place than in a college classroom, where you’re exposed to all kinds of ideas and information, including some you don’t like?