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.
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.
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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:
- Collaborative: constantly tapping disparate people and ideas; creating intersections of random ideas.
- Experiential: think in motion; bring ideas to life by leaping the chasm from theory to reality.
- Futuristic: always thinking about what's next; energized by future possibilities instead of today's challenges.
- Fluid: turn ambiguity into clarity; uncharted territory is the path to new ideas.
- Imaginative: vivid mind that is always creating new things; ability to turn wild thinking into real world ideas.
- Inquisitive: highly curious; recognize innovation is in the questions, not the answers.
- Instinctual: tap the more intuitive part of the mind; connect dots in new and meaningful ways.
- Risk Taker: adventurous spirit willing to take bold action; willing to pursue unproven yet high potential ideas.
- 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)
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