Nourish Your Pack First

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The Iditarod dog sled race in Anchorage

Rona Cant, of Oxford England, should change her name to Rona Can.

After being an English housewife and raising two children, she decided life was missing something. She wasn’t the type to host afternoon tea, so she started a business in fabrics and upholstery. That wasn’t quite satisfying enough, so she decided she needed another degree and enrolled at a University. Something was still not quite right. She felt a bit unfulfilled, so she started taking sailing lessons.

Finally realizing she was confusing busyness with fulfillment, she signed on to a yacht crew to race around the world. But before she could feel competent to race, she completed the arduous Yachtmaster ocean certificate to ensure her capability and contribution on the boat. And just for good measure she also completed a diesel engine mastery course just in case the ship’s engines needed repair while far from harbor.

Then she participated in another around the world yacht race. Then a third race around Great Britain and Ireland. And this time winning. Now you are introduced to the kind of flinty, tenacious, can-do person that Rona is.

So it won’t surprise you to learn that after winning the sailing race around Great Britain and Ireland, she signed on to be part of a three-person expedition to drive dogsleds through the remote wilderness and mountains of Norway 500km to the very tip of the Norwegian landmass where it touches the arctic ocean. To a remote outpost of snow and ice on the edge of the world called Nordkapp. It wasn’t even a trail. In fact the goal was to create the trail – pioneer it – so that it could be done again.

In our interview last week, Rona described to me something I found fascinating about dogsledding in the northern wilderness. Each evening they would camp near a frozen lake or river. While Cathy erected the tents and Rona built a fire and untethered the 28 sled dogs and inspected them for cuts and injuries, their guide Per Thore would take an immense auger and drill a hole through a meter of ice. Then Rona would hike to the well he had created on the lake, post-holing her way through the waist-deep snow to ladle 40 litres of water into a plastic container and haul it to the campsite.

This required several trips to deliver all of the water to where Per Thore was busy sawing chunks of frozen reindeer meat to mix with dry food and water, and then set over a campfire to make a stew for the dogs. The dogs required over 60 kilos of food per day.

And then Rona would return to the hole in the ice to retrieve 10 litres of water for the humans. You see, only after the dogs were fed, and cared for, would the humans take their first sip of water. When you hear her tell the story the reason is obvious. Without the dogs in the wilderness you die. Without the dogs you are going nowhere. They are the engine that makes the expedition possible, and without their health and well-being, and rest and focus, all is lost.

The same is true on teams. The people on our teams, in our organizations, are the reason our companies exist at all. And when the boss spends all of his time working, refining and forwarding their own agenda – their own mission and aspiration for promotion, or money, or recognition – it’s the beginning of the end. Things start to break down. Not just the processes and integrity and quality of what your company delivers, but the very people within the organization begin to suffer emotionally and even physiologically.

Remember, nourish the people first. The expedition will go great places.

Money can buy happiness… If you give it away

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Kid-sharing-his-umbrella-with-a-deer

Imagine that every morning someone gives you an envelope with either $5 or $20. You never know which. And each day you are asked to either spend it on a treat for yourself, or spend it on a gift for someone else. Then that same person calls you at 5pm to ask how your day went. How do you feel?

Turns out that the answer to the question, “Can money buy you happiness?” is Yes. The kicker is that the greatest happiness comes from spending it on someone else. And as it turns out, how you spend the money is much more important than how much money it is.

Michael Norton and his colleagues Elizabeth Dunn and Lara Aknin researched whether money can really buy happiness. The hypothesis was that after basic needs of shelter, food, education, and living standards are met, extra income has little impact on personal happiness, except when we spend it on acts of generosity.

The reason for the study was based on the paradox that although people spend so much of their time and effort trying to make more and more money, having all that money does not seem to make them as happy. Could it be that they were not spending money the right way? The idea was if people were encouraged to spend money differently, perhaps we might be able to generate a greater sense of joy within ourselves and others.

An interesting part of the study revealed that this goes directly against our own instincts. When asked, 65% of those surveyed stated that spending money on themselves would make them the happiest. Additionally, over 85% believed that receiving $20 to spend would have a greater happiness advantage than $5. Wrong again. Turns out that the amount we spend on others doesn’t make than much of happiness difference. The important part is the act of generosity, not the amount we spend.

The same is true at our work. Lending resources across divisions and product lines increases collaboration, unity and sense of shared purpose. Generosity of time, energy, and commitment builds our own sense of belonging and joy. Remember, generosity only makes you richer.

Why Do You Hide From Your Boss?

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HidingatworkAccording to researcher Robert Hogan, 75% of working adults today say the most stressful, most dreaded interactions they have at work is with their immediate boss.

Stress-inducing bosses have even been linked to increases in heart desease related illnesses. Studies show that the correlation of bad bosses and heart trauma seem to occur together, just like death and taxes.

As a result these same professionals avoid dealing with their boss by hiding, often in plain sight. Hiding in their email, hiding in meetings, phone calls, commutes, and projects that “demand” their attention.

The quest toward greater transparency has spawned open workspaces, and naked communication practices which approach surveillance levels. Indeed, the 7th Principle of the Toyota Way is “use visual control so no problems are hidden.” All in the pursuit of “visibility.” Many bosses benignly believe that regular oversight will elevate performance, drive healthy competition, and allow them to tweak processes by watching workers from a higher vantage point. As if by studying worker activity they could gently guide the team activity in the right direction of higher efficiency, greater collaboration and productivity.

Yet Harvard Professor Ethan Bernstein discovered almost the opposite. In a series of studies he found that the greater the oversight, the lower the productivity and worker moral. He dubbed this phenomenon The Transparency Paradox. What he discovered is that even modest levels of privacy for small groups of workers significantly increased productivity and engagement in their work.

Organizational transparency can, of course, have very positive effects. It can allow increased awareness into the capabilities of other teams, and allow team members to more easily build cross-functional collaboration. That’s clearly a good thing. Transparency in surfacing product or service issues can certainly more quickly isolate problems for faster correction. Transparency can also help ensure that localized problems don’t linger. As Justice Louis Brandeis famously said “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

However in Professor Bernstein’s studies he found that transparency when applied as constant worker observation has a negative effect. Constant observation by bosses was not only a performance distraction, but also severely curtailed process experimentation or procedure deviance. In other words, when you are constantly monitored and scrutinized in your every action, you are far less likely to try something new, experiment, and come up with a new way of working.

So answer to “Why do you hide from your boss?” is you know that by building autonomy into your work life you will perform better, innovate faster, and be happier in your work.

And just for fun…

You Don’t Have to Be Lonely at Work

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On a scale of 1 to 10, answer these questions about yourself at work:

* “I feel out of tune with my co-workers”
* “I lack companionship at my work”
* “There is no one I can turn to in this organization”
* “I feel left out”
* “I don’t feel like I can talk honestly with anyone in this company”

These are some of the questions researchers asked of 786 professionals and their bosses, to help determine both their sense of loneliness in the organizational culture, and then correlate that result with their current job performance.

Recent studies reflect that a little over half of us, at one time or another, experience periods of intense loneliness in our professional lives. But loneliness is not depression or shyness or poor social skills, and it certainly isn’t introversion. It’s more a feeling of estrangement, of alienation – a sense of not belonging to a place, or a culture. And the implications of having lonely people at work are big. Our sense of belonging on a team has a direct impact on our commitment to task, sense of role clarity, and collaborative effectiveness.

The other big implication of feeling lonely at work is that we increase our level of surface acting or “covering.” That is, we intentionally conceal parts of our authentic identity. What happens when we feel lonely at work is we start to pretend to be someone else. And when we pretend to be someone other than who we are, we start to emotionally withdraw.

Not only that, loneliness is linked to personal health. Feeling socially isolated has a direct link to increased blood pressure and increased risk of heart disease. Loneliness also negatively affects sleep quality, which affects cognition, which… well, affects everything.

Empathetic Interventions:
Persistent loneliness often leads to an expectation of negative interactions and an increase in hostility. If we feel socially isolated at work, we begin to expect that isolation will persist. In other words, loneliness begets loneliness. You have to break the cycle. Try this: the next time you feel a lonely emotion (“No one understands me.” or “I don’t belong here.”), recognize the emotion as simply that – an emotional response to a circumstance, or an individual. And recognize that we can choose other responses.

And even if you can’t conjure a charitable thought, try instead to see the world from their lens, their point of view. When we work on our empathy, we gain greater emotional fluency, which in turn creates connection.

If you are a boss, understand that loneliness in the workplace isn’t a private and personal issue, this is an organizational culture issue. If people around you are emotionally withdrawing, it’s not their problem, it’s your problem, and it’s your company’s problem.

The 5:1 Rule:
Aside from direct and personal intervention, ensure that you are using a 5:1 rule. That is, create a team interaction dynamic that builds a 5 to 1 ratio in terms of positive to negative communication. And by positive I don’t simply mean saying “That’s great!” Research tells us that supportive questions are even more powerful than supportive assertions. So the next time someone on the team has an idea you feel is valuable, ask a deepening question like “How did you arrive at that?” or “Who do you think we should talk with next to make this a reality?”

Check out our new micro-learning series Small Acts of Leadership to begin making cultural shifts one small act at a time. Message me if you’re interested and we’ll send you a preview. Enjoy!

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SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

Give the Gift of Time

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If only HP knew what HP knows, we’d be three times more productive.
—Lew Platt, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard

Everyone is so busy these days, overwhelmed by complexity and uncertainty, that it’s hard to know what to do or who to talk to in order to accomplish daring, and unexpectedly awesome initiatives. And so we create structure, process and teams to solve specific tasks or projects. But team composition, proximity, and facilitation matter a great deal in terms of how productive they eventually become.

London Business School conducted an interesting study in which they asked 1,543 people to answer a bunch of questions about the composition and behavior of the teams they worked on. It turns out that some of the very characteristics that define modern professional teams, are the same characteristics that undermine their success. These trending characteristics include:

Bigger teams: Teams are swelling in size to be (or appear to be) more inclusive, gain greater stakeholder buy-in and leverage more expertise. Teams of 20 people or more is increasingly common, and technology is enabling a good part of swelling headcount. But research from Bob Sutton on scaling excellence demonstrates that honest and engaged collaboration decreases after team size exceeds about 8 people.

Diverse teams: Again, technology enabled, globally dispersed diverse teams are growing rapidly. And with good reason since the ability to leverage expertise throughout the globe is increasingly a powerful component of competitive advantage. But deeply engaged, open collaboration starts with trust. And trust starts with the personal understanding that comes from cultural and emotional fluency. We might get technically proficient collaboration across cultural boundaries, but richer collaboration requires the bedrock of trust. I once 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 for no other reason than 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.”

Educated teams: According to the study, teams are increasingly comprised of people with higher and higher education levels. And it turns out, the higher the education among the team members, the more likely the team may devolve into petty arguments. One key to overcoming this obstacle is to require teams to have not only task goals, but also relationship-oriented goals.

The study cites some constructive interventions to help boost the effectiveness and ingenuity of teams, as well as to eradicate “fault lines” within teams, but one leadership trait in particular has a powerful effect in scaling excellence: giving the gift of time.

Company cultures in which leaders regularly give their time to listen to emerging problems, and advise team members of who they might talk to within the company to accelerate solutions is a defining characteristic of successful cultures. Specifically, the study cites Nokia’s cultural tendency for leaders to sit with individual team members and point them in the direction of people throughout the organization which they believe will accelerate results and strengthen inter-departmental collaboration.

What Women Understand About Effective Modern Leadership

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In his wonderful book, Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard researcher Daniel Gilbert points out that often our best bet for making decisions we will both enjoy and benefit from, is to ask our peers who have made similar decisions. Gilbert’s advice before embarking on an important decision is to ask someone whom we trust, who has also made the decision we are contemplating, and follow their advice. And, as he points out, once we learn their point of view on the matter, we often refuse that advice on the grounds that our situation is different. We reject their advice claiming, “But I’m unique! How could they possibly know what’s best for me?”

Research finds that this inability to accept outside advice and insight only increases with power. The more power and resources controlled by an individual, the more confident they tend to be in their decision-making, and less they tend to listen and be influenced by outside opinions and points of view. However, in their study women were often an exception.

In two phases of the study, women tended to be more open to outside points of view regardless of their position of power within the organization. In their study entitled “The detrimental effects of power on confidence, advice taking, and accuracy,” Kelly See and her colleagues discovered that women more often reported less certainty in their decisions than men, and solicited the advice and opinions of their colleagues more. Most interestingly, because women more often solicited the opinion and advice of their colleagues, they were viewed by their peers as stronger leaders.

So while they may have lacked confidence in their decisions, women were regarded as more confident and effective leaders precisely because they asked for advice from their peers.

This innate ability hold separate ideas at once, and to solicit external opinions and advice is but one of many of the 21st century traits and competencies needed to be an effective leader in this turbulent economy. As author Tony Schwartz noted in the Harvard Business Review, “An effective modern leader requires a blend of intellectual qualities—the ability to think analytically, strategically and creatively—and emotional ones, including self-awareness, empathy and humility…I meet far more women with this blend of qualities than I do men.”

Schwartz goes on to say, “For the most part, women, more than men, bring to leadership a more complete range of the qualities modern leaders need, including self-awareness, emotional attunement and authenticity.”

At an unprecedented historic time in which much of the educated talent and a majority of the consumer decisions are made by women, we need gender diversity at all levels – and particularly the highest levels of organizations. As gender diversity expert Avivah Wittenberg-Cox researches and argues, some of the most successful organizations who are effectively adapting to change are populated at the highest levels with balanced gender diversity.

[Originally posted on Skip Pritchard’s great blog Leadership Insights]

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Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building powerful human and digital learning experiences based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.

Last summer, my son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Grab a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.

Five Traits of Leaders Working at Scale

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sweepersIt’s not a glorious job. And would likely be completely forgettable, if not for the frantic brushing down the ice. It’s distracting until you figure out that they are actually making the stone go faster by polishing the ice in front of the sliding stone. Sometimes I wonder if they accidentally bump into the other stones on the ice. I’ve never seen it happen. But it’s the role of the sweeper that can often make the biggest difference in the outcome in a game of curling.

Effective leaders who create excellence, at scale, in the companies and communities in which we work, have this skill of clearing the way ahead, along with several other key traits. These unique people operating at the highest levels of leadership can divest their ego from the end goal. They have accountability when things go awry but not granular responsibility over individual elements, because the journey toward a shared audacious goal must be emotionally owned by the entire organization to create scale.

Those leaders who can create innovation and excellence at scale possess these five traits:

Sweep away barriers: In order for excellence to grow rapidly and unimpeded, the clutter of antiquated bureaucracy and organizational roadblocks needs to be mitigated or removed entirely. This is the job of the best managers – not to create work that distracts, but instead identify obstacles and have the power and political clout to remove them. Jack Welch likes to use the analogy of the sweepers in a curling match, whose job is to clean the ice in front of the oncoming stone.

Mine the organization for expertise: Lou Platt, the former CEO of HP once said, “If only HP knew what HP knows, we’d be three times more productive.” By that he meant that there was redundancy and untapped capability within their own organization. The best leader creates environments and communication patterns to recognize untapped potential and surface latent expertise. Sir Howard Stringer of Sony, once hosted an international gathering of their engineers just so they could meet and talk, and discover the great capabilities Sony already possessed. Many later thanked Howard, saying they had no idea the depth of skill and knowledge within their own organization.

Build an ownership culture: One of the strongest and fastest ways to build a culture of ownership is to facilitate the building of shared language. When leaders create the circumstances and opportunities for the people around them to define the language use to build projects and collaborate, it creates a higher sense of ownership because suddenly each team member has a vested interest in the eventual outcome. When you have the team name the project, or the outcome, it becomes more about how “we” play the game. This is a stepping stone to building signature solutions. A signature solution is a process or result that has the character, the personality, of it’s contributors baked in to the finished result.

Give credit: A hallmark of a great leader is one who doesn’t want the credit. Or more specifically, doesn’t need the credit. These leaders who can scale excellence recognize that by giving credit, they allow those around them to step to the front – to become leaders themselves. In this way, remarkable leaders are more inclined toward starting something with a greater purpose, and then allowing those more capable people around them to execute on the details and drive scale.

Emphasize process over results: I once had an interview with the Dean of Melbourne Business School, Zeger Degraeve, who has a strong passion for understanding how people make decisions, and create excellence at scale. In our discussion, he strongly reinforced the power of process-driven cultures in eradicating blame tendencies among managers and peers. When individuals and teams are punished on the basis of poor outcomes, despite strong collaboration and decision making, it sends a signal to the rest of the organization that failure is dangerous, and therefore risk should be avoided. Yet inversely, rewards-centered cultures create disincentives for people to make mistakes at a time when making mistakes is the most reliable way of figuring out what works.

Most organizations today create bonus and reward structures that focus on and reward results. If we want an outcome to be repeatable, we instead need to focus on the process that created the result and reward for that. To truly connect with people in our organizations, we should spend more of our time and energy as leaders asking them to examine more closely how they perform their tasks and collaborate as teams, and how the organization, as a whole, operates.

The Innovative Leader: Finding + Seeing + Leading

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A short excerpt from Out•Think – enjoy!
Mashup
Innovation doesn’t have to be complicated. Sometimes it’s as simple as designing the shampoo bottle so it rests upside down. Sometimes it’s as novel as a vending machine that mixes your drink on the fly.

Today’s leader is an expert on figuring out how to stitch together varying ideas and technologies which result in realized value in the world. The challenge will become how quickly can we both conceptualize powerful combinations of ideas, and then lead a team to execute on that dream.

I had an interview two years ago with Venkatesh Valluri, President of Ingersoll Rand India. In our conversation, he spoke of the qualities of successful emerging leaders as possessing three distinct qualities:

  1. The ability to scan a constantly moving stream of technologies and information and pick out the meaningful trends in their businesses
  2. The ability to conceptualize a mashup of disparate technologies and capabilities into new valuable innovations which are right for your market
  3. The passion, communnication, and conviction to lead a team to execution on this vision.

As he described it:

Today if you asked me, What would be a leadership development model at Ingersoll Rand?—it would be a very unique model, in the sense that, Okay, is this leader prepared to have a conceptual flexibility, and strength to scan the environment, look where the problem is in that market, and build a solution backwards? Now once having defined that, then I guess the next piece which really comes is: Would he be able to execute on that? And once you talk about execution, then, at the same time, is he able to rally the entire team behind that by saying, This is the right thing for us to do?

Valluri pointed out that industries around the world are developing deep expertise in many fields, including nanotechnology, energy sustainability, food preservation, or GPS tracking and reporting technologies. Ingersoll-Rand doesn’t need to develop expertise in each of these, he said, but the company does need be aware of that these technologies exist and be able to conceptualize new ways to leverage them to solve problems for their customers.

Valluri calls this “innovation convergence,” giving the following example: Historically farmers in India have used the technologies available to them to move farm produce to market—namely, carts and wagons pulled by human or animal power. There are many variables that can lead to product loss and missed market opportunity while picking, loading, and conveying farm produce to a buyer’s market or distribution center. The farmer may be unaware of deteriorating weather. There may be a lack of buyers in the market, and the produce will spoil. The seasonal rains may have created mud conditions that slow the farmers’ progress. There may be a glut of produce at one market and scarcity at another.

Ingersoll-Rand integrated multiple technologies, including ruggedized buggies with four-wheel drive, GPS tracking to monitor the location of shipments, technology to determine the status of demand at different markets and shipping locations, and finally refrigeration technology to preserve the produce in transit.

This solution optimizes the entire value chain, reducing loss and maximizing delivery and value to the market—all without needing to have within the organization deep niche expertise of each of these disparate technologies. All that was needed was for leadership at Ingersoll-Rand to have an awareness of these technologies, strong networked collaborators, the ability to conceptualize a new solution for the customer, and, perhaps most importantly, the strength and conviction to lead a team to execute on the vision.

That, to Valluri, is real innovation.

Redefine your competition. Think bigger.

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thinkbiggerJeri Finard has made some valuable decisions on her way to the highest echelons of business. She stopped trying really hard to get ahead, she listened closely to trusted mentors, and she stopped following the conventional wisdom of focusing on your competition.

I had the privilege to interview Ms. Finard last week in New York. Currently the President of Godiva, and formerly the Global Brand President of Avon, and Chief Marketing Officer at the immense organization Kraft Foods, Ms. Finard is no stranger to executive offices and boardrooms. But as she described to me, the key to getting ahead was finding what she loved. And one key to finding what she loved was ignoring the ladder-climbing game. Let me explain.

Years ago as a manager at Kraft Foods, she was invited to lead the confectionary business for the newly acquired Nabisco. It was a generous and plum position offer. She declined it for personal reasons to focus on her family and children. She explained to me that while she was dedicated to her husband and kids, and unwilling to relocate her family for new opportunities, she also felt a sense of frustration while others around her were getting promoted. At the time her mentor was Ann Fudge, who went on to be President of Kraft General Foods and recognized as one of the savviest and most successful women in business. Ann advised her to follow her own path and passions, and disregard what her colleagues were doing.

As somewhat of a consolation, Ms. Finard was offered a lateral move to run the desserts division within Kraft. The desserts division was comprised of brands such as JELL-O, Cool Whip, Baker’s Chocolate and other brands which were stagnating. JELL-O already owned 85% of the gelatin market, Cool Whip had saturated their own market, and home baking was on the decline. From the perspective of many within Kraft it was considered a dog division with no prospect of growth opportunity. The expectation was that she would go babysit a flat line of products.

Ms. Finard took a new perspective. She didn’t know it wasn’t possible to build growth in a flat market. Yes, JELL-O had 85% of the gelatin market, but she focused on the fact that gelatin wasn’t the competition. The real competition was snack foods like yogurt, fruit, chips and candy bars. And JELL-O was less than 2% of the snack foods industry, so from her perspective there was nothing but growth opportunity. She focused on fun, like JELL-O Pudding Pops, and healthy alternatives, like JELL-O with less sugar and more fruit, JELL-O smoothies, even created popular recipes to reinvigorate desserts.

As she described, “Ultimately you’re competing for share of stomach. So I think it’s important that you don’t limit yourself by defining who your competitors are. Because if you do that, you’ll never think big enough.”

She also once had a hilarious dinner with Bill Cosby when working with him on the JELL-O Pudding Pops project.