Go. Conceive and Deliver Art

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Beautiful non-commissioned work at http://www.heatherperryphoto.com/

More beautiful art conceived and delivered at http://www.heatherperryphoto.com/

In 1943, Richard James was a naval engineer trying to develop a meter designed to monitor horsepower on naval battleships. Richard was working with different types of tension springs when one of the springs fell to the ground. And after it fell to the ground, it kept moving as if stepping away. Astonished and delighted by the odd movement, he immediately thought this would make a fun toy for a child. He had just discovered the slinky.

Swiss chemist Jacques E. Brandenberger was sitting at a restaurant one day in 1900 when he watched a glass of wine spill and seep slowly into the tablecloth. His thought in the moment was: wouldn’t it be better to have a kind of coating to the cloth that would prevent absorption, so it would be easy to clean up. He spent the next ten years of his life working on this side project to invent what is now called cellophane.

Some cool innovations are recognized immediately, while others are conceptualized and take years of persistence of realize. Yet there are two primary ingredients that pervade accidental innovation: Curiosity and Play.

Or to put it another way, these were non-commissioned works by an artist.

Almost twenty years ago, Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and her colleagues conducted an interesting study. They asked 23 artists to randomly select 10 of their commissioned works and 10 of their non-commissioned works. They then took the 460 works of art to a space where they could be evaluated by a team of art curators, historians, and experts – all of whom had not been told which was commissioned (paid) art, and which art was created at the self-direction and initiation of the artist

Amabile and her colleagues reported:

“Our results were quite startling…the commissioned works were rated as significantly less creative than the non-commissioned works, yet they were not rated as different in technical quality.”

In other words, it was the non-commissioned, self-directed art that was found to be more creative, interesting, and valuable. Go, conceive and create, undirected, non-commissioned work.

The Dividends of Giving

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helping-handsIn the wake of hurricane Katrina, numerous people throughout the gulf coast area had lost homes, and were in need of basic food, shelter and care. With sporadic electricity available in the region, cash became critical to sustaining people’s lives.

Serving customers from Texas to Florida, Hancock Bank was one of the primary banking providers in the region. But without power at their banks or ATM facilities there was no way their customers could get access to funds to buy basic needs like clothing, food and shelter. Even if some of their branch locations were able to open, often either the customer had lost their identification in the storm or the bank itself and had power and access to people’s account information.

A few of the managers at Hancock Bank did something remarkable. Reminded of the original charter of the bank to serve communities first, profits second, they established makeshift human-powered ATMs. They decided to provide $200 cash to anyone who asked for it. That’s right. Without either proof of identification or verification of account information, Hancock Bank gave up to $200 to anyone who asked for it in exchange for a written IOU.

During those critical weeks following Katrina, Hancock Bank employees literally laundered money from destroyed ATM machines and gave out millions in increments of several hundred dollars each. Of the millions they gave out, asking only written promissory notes in return, less than $300,000 (1%) was not returned. And in the months that followed the disaster, their cash deposits from existing and new customers ballooned 40% as customers repaid the loan and new customers joined. Andrew Zolli tells the story here.

Shortly after that Hancock Bank Chairman George Schloegel was elected Mayor of Gulfport, MS with over 90% of the vote.

Do the Right Thing

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the-hard-thing-is-the-right-thingIt never really occured to me. It didn’t occur to my wife. Candy never thought of it either. The morning when Annie and I got in the car, it did cross my mind, but only briefly enough to send a quick text to Candy asking, “Do you think it’s OK if I bring Annie?” It never seemed such a concern that I should call in advance or question it. Although alas, that decision changed the day.

Our team decided a year ago to have a group event and volunteer our time and energy giving back to communities. We picked a GoodWill Center. Candy arranged the time and volunteer effort with the center, and at the last minute I decided to include my five year old daughter in this wonderful exercise of giving. She’s just in kindergarten, and well shucks, what better education than to include her in a day to giving back to those in need?

Annie and I drove the hour from Portland Maine to the GoodWill center and presented ourselves, along with the clothes and toys we had gathered that morning to donate. We were greeted by a floor supervisor who led us to the assigned task of the day. In the warehouse he brought batches of newly donated goods which we were to sort into bins to later be placed on the floor and sold to needing families. Annie thought it was awesome! digging through interesting clothes and sorting them into bins for the WoodWill center to sell.

While we set up shop and prepared to attack the task, the supervisor person re-emerged and declared that we could not stay because Annie was in violation of their safety regulations. It wasn’t a kind dismissal, but delivered more in the tone of “well rules-are-rules” sort of way.

Well, I understand following policy but still asked to talk to the manager who decided this. This was the same decider who was still hiding in her office. Annie and I walked to the closed office of the GoodWill site manager to politely inquire. My intention was just to build rapport and understand her concern. Well, immediately it was clear she was adamant – five year olds cannot be on the “sorting floor”. Ok, I get that but we’re just throwing clothes into big boxes and Annie would love it. She would, in fact, be awesome at it. We were never asked to sign any type of release and obviously I’m there as her parent responsible for her behavior and actions.

Nope, not a chance. Perhaps we could distribute the sorted clothes on the floor in the showroom? Nope, not in the policy. My daughter started to cry, and I knew there was no negotiating. It would only make things more difficult for her. We left, had a nice lunch and I tried to get Annie to forget about the unyeilding people at GoodWill.

Here’s the thing – consistently the best places to work communicate clearly that they trust their people. W.L. Gore, Umpqua Bank, NetApp, and many others have, for example, have adopted travel policies of “do the right thing.” GoodWill has a chance to communicate clearly to their people in the field that they have an opportunity to “do the right thing” as well. Or at the very least be human when delivering sad news.

Beat Your Own Awesomeness, Lead by Doing

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einstein-making-a-differenceFirst ask yourself, “Do I behave with high integrity?” The majority of us would respond that yes, we do.

Now ask yourself, “Do my colleagues share my same high level of integrity?” A far fewer number of people would agree that their colleagues and peers possess our own elevated level of integrity.

Why? Because we confuse our intention with our action. We can get intoxicated on how fabulous we are and confuse that with the actual impact we are making in the world. It’s the same reason 80% of executives believe their company creates a superior product in the marketplace, while only 8% of their own customers would agree. Or why 86% of MBA students believe they are better looking than their classmates. Or why almost all of us think we are better drivers than everyone else.

To overcome our own awesomeness, and to lead from a place of credibility, try these two tricks

First, Lead by Doing: If you ask the five people on your team, each individually, how much they each contributed to the last project, the total will be well over 100%. Because we all overestimate our own value. Get over yourself. You aren’t above doing the dishes, cleaning the sink, or taking out the trash. True, others around you have become better at managing projects, or generating marketing copy, or advising on the user experience…but by walking a mile in someone’s shoes you’ll learn quite a bit about the effort and value of everyone’s contribution.

Now, Only Do What Only You Can Do: Now that you know the reality of what it’s like to get the monthly newsletter out, or write 500 words of PR copy, you understand it isn’t a cakewalk. In a conversation with Lisa Vos of Melbourne Business School, she explained that the next key to developing oneself if to find our most compelling signal in the noise and to accentuate it. That is, in order to develop distinct value, we need to emphasis and develop that which only we can do with distinction.

Labels, mazes and stupefying change

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think_differentFrancis Hesselbein was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States of America’s highest civilian honor by President Clinton, in 1998. She is founder of the Hesselbein Leadership Institute. Her books have been translated into 29 languages, and she is the recipient of 22 honorary doctorate degrees. She has been awarded nearly every prestigous award of leadership excellence you can imagine, inducted into Halls of Fame, sits on numerous boards, was appointed to two commissions on community leadership by George Bush… You get the idea.

Last week I sat in and listened to an interview as she spoke with my collague Taavo about what it means to be a leader. She kept returning to a few key phrases throughout the conversation. One expression she repeated consistently was “Ban the heirarchy.”

That expression kept jumping into my mind as I read through a study on the relationship between giving heirarchical labels to individuals and its negative impact on their ability to solve complex puzzles. No one I talk to seems to disagree with the fact that as we live in a world of stupefying change, the ability to digest complicated information and then transform it into meaningful ideas or innovation is critically valuable. And yet, we often persist in such debilitating labels.

In the study called Names Can Hurt You, a group of researchers from the World Bank went to rural India and conducted a series of problem-solving tests with 6th and 7th grade students from both the highest and lowest castes. Before the test began, each student was privately interviewed and asked their name, caste, father’s name, grandfather’s name and village. Then they were divided into three groups. Each group was first asked to solve mazes on their own. And then the researchers created a competitive tournament game in which the students were incentivized to perform better. The best performers gained peer recognition and cash.

The first group, known as Caste Concealed, consisted of 3 high caste students (H) and 3 low caste students (L). Because the students were selected from multiple villages, and because none of their personal information was shared with other students, a child might reasonably assume the others are unaware of their caste. As expected, in this group all 6 students performed comparably well on the puzzles, and responded positively to the social and monetary incentives introduced in the competitive tournament game.

The second group, know as Caste Revealed, again consisted of 3H and 3L students. However, at the beginning of the session the researchers read aloud each child’s background information, revealing their identity and caste. In this group all students did not improve or respond to incentives in the tournament portion of the test.

The third group, Caste Segregated, consisted of 6H and 6L students, and again all identities were revealed prior to starting the session. In this group, not only did the students remain unresponsive to competitive incentives, it had a negative impact on the lower caste students. Once their identity was revealed in a larger group they performed even worse when incentivized to do better.

Huh! Imagine that: in team-based problem-solving environments, when certain members of the group are labeled as inferior, they perform worse on complex problems.

Avoid labels, speak in terms of “we.” And in the language of world-class innovative – and non-heirarchical – company W.L. Gore, “No one may commit another.” That is to say, you may invite or challenge people to take on tasks and accountability but you may not commit another person to doing something. In their culture, people have influence based on the compelling power of their ideas and leadership ability to get things done, not based on their title.

The Flying Handshake

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face-to-face-600I met a guy named Marcus who was based in Germany and ran an IT services group, which was based in Silicon Valley. Several times a year Marcus would fly to California to spend time with his team, chatting, having meals, talking about work, but also interacting on a human and personal level. He calls these trips “The Flying Handshake.”

We know from research that it’s critically important to meet in person. So much nuance can get lost in translation over the phone, and certainly over email or in social media environments. Meeting face to face is important in early stages of assembling teams to embark on projects, and particularly important when introducing new people to projects whom others have never interacted with before.

In an interview with team expert Mary Waller, Professor of Organizational Studies at York University’s Schulich School of Business, she described an important accelerator to collaboration known as Transactive Memory Systems (TMS in pro lingo). Which basically means an understanding of who knows what information, and who possesses what skills on the team. This understanding of whom to go to for particular types of skill and knowledge to get things done is critically important in accelerating the performance of teams. And when the team is virtual, face to face interaction becomes increasingly important over the life-cycle of projects.

As this study, published in Management Science found:

“Frequent face-to-face communication also led to TMS (Transactive Memory Systems) emergence, but communication via other means had no effect.”

In other words, while digital or phone interaction at a distance is certainly valuable in the exchange of information and collaboration of ideas, such interaction doesn’t improve the quality of team transactions, thus performance.

So next time you have a digital interaction on a project, break the thread of email by picking up the phone. Then break the thread of constant conference calls by actually meeting in person.

The alternative can be pretty amusing:

The Gap Between Knowing and Doing

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leadership-cartoon

Yes, but what’s remarkable is that he is doing it. He is actually practicing these behaviors, while many leaders are simply talking about them.”
– Jill Klein, Melbourne Business School

I had a conversation recently with Campbell Jones, COO of a large Australian company. He had risen steadily in the organization after years of dedicated work, and was widely regarded as an excellent leader and savvy entrepreneur. So I asked him what things he did on a daily basis that contributed to the high level of engagement clearly found throughout the vibrant company.

He explained a series of consistent behaviors he was committed to. He regularly travels throughout the different operating offices in Australia and New Zealand to meet directly with the people in the company and to spend time listening to their ideas and challenges. He gives local control to people in different divisions of the organization to change or refine how they do their work and supports them with people, funding, and other resources as necessary.

Jones also explained that he intentionally has worked in many different divisions of the company, from marketing to sales to logistics and operations. This diversity of experience and the first-hand knowledge and understanding of the work enables him to relate to, and collaborate with, people in those divisions more easily. He spends as little time as possible in closed-door executive meetings, and as much time as he can working directly with employees and customers in the field.

People clearly trust him because he has demonstrated consistency of action to back up his promises, he has developed deep expertise in widely different capacities in the organization.

A few days later I met with Jill Klein, professor of marketing at Melbourne Business School, to discuss her work. Before our interview, I described Campbell Jones’ successful story to her. In my opinion his success was to be expected. After all, it was common sense that, if a leader behaves with integrity, supports and listens to the people in the organization, and supports and trusts their ingenuity of those performing the work, well… certainly excellence will emerge. In my telling of the story, I recall thinking, “But of course it works! There’s nothing remarkable about this story. Obviously a leader with these traits would drive excellence and innovation for the company.”

After listening to the story, Klein remarked, “Yes, but what’s remarkable is that he is doing it. He is actually practicing these behaviors, while many leaders are simply talking about them.”

Or as Tim Sanders likes to say, “Stay away from the ‘ings’ and spend more time with the ‘eds.’ The ‘eds’ say ‘We tried that. We tested that. We modeled that.’ The ‘ings’ say things like ‘We’re thinking about that,’ or ‘We’re discussing that.’”

Start with Shared Values

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If you work in a big company, with people around the world operating in different cultures, on different projects, with different skillsets and different world views, how can you create shared conviction and vision?

Don Vanthournout is the Chief Learning Officer of Accenture, a premier global management-services and advisory organization with more than 259,000 associates in almost fifty different countries around the world. Accenture is perhaps not unlike other multinational companies except that it has no clear headquarters. Accenture’s CEOs over the past few years have been based in Paris, Boston, Palo Alto, and Dallas. Its executives operate globally, and its associates are expected to adopt a nimble and global world view. They’re supposed to remain effective and adhere to the Accenture philosophy regardless of where they work. How can such a globally dispersed workforce, with no clear headquarters and a CEO with no nationalistic identity, have a strongly held, shared vision?

In October, 2011, I had an interview with Don Vanthournout. In that conversation, he explained that the company starts with a simple and clear set of values as its behavioral principles. Accenture ingrains these values in all associates, so regardless of where they are working in the world, the associates’ values and behavior are guided by them. As he put it,

we build core skills into our people on how we want them to collaborate and communicate with each other, how we want them to manage projects, but we’re never going to be able to guess every situation that might confront them. And so the why of why you spend so much time focusing on the value side of things is so that we can develop people who, when they’re thrown in that situation that they might not have been prepared explicitly for from a content standpoint, will from a contextual standpoint know how to operate in alignment with what Accenture values.

Next, according to Vanthouronout, Accenture operates under a principle of facilitating job mobility and growth. As the Chief Learning Officer, Vanthouronout knows people participate at their highest level of engagement and collaboration when they are doing work they love. When a position becomes tedious, he says, it’s time to look for growth opportunities. Accenture recognizes the need for constant development, and creates opportunities for them to fill that need. Vanthouronout’s recommendation is to start local—ask friends and colleagues for advice in developing oneself. He has found that the strongest professional developers trust the insight of their colleagues and take action to gain new and diverse skills.

When it comes to aspiration, those around us will understand and help place us in developing positions only if we voice our opinions and ideas about our own best career trajectory. Accenture has worked to build a culture in which managers are expected to identify and listen closely to the development aspirations of associates, with the recognition that those best placed will ultimately perform at their highest level and realize their greatest confidence.

Keys to effective swift-starting teams

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pilotsNext time you’re standing at the gate waiting to get on a flight and the crew shows up, watch how they interact with each other. It will tell you a lot about how effective as a team they are going to be up in the sky shortly.

Mary Waller, a researcher at York University in Toronto, has been studying swift-starting teams – and flight crews in particular. Swift-starting teams of experts are everywhere – TV news crews comprised of journalists, camera, lighting, audio, and transmission engineers who come together to cover a media event. The doctors, nurses, technicians in hospitals who assemble for a ER shift to work together. Or the engineers that may run a nuclear power plant. In many cases these teams are comprised of highly-specialized professionals who assemble as a team for a specific job or task, and sometimes have little or no prior interaction with each other.

Specifically members of swift-forming experts teams are:

  • competent and familiar with their complex work environments
  • working quickly under situations of very evident time pressure
  • have a stable role on the team but ad hoc team membership
  • have complex, interdependent tasks that rely on interactions with team mates during the performance to yield coordinated execution of well-trained skills.

It turns out that how they interact with one another during just the first 15-20 minutes is highly predictive of how they will perform as a team for the duration of the job. The reason is that interaction patterns are established early in these relationships, and those patterns usually persist throughout the job.

Key #1: simple and consistent communication

Waller and her colleagues tracked each piece of dialogue uttered and identified the patterns in which they develop. For example, “Input the coordinates” is a command. “We have good weather today” is an observation. “Maybe we should ask tower control” is a suggestion and “What should our heading be?” is an inquiry…and so on to include disagreement, humor, anger or small-talk, etc. What they discovered is that patterns of interaction often emerge quickly and persist throughout the relationship. And the highest-performing teams established those patterns early, keep them simple, consistent, and reciprocal and balanced with one another. The lowest-performing teams had greater variety of conversational patterns, more unique communication patterns, and members who showed lack of reliance on other team members.

Key #2: short and targeted communication

While big locker room pep-talks or command-center speeches look good on television (think Ed Harris playing flight director Gene Kranz in Apollo 13), they aren’t terribly effective in driving team excellence. The most effective teams kept their communication short, precise and targeted to a specific task or job sequence.

Key #3: balanced communication

In the study, the researchers measured what they called “reciprocity.” That is, to what extent the team members relied on each other and balanced the participation of communication, as well as the reliance on one another for information and expertise. For example, if a team member showed “mono-actor” behavior of asking and answering their own questions, they showed less reliance, and less reciprocity on other team members. As a result, their study showed an overall decreased team performance when team members showed a lack of reliance on others and lack of reciprocity of expertise.

Here’s an interesting twist in the study. The researchers hypothesized that any “mono-acting” behavior (when someone asks and answers their own questions) would be on that part of the pilot currently in control. They thought that the person with command of the airplane would be the one offering the least reciprocity. Nope, it was the PNF (pilot not flying), who lacked control of the plane who exhibited the greatest amount of mono-acting behavior – in other words, was the least team player.

The best swift-forming teams of experts keep their communication simple, targeted and balanced.

What do you do when predictions fail?

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saucer_41The Mayan weren’t the only ones to predict the end of the world. Or rather I should say, those who interpreted the Mayan to have predicted the end of the world aren’t the only ones who have predicted the end of the world.

In the 1950s a Chicago housewife named Dorothy Martin predicted the end of the world to occur in the dawn hours of December 21, 1954. She said she had been receiving messages from Sanada of the planet Clarion that a world flood event would wipe out humanity. Yet at midnight just hours before the devastating flood, a flying saucer from the planet Clarion would arrive near midnight and take them to safety and a new life in outer space.

She had quite a following. Some stayed home and fretted through the night wondering what would happen, but her closest believers, having sold their homes, quit their jobs and left their spouses, held vigil with her in her living room throughout the night. As midnight came and went with no rescue from a flying saucer, the group became increasingly agitated and despondent. After all, the cataclysmic flood was coming and still there was still no rescue. Near four o’clock in the morning, Dorothy received another message from the planet Clarion: There would be no flood. The God of Earth has decided to spare them.

Here’s the interesting thing – prior to the morning of December 21, 1954, their small cult remained in self-isolation. They made no outside contact, nor attempted to convert anyone to their beliefs, and remained suspicious of those who inquired about the end of the world. Yet when the cataclysm came and went without incident, they then called the newspapers and immediately worked to spread the word that earth had been spared, and worked to convert many new believers to their mission.

Leon Festinger, a psychologist, imbedded himself and in the group and relates the story in his book When Prophecy Fails. He describes a few conditions that contribute to continued ardent belief in the face of failed predictions:

  • The belief must be correlated with a behavior or action (selling one’s life possessions)
  • The behavior must be difficult to undo (selling one’s life possessions)
  • The belief must have a specific event associated with it (end of world Dec 21, 1954)
  • The believer must have a social network to support continued belief in the face of failed prediction (they actively recruited new members immediately after the spaceship did not appear)

Here’s my question – what kinds of more sane predictions and associated behaviors do we hold on to in the face of repeated failure?

Incidentally, Dorothy Martin’s own husband, a non-believer, went to bed early and slept soundly through the night.