Become a More Collaborative Leader

 If you rely on a decisive, command-and-control leadership style, you may find yourself not only at odds with your colleagues, but also viewed as a liability to the organization. There are several mindset shifts you can make to build trust with your peers and become a more collaborative leader. Start by turning inward and cultivating some humility. Ask yourself why you have such a hard time collaborating around decisions. Do you struggle to trust other people? Could you be undervaluing your colleagues’ contributions? Are you afraid of slowing processes down? Whatever the source of your hesitation, identify it, and remember that success is about accomplishing business objectives—not getting your way. Asking for input and seeking different perspectives is not a weakness—it’s an advantage that will only make your leadership more effective. Be honest about what you don't know and pursue that information or data with an open curiosity alongside your colleagues. Finally, position your opinion as one option, not the option. When you opt to present your preference as just one possibility, you implicitly open the door to others that could be even stronger.

Seek Out the Leadership Feedback You Need

 

Seek Out the Leadership Feedback You Need

Being a leader doesn’t make you immune to feedback. In fact, the quality of your leadership depends on your ability to receive and implement feedback—especially when circumstances are challenging or uncertain. To get an accurate pulse on your leadership performance, first, actively seek out negative feedback. If what you’re hearing from your colleagues is all feel-good praise and no hard-to-hear criticism, you need to work harder to get them to criticize you. To do this, come up with go-to questions you can ask your manager, your peers, and your direct reports. Avoid yes-or-no questions (“Do you have any feedback for me?”) and instead invite specific suggestions (“What’s one thing you need me to do differently?”). No matter how good your go-to question is, the other person is likely to feel uncomfortable; embrace that discomfort. Try asking your question and then remaining silent. Count to six, slowly, in your head. Very few people can endure six full seconds of silence—they’ll tell you something. Then, listen carefully. Really try to understand what they’re saying rather than focusing on how you’re going to respond. Look for the criticism. Often people will sandwich the negative thought between two positive ones. Finally, the best way to ensure you’ll continue receiving feedback is to follow up and share the actions you’ve taken based on what you heard.

Leadership Isn’t About Your Job Title

 

Leadership Isn’t About Your Job Title

You don’t need to be the boss to be a leader. Here are three actions you can take to hone your leadership skills right now and become a highly respected and influential team member. Embrace your existing strengths. Start by asking yourself: Which tasks at work feel most energizing and natural to you? Which projects do you excel at and enjoy? What unique perspective do you bring to the table? Your strengths, identity, and interests are what set you apart. The more you understand yourself, the more you’ll be able to carry yourself with the confidence of a leader. Devote time to daily development. Improving your skills will help you expand your impact and influence. For example, maybe your organization values leaders who can back up their ideas with hard data and insights, or those who project empathy, curiosity, and compassion. Whatever it is, take note and prioritize developing those skills and projecting growth on a daily basis. Connect with people. Whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert (or somewhere in between), you can establish the kinds of meaningful relationships that are key to building influence on your team. Commit to being vulnerable, authentic, and empathetic in your interactions with your colleagues.

3 factors of how ''great'' companies stand out.

 From the book: Good to Great, what the “great” companies did differently resulted from three main factors that were more impactful than other factors like technology, mergers and acquisitions, and change management initiatives:

1.Disciplined people: having leaders committed to the long-term success of their organizations and getting the right people on the bus.

2.Disciplined thought: Sustained great results depend upon an overarching organizational culture of discipline.

3.Disciplined action: Every team member is rather afforded the degree of personal empowerment and latitude that is necessary to bring the firm’s envisioned objectives into existence.

Important to realize that this process takes time to see true results and sustained performance.

Simplicity in Business: To Be Simple Is To Be Focused

 “In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Successful businesses grow over time. Too often, however, as businesses grow, they take on additional complexities. Such complexities may detract focus from a company’s primary mission and purpose. A healthier way to bring about business growth is by mastering simplicity. Organizational leaders can take the first steps to achieving simplicity by staying focused on defined goals and eliminating processes that deter from those goals.

What Is Simplicity? 

To some, simplicity may sound like something to avoid rather than strive for. After all, don't businesses have to grow to become more profitable?  The word “grow” doesn’t just mean increasing revenue, however; it can also include cutting out unnecessary processes.

In this vein, simplicity means sticking to streamlined processes that have not only been well-designed, but are also regularly maintained. By managing with simplicity in mind, companies will ensure they don't expend any time or energy on anything but developing the business. 

What’s Wrong With Being Too Complex?

As businesses expand, both managers and employees try to accomplish a multitude of tasks simultaneously. Organizations have become so convoluted that the objective of implementing new processes is often to manage internal complexity, rather than to streamline existing operations. Instead of striving for consolidation, many businesses today find it easier to add layers of complexity throughout their organizations. They do this by hiring more employees, having multi-step processes and continually introducing new ones, implementing multiple software solutions, etc.

Thus, complexity becomes encouraged, instead of stunted, in areas ranging from products, to website design, to organizational structure. As a result, it takes longer than usual to make decisions because information has to be digested and transmitted through a host of individuals with unclear or overlapping roles. Members of an organization are forced to learn and utilize a myriad of technologies and procedures, which require preliminary training. Also, mistakes become inevitable as employees are trying to work with a mixture of new and old systems. Ultimately, excessive complexity leads to confused and stressed out employees. Moreover, customers will ignore organizations whose messages and products/services are not easy to understand and use.

Tips on Being Focused

The way an organization goes about attaining simplicity is different for every enterprise. However, there are some universal factors to consider for centralizing operations and narrowing your organization's focus.

1. Outline Your Goals

Any organization looking to simplify should first outline explicit goals. Goals can be based on increasing sales, acquiring new customers, eradicating outdated systems, reducing waste, etc. Regardless, organizations need to prioritize what is most important to them before striving to accomplish more with less. Keep the list of goals short, as an extensive to-do list is counterproductive to simplifying. Be focused on enhancing areas of your organization that are making money and ousting those that are wasting it. Having fewer projects to focus on will assure that each one is completed effectively and efficiently, and that details won’t get overlooked because employees have too much on their plate.

2. Identify Your Obstacles

After deciding upon fundamental goals, organizations should determine the top challenges that are holding them back, according to Forbes contributor Josh Bersin. He writes that this part requires hard work. Organizational leaders need to take the time to analyze and document pain points and their implications. Are there processes in place that are 20+ steps long? Is the internal communication system slow? Are your marketing messages aligned with your organization’s vision? To develop simplicity, take a hard look at what areas of the business need the most improvement.

3. Select a Strategy

Bersin goes on to say that after determining the challenges that your organization is up against, choose a simple tool, process, or technology that addresses its problems and aids in reaching goals. If a new solution is wildly complex, employees won’t respond well to it. Fast Company contributor Faisal Hoque explains three components involved in making decisions surrounding simplicity; Namely, they are discipline, patience and strength. Discipline means saying “no” to things that don’t fit into the master plan. Patience allows for quality of experience. Strength enables organizations to stay focused on a singular purpose.

Business processes and technologies have become more complicated over the years. Instead of taking on new systems that don’t mesh with those already in place and that are hard to implement, businesses should make the effort to make the most of what they already have. All operational changes should be in line with your organization’s principal goals and should encourage simplicity. By staying focused on your organization’s mission, its members, and its audience, you will be on the path towards simplification.

A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making - HBR

 In January 1993, a gunman murdered seven people in a fast-food restaurant in Palatine, a suburb of Chicago. In his dual roles as an administrative executive and spokesperson for the police department, Deputy Chief Walter Gasior suddenly had to cope with several different situations at once. He had to deal with the grieving families and a frightened community, help direct the operations of an extremely busy police department, and take questions from the media, which inundated the town with reporters and film crews. “There would literally be four people coming at me with logistics and media issues all at once,” he recalls. “And in the midst of all this, we still had a department that had to keep running on a routine basis.”

Though Gasior was ultimately successful in juggling multiple demands, not all leaders achieve the desired results when they face situations that require a variety of decisions and responses. All too often, managers rely on common leadership approaches that work well in one set of circumstances but fall short in others. Why do these approaches fail even when logic indicates they should prevail? The answer lies in a fundamental assumption of organizational theory and practice: that a certain level of predictability and order exists in the world. This assumption, grounded in the Newtonian science that underlies scientific management, encourages simplifications that are useful in ordered circumstances. Circumstances change, however, and as they become more complex, the simplifications can fail. Good leadership is not a one-size-fits-all proposition.

We believe the time has come to broaden the traditional approach to leadership and decision making and form a new perspective based on complexity science. (For more on this, see the sidebar “Understanding Complexity.”) Over the past ten years, we have applied the principles of that science to governments and a broad range of industries. Working with other contributors, we developed the Cynefin framework, which allows executives to see things from new viewpoints, assimilate complex concepts, and address real-world problems and opportunities. (Cynefin, pronounced ku-nev-in, is a Welsh word that signifies the multiple factors in our environment and our experience that influence us in ways we can never understand.) Using this approach, leaders learn to define the framework with examples from their own organization’s history and scenarios of its possible future. This enhances communication and helps executives rapidly understand the context in which they are operating.

Understanding Complexity

Complexity is more a way of thinking about the world than a new way of working with mathematical models. Over a ...

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has applied the framework to counterterrorism, and it is currently a key component of Singapore’s Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning program. Over time, the framework has evolved through hundreds of applications, from helping a pharmaceutical company develop a new product strategy to assisting a Canadian provincial government in its efforts to engage employees in policy making.

The framework sorts the issues facing leaders into five contexts defined by the nature of the relationship between cause and effect. Four of these—simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic—require leaders to diagnose situations and to act in contextually appropriate ways. The fifth—disorder—applies when it is unclear which of the other four contexts is predominant.

Using the Cynefin framework can help executives sense which context they are in so that they can not only make better decisions but also avoid the problems that arise when their preferred management style causes them to make mistakes. In this article, we focus on the first four contexts, offering examples and suggestions about how to lead and make appropriate decisions in each of them. Since the complex domain is much more prevalent in the business world than most leaders realize—and requires different, often counterintuitive, responses—we concentrate particularly on that context. Leaders who understand that the world is often irrational and unpredictable will find the Cynefin framework particularly useful.

Simple Contexts: The Domain of Best Practice

Simple contexts are characterized by stability and clear cause-and-effect relationships that are easily discernible by everyone. Often, the right answer is self-evident and undisputed. In this realm of “known knowns,” decisions are unquestioned because all parties share an understanding. Areas that are little subject to change, such as problems with order processing and fulfillment, usually belong here.

Simple contexts, properly assessed, require straightforward management and monitoring. Here, leaders sense, categorize, and respond. That is, they assess the facts of the situation, categorize them, and then base their response on established practice. Heavily process-oriented situations, such as loan payment processing, are often simple contexts. If something goes awry, an employee can usually identify the problem (when, say, a borrower pays less than is required), categorize it (review the loan documents to see how partial payments must be processed), and respond appropriately (either not accept the payment or apply the funds according to the terms of the note). Since both managers and employees have access to the information necessary for dealing with the situation in this domain, a command-and-control style for setting parameters works best. Directives are straightforward, decisions can be easily delegated, and functions are automated. Adhering to best practices or process reengineering makes sense. Exhaustive communication among managers and employees is not usually required because disagreement about what needs to be done is rare.

Nevertheless, problems can arise in simple contexts. First, issues may be incorrectly classified within this domain because they have been oversimplified. Leaders who constantly ask for condensed information, regardless of the complexity of the situation, particularly run this risk.

Second, leaders are susceptible to entrained thinking, a conditioned response that occurs when people are blinded to new ways of thinking by the perspectives they acquired through past experience, training, and success.

Third, when things appear to be going smoothly, leaders often become complacent. If the context changes at that point, a leader is likely to miss what is happening and react too late. In the exhibit “The Cynefin Framework,” the simple domain lies adjacent to the chaotic—and for good reason. The most frequent collapses into chaos occur because success has bred complacency. This shift can bring about catastrophic failure—think of the many previously dominant technologies that were suddenly disrupted by more dynamic alternatives.

The Cynefin Framework

The Cynefin framework helps leaders determine the prevailing operative context so that they can make appropriate ...

Leaders need to avoid micromanaging and stay connected to what is happening in order to spot a change in context. By and large, line workers in a simple situation are more than capable of independently handling any issues that may arise. Indeed, those with years of experience also have deep insight into how the work should be done. Leaders should create a communication channel—an anonymous one, if necessary—that allows dissenters to provide early warnings about complacency.

Finally, it’s important to remember that best practice is, by definition, past practice. Using best practices is common, and often appropriate, in simple contexts. Difficulties arise, however, if staff members are discouraged from bucking the process even when it’s not working anymore. Since hindsight no longer leads to foresight after a shift in context, a corresponding change in management style may be called for.

Complicated Contexts: The Domain of Experts

Complicated contexts, unlike simple ones, may contain multiple right answers, and though there is a clear relationship between cause and effect, not everyone can see it. This is the realm of “known unknowns.” While leaders in a simple context must sense, categorize, and respond to a situation, those in a complicated context must sense, analyze, and respond. This approach is not easy and often requires expertise: A motorist may know that something is wrong with his car because the engine is knocking, but he has to take it to a mechanic to diagnose the problem.

Because the complicated context calls for investigating several options—many of which may be excellent—good practice, as opposed to best practice, is more appropriate. For example, the customary approach to engineering a new cell phone might emphasize feature A over feature B, but an alternative plan—emphasizing feature C—might be equally valuable.

Another example is the search for oil or mineral deposits. The effort usually requires a team of experts, more than one place will potentially produce results, and the location of the right spots for drilling or mining involves complicated analysis and understanding of consequences at multiple levels.

Entrained thinking is a danger in complicated contexts, too, but it is the experts (rather than the leaders) who are prone to it, and they tend to dominate the domain. When this problem occurs, innovative suggestions by nonexperts may be overlooked or dismissed, resulting in lost opportunities. The experts have, after all, invested in building their knowledge, and they are unlikely to tolerate controversial ideas. If the context has shifted, however, the leader may need access to those maverick concepts. To get around this issue, a leader must listen to the experts while simultaneously welcoming novel thoughts and solutions from others. Executives at one shoe manufacturer did this by opening up the brainstorming process for new shoe styles to the entire company. As a result, a security guard submitted a design for a shoe that became one of their best sellers.

Another potential obstacle is “analysis paralysis,” where a group of experts hits a stalemate, unable to agree on any answers because of each individual’s entrained thinking—or ego.

Working in unfamiliar environments can help leaders and experts approach decision making more creatively. For instance, we put retail marketing professionals in several military research environments for two weeks. The settings were unfamiliar and challenging, but they shared a primary similarity with the retail environment: In both cases, the marketers had to work with large volumes of data from which it was critical to identify small trends or weak signals. They discovered that there was little difference between, say, handling outgoing disaffected customers and anticipating incoming ballistic missiles. The exercise helped the marketing group learn how to detect a potential loss of loyalty and take action before a valued customer switched to a competitor. By improving their strategy, the marketers were able to retain far more high-volume business.

Games, too, can encourage novel thinking. We created a game played on a fictional planet that was based on the culture of a real client organization. When the executives “landed” on the alien planet, they were asked to address problems and opportunities facing the inhabitants. The issues they encountered were disguised but designed to mirror real situations, many of which were controversial or sensitive. Because the environment seemed so foreign and remote, however, the players found it much easier to come up with fresh ideas than they otherwise might have done. Playing a metaphorical game increases managers’ willingness to experiment, allows them to resolve issues or problems more easily and creatively, and broadens the range of options in their decision-making processes. The goal of such games is to get as many perspectives as possible to promote unfettered analysis.

Reaching decisions in the complicated domain can often take a lot of time, and there is always a trade-off between finding the right answer and simply making a decision. When the right answer is elusive, however, and you must base your decision on incomplete data, your situation is probably complex rather than complicated.

Complex Contexts: The Domain of Emergence

In a complicated context, at least one right answer exists. In a complex context, however, right answers can’t be ferreted out. It’s like the difference between, say, a Ferrari and the Brazilian rainforest. Ferraris are complicated machines, but an expert mechanic can take one apart and reassemble it without changing a thing. The car is static, and the whole is the sum of its parts. The rainforest, on the other hand, is in constant flux—a species becomes extinct, weather patterns change, an agricultural project reroutes a water source—and the whole is far more than the sum of its parts. This is the realm of “unknown unknowns,” and it is the domain to which much of contemporary business has shifted.

Most situations and decisions in organizations are complex because some major change—a bad quarter, a shift in management, a merger or acquisition—introduces unpredictability and flux. In this domain, we can understand why things happen only in retrospect. Instructive patterns, however, can emerge if the leader conducts experiments that are safe to fail. That is why, instead of attempting to impose a course of action, leaders must patiently allow the path forward to reveal itself. They need to probe first, then sense, and then respond.

There is a scene in the film Apollo 13 when the astronauts encounter a crisis (“Houston, we have a problem”) that moves the situation into a complex domain. A group of experts is put in a room with a mishmash of materials—bits of plastic and odds and ends that mirror the resources available to the astronauts in flight. Leaders tell the team: This is what you have; find a solution or the astronauts will die. None of those experts knew a priori what would work. Instead, they had to let a solution emerge from the materials at hand. And they succeeded. (Conditions of scarcity often produce more creative results than conditions of abundance.)

Another example comes from YouTube. The founders could not possibly have predicted all the applications for streaming video technology that now exist. Once people started using YouTube creatively, however, the company could support and augment the emerging patterns of use. YouTube has become a popular platform for expressing political views, for example. The company built on this pattern by sponsoring a debate for presidential hopefuls with video feeds from the site.

As in the other contexts, leaders face several challenges in the complex domain. Of primary concern is the temptation to fall back into traditional command-and-control management styles—to demand fail-safe business plans with defined outcomes. Leaders who don’t recognize that a complex domain requires a more experimental mode of management may become impatient when they don’t seem to be achieving the results they were aiming for. They may also find it difficult to tolerate failure, which is an essential aspect of experimental understanding. If they try to overcontrol the organization, they will preempt the opportunity for informative patterns to emerge. Leaders who try to impose order in a complex context will fail, but those who set the stage, step back a bit, allow patterns to emerge, and determine which ones are desirable will succeed. (See the sidebar “Tools for Managing in a Complex Context.”) They will discern many opportunities for innovation, creativity, and new business models.

Tools for Managing in a Complex Context

Given the ambiguities of the complex domain, how can leaders lead effectively? Open up the discussion. Complex ...

Chaotic Contexts: The Domain of Rapid Response

In a chaotic context, searching for right answers would be pointless: The relationships between cause and effect are impossible to determine because they shift constantly and no manageable patterns exist—only turbulence. This is the realm of unknowables. The events of September 11, 2001, fall into this category.

In the chaotic domain, a leader’s immediate job is not to discover patterns but to stanch the bleeding. A leader must first act to establish order, then sense where stability is present and from where it is absent, and then respond by working to transform the situation from chaos to complexity, where the identification of emerging patterns can both help prevent future crises and discern new opportunities. Communication of the most direct top-down or broadcast kind is imperative; there’s simply no time to ask for input.

Unfortunately, most leadership “recipes” arise from examples of good crisis management. This is a mistake, and not only because chaotic situations are mercifully rare. Though the events of September 11 were not immediately comprehensible, the crisis demanded decisive action. New York’s mayor at the time, Rudy Giuliani, demonstrated exceptional effectiveness under chaotic conditions by issuing directives and taking action to reestablish order. However, in his role as mayor—certainly one of the most complex jobs in the world—he was widely criticized for the same top-down leadership style that proved so enormously effective during the catastrophe. He was also criticized afterward for suggesting that elections be postponed so he could maintain order and stability. Indeed, a specific danger for leaders following a crisis is that some of them become less successful when the context shifts because they are not able to switch styles to match it.

Moreover, leaders who are highly successful in chaotic contexts can develop an overinflated self-image, becoming legends in their own minds. When they generate cultlike adoration, leading actually becomes harder for them because a circle of admiring supporters cuts them off from accurate information.

Yet the chaotic domain is nearly always the best place for leaders to impel innovation. People are more open to novelty and directive leadership in these situations than they would be in other contexts. One excellent technique is to manage chaos and innovation in parallel: The minute you encounter a crisis, appoint a reliable manager or crisis management team to resolve the issue. At the same time, pick out a separate team and focus its members on the opportunities for doing things differently. If you wait until the crisis is over, the chance will be gone.

Leadership Across Contexts

Good leadership requires openness to change on an individual level. Truly adept leaders will know not only how to identify the context they’re working in at any given time but also how to change their behavior and their decisions to match that context. They also prepare their organization to understand the different contexts and the conditions for transition between them. Many leaders lead effectively—though usually in only one or two domains (not in all of them) and few, if any, prepare their organizations for diverse contexts.

Decisions in Multiple Contexts: A Leader’s Guide

Effective leaders learn to shift their decision-making styles to match changing business environments. Simple, ...

During the Palatine murders of 1993, Deputy Chief Gasior faced four contexts at once. He had to take immediate action via the media to stem the tide of initial panic by keeping the community informed (chaotic); he had to help keep the department running routinely and according to established procedure (simple); he had to call in experts (complicated); and he had to continue to calm the community in the days and weeks following the crime (complex). That last situation proved the most challenging. Parents were afraid to let their children go to school, and employees were concerned about safety in their workplaces. Had Gasior misread the context as simple, he might just have said, “Carry on,” which would have done nothing to reassure the community. Had he misread it as complicated, he might have called in experts to say it was safe—risking a loss of credibility and trust. Instead, Gasior set up a forum for business owners, high school students, teachers, and parents to share concerns and hear the facts. It was the right approach for a complex context: He allowed solutions to emerge from the community itself rather than trying to impose them.• • •

Business schools and organizations equip leaders to operate in ordered domains (simple and complicated), but most leaders usually must rely on their natural capabilities when operating in unordered contexts (complex and chaotic). In the face of greater complexity today, however, intuition, intellect, and charisma are no longer enough. Leaders need tools and approaches to guide their firms through less familiar waters.

In the complex environment of the current business world, leaders often will be called upon to act against their instincts. They will need to know when to share power and when to wield it alone, when to look to the wisdom of the group and when to take their own counsel. A deep understanding of context, the ability to embrace complexity and paradox, and a willingness to flexibly change leadership style will be required for leaders who want to make things happen in a time of increasing uncertainty.

Are You Feeling Less Ambitious?

 You’re used to thinking of yourself as a high achiever, but lately, you haven’t been feeling that usual spark of ambition. Is this wrong? 

Absolutely not! Here are three tactics you can use to make peace with your desire to tone it down—even if that impulse conflicts with your previous vision of yourself. First, adopt a flexible mindset and recognize when it’s time to shift to another strategy. 

This could mean acknowledging that it may be time, after years or decades of grinding hard at work, to reallocate energy toward your health and happiness, family, or hobbies and passions outside of work. Next, understand that there’s no standardized timeline. Your career is a marathon; give yourself the grace to slow down sometimes, take mental breaks, and pace yourself. Finally, figure out what you need in order to grow. 

Moving forward isn’t always a function of getting a raise, making new professional connections, or building your resume. Sometimes it’s a function of changing things up and exposing yourself to new inputs—whether it’s a month-long trip abroad, or a year of stepping back from the grind mentality and focusing on other areas of your life and well-being—that eventually lead to new and different outputs.