When we ask our clients what their company’s goals are, very often, they don’t know.  This is typically true at all levels of the organization, from senior management to the front line.  Yikes! And when they do think they know what the goals are, very often, what they report are, in fact, activities  rather than actual results. Or their stated goals are so abstract as to be meaningless: “We want to be better this year than we were last.”  This vague vision is not helpful. Our last post looked at how there must be a natural flow from strategy to goals to results. In this post, we’re peeling another layer of the onion to show you how to take the general ideas from your initial reflections and shape them into clear, crisp, results-oriented goals. (In our third post in the series, we will dig into actioning them).  INVOLVE YOUR TEAM IN GOAL SETTING In a lot of organizations, the goal-setting process happens at the top. The leadership team hands down the goals as a proclamation from on high: “Here's your target. Go hit this number.”   This top-down approach is typically doomed to failure because the people responsible for hitting the goal don’t know where those numbers came from or how they align with the company’s overall strategy (which should be the North Star for everyone).  A client once told me their department’s goal was “10% fewer product defects in 2024.”  Ok, great. But why? How does that relate to your strategy? How does it create value for your customers? Is that achievable for your team? Does it make sense based on your resources?  There is also the risk that it may not be realistic, setting up your team for frustration and failure, which is a major motivation killer. It can also create confusion or even resentment because, really, who among us likes receiving orders that seem arbitrary?  NAME THE RESULT We once worked with a telecom company with the strategic objective of increasing brand loyalty. Love it.  But when it came to goals, this strategic aim was nowhere to be seen in the priorities guiding the front-line customer service reps, who are crucial to customer experience. Their performance was primarily based on a metric: take at least 100 calls daily. (Ironically, this target actually ran counter to the strategic goal because it encouraged reps to end calls quickly, even to the point of intentionally hanging up on customers to hit their target!) Instead of activities, they should have been promoting outcomes. This is where setting results-oriented  goals comes in.  Results-oriented goals are a game changer because they define what you want to accomplish  rather than what you should do . By setting these types of goals, everyone in the company can understand how their work contributes to the larger picture. It also sets you up to easily track progress and adjust as needed.  Results-oriented goals can be either quantitative or qualitative. Some examples of the former include increasing market share, profitability, or new product development. Some examples of qualitative goals are improved service levels, elevated thought leadership, or better client satisfaction.  The important thing is to look at the result rather than the activities to get there.  REFINE INTO S.E.T. GOALS OK, so now you’ve got one or even a few results-oriented goals defined for 2024. You know what you’re hoping to achieve.  Now, we’re going to take things a step further, refining your goal into SET form so it has a:  S tarting point  E nding point T imeframe The starting point is where you’re at now, and the ending point is – you guessed it – where you want to be. This is as simple as it sounds, but it’s incredible how articulating these three simple boundaries can help focus your team. Just defining this gap can help motivate your team and provide a healthy tension to drive performance.  And the timeframe? That’s just the deadline or target date for achieving your goal. It helps your team manage their time and priorities. It also allows them to direct their energy and focus. A goal with no timeframe feels arbitrary and formless. The chances of realizing it are slim indeed.  So, going back to our telecom company, a SET goal might be to increase the Net Promoter Score, a critical measure of customer loyalty, from 65 to 75% by the end of the year.  The specificity of the result and the timeframe aren’t just motivating; they will help you determine if you’ve met your goal in the future. It also makes planning and provisioning around the goal easier because the tools and talents needed to succeed should be pretty clear. Not having the right architecture – the systems and processes – to deliver is one of the most common reasons organizations fail to transmit well-formulated strategies to results. BE BOLD YET REALISTIC By now, you should have at least one (but maybe a few) results-oriented goals that align with your overall strategic objectives, defined in S.E.T. form.  Amazing! You are already ahead of more than half of organizations and on track to hitting your targets for 2024.  Now, look at your list and ask yourself: what can we reasonably expect to accomplish this year? There’s no point in setting goals that are impossible to hit based on your team, processes, or other factors.  More on that in our next post, which will show you how to break your goal into  bite-sized actions and focus your team’s energy and time to align with the goal. We’ll also show you how to measure your progress as you transition from naming goals to getting results. Before you know it, you’ll be on your way to achieving your goals for 2024.

Actionable ways to be a more connected leader In our last post, we looked at empathy's benefits for leadership and its positive power to influence your organization's culture, morale, and bottom line.  Simply put, when you care about people, they’ll also care about you and your shared goals. This is the reciprocal power of empathetic leadership. The research backs this. But to maximize engagement, more than merely transactions between managers and employees is needed. A 2015 Gallup study, Employees Want a Lot More from their Managers , found that employees who feel their manager is invested in them as people, not just workers, are more likely to be engaged. Remember: empathy in leadership isn’t soft; it’s smart. But for many leaders, it can feel hazy or slippery. How do you show empathy to make it tangible to your colleagues and teammates?  We’ve already explored the Empathy Spectrum and Empathy Map, two tools for building empathetic leadership practice. In this post, I share five practical ways to level up your empathy to foster stronger relationships and create a culture where everyone feels seen, valued, and supported.  Empathy in Leadership: Creating a safe space A productive workplace is one where people feel safe—safe enough to experiment, challenge ideas and each other, share information, and support one another. Team members are prepared to give their manager and organization the benefit of the doubt. However, none of this happens if employees do not feel cared about. Stereotypical small talk—“Hey, how about those Dodgers?” “How are the kids?”—isn’t going to cut it. Again, this is not a mere “check the box” effort. The best leaders make a concerted effort to get to know their employees and help them feel comfortable talking about any subject, whether it is work-related or not.  This is no small feat. It requires some real engagement on your part, allowing yourself to care about each person. That means listening deeply and empathetically, getting to know their individual passions, interests, and challenges, and actively supporting their success and growth to help them be their best. The best leaders understand that each person they lead is different, with their strengths, skills, and challenges at work and away from it. Knowing their employees as people first, leaders accommodate their team members’ uniqueness while managing toward high performance. To build deeper relationships with people, you must work through five levels of connecting. (And bonus points if they have kids AND you know their names!). 1) Establish trust This means developing a mutual understanding of your respective drivers, preferences, motivators, and demotivators for high performance at work, and coming to understand what makes each other tick. 2) Align on expectations You both need to understand what you are trying to achieve at work and why, then align the expectations you have for each other to achieve those outcomes. 3) Show genuine appreciation This includes helping team members focus on where they are being successful, jointly understanding what drives that success, sharing how much you appreciate their contribution and exploring ways in which they can use their skills and talents to benefit both themselves and the organization. 4) Challenge unacceptable behavior or inadequate performance There will be times when you need to hold more difficult conversations, to agree on a more effective set of behaviors or results when the team member’s performance or actions are getting in the way of the team’s overall performance and results. 5) Grow for the future Understanding your team members’ career aspirations gives you the best chance of creating the conditions for them to build that career within your organization rather than elsewhere. And, occasionally, it means helping them achieve those aspirations in other organizations, if that’s what’s best for them. As these five simple levels show, it really comes down to connecting better with people. Remember, workplaces where people feel connected deliver better results. And, ultimately, isn’t that our job as leaders? Want to learn more about empathy or get some professional support making it part of your leadership development strategy? Our program, Lead with Empathy , which is based on many years of fieldwork with hundreds of leaders, is designed to help close this gap. Meanwhile, we’d love to hear from you. What’s helped you build closer relationships with your team? What’s your biggest empathy challenge ?

How seeking new knowledge, experiences makes you a better leader Reddit has become my go-to social media platform, and one of my go-to SubReddits is  “TIL: Today I learned,” which is precisely what it sounds like.  There are always interesting posts, from how 16th-century Venetian glassmakers protected their trade secrets to the fact that 21 of the 50 oldest living people are Japanese to any fact you can imagine, from history and sports to science, pop culture, business, and more. The posts range from goofy and oddball to pithy and profound. What they share is a sense of delight in learning and sharing knowledge. Here at WhiteWater, we’ve long known that curiosity is vital to unlocking your business’s potential. Last year, we led a project with a large multinational organization client to understand what separated their highest-performing leaders from the rest. Intellectual curiosity was the most significant differentiator by far . (Check out the entire case study here .) These leaders were open to new ideas and people. They relentlessly pursued their interests. They were proactive in seeking new information and hungry for learning. And their curiosity fed itself as new ideas made them thirsty for more knowledge: They’d read something that would trigger an idea or question and keep pulling that thread, seeking more articles, books, podcasts, and people to explore the topic.  So, what makes intellectual curiosity valuable? It means you’re willing to consider other viewpoints and explore and adopt new ideas. It’s the basis for mental agility, which translates into business agility. It fuels innovation.   And while it’s a trait that some people naturally have, it’s also a skill you can build. And summer is the perfect time to polish up your curiosity toolkit.  What kind of curious are you?  Of course, like any trait, intellectual curiosity isn’t one-size-fits-all.  Our team here at WhiteWater loves The Five Dimensions of Curiosity , a 2018 Harvard Business Review article by Todd B. Kashdan, David J. Disabato, Fallon R. Goodman, and Carl Naughton. It explains that curiosity can be broken down into five distinct dimensions rather than a single trait.  As the article states, “Instead of asking, “How curious are you?” we can ask, “How are you curious?” Synthesizing leading research, the authors co-created a five-dimensional model of curiosity: Deprivation sensitivity  is when you recognize a gap in your knowledge, and filling it offers relief. Joyous exploration  is that sense of wonder you feel when confronted with or consumed by something fascinating.  Social curiosity  is talking, listening, and observing others to learn what they are thinking and doing.  Stress tolerance is a willingness to accept and even harness the anxiety associated with novelty. Thrill-seeking  is the willingness to take physical, social, and financial risks to  acquire varied, complex, and intense experiences. By understanding curiosity as nuanced and varied, you can harness its incredible power.  “A monolithic view of curiosity is insufficient to understand how that quality drives success and fulfillment in work and life,” the authors write. “To discover and leverage talent and to form groups that are greater than the sum of their parts, a more nuanced approach is needed.” Check out the end of this post, where we’ve included their curiosity scale. Take the test to figure out what kind of curious you are.  HOW TO BUILD YOUR INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY Becoming more curious takes attention and intention. Here’s how: This might not come naturally, and that’s OK. Even if your interest is forced at first, fake it until you make it! I promise your curiosity muscle will become toned the more you use it. Curiosity requires valuing questions, and intellectual curiosity thrives when you're asking better ones. To assess and improve the quality of your questions, check out Questions that Fuel Curiosity ,  a LinkedIn Learning video by Becki Saltzman. At just under 5 minutes, it’s a quick hit of actionable ways to up the ante on your questions, resulting in instantly better answers. We like it so much that it’s part of the prep work for WhiteWater’s Intellectual Curiosity program!  Fish can’t see the ocean they’re swimming in. Likewise, when you’re a leader, it’s hard to spot the ruts, routines and conventions in your organization. Make a conscious effort not just to accept how things are, but also to question whether there’s a better way.  Remember our client’s high-performing leaders from our research? We found they read a lot and tend to have more diverse social and professional networks. In other words, they don’t stay in their lane–and neither should you. Put yourself into new, even uncomfortable situations. It might feel forced at first, but over time, like any habit, it will become more natural.  Curiosity is an infinitely renewable resource - the more you have, the more you’ll generate.

Performance drivers to master your goals Welcome to the third and final installment in our trifecta of posts taking you from strategy to goals.  This last post is all about those high-value actions, what we call performance drivers, to make your goals happen. This is where things go from big ideas to real-world success.  Fun, right?  If you’ve followed along, you’ll remember my housebuilder friend, whose differentiator is an iron-clad commitment to project timelines. I love using this example because his work is so tangible, but this advice applies to any business, from a small, family-owned shop to a large, multinational company.  Below, I outline four key performance drivers to help you hit your 2024 goals. Think of them as gears – they fit together to transmit energy. As I write about in Get in Gear , my 2020 book about getting from strategy to execution to results, the more aligned they are, the less friction between them, and the smoother your path to success.  Right, Right, Right.  You want to start by having the right people with the right capabilities in the right roles at the right time.  That means finding the proper skill sets but also people with the right attitudes and values to get to your goals. A master technician with a bad attitude and a big mouth will drag the rest of the team down. And don’t miss the talent you’ve already got: how can you engage and develop your existing team?   Using our home builder example, this means having a team of reliable construction professionals and tradespeople, from framing and finishing carpenters to electricians, plumbers, crack-fillers, and painters, lined up to do the job. He wants workers with great technical skills, a good work ethic, and high reliability. He needs to count on them so the company can honor its commitment to on-time delivery.  It’s important to remember that you never “solve” Right, Right, Right. It’s an ongoing adaptation, and part of getting it right is to look for people who embrace the opportunity to develop themselves to perform better in their current and future roles.  Align the Architecture Having the right people is not enough – you need an architecture, the systems, structures, and  processes that align with your goal.  This can feel risky. It may mean challenging the way things have always been done.  Take our builder.  In an industry that’s been slow to go digital, I’ll bet he’s using software and online tools to create an efficient, transparent, aligned organization.  Construction is a very choreographed field: timing is essential to bring the right skills, materials, and equipment together, as well as managing administrative elements such as permits and inspections. For our builder, this means project management software that tracks human resources, costs, and timelines. It’s just one of the architectural elements that keep things humming.  So, when it’s time to dig the foundation, he doesn’t have a crew standing around, leaning on their shovels, waiting for the excavator.  Visible Scorecards “What gets measured gets done,” an old management maxim states.   In every industry, there are key performance indicators that tell the story of how things are going.   In construction, schedule fidelity drives everything else – including costs. The farther you fall behind schedule, the higher your costs will go. So, it follows that our builder’s scorecards would track performance related to those key drivers. From a system standpoint, he has both individual project and cumulative scorecards that he looks at weekly, monthly, and quarterly results to stay on top of the day-to-day and spot larger trends or challenges.  When creating scorecards, start with the premise that people want to do work that matters and will rise to the occasion when given the chance. Scorecards don’t work when they feel punitive. When people have clear targets, they tend to spend less time messing around with stuff that doesn't matter.  Good scorecards drive performance by clarifying the connection between effort and results and highlighting shortfalls, prompting corrective action or extra effort to close the gap.   Follow-up, follow through.  A goal without a plan is just words.  Consistent follow-up, follow-through ensure we honor the commitments that we've made. This is communication to drive accountability. It keeps the goal active and in sight.  This communications cascade must flow down through the entire organization. That doesn’t mean everyone needs to be in every meeting – that would actually be a really inefficient way of communicating. But it does need to reach the team members responsible for executing the work that will help you hit your goal.  For our builder, I’ll bet he is in contact with his site superintendent or construction manager daily for a status report on each house. The construction manager is, in turn, following through with their team, suppliers, inspectors – anyone who’s essential to keeping the project on track to reach their goals.  Follow-up, follow-through should have its own architecture, a clear, repeatable process, so everyone knows what to expect.  And there you have it, our round-up of the four most important performance drivers you need to be aligned. With that, our three-part series on getting from strategy to goals is complete.  We love to hear from you. What is the status of your goals for 2024? What struggles are you having? What has most helped you and your team hit your goals? Share in the comments below. Goal Setting.

Stretch Goals Keep You Ahead of the Curve Disruption is one of the great buzzwords of our accelerated digital era.  It seems like everything is constantly being disrupted: how we work, shop, socialize, get medical care, buy our groceries–you get the picture. It’s that feeling of perpetual whitewater I’m always talking about (and that I named my business after!) Disruption can get a bad rap. For some, it’s synonymous with instability. With risk.  That’s not wrong. But it also misses the fact that in disruption’s destructive force lies its potential. If you can learn to embrace disruption, to get comfortable proactively challenging your company’s status quo, that’s a position of incredible power.  Think bigger– much  bigger Most companies have growth as a goal, but their margins are too modest. A typical quality improvement goal might be 10% each year. That kind of steady-she-goes growth might result in some incremental improvements. It might even be fine for an overall target.  But every business has areas where 10% better is simply not good enough.  As I wrote in a year-end post  reflecting on Whitewater’s recent growth trajectory, it was only once we embraced the idea of exponential growth, of doubling year over year, that, well, we started to double. Before that, I’d been pretty content to keep on keeping on. We were comfortable, complacent, and frankly, vulnerable to our competition. That was the prod I needed to kick into high gear. There’s a great business story from the 1980s about how Motorola responded to intense competition in the pager market (yes, I know I’m dating myself, but stick with me, the fundamentals are still relevant!). Motorola was getting trampled by cheaper, better Japanese-made models. It turns out that quality controls were the problem. Motorola’s defect targets were 20% (20 per 100 units).  Compare that with the competition’s standard of three defects  per million .  Not even in the same universe, right?  Defects are expensive, and they were killing Motorola.  Wisely, its leaders realized that at 10% better a year, they had zero chance of competing.  They had to set a stretch goal: to get 10 times better every two years. It was a big lift. They had to transform all of their systems, structures and processes. And, as I discuss later in this piece, their people also needed to be brought along. (Unfortunately for Motorola and pager manufacturers everywhere, that line of business got wiped out before they could fully catch up, but the underlying story is still valid.) Motorola’s pager story shows that there are times when you have to do better by orders of magnitude, to make quantum leaps, not just incremental gains. Ask yourself: where does your company need to be ten times better than you are today–not just 10%?   Disrupt your brain Once you decide you've got to be ten times not 10% better, another realization will quickly arrive: your current thinking will never get you there. Disruption starts from within. And it takes a leader who’s willing to self-reflect, to hold their thinking and the group-think of their organization up for examination, to compel others to come along on this journey.  So challenge yourself by actively examining your underlying thinking – the mental models, beliefs, assumptions and perceptions that shape your actions and, ultimately, your outcomes.  ( Check out this post f or ideas on how to examine your thinking and understand how it influences your actions and outcomes).  And get ready to get comfortable with the discomfort of not knowing.  Make disruption your culture.  When leaders talk about disruption as a positive force, it sets the tone for the whole organization. It helps create a culture where innovation, change, experimentation, and adaptation are the norm. It nurtures the kind of risk-taking and out-of-the-box thinking that’s needed to reach stretch goals.  Returning to the Motorola pager example, what they did from a people perspective is fascinating. One of their realizations was if they wanted to get dramatically better at quality, they had to instill total quality management principles across the entire organization.  It was a big shift–and it worked. I think that’s partly because when your team feels part of something bigger than themselves, something bold and new, and when they have permission to try–and fail–it nurtures a new boldness.  I think back on a project I’d worked on in the early 2000s at a failing golf resort that was burning cash and barreling towards bankruptcy  I’d been brought in as a consultant to turn things around. We needed to set some big goals and work fast before the money ran out. Every day, we had to make decisions with less-than-ideal information. There was no time to wait. The team was resistant. “We're moving too fast,” they’d say.  But if we slowed down, we would have died.  And you know what? We made it.   Most of us are comfortable with the pace at which we've grown accustomed to working. But your competition may be moving at a very different speed–and if you don't move faster, you’ll be left eating their dust. My takeaway from the resort turnaround project is that we often don't know how fast fast is.  No one thought breaking the four-minute mile was a human possibility until Roger Bannister did it. Once he cracked it, his record was beaten in just 46 days. Disruption is a mindset as much as a set of actions or a strategy.  It is heady, scary and, well, fun! Don’t forget to enjoy that rush of exhilaration. It’s contagious. And it will help fuel you in those challenging moments when your confidence in your ability to hit your stretch goal is ebbing.  By imagining the impossible, it just might become achievable. And even if you don’t quite get there, you’ll still run faster and further than you likely ever imagined you could.

How to build an inventive culture that seeds and feeds new ideas, fostering innovation Raise your hand if your company wants to be more innovative.  Now, keep it up if you’re struggling to do so.  I’ll guess there are a lot of elevated hands out there. That’s because, for many organizations, innovation feels like  such a big lift.  And not a few leaders I’ve met mistakenly think they need to implement R&D departments and dedicate vast resources to innovation.  But innovation really isn’t so complicated. Some simple tweaks to your mindset, culture, and priorities can yield fresh ideas.   Here are some simple things you can do today to make your organization instantly more innovative: Reframe failure By now, I think we’ve all heard 3M’s  most famous innovation story about the creation of the Post-in note. In 1968, Spencer Silver, a company scientist, failed to create a super-strong adhesive, instead turning out low-tack, reusable glue.  For five years, Silver promoted his "solution without a problem" without success. It took a colleague, Art Fry, who, six years later, had the idea of using Silver’s adhesive to stick a bookmark in his hymn book. He worked on the idea using 3M's  "permitted bootlegging" policy which gives employees time to tinker, and, long story short, the Post-In was born.  There are so many nuggets of innovation wisdom in this story: finding the right solution for your problem, rather than starting with the problem;  widening the lens of possible applications. inviting curiosity; tenacity; and a company culture that encourages experimentation.  Examine your garbage One day, on vacation in Mexico last year, my wife and I got chatting with a friendly couple beside the pool. I learned that the husband had a management consulting business and had recently published a book, Lunch With Leaders , in which he shared highlights from conversations with a range of CEOs and founders.   One was with the woman who started the Little Potato Company . If you’re not familiar, they sell bags of tiny tubers prized for their cute appearance on your dinner plate and creamy texture. They effectively created a new category in the produce aisle in the notoriously competitive and challenging food market. I checked with my local grocery store: a bag of baby potatoes, by weight, sells for four times the price of a bag of regular Russets.  The innovation learned from this tasty example? How they took a product that was traditionally treated as waste and repositioned it as niche, almost gourmet.  Another example is closer to my home in New Brunswick, where forestry is a major traditional industry. It may be a traditional industry, but it isn’t stuck in the past. Along with technological innovations and scientific advancements in growing trees, they’ve looked at their production line, including what was traditionally considered waste, to innovate new products.  Today, they turn sawdust and chips that were once mill detritus into wood pellets, which fuel increasingly popular pellet stoves as consumers look for lower-price alternatives to expensive oil or electric heat.  And, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my great friends at Nucor . In the 1960s, then CEO Ken Iverson spotted a need for an inexpensive source of steel for their Vulcraft joist fabrication business. In those days, steel was made in blast furnaces from iron and coking coal. And, old steel was merely disposed of in landfills. Iverson recognized the opportunity to remelt that scrap steel (garbage!) in electric arc furnaces and turn it into new steel. Since no one else wanted the scrap, that gave Nucor a huge cost advantage. Along with an incredible culture, they have used that innovation to grow into the largest steel maker in North America AND the largest (by weight) recycler in North America. As an added bonus, greenhouse gas emissions from recycling old steel into new is a fraction of the emissions from traditional blast furnaces. In all these examples, the companies saw treasure, whereas others saw trash.  And even if you’re not a manufacturer, there are by-products of your process and services that can be spun off as value-added offerings. Act like it's improv night Innovations look wildly different, but they all rely on a particular mindset that’s willing to experiment, play and imagine.  So, how do you promote that from within your organization? How do you nurture a culture that is open to new (maybe even wild-seeming) ideas and not dismissive of them? I’ve seen a lot of workplaces inadvertently crush good ideas before they see the light of day, in part due to a structural challenge: there are more people in your organization who can say no to an idea (almost everybody) than those who can say yes (typically a few leaders vested with authority). So how do you change that nay-saying mental model, that paradigm within the organization?  One easy way is to take an improv approach. Instead of “no, but…” being your default stance, try “yes, and…”  It’s incredible what this simple shift to a more open and positive mindset can do to nurture potentially innovative ideas. While the first kills them right out of the gate, “yes, and…” encourages exploration.  Swap ‘should’ for ‘could’  Another easy mindset shift is changing the questions your team asks.  When solving a problem, the typical approach is, “What should we do?”  This divergent line of inquiry aims for the “right” answer, which is limiting.  Instead, ask, “What could  we do?” This is a far more open-ended and potentially generative question. Of course, eventually, all those “coulds” will have to converge. But starting with divergent will give you a much richer pool of ideas.  Give the people what they want  Innovation doesn’t need to come from within–it still “counts” if it comes from someone outside your organization. Sometimes, it's just a matter of being alert and responsive to opportunities.  This has been the case for us here at WhiteWater. Most of our product development ideas come from clients asking us questions.  My first book,   Get in Gear , resulted from a client asking, “How do we better translate our strategy to real results?”  We had the pieces to that answer; we just had never put them together into this cohesive new form.  Ditto another offering we’ve got in the works, a training program to develop leaders’ intellectual curiosity, that also came from a client request. We had done original research on the topic, which we found to be the top factor separating high-potential leaders (check out this post to learn more). We knew there was a need for this kind of program, but it was on the back burner. But we knew we had to act when another client asked about it.  Our latest venture, a pilot program called Lead With Empathy, was the same. I talk and write about empathy a lot, but it wasn’t until a client asked for a program specifically focused on it that we created it.  It might be the most significant thing we've ever done. And it’s completely client-driven. Be alert to client-driven innovation. If you listen to your customers, they'll tell you what they need and help you innovate.

Imagining another’s experience unlocks new ideas, connections. My team has been thinking deeply about empathy lately as we build a new program for a client to develop their leaders’ capabilities in this area.  At the same time, my attention keeps getting pulled toward innovation because it’s become so apparent that survival in our business climate of accelerated change demands new solutions to problems. (Check out my latest blog post on nurturing an open, inventive culture.)  Well, it took me a while to connect the dots, but I recently had a lightbulb moment where the two ideas converged, and I began to see an inherent relationship between empathy and innovation.  The more I thought about it, the more I saw threads linking them. And I think they are essential priorities for exceptional leadership.  High-quality attention Both innovation and empathy rely on an unusual quality of attention, a degree of focus you’re willing to give to a customer, colleague or problem. I’d argue that both innovation and empathy require you to get out of your self and direct your attention externally rather than internally, as most of us tend to do much of the time.  Innovation and empathy both require us to sit with a problem or person and give them our deep attention. That’s an increasingly rare and valuable gift in today's distraction culture.  Active imagination This quality of deep attention is paired with a certain imaginative capacity: in both innovation and empathy, it’s necessary to imagine what is not , or at least what we ourselves are not directly experiencing. (Even when we’re able to empathize with another’s situation because it’s similar to something we’ve also felt or lived, we can’t really  know how it feels to be them).  That ability or at least willingness to try to understand somebody else's emotions or perspective, to vicariously experience their life, is an act of imagination.  And so is conceiving of a new solution or approach to an old or emerging problem – the very definition of innovation.    Comfort with discomfort  What do trying new things, advancing potentially wacky ideas, active listening, and being present with another human being have in common?  They can all feel a little … awkward.  That’s because they challenge the status quo, where we all know what to expect, and go beyond the superficiality of most work relationships. Innovation and empathy can feel risky because, well, they are! They require vulnerability.  It’s scary to open up like that.  But let’s consider what the opposite of empathy and innovation looks like. And here, too, I see a lot of common ground. Mostly, it’s a closed, potentially even defensive stance.  My mental image of the non-empathetic/un-innovative leader is a nay-sayer with tightly crossed arms and a look on their face that says, “Try me.”  It’s the office conversation killer. It’s the boss who won’t listen or who’s dismissive of your concerns. It’s the colleague who says, “Oh, there's no reason for you to be upset about that.” It’s the teammate who scoffs at your suggestions and the team meetings where ideas are not really welcome.  These kinds of shut-’er-down responses will kill creativity, trust and connection.  I’ll bet dollars to donuts that a more empathetic organization is also likely to be a more innovative one, because it’s the same foundational elements that nurture both.  Innovation and Empathy

The high costs of low morals and destructive behavior of bad bosses Ah, bad bosses. Most of us have had at least one in our careers.   You know the type: their management style is characterized by abusive, manipulative, and self-centered behaviors. They run the show on a mix of fear, intimidation, coercion, and control. They lack empathy, blame others for their mistakes, and can’t accept feedback.  In my last post, I shared some stories from fairly early in my career about a cartoonishly bad boss (although no one who had to work under this dictator was laughing). While J.R.'s outsized awfulness took place nearly 30 years ago, I’m worried about the rise of toxic leaders in our politics and the risk of spillover effects in business. We must actively resist returning to this outdated, destructive brand of leadership.  In this post, I outline some adverse effects on employees and organizations, including undermined morale, reduced productivity, increased stress and burnout, and higher turnover rates.   Just as a single drop of oil can poison a well, toxic bosses pollute their work environments to catastrophic effect. Here’s how.  Engagement Plummets Under Toxic Leadership The biggest hit I see toxic leaders having on their organizations is on people's commitment to their jobs and overall engagement–and who can blame them? Why should you care about your work when your boss clearly doesn’t care about you?   Toxic leaders often create hostile work environments that degrade employee morale and job satisfaction. Constant criticism, unrealistic expectations, and lack of support can demoralize even the most dedicated workers. When employees feel undervalued and mistreated, their enthusiasm and engagement with their work drop like a stone. Productivity takes a nosedive  Bad bosses don’t just hurt feelings; they can also have very real financial impacts. Instead of helping the bottom line by being “tough,” toxic leaders often hurt it through reduced productivity and increased recruitment costs.   Companies suffer from high turnover rates, reduced productivity, and increased healthcare costs due to the stress and burnout associated with toxic work environments, as these pieces by​ McKinsey & Company ​​ and the Ivey Business Journal  detail. Burnout is ignited It is exhausting for employees to come to work every day and navigate a workplace ruled by a dark overlord, where it feels like they are walking on eggshells. Under constant pressure and scrutiny, employees can experience increased rates of anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues, which affect their sense of well-being AND their productivity and performance.  Collaboration is crushed Successful teams run on trust, which toxic leaders erode through their manipulative behavior. In this setting, people become more guarded and suspicious, more hesitant to share ideas or seek help, and less communicative and collaborative. A toxic leader's divisive tactics can foster a culture of competition and conflict rather than cooperation, where employees are pitted against each other rather than encouraged to work as a team.  All this delivers a gut punch to innovation, which thrives in environments where employees feel safe, valued, and empowered to take chances. Toxic leaders stifle creativity and discourage initiative, leading to a stagnant, risk-averse culture.  Diversity and inclusion suffer  Toxic leadership disproportionately affects underrepresented groups, including women and minorities. These leaders often create environments that hinder diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, exacerbating the challenges these groups face in the workplace​ ( McKinsey & Company )​ Reputational damage  In the age of social media and online reviews, your organization’s reputation is more vulnerable than ever. Word of toxic leadership practices can spread quickly online and in real life, damaging your organization’s brand and making it difficult to attract top talent. A tarnished reputation can also affect relationships with clients, customers, and business partners. And…the doom cycle continues Bad leaders typically hire bad leaders, spawning a whole org chart of toxic mini-me managers.  This ripple effect can accelerate quickly with exponentially toxic leadership (remember that 1980s Faberge shampoo ad, where Heather Locklear “told two friends about it, and they told two friends, and so on,” into infinity? Same idea, just with bad bosses, not gorgeous hair).  As we see from this laundry list of workplace disasters, the consequences of toxic leadership are far-reaching and detrimental. Being caring, and coming from a place of character isn’t just good for your humanity and that of your team – it’s better for your business, too.

Scenario planning’s origins and evolution The 1970s were a tumultuous decade on many fronts, not least the economy, notably the 1973 Oil Crisis. When Arab countries turned off their U.S. oil tap, it rippled through the economy, causing a rush at the pumps and nearly quadrupling barrel prices in just a couple of years. For many, it was an unthinkable turn of events. Not so at Royal Dutch/Shell, which had been experimenting with a dynamic and multifaceted planning approach to be ready for just this sort of upheaval. They’d used scenarios to predict the possibility of this disruption. What’s a scenario, you ask? “Scenarios are not projections, predictions, or preferences; rather, they are coherent and credible alternative stories about the future,” Peter Cornelius, Alexander Van de Putte, and Mattia Romani wrote in Three Decades of Scenario Planning in Shell  in California Management Review.  “They are designed to help companies challenge their assumptions, develop their strategies, and test their plans.” Shell wanted a more sophisticated and multilayered approach to future readiness than traditional forecasting, which tends to predict a future that is similar to the present. Forecasts aren’t simply inadequate; they might even be dangerous, the authors write, “as they are typically wrong when they are needed most.” The oil crisis and its unimaginable-to-some scenario of Middle Eastern oil supplies abruptly ceasing illustrates this point. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood While Shell is widely recognized for its early adoption and ongoing refinement of this approach, the roots of scenario planning run deeper, all the way to Southern California in the late 1940s. That’s when the futurist Herman Kahn, a defense analyst at the Rand Corporation, used stories to illustrate how nuclear weapons might be used by hostile nations. Scientific American dubbed it “thinking the unthinkable.” By 1961, Kahn had founded the Hudson Institute to expand his scenario planning work to social forecasting and public policy. In the mid-1960s, he was approached by Royal Dutch/Shell executives Pierre Wack and Ted Newland, who shared two key insights. First, they thought changes in the Arab world would soon end the decades-long stability of the oil regime. “Second, everybody in the oil industry knew it, but nobody was prepared to do anything,” Kleiner writes. Wack and Newland set out to bring that awareness to the entire organization through scenario planning. It was the first application of a tool subsequent generations of Shell planners and strategists would continue to use and refine. Over the years, scenario planning has helped Shell anticipate major industry disruptions, from oil price shocks to geopolitical shifts. But its usefulness extends far beyond the energy sector. Why This Matters for You: A Mid-Sized Business Case Study While scenario planning has shaped the strategies of global corporations and governments, its principles apply to businesses of all sizes—especially those navigating uncertain market conditions. If you’re leading a mid-sized company, you may not be dealing with global oil crises, but uncertainty still looms large. Supply chain disruptions, shifting regulations, and economic downturns can all threaten business-as-usual. That’s where scenario planning comes in. Consider the recent U.S. tariffs on Canadian goods. Policy changes like these can shift costs and market dynamics overnight. Take, for example, a fast-growing mid-sized manufacturer. Over the last five years, they’ve expanded rapidly, growing revenue by 25% annually. But now, shifting policies and rising costs are creating uncertainty about their next move. By mapping out different scenarios—ranging from continued growth to potential setbacks—they identify key factors that could impact their business, from legislation changes to supply chain costs. Instead of reacting in panic, they’re proactively preparing for multiple futures. The world remains unpredictable, but one thing is certain: leaders who embrace scenario planning can turn uncertainty into an opportunity rather than a threat. In our next post, we’ll take a closer look at how this company puts its scenarios into action—and what lessons you can apply to your own business. Stay tuned. The Plot Thickens - How Scenario Planning Shapes the Future In the decades since Wack met Kahn, a number of organizations and schools have further developed scenario planning. The Oxford approach, for instance, explores the interplay between your immediate business environment and the broader context during “TUNA conditions”: times of turbulence, unpredictable uncertainty, novelty, and ambiguity. Its application has spread across the corporate world and beyond, including to governments. In South Africa, Kleiner writes, scenario planning played a significant role in the peaceful transition from a system of apartheid to a stable multiracial government. In the business world, scenario planning continues to evolve and stay relevant. A Harvard Business School  newsletter, Scenario Planning Reconsidered , quotes Chris Ertel, cohead of practice at Global Business Network, saying scenario planning is becoming “much more entrepreneurial.” “There’s definitely been a shift in recent years away from using it as a contingency-planning device and more as an idea-generation and innovation device,” he says. “For some fast-growth firms, the problem is too many options, so they use scenario planning as an opportunity-management tool.”   Takeaway Uncertainty is inevitable, but leaders who embrace scenario planning turn it into an advantage. The real question is: Is your business prepared for what’s ahead? Download free whitepaper on scenario planning

Why a core of character, caring wins in the long run “You can’t be a leader around here until your ego eats your brain.”  This frank observation, imparted to me early in my tenure at Pacific Gas and Electric by a senior leader in the California utility, has stuck with me throughout my career, not only for its darkly catchy phrasing but also for its undeniable accuracy in that organization.   In those days, what we would now consider corporate bullying was often tolerated and even rewarded with promotions and bonuses. The upper ranks included accomplished people with big titles who crushed those reporting to them.  Back then, when I looked up the corporate ladder, I didn’t see enough examples of leaders with what I call a “core of character.” They weren't caring. They weren't necessarily trustworthy. And they often didn’t make the best decisions for their teams or their customers. They were in it for themselves–and encouraged to be.  Admittedly, that was a long time ago, more than 30 years. I’d love to think that this leadership style is a remnant of a colder, crueler era, that we’ve moved into an age that is more empathetic, people-focused, and collaborative.  It’s interesting and instructive to look at the tale of two leadership styles emerging in the U.S. presidential election. As an American living in Canada, I’ve been dismayed at times by the incivility and even cruelty that’s crept into our politics. But I’m also inspired and encouraged by the clear signs that empathy, caring and character are alive and well.  Monday night of the Democratic National Convention, I found myself nodding along to the burn-burning speech by Steve Kerr, the coach who’s taken the NBA’s Golden State Warriors to four championships and recently returned from the Paris Olympics, where the U.S. basketball squad got the gold. The guy knows a thing or two about leadership!  “I believe leaders must display dignity. I believe that leaders must tell the truth,” Steve said. “I believe that leaders must care for and love the people that they are leading.” This is the core of leadership in any arena: sports, politics, business, and even our homes.  Toxic Leadership memories  The election has caused me to reflect back on some of the worst leaders I’ve met. J.R. is probably the worst, the embodiment of toxic behavior.  This is how he opened daily meetings with his department managers, who were expected to yell at their teams to prove their competence: “You need to go out and kick somebody's ass today.”  Yep, that was his version of “good morning.” Dude, can I get a coffee first? To him, being loud and intimidating was synonymous with being effective. I think he got his leadership lessons from Hulk Hogan!  J.R. was a neat freak who lost it when anything violated his sense of order. One day, after work hours, he went down to the construction crew offices, ripped all of the maps (this was before GPS and digital mapping tools) off the walls, and stuffed them in the garbage. I guess he didn’t like the way they looked!  When the construction crews arrived the following day to prepare for their work in the field, they had to dumpster dive to retrieve their maps.  Another time, a few days after my group moved to a new office space, my colleague, Charlie, came into my office, practically in tears. “Where's my stuff?” he asked. Once I calmed him down, he explained that his collection of family photos and personal items decorating his desktop and cubicle was… gone. After the incident with the missing maps, I had a hunch about where to look first. Sure enough, we ended up in the dumpster behind the office building, where we found his family pictures, along with a bunch of other personal belongings. Again, J.R. had swept through like a hurricane the night before, taking stuff off people's desks that he didn't think ought to be there, callously tossing them. I was starting to think he should set up his office in there!  Anyhow, that did it for Charlie. All of a sudden, this incredibly loyal, talented, hard-working team member essentially said, “screw it.”He started coming in precisely at eight o'clock and leaving at five when he’d lock his pictures and belongings in his desk. In the morning, he’d start his day by taking everything back out, dusting and cleaning to make his point, before laying it all out on his desk. Only then would he go to visit customers. It wasn’t long before he moved on, which was a stupid loss of a great team member.  Bob, our transportation manager, responsible for a fleet of around 150 vehicles, was another favorite target of J.R.’s, who insisted the trucks be spotless, a challenging standard in the primarily rural, dusty Central Valley.  One day, J.R. decided to hold a fleet examination, like a military inspection. Bob and his team worked their butts off to get their vehicles gleaming. After passing a half-dozen trucks, J.R. suddenly stopped, yelling at Bob, “What's wrong with this truck? What’s wrong with this truck?” The rest of us assembled there shrugged. We looked at the gleaming half-ton and couldn’t see anything wrong with it.J.R.’s beef was that the license plate was on the right side of the bumper instead of the left, like the other vehicles.  The next day, I was in J.R.’s office when Deb, our human resources manager, came in to speak with him. She sat down and got right to the point: “I just have one question: What's your theory of how to lead people?”J.R. didn’t hesitate: he grabbed a Sharpie out of his drawer, put it in his palm, and started twisting–hard.“You crank it down, and crank it down, and crank it down,” he said as he drilled the pen into his reddening hand. “And when it's just about tight enough, you give it one turn more.” (You can’t make this stuff up!) Deb looked him straight in the eye. “Well, I'm just wondering,” she asked, “what happens if you strip the screw?” Two weeks later, Deb was transferred out of the division.  I’ll be the first to admit that J.R.’s dictatorial leadership was extreme. These stories are not the norm I see in my clients or corporate culture at large, but they are real. And as we have seen in politics, the slip from integrity, decency, respect, and trust can happen very quickly.  But there is an alternative, embodied by leaders like Steve Kerr, and in businesses everywhere.  I know many of you, like me, still believe in the marrow of your bones, that people are the most important thing, that caring matters, and that it’s not naive to think that we can be both profitable AND humane.  I’ll end with a line from Steve Kerr’s DNC speech that says it best.  “Leadership, real leadership, is not the kind that seeks to divide us,” he said, “but the kind that recognizes and celebrates our common purpose.” Toxic Leadership

Don't let the election–or other big events–steal your focus, especially amidst change. The election, the election: these days, it’s almost all anyone can talk about. As an American living in Canada who works mainly in the U.S., I have to admit that I’m a little bit addicted to the constant discussion of battleground states, polls, debates, and projections! (And, my Canadian friends, neighbors and relatives often ask me to explain it…and, it’s often really hard to come up with an answer that makes sense!) And while I follow the news of the day as much as anyone and care deeply about the outcome, here’s the thing: whoever wins the election, it doesn't matter.  Now, I'm not trying to be glib. Of course, there will be serious policy implications regardless of the victor. The next administration will shape our lives, work, and economy in myriad ways, big and small. Of that, there's no doubt.  What doesn't matter, though, regardless of the outcome, is the inevitability of change. What matters to you and me is that we can't stop and wait. We can't put our companies and our plans goals on hold. We can't wait and see. We must keep going and adjust as needed when the results are in. Living in a VUCA world This isn’t just true during election seasons but is an important lesson all the time. The world is in a state of accelerated change. As I wrote in a recent blog post , we live in an age of endless distractions, where it feels like the ground is constantly shifting beneath us, with competing priorities coming at us fast and furious.  The term VUCA – first used at the US Army War College in 1987 – pretty much sums up our times: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous . It’s what our team describes as a world of perpetual whitewater.  Developing the skills to overcome distraction, to stay calm and focused even in the proverbial storm, and to keep on keeping on is a powerful leadership skill. Here's how to cultivate yours even in– especially –in uncertain times. Revisit your vision It can feel tempting in times of uncertainty to ignore our purpose or even risk abandoning it. In fact, this is when it's most important to double down and recommit to your core,  even as it feels like everything is changing around you. It can be really helpful to step out of our day-to-day concerns and remember our bigger purpose. if you know who you are and what you stand for, that's immutable, and incredibly stabilizing Connect with your team   That uncertainty you're feeling? Your team is feeling it, too. It's your job to make them feel motivated and also safe. The best leaders foster a culture of trust and transparency. That means communicating clearly, being supportive, and actively working to build stronger, more positive relationships with them.  Be a good role model Your team looks to you for cues on how things are going, how to behave, and what's acceptable in your workplace. In times of uncertainty, this is more true than ever.  You need to model the kind of calm focus and dedication that you want from your staff. That might mean working extra hard to manage your frustrations or to embody a positive energy you might not necessarily feel. This is one of those times when you should fake it till you make it.  Control what you can We are bombarded by so many things grabbing for our attention every day that it is impossible to pay attention to them all. So, don’t bother trying. To paraphrase a line I first heard used by Dan Patrick on ESPN’s SportCenter  sometime in the last century , “You can’t stop it; you can only hope to contain it!” The simple act of setting priorities and developing a system for effectively managing them can go a long way. A great place to start is the elegantly simple Time Management  Matrix, with its four boxes plotting tasks along the urgent/non-urgent and important/not important axes. Once you've plotted out your tasks and priorities on The Matrix, ask yourself a few questions: Many of us spend a lot of time on Important, Urgent tasks. How might we change what we do to minimize the number of them in the future?  What low-importance tasks can you eliminate so you can spend more time on your important, non-urgent tasks? Plan for the future Just because the future is unknowable and the present feels uncertain doesn't mean we can't look to the future and plan for it as much as possible. This is what risk management is all about: proactively identifying potential risks and developing contingency plans. This forward-thinking approach helps you anticipate challenges without becoming paralyzed by the prospect of what might or might not happen.  As November 5th draws near, it's helpful to remember this is not our first election, nor will it be our last. (At least, we hope it won’t be!) Whatever happens, your team is looking to you to be focused amidst change, lead them and your organization through it.

Our scenario planning whitepaper helps you prepare for uncertainty. Strap on your helmet, and get your paddles ready: we’re about to enter some very turbulent times! That era of perpetual whitewater we’ve been paddling through will likely get even more choppy as Trump returns to the White House later this month.  As his first term demonstrates, it’s foolish to try and anticipate what the returning president will do, what policies or plans he will put in play. The only certainty is change, which isn’t new but is accelerating and intensifying at a pace we’ve never seen before. It’s not just Trump-related. The world is also grappling with other upheavals: economic and geopolitical instability, the environmental crisis, and warp-speed digital transformation.  It all adds up to a boatload of uncertainty for leaders. As an American living in Canada who works in the states almost weekly, I feel it on both sides of the border. Regardless of your politics, what’s for sure is that the Trump presidency will have wide-ranging impacts on businesses in the U.S. and beyond.  It can feel like tough paddling out there! But the worst thing you can do is sit on shore, helpless. Scenario-proof your strategy   While we can’t know what lies around the bend, wise leaders are doing all they can to be ready to respond to changing circumstances and even prepare for worst-case scenarios. That takes agility. Traditional strategic plans, with their years-long cycles, are too slow to respond to this breakneck change.  This is where scenario planning steps in. It offers a dynamic and multifaceted approach to future planning that can respond to the complexity of multiple uncertainties.  The WhiteWater team are such fans of this approach that we’ve created a  free whitepaper  on scenario planning. This concise primer will give you the confidence to prepare for an unknowable future through a proactive process.  Scenario planning can help your organization plan in three key ways: exploring future options, naming the triggers that will activate a course of action, and defining the factors to evaluate a plan’s success. Along with drawing on our extensive experience leading clients through this process, we’ve curated the best practices and ideas from the leadership literature. Our whitepaper breaks down the three major categories of destabilizing elements in the larger context that could affect your business and operations: your markets, your people and your values. It offers a brief history of scenario planning, and details the three essential elements of successful scenario planning. It also looks at the related roles of improvisation and communication in this approach.  Why Traditional Forecasting Falls Short: The Power of Scenario Planning Unlike traditional forecasting, which tends to assume a single future that’s not very different from the present, scenario planning proactively explores multiple potential scenarios and their implications for your organizations.  Scenarios explore a range of  plausible  outcomes, not a single  probable  one. They help you prepare for the unexpected–before it happens. After all, your strategy is based on a set of assumptions about what will likely occur.  But what if that planned-for future never arrives? What if the conditions change? Scenario planning is an antidote to helplessness, a source of credible action plans to implement when change happens. Scenario planning is a way to explore the interplay between your immediate business environment and the broader context during “TUNA conditions”: times of turbulence, unpredictable uncertainty, novelty, and ambiguity.   This approach helps make your strategy as dynamic as the context in which you do business. It allows you to interact pre-emptively with external factors, from local, national and international politics to domestic and foreign economic forces and social movements. Most importantly, it helps you prepare for multiple eventualities–including those that are not ideal or that seem less likely. If there’s anything we can expect these days, it’s the unexpected.  Building Business Resilience Through Scenario Planning Scenario planning requires an open and creative stance to uncertainty. It also brings your team into the process and mindset of being ready for whatever may come. It provides training, in a sense, for flexible responses to quickly changing circumstances.  As Fernando F. Suarez and Juan S. Montes wrote in ‘Building Organizational Resilience,’ a fascinating Harvard Business Review piece, “Organizations that regularly deal with fast-evolving situations—think SWAT teams and military commandos—know that it pays to practice and prepare for the unexpected while you have the luxury of time and resources instead of trying to learn how to adapt in the middle of a storm.”    By reflecting on their potential impacts today, you can better plan for a prosperous future. Remember, for every risk, there’s the possibility of a new opportunity.  The more comfortable you become with the uncertainty, the better you’ll be able to navigate the whitewater that’s ahead.  So, ready, set, let’s dig in! Grab your free copy of our whitepaper now. And stay tuned for more posts on the power of scenario planning.