There is a lot of fear in the economy right now. But hunkering down isn't necessarily the right strategy. If you want to thrive, not just survive, you need to keep innovation at the top of your priority list.

There are three beliefs that may be hiding out in your organization and killing innovation before it can even lift its head.

1. It's dangerous to be seen as having participated in an experiment that failed.
This belief is the source of most CYA activity. Don't let it spread in your team. Mistakes are a huge learning and innovation resource. They should be mined like gold for your company's future treasures.

2. Mistakes are embarrassing.
Most of us get a lot of negative messages about making mistakes from our parents and teachers as we are growing up. In the workplace, you want to overcome those negative messages so that the team can learn from mistakes. Find ways to share the learning with the team without anyone having to feel ashamed about the mistake.

3. What people think matter more than results.
These days people are worried about losing their jobs; there is a feeling that you need to look good or "you could be next." Be care that this mindset doesn’t eat your organization alive. If everyone is worried about what others think, the truly novel ideas will go underground.

If you see these beliefs in action in your team, it"s a good sign that innovation is suffering. And if innovation is suffering, your bottom line will suffer too!

Ferret out these beliefs and use your leadership role to help overturn them. For more on how to do that, read Chapter 6 of my book, The Fourth Factor: Managing Corporate Culture.

What do you see blocking innovation in your organization? Post a comment and tell us about it.

Labels: fear, innovation, leadership, learning

The economy is in a mess and the technology sector is suffering badly. Except for Apple. Even with Jobs on medical leave, Apple continues to produce good results. Apple received Fortune Magazine's "Most Admired Companies" top rank. In the detailed categories, they were #1 for innovation, people management, and quality of goods/services.

You could hardly pick three variables on the list that are more tightly linked. Apple is widely known for creating a climate where employees can be creative. It's high on Jobs' list of priorities. In fact, that's one of the main reasons investors get so nervous about Jobs' health. He has created a culture where it's expected that designers are swinging for the fence with new designs.

Creating a healthy culture that supports performance is a key role of the CEO and certainly a central part of people management. It leads to innovation and to quality products/service, the other two "best in class" items in Fortune's summary for Apple.

As a leader, ask yourself – what am I doing to create a culture that supports my employees in making their absolute best contributions to the organization? If you're not sure your team is doing everything they should be, ask me about getting a leadership team assessment.
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The Fourth Factor: Managing Corporate Culture
Available from Amazon.com

Labels: apple, corporate culture, innovation, leadership

"Your key people must grow as fast as you want your organization to grow. That is the advice of o a CEO who was responsible for fueling his organization's growth from $40M to $80M over the past few years.

If you expect your organization to grow revenue or expand market share, how will you do that? It's tempting to pay attention only to the external-facing factors such as marketing and new products. But it's just as important to look internally.

Look, I know it's a tough economy. But your company's future is at stake. Don't let the "hunker down” mentality blind you to opportunities to enhance your most important asset. Your key employees, whether they are senior managers or technical gurus, need to be continually growing their skills and knowledge.

Here are three strategies to make that happen.

1. Create a culture that supports risk-taking and development.
If it's not safe to take risks, your employees will not grow rapidly. Create a culture where mistakes are accepted, in fact encouraged, as long as learning follows. For more on this, read chapter 6 of The Fourth Factor.

2. Encourage each individual to drive her own growth.
Ask each key employee what new skills or knowledge s/he would like to gain this year. Make time and funds available; bring books or articles relevant to each person's learning agenda.

3. Use team time to enhance the team's leadership capacity.
Your senior team should spend at least a full day together once a quarter to address business problems that are more than today's "fire drill.” Use that time to upgrade your team. For more on successful business retreats, read about New Territory Offsites.

Use every opportunity to let employees know that you expect them to continually develop and will support them any way you can.

Growing your team provides the fuel to grow your business!

Labels: growth, innovation, leadership

Hooray – in just a week, I’m leaving for vacation! I’m exited to have some time off, explore new places, meet new people, and just generally unwind. It’s been about two years since I took more than just a long weekend so I’m feeling somewhat overdue for a break.

The break is important to me personally but it’s also a key part of keeping my creativity and my energy high for my work. It recharges my brain and gets me refreshed for the next project. Basically, it’s good for my productivity and therefore my bottom line.

How about you? When is the last time you took at least two weeks off work? So long you can't remember? If so, you might consider taking a real vacation soon.

I can imagine that many of you are thinking, "Yeah, yeah - when I have the time I'll think about it." Perhaps it seems like your own renewal is a luxury, an indulgence you'll consider when all your work is done. I want to encourage you to view it more as an investment in your organization's success.

Answer these three questions:

1. Does your performance level significantly affect the results your organization achieves?

2. Is your performance level affected by your mental state, whether you are tired or alert, energized or burned out, satisfied or frustrated?

3. Are you currently feeling a bit fried from working too hard and too long?

If you answered "yes" to even two of these questions, you know where I'm going with this. YOU are a key asset to your organization. That asset should be managed in a way that increases its value. That means that your personal renewal is vital to your organization's success. So go ahead, take a break. You deserve it and so does your organization.

I'll talk to you again in June, when I'm refreshed and renewed.

Labels: leadership

I recently had a chance to catch up with Julie Puentes, one of the graduates of the MSOLE (Masters of Science in Organizational Leadership and Ethics) program at St. Edward's. She's integrated a lifelong love of horses with a passion for authentic leadership to create some amazing development opportunities for leaders. Here are some snippets from our conversation. You can read more about Julie's work at www.LeadershipBridges.com.

I love your work with the horses as a vehicle for developing leadership. I know you love horses but why horses for leadership development?
Horses provide a safe and fun environment to practice and experiment with your emotions, actions, and intuition. They act as feedback agents for us, reacting to our most subtle changes in thoughts, emotions, intention, and focus. The horses are not judgmental in their reactions to us, but they do react in very clear and immediate ways in response to our behavior and feelings, so we cannot help but to become aware of the effect we are having on them and others. It enables people to take a cerebral idea and then bring into an actual experience that can easily be translated back to the workplace and interactions with people. It is also accurate because horses react authentically all the time. It can be much easier to know where you stand with a horse than with people sometimes!

The awareness leaders gain in the exercises with the horses goes a long way in helping them act and communicate from a place of authenticity. Authenticity is important when you talk about leadership effectiveness because it creates resonance among individuals and teams. Resonance means that a leader has struck an emotional chord with others by tapping into their emotions and is thus able to move them in a positive direction.

So getting unfiltered feedback is important to our self-awareness?
Yes, horses help us look at ourselves honestly and give us an accurate portrayal about which of our behaviors work and which ones don’t. They help us utilize our intuition, effectively direct our intention, and give us immediate positive feedback when we are being authentic. So, a leader gets a crash course in building his or her emotional intelligence, develops awareness and the ability to be authentic and create resonance.

Good stuff, Julie. How does that help the leader be more successful?
These skills translate into improving a leader’s ability to run his business because he will be better able to:
• Develop teams that are, congruent and engaged which increases productivity.
• Drive a business culture that fosters open two-way communication and dialogue in which people feel comfortable delivering bad news as well as good news so that everyone has the information they need, including the leader himself.
This open and honest environment promotes better decision-making from the leader and his employees.

No question that this has a huge impact on the bottom-line of the business. This is truly just the tip of the iceberg of what can be achieved with more authenticity in the workplace. The horses are a wonderful, fun, incredibly effective, experiential way to explore this and enhance leadership.

Thanks for sharing these ideas with my blog readers, Julie!

PS. For those of you in Central Texas, Julie is leading an open enrollment workshop at the Crossings, March 31-April 3. Great opportunity to learn more about this wonderful work!

For more information about Julie or her workshops and coaching: www.leadershipbridges.com or jpuentes@leadershipbridges.com.

Labels: interviews, leadership, learning

It's happening again - another founder returning to the helm when things aren't going well. Can Schultz do for Starbucks what Jobs has done for Apple?

Today's Wall Street Journal (January 8, 2008) notes that Schultz plans to improve the customer experience and streamline management. His objectives include "re-igniting the emotional attachment with customers." Sure sounds like culture to me.

One of the most common challenges with the transition from the founding CEO to his replacement is that the culture has developed around the CEO's personality, style, and values. Some of that may be conscious and explicit but much of it "just happens." The organization often isn't aware of the specific assets and liabilities of the culture until well into the transition to the new CEO.

In the case of Starbucks, some of the internal practices (aka culture) that made Starbucks a huge success slowly drifted away under new leadership. Like Jobs at Apple, Schultz has a distinct style, his mojo, that helped make the organization successful. Can he reignite the organization with that style? My bet would be yes, he can. And that's a solid start to getting the numbers back on track.

How is your personal leadership style reflected in the way your organization does business? If you had a "culture balance sheet," what would your assets and liabilities be?

Linda Ford, PhD

Labels: change, corporate culture, leadership

I'm so excited to tell you that my new book, The Fourth Factor: Managing Corporate Culture, is here! It's available on Amazon and at other retailers. The celebration is Thursday, November 1. If you're in the Austin area and would like to come, just drop me a note (see the Contact page of the website) and I'll send you the details.

Now that the book is on Amazon, I'd love to have more reviews. The first 3 people to send me a link to their review of the paperback edition of the book before November 6 will get a free FlashDeck of the 800 pound Gorilla ($14.97 value - see http://www.fordbusinessconsulting.com/ecommerce/flashdeck.html for more details.) Just go to the Amazon book page, scroll down to "Customer Reviews" and and click on "write your own review."

Here's a short excerpt from the book that talks about the Gorilla's Guide and its impact on employee behavior. Download a sample chapter now!

EXCERPT
So much of culture is outside of our awareness. You and your employees often behave the way you do out of habit, in unconscious conformance with the culture. It takes repetition of the new behaviors over time to make a shift in the culture. Everyone needs to see evidence of the messages in action over and over.

It's a little like watching a mystery movie. You're not quite sure who is the good guy and who is the bad guy. Little snippets provide clues; then there is the scene where two people exchange a glance, and you understand what's going on. Without the earlier clues, it wouldn't have made sense; each glimpse seeded the idea. It's all about consistency and repetition.

Events and stories work the same way in the Gorilla's Guide. Each one builds on another as the pattern emerges. It's essential that you develop consistency across both formal and informal systems so there is a preponderance of stories that support the directives. The mutually reinforcing interaction between the Gorilla's Guide and behavior makes culture self-perpetuating. That's why it's so essential that your official and informal systems reflect the directives consistently.

Buy the book on Amazon today!

Labels: corporate culture, leadership

Today's Wall Street Journal (Oct. 23, 2007) has a short note about companies that forbid the use of email on certain days as a way of forcing employees to have work/life balance. Readers responded with both sides of the argument.

Here's a simpler and more flexible strategy. Use your leadership to set the tone.

If you send employees emails on weekends and evenings, there is an unspoken message that an after-hours response is required. Do that enough and pretty soon everyone knows that you've got to check your email day and night. So, unless your message is truly urgent, hold that email until the start of the workday. If you really need to handle your own email during non-work hours because of your schedule commitments, compose your messages but don’t' send them till work hours. (And do ask yourself if you really have to do email in the evenings or if you want to consider a little work/life balance improvement of your own.)

If you and other leaders in your organization hold off on non-work time emails consistently over time, employees will feel less pressured to handle business emails during evenings and weekends. That way, they can make their own choices about work/life balance.

What habits have developed in your organization that concern you? Drop me a note and I'll talk about the most interesting ones in future columns (without identifying you of course).

Linda Ford, PhD

Labels: corporate culture, leadership

OK, I've been traveling a lot these days. You know what that means --- I'm reading USA Today because that's the paper that shows up on my doorstep at the hotels.

Today I read that only 39% of companies provide formal performance feedback on a quarterly or biannual basis. The rest provide annual feedback or none at all. The good news is that's up from 29% five years ago. The bad news is that organizations are leaving a lot of potential on the table by passing up so many good opportunities to improve performance. Frequent and open dialogue about strengths and weaknesses is vital to your organization's success.

Regardless of the rhythm of your company's formal system, how often do you have a focused one-on-one dialogue with members of your team about their successes and their development opportunities?

I challenge you to find the time to have that conversation at least once a month and see what a difference it makes. Let me know how it goes.

Labels: change, corporate culture, leadership, learning