Leadership is… Being Able to See What’s Not There.

 Creativity, Leadership  No Responses »
Apr 262012
 

This is the fourth post of the Twitter-inspired Leadership is… series.

Leadership is.. being able to see what’s not there, or just: being creative.

Using your imagination (is that a dirty word in business?) will help you to anticipate new problems and come up with new solutions to the challenges already staring you in the face.

Creativity is inspiring and it doesn’t need to be “whacky”: just seeing someone’s brain ticking over as they visualise new ways of working, taking new steps towards success, can lift everyone’s spirits and fuel their own imagination too.

New ideas need not be radical nor aggressive: they can be simple, gentle, playful, building on what we already have or simply turning what’ already there, on its head. Imagination allows us to see how things would be if we did them differently; it allows us to question, to imagine.

Of course this imagination is not of much use unless it can be turned into a useful reality – that kicks in later when we begin to look at the detail: how to implement change; what resources we need; how it fits into our overall strategy etc, etc. But a leader who can’t take the initial step of  seeing what is not staring them in the face, will find it difficult to challenge team members and help them evolve.

For more Leadership Is… articles, click here.

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Leadership is… Making the Future Seem Bright

 Creativity, Leadership  No Responses »
Apr 242012
 

This is the third post of the Twitter-inspired Leadership is… series.

“Not too bright,” I hear you say. I know but the title “Leadership is… making the future seem bright within reason” doesn’t scan as well.

It is very difficult to move a group of people towards a goal or vision that doesn’t seem bright. It is, of course, also unethical to tell everyone that everything is going to be all right, when we know that times will be tough. Having confidence in your team members (and youself) always helps; finding ways of recognising progress and small wins, however small, will also go a long way.

In tough times, it is difficult to find the stamina to see something through as we get  blocked by fear of failure at one or more moments (I’m using “blocked” here mainly to mean psychologically, but the blocking can become very real if the fear is felt by others).

When we can’t find the necessary push within ourselves, we look for it in others: in someone who doesn’t dwell on the negative; who doesn’t ponder over things they can’t control; who identifies where they can change things for the better; who reminds us of the times when we did get a buzz out of working together, when we did make a difference; who acknowledges that to change is not easy but it is worse than staying put.

Could that someone be you?

For more Leadership Is… articles, click here.

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Why People Aren’t Creative at Work

 Change, Creativity, Leadership, Podcast  No Responses »
Mar 132012
 

For those of you who prefer to listen than read, here is the second podcast of the Leadership in Your Pocket series.

Find out why people guard their creativity at work and what you can do to help it surface;

How to decrease uncertainty in your team during times of change and

Strategies to ensure you set time aside for your own development.

Listen to this episode

Download this episode (right click and save)

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Are we killing collaboration by going paper-free?

 Creativity, Leadership, Teams  2 Responses »
Sep 262011
 

Having read an article about how photocopiers easily trigger collaborative interactions in the workplace, I am concerned that a paper-free future will lack this unassuming tool which promotes collaboration.

Desperate plea of the RisographI used to teach in a small school where the photocopier sat in a small room. It was a huge machine and it jammed constantly. A  jam if you fed too many pages through at once; another  jam if you tried to make too many copies at once, etc etc. But I did love one thing about it: I would meet other teachers there who I wouldn’t otherwise interact with. I could share my frustrations with them; I could have meaningful interactions with them as they showed me how to spot where the problem was; it gave me an excuse to say hello to Rosalind in her office as I asked for help.

“We know that chance encounters and conversations promote cooperation and innovation.”

As a result many companies design “time-out” spaces that will encourage conversations between employees. This is a great way of promoting inter-departmental collaboration (assuming that you have the opportunity to bump into people from other departments or areas in the organisation). It is also a way to enable informal learning to take place in person.

In a Harvard Business Review article brilliantly titled ‘Who Moved My Cube?’ from the July/Aug 2011 issue which focused on collaboration, Anne-Laure Fayard and John Weeks share their research on how different companies have changed their virtual and physical spaces to promote informal interactions at work.  One of the factors that need to be taken into account when designing a space to enable people to have informal (yet private) conversations, is the need for privacy. But privacy does not just mean that you can talk without risking being overheard, you also need to see when other people are about to enter your space, so that you can have control over who can or can’t hear you. Another interesting fact was that a communal space designed for interaction cannot be placed where there is a constant stream of people going through. Not only do you want to control who hears you or talks to you, but you also don’t want to feel like you have to join a conversation when you are just passing through an area.

But what struck me most was the piece on photocopiers, as a perfect place to promote interaction.

The authors of the article observed the interactions that took place in the photocopier room in three French companies.  As they observed people having problems with the machine, they saw others going out of their way to help them solve problems or to teach others how to use the machine or fix a problem. These “photocopier- related” conversations sometimes turned into other work related discussions.
ToreGirAlt
What’s more, through observing what other people were photocopying, staff found out about other people’s work that could affect them – such as when “someone was copying a written report of a project that was relevant to their own work or a new company policy that might affect them.” Indeed, I remember discovering what other teachers were interested in or teaching their students by having a quick peek at what they were photocopying and asking them about it if it seemed interesting. The kind of conversation that could hardly be replaced by approaching them in the staffroom and asking them: ‘So, what are you teaching your students today?’ Having a look at what other people were handing out to their students also gave me some idea of what my own students were being exposed to in other classes as well as providing inspiration for teaching materials I could create myself.

The photocopier needs to be placed somewhere appropriate for these interactions to take place of course. When I used to run a theatre company, I shared an office space with two other companies. At first, we shared a big room and had an open-space type office. The photocopier was located well within the space of one of the companies. As a result, I always felt like I was in someone else’s space when I used the machine. Not that the company weren’t welcoming about this or had a problem with it, but I was very aware that I might be distracting them while I was there.

Three years later, we all moved to an office space where each company had their own room and the photocopier was placed in our shared kitchen space. There, I DO remember stopping and having a chat with people while we were using the machine. We were already in quite a social space and our conversations did not distract anyone.

So, back to the title of this post.  The photocopier comes from a time when paper was the best way to disseminate information. Now that we try to use as little paper as possible, what will replace the photocopier? I’m not sure that a machine with the printer function has the same effect, as some of the material printed might be confidential, while only a small proportion of photocopied material might be for your eyes only.

In addition to that, photocopying is a much longer process (well, ok, that might be a bit of an exaggeration) than printing. When you print a document, you click your mouse at your desk and when you feel like it, you walk to the printer, grab your bits of paper and leave. When you are about to photocopy something, you usually wait for a time when photocopying won’t interrupt your work too much, then you grab your papers, go to the machine, put the docs in, wait and then leave. That means that, generally, you spend more time at the machine than you would if you were just picking up your printed documents, therefore increasing the time during which you are likely to interact with others.

Will our attempt to go paper-free reduce the opportunity for informal collaboration in the workplace?

Or will something else take its place?

Should large organisations where teams run the risk of working in isolation be thinking about a suitable replacement?

Should leaders begin to consider how this might be affecting people at work?

Or maybe the need for social interaction, which was inherent in humans before the photocopier existed, adapt itself to this brave new world?

(This is the first post in a new short series about Promoting collaboration in the workplace.)

Thanks for the images:
quinn.anya
Emma K Lydersen

 Quotes from the HBR  July/Aug 2011 article Who Moved my Cube? by Anne-Laure Fayard and John Weeks.

 

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Why We Hide our Creativity at Work

 Creativity, Leadership  No Responses »
Aug 092011
 

What is creativity and why should we bother being creative? How can we make sure we don’t put the breaks on other people’s potential?

I have been asked a few times what I mean by “creativity”. I tend to answer that I don’t mean “artistry”, but just the ability to develop new ideas by making unusual connections.

So, when I talk of “nurturing team creativity” through the use of theatre exercises, I don’t mean that I am going to teach a team how to be more artistic. What I mean is that I am going to put the team members in a place where they have to address team issues from a different point of view; where they are going to have to make connections that aren’t that apparent; where they are going to challenge their current way of thinking and look for the most appropriate solutions, not just the most common ones.

Creativity is the ability to see what’s not already there, to come up with new solutions, new procedures, new ways of operating. It’s the ability to turn a threat on its head and morph it into an opportunity.

I firmly believe that most of us are creative individuals – but, pretty much as with talent, the context has to be right for our creativity to surface.

I might be incredibly creative at home with the family: devising interesting ways of splitting up the chores; finding different things to do every weekend; building different filing systems every year to take the pain out of sorting out the bills.

But at work, it’s a different story.

I rarely contribute to team discussions; I rarely point out problems when I see them; I never challenge a new project, decision or policy. Why? Because at home I feel like my opinions matter, like my ideas are respected and my actions have an effect.

Luckily, this is not my personal story, but I fear it will ring true to most of you – through direct or second-hand experience.

There is a lot of untapped creativity at work and I think the two main reasons are the suppression of creativity in the workplace (or the lack of conditions to unleash it, which for me, become one and the same thing) and the tradition of separating not just our work and personal lives but also separating who we are at work from who we are outside work.

I’ll deal with the second point first, as it can be easily illustrated with a story.

Linda was a Chinese woman working as part of a product development team at a food company. During the creation of a new soup, the team reached a stumbling block when the chemists could not come up with the right flavour. Linda had a real understanding of Chinese cooking, but in approaching this new problem, she felt like she had to hide this for fear of appearing unprofessional and conforming to stereotypes: a woman in an all- white, male team, bringing her traditional cooking into the lab. If Linda felt like she couldn’t use her cooking skills to help solve a soup-flavouring problem, can you imagine how many seemingly unrelated skills she left outside the lab, in order to conform?

A second example illustrates how even those skills that are required of us in the workplace can be shut away in our “personal life box” instead of being put to good use in the organisation.

After watching Meredith rise organically as a leader in her Church community, Rob promoted her to a leadership position in their national insurance company. Rob soon became disappointed, as in three months, he saw none of the open and empowering style that she used in her community being applied to the workplace. When she was made aware of this, Meredith, who had been in the organisation for fifteen years, admitted that she had deliberately changed her leadership style at work. She felt that if she had been true to herself, she wouldn’t have survived in the organisation for long. Having felt undervalued in the organisation for a long time, she had got used to splitting her work persona from who she was in the community.

(Both of these case studies have been adapted from “Making Differences Matter: a new paradigm for managing diversity.” By David A. Thomas and Robin J.Ely. Harvard Business Review Sept-Oct 1996).

This second example brings us back to the importance of context and organisational culture in allowing individuals to bring the best parts of themselves to work. Fomenting creativity does not mean giving everyone the freedom to do whatever they like. On the contrary, creativity flourishes when boundaries are clear – countless options are sure to result in a jammed brain as it overheats from the thought of boundless possibilities. Knowing our limitations means that we can focus our energies on those areas we can improve or change.

So, what can we do to allow those around us to be creative?

Suspend disbelief.
Guilty, I have to confess, I’m really guilty of replying “No, that won’t work” when someone comes up with something unexpected. But I have taught myself to suspend that thought and ask more questions, ask for details, modifications. I have turned my default reply into: “That’s really worth a try. That sounds like an option”.

(I would also like to warn against being guilty of resting at the other end of the spectrum, when all ideas are implemented. Teams need to retain a focus, and the responsibility of this, tends to lie with the leader.)

Explain why not.
If you really feel like you need to knock an idea on the head, be specific as to why. Is it such a bad idea? Or is it that it will take longer than other suggestions to implement? Or have you not got the authority to implement it? Or simply, you prefer to go with something else because you are the one that will have to see it through?

 Make it routine.
Not every job can take 20% innovation time off, such as that offered to Google engineers or those working for 3M. But there are small changes that can be made if you think creativity (and even innovation) will be key to your team’s or your business’ growth.

Be outward looking.
Creativity will be fuelled by the outside world, so encourage your team members to talk to other people in the organisation and to take time to find out what is going on in other areas of your industry and other unrelated sectors.

And lastly, of course, the big one:

Encourage open communication.
Encourage your team members to share their thoughts, worries and observations in your meetings. Foment a culture of “Am I disturbing you?” instead of one of “Do not disturb” by leading by example: don’t assume people should drop everything when you need them just because you are in charge. At the same time, don’t try to squeeze an important conversation into three minutes because you have an open door policy and you want to be always “available”. Give the word its full weight by making sure you are available in both body and mind by scheduling time in your diary when someone has something important to talk you about but they raise it at an inopportune moment.

Of course, it might not be enough to create the right circumstances for individuals to be creative if they find difficulty in accessing their creativity. In the next post, I will turn the focus back on ourselves, the individuals and how to bring down the barriers to creativity.

© Unusual Connections 2012 Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha