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  • Open for Innovation

    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.

  • Dream, Plan, Achieve

    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.

  • The Link Between Innovation and Empathy

    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.

  • Putting Empathy to Work

    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.  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 Sears Killed Sears

    How Sears Killed Sears A Horrific Case of the Missing Follow-up/Follow-through Process Early in my career, I was responsible for a team of technical sales engineers. After a few weeks, I inherited an engineer who had worked for our company for about a year and had developed a reputation as lazy and ineffective. Yeah, I know: the proverbial Thanksgiving Special: the organization was playing “Pass the Turkey” with him. Yet, as I got to know him, I found that he was bright, energetic and highly motivated…the complete opposite of his reputation. I asked him what he’d been doing for the last year. His completely honest response: “Not much.” Why? “Well, frankly, no one has asked me to do much, and then they never check on me. So, I spend my time researching, reading and, generally, hanging out.” Besides the obvious lack of direction or anything that resembled a critical goal, the Follow-up/Follow-through process was totally non-existent. While the sales engineer bore a lot of the responsibility for being missing in action, his previous leaders also clearly failed him. The good news: after we established a few critical goals and started a regular Follow-up/Follow-through process, the sales engineer began to put all that reading and research to work. Within months, he had earned his new reputation as being smart as a whip and doing great things for our customers and our organization. Follow-up/Follow-through: Generating Learning and Accountability for Results In our last post, we talked about the 7th gear in the Strategy>Execution>Results Framework: Follow-up/Follow-through. It’s the gear that keeps the other gears aligned and translating effort to results. As the story above illustrates in stark terms, when Follow-up/Follow-through is missing or ineffective, the other gears wobble, grind and waste time and energy. Effective Follow-up/Follow-through: Set the Rhythm Performers and Leaders need to establish a consistent rhythm for following up and following through. They should create a consistent time frame for meeting, updating and assessing progress toward the project’s goal. Once the rhythm has been established, the burden is on the performer to follow-up with the leader at the agreed upon time. This shifts the responsibility and accountability for performance to the performer and away from the leader. Instead of having to nag performers about scheduling their next status meeting, leaders can focus their attention on their own critical goals and priorities. Follow-up/Follow-through Rhythm: Driven by the Performer’s Needs and the Goal How frequently should they meet? The answer is generally driven by: • the performer’s needs • the nature of the goal or task. Let’s say you just hired a new team member who brings a ton of new capabilities, raw talent and enthusiasm to the organization. But, she has no experience with how things work within your organization and has not proven that she can apply her talent and enthusiasm to consistently achieve critical goals. In this case, you would be wise to start with a fast follow up/follow-through cycle. This enables the leader to provide the guidance the new team member needs to be successful. It also allows the leader to celebrate quick wins and understand her quickly evolving development needs. In the first few days on the job, the cycle might be daily or even every few hours. Or the new team member might be assigned to shadow or be shadowed by a mentor, in which case, the cycle might be nearly continuous. As the new team member demonstrates that she can operate safely and effectively on her own, you can (must) gradually decrease the frequency of the follow-up/follow-through cycles. On the other hand, your “pros in position” will feel smothered by an hourly or daily Follow-up/Follow-through rhythm on a goal or task they are expert in. Weekly, monthly or quarterly better fits their needs. A Recipe for Disaster Establishing a Follow-up/Follow-through rhythm that is less frequent than quarterly is a recipe for disaster. Waiting for the annual or six-month performance review creates too much potential for performers to drift out of day-to-day alignment with their critical goals. (Wait a minute…are you still doing annual performance reviews? We should talk.) If you’re not already comfortable with follow up/follow through, I suggest that whatever interval you choose, make it regular, such as every week at the same day and time. But follow up/follow through can also occur at specific, but not necessarily regular, intervals if that’s what a project plan or task requires. For example, a foreman at a commercial windows and doors company might follow up with his manager within a day of completing an installation. Depending on the size of each job, their meetings could be days, weeks or months apart, but they still occur at specific times. What do you think? To what extent have you established a Follow-up/Follow-through cycle for each of your goals? Is Follow-up/Follow-through driven by the Performers’ needs and the nature or the goal, or driven more by crisis? To what extent does your Follow-up/Follow-through process push responsibility and ownership to Performers, rather than Leaders? Next: The project’s role in setting the Follow-up/Follow-through rhythm. Intrigued by what you’re reading? Download our white paper on converting strategy into execution and learn more about us by visiting our website . WhiteWater International Consulting, Inc. helps organizations understand the challenges they face and helps enterprises achieve and sustain outstanding performance through unleashing the passion and capabilities of its people. Because an organization is only as good at the people who power it.

  • Understanding: Custom Training & Development

    Understanding: Custom Training & Development WWCG provides a wide-range of training and development services to ensure our clients attract, develop and retain the talent necessary to be successful. We provide turnkey training management services; conduct training needs assessments; design, develop and deliver the necessary curriculum; and measure the effectiveness our clients’ training efforts to ensure they optimize the return on their training investment. No one would take a whitewater kayak through Lava Falls in the Grand Canyon without the proper skills and training necessary to navigate through the rapids. The skills can take years of hard work and effort to develop. Hence, we firmly believe that successfully executing the rapids and turbulence in business today is a direct result of an organization’s ability to recruit, select, engage, develop and retain the talented people necessary to execute effectively, in real time, at the speed of light. The ability to develop people is key. Few people who walk through the doors of their employers have all the skills necessary to be effective. They need the right developmental opportunities, at the right time, in the right place, delivered the right way. Many people in organizations believe that training is a waste of time, energy and money. And, frankly, it often is…when the audience is wrong or the timing, content, place or delivery of the developmental activity is off-the-mark. This wastes resources that should be targeted toward productive tasks. Fortunately, education and development in most organizations can be much more effective. Our process for doing so includes: Fully understanding the organization’s business goals and strategies. Understanding how these business goals and strategies tie directly to the skills and competencies to be developed by individuals and groups of people. Building, buying, acquiring etc. appropriate courseware or making other developmental efforts that best build the needed skills and competencies while cutting out wasted material. Helping clients effectively implement their People Development strategy. Rigorously evaluating the outcomes of your learning efforts to ensure they contribute to business objectives set out in the first step. Intrigued by what you’re reading? Download our white paper on converting strategy into execution and learn more about us by visiting our website . WhiteWater International Consulting, Inc. helps organizations understand the challenges they face and helps enterprises achieve and sustain outstanding performance through unleashing the passion and capabilities of its people. Because an organization is only as good at the people who power it. Custom training and development .

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