If you listen to the media, especially new media, you would think the US is a hotbed of innovation.

You would be wrong.

“The Information Technology Innovation Foundation ranked the U.S. last of 40 countries in terms of improved innovation capacity over the past decade.”

What if you asked business leaders? More than two-thirds would give their organizations high marks for innovation.

But what happens when you ask the working stiffs in those same organizations? You’d find innovation marks well below half.

Some 78% of leaders said yes; just 43% of employees agreed. Does the leader “urge employees to continually expand their understanding of business trends and emerging issues”? Leaders 77%; employees 51%. Does he or she “guide employees who fail or make mistakes to reframe the experiences as learning opportunities”? Leaders 77%; employees 47%. And does he or she “champion the merits of employee-initiated ideas to senior management”? Leaders 75%; employees 42%.

Those questions were asked of “513 leaders and 514 non-leader employees.”

I found grim amusement in the recommended fixes.

Senior Management Sets the Pace

Choose the Right Leaders

Develop Innovation Leaders

Build a Business Process for Innovation.

I thought senior management were the leaders, but obviously not since they are supposed to choose the “right leaders” and develop “innovation leaders.”

The idea that innovation thinking and support can be delegated by senior management to specialists at lower levels is just plain ludicrous.

If you want an innovative company filled with innovative employees then you need a culture of innovation that includes no fear, room for initiative and where the messenger is never killed.

(For more on culture and innovation, including links to research and articles, click here.)

Oops; I forgot to send an entry to The September 2012 Leadership Development Carnival NFL Kick-off Edition, but at least I remembered to give you the link!

Flickr image credit: EFF

After all that’s been written and discussed it shouldn’t surprise you to know that most people crave a positive corporate culture and an open-door policy, but would it surprise you that this desire isn’t a product of the US or even the industrialized west?

Yesterday I mentioned I would share a universal truth from an unlikely source.

A positive corporate culture (40% of respondents) and an open-door policy (100%) are the two key elements of an ideal workplace, according to a recent region-wide human resource (HR) survey conducted by IIR Middle East.

Employee engagement and transparency were also found to be essential to enhanced employee performance within an organizational culture.

One of the reasons I find this so intriguing is not so much the desires themselves, but the local in which they are found.

Granted, my knowledge of the Middle East is limited, but the prevailing customs and culture don’t seem particularly conducive to the development of that kind of MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) in management

(And this has nothing to do with an Islamic vs. Judeo-Christian sub-text.)

Workers all seem to want the same thing, whether in the Mid-East, North and South America, Europe, Russia, India or Asia.

Of course, the surface results of implementing those desires might look different, but the basic cravings that drive them are the same, as is the main stumbling block—management.

Changes in transparency, door policy, not killing the messenger, etc. require changes in managers’ MAP and those changes can not be ordered or implemented from the outside in.

Flickr image credit: FlyingSinger

The thing she [behavioral psychologist] taught me—and this sounds obvious—is that behavior is a function of consequence.  We had to change the behavior in the organization so that people felt safe to bring bad news. And I looked in the mirror, and I realized I was part of the problem.  I didn’t want to hear the bad news, either. So I had to change how I behaved, and start to thank people for bringing me bad news. —Joseph Jimenez, chief executive of Novartis

The behavioral psychologist was brought in after a consulting group was paid to provide “better, more robust process, with more analytics,” which changed nothing.

When we started RampUp Solutions in 1999, we spent a good deal of effort coming up with a tag line that easily explained the services we provide.

After several iterations we finally settled on “To change what they do change how you think”

Over the years, I’ve heard and read story after story of how all kinds of changes—from turn arounds to improved productivity to retention—all started with a change in the way the boss thought.

And that applied whether the boss was CEO, team leader or somewhere in-between.

Stories and discussions about change tend to focus on the actions that bring about the changes, instead of starting at the beginning with the hardest work,

Work that requires the boss, at whatever level, changing the way she thinks and then dispersing and embedding those changes throughout her organization.

So before you hire expensive consultants or seek help from advisors look in the mirror to determine how much of the problem is you.

Flickr image credit: manymeez

In the popular vernacular, the expression “mea culpa” is an admission of having made a mistake by one’s own fault (one that could have been avoided if the person had been more diligent).

Mea culpa are two of the most powerful words any manager can say—as long as they are authentic.

Creating a culture where mea culpa is not just tolerated, but applauded is the mark of the best ‘leadagers’ (Leader + Manager discussion).

They offer no value if they are uttered insincerely or as a means to an end.

Publicly taking responsibility for an error, let alone a real screw-up, is the mark of a good leader, a great manager and a true mensch.

How often have you said ‘mea culpa’ and meant it?

Flickr image credit: ZedBee | Zoë Power

There is a sizable difference between accepting positional leadership when a company is at the bottom and there is no place to go but up and taking over when its at its height—even more so when what was the growth engine and source of extraordinary profits disappears from the economic landscape.

It is one thing to maximize what you have, wringing out every last possible dollar, and investing in innovation for sustainable growth in the future.

It is one thing to create a culture where public shame and the likelihood of termination for missing your numbers rules and changing that to a culture that encourages appropriate risk-taking and never kills the messenger when the risk doesn’t pan out; a culture that understands not every innovation will be a home run, but encourages and applauds the effort anyway.

These are the differences between Jack Welch

But Welch had taken over when the company was in the bottom of an economic cycle. He took over GE in a recession, not the height of a bubble. Immelt got the job right after the end of the high-flying 1990s, an era which crowned CEOs with mythical, God-like crowns, and Welch was bestowed the biggest of them all.

and Jeff Immelt.

Immelt had known before the meltdown the company needed to ween off the leveraged risk from finance that was begun under Welch. … He admitted mistakes, as any good leader must do, and GE more quietly if not humbly went about its business in making the company a 21st century sustainable and reliable profit engine.

The differences are worth noting.

Flickr image credit: laurita13

Recent global events made me think of Clarence Darrow, not for his defense of evolution, but for something else he said, “As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.”

A powerful concept and one that has been true since humans started walking upright.

So I decided to check out some of his other comments and see how applicable they still were.

Darrow was no lover or ideology, especially when it was religiously-based; he saw doubt as a driving force of change and believed it needed to be actively shared to survive, “Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.”

I found this comment particularly apropos after reading today that the Oxford Dictionary gave its stamp of approval to OMG and LOL, “Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?” Good question.

People flock to hear Tony Hsieh explain why he built a happy culture; I wonder if he ever quotes Darrow, “If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.”

Darrow was a lawyer and acted with passion, because he believed in the importance of truth, “The pursuit of truth will set you free; even if you never catch up with it.”

Wise words and a good concept to add to your life credo.

However, in spite of his ideals and profession, he was pragmatic, if not downright cynical, about the world in which he lived, “The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.”

Finally, here’s one for all the managers who claim they want their people to ‘think outside the box’ and be more creative, but react negatively if they disagree with the ‘accepted wisdom’, “To think is to differ.”

Have a great Sunday!

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Win some, lost some is the mantra of business from the largest global enterprise to the newest startup to the micro entrepreneur.

That’s true whether ‘win some’ means a quarter filled with Wall Street plaudits and ‘lose some’ means your stock crashed or ‘win some’ is being able to afford a restaurant dinner after the bills are paid and ‘lose some’ sends you scraping to pay the mortgage.

Winning is easier, often driven as much if not more by the economy than by management skill.

While losing is also affected by the economy, there are enough wins that losing is more about skill—or is it?

Maurice Ewing talks offers up some useful tips on losing your first million. Written for entrepreneurs, it’s applicable to anyone, personally or professionally.

Here are the tips, for details read his HBR post.

1. Making losses is part of making money.
2. Just lose money — not perspective.
3. Never love the business — love doing business.
4. Losses do not make you a loser but how you handle them might.
5. Stuff happens.
6. Loss does bring some advantages.

Perhaps losing is more about MAP.

Perhaps it’s more about what you make out of what happened.

Perhaps it’s not just/all about you.

Yet all Ewing’s tips, along with my ruminations, apply just as well to winning.

Think of it as two sides of the same coin or the inseparableness of Yin and Yang.

Win some, lose some…

As with many things, your choice lies not in winning or losing, but in how you choose to respond to whichever is currently happening.

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/j_obsworth/4984121965/

Engaging your people is a priority these days, but to do it you must foster an environment of trust, where the messenger is never killed and people feel safe saying what they really think. It also helps if you have the kind of ego that doesn’t stand on its dignity.

Here is one approach.

Start with how many times you have said or heard people say ‘should have’, as in “We should have…” or “My boss should have…?”

What if you could harness the creativity behind those thoughts to improve performance in an organization (whether team, executives or somewhere in-between)—the company’s; the group’s; the individual’s; your own?

The idea is to take that “should have’ attitude and make it a constructive function to foster corporate/personal growth and motivation, since the more comprehensive the view of their job and company the more creative people will become.

Drawing in all your people, no matter their level, encourages them to see a larger picture, juices creativity, surfaces ideas from unlikely sources and enhances their sense of ownership, i.e., engagement.

Improvement happens because how they think is the basis for how they perform.

If your MAP makes you the type of manager to whom this appeals then encourage your people to ask

• “Why did she do that?”
• “What can I learn from his decision?”
• “What would I have done differently?”
• Later ask, “Would it have worked?”

Discuss the responses and implement the insights.

For more great stuff on engagement, click over to Becky Robinson’s LeaderTalk for a roundup of articles on engagement from some terrific bloggers.

Image credit: HikingArtist on flickr

Stress is like chlorestoral—there is good stress and bad stress.

A year ago I wrote a post about the problems of stress in the workplace. During the intervening months the economic situation has worsened and stress has increased exponentially.

Managers are under fire and being forced to do far more with far less—a situation that automatically raises stress in any workplace. And there are still those out there who prefer to manage by stress.

I decided to revisit that post, because I believe it’s very important.

Stress, Death and Obesity

Years ago I knew a manager who believed that high stress yielded the best productivity, he generated that environment by setting unrealistic deadlines and generating plenty of consequence-fear (I, and my fellow recruiters, considered his organization our happy hunting ground). The year his department’s turnover hit 99%, which was everyone except him, he was finally terminated.

There are still too many managers who run stress-filled organizations and too many companies that ignore, allow, and even support them—it’s called performance culture—but, as they say, these times they are a’changin’—even if it takes suicide as the wake-up call for some.

“Earlier this year, the French automaker, Renault, found itself doing some soul-searching following a rash of suicides at a design complex outside Paris. In the course of about five months, three engineers killed themselves. In suicide notes and conversations with their families before taking their lives, the three men voiced anxiety about unreasonable workloads, high-pressure management tactics, exhaustion, and humiliating criticism in front of colleagues during performance reviews.”

And companies are starting to get it, “Draper Laboratory, an R&D shop based in Cambridge, Mass., refuses to buy BlackBerrys for its engineers.”How can anyone be creative if they are on’ 24 hours a day?” asks HR Director Jeanne Benoit. “We want to keep them fresh and robust.””

Another recent finding adds another significant reason to reduce worker stress, touching on businesses’ greatest bogyman—obesity and its effect on worker health.

“Scientists reported yesterday that they have uncovered a biological switch by which stress can promote obesity, a discovery that could help explain the world’s growing weight problem…”

Now you have two negatives—death and obesity—and two positives—creativity and retention; separately or together they have an enormous impact on the bottom line.

Here are six ideas from Business Week that you can do to reduce stress in your organization.

• Educate employees about stress types
  Good stress is about concentration and creativity. Bad stress is about panic and fear.
• Never worry alone
  Sharing concerns can turn problems into brainstorming sessions. Teams are cemented through problem-solving.
• Create a listening culture
  If you’re not hearing about problems, there’s a problem. A good gauge: How many e-mails do you get from staff?
• Conduct autopsies without blame
  Make it safe to fail. Innovation languishes in blame-happy cultures.
• Create a listening culture
  If you’re not hearing about problems, there’s a problem. A good gauge: How many e-mails do you get from staff?
• Encourage workers to ask for help
  What is toxically stressful for one can be an exciting challenge for a team.

No, they won’t get it done in a day, but there aren’t any silver bullets for organizational changes (or anything else, for that matter)—especially those involving individual MAP—all you can do is start and then keep going.

Finally, if you run a company, or any organization, and you don’t heed this wake-up call to start reducing negative stress then, as a manager (and a person), you are heading for the same fate as the dodo bird.

Image credit: TenSafeFrogs on flickr

Starting a few years ago, companies that wanted to innovate were finally learning to appreciate failure. They had taken the first steps to understanding that without a culture in which it was safe to fail no one would take the risks that lead to breakthroughs.

Google is held up as the archetype for innovation, but what exactly is it that gives them an edge? Is it really the 20% of time given people to work on their own ideas? Or the food and other perks about which the media loves to write. Or is there something more easily transferable that other companies can do?

Is there one single thing that holds companies back from building successful cultures that juice innovation, spark creativity and empower their employees/customers/investors?

You bet there is: fear!

Fear of being dumped/demoted; fear of being laughed at; fear of what bosses/employees/customers/investors will say when they have the chance; fear of being fired.

In fact, all of these fears can be trace to a basic, still-active, though unstated, policy for too many companies and/or managers—the messenger will be killed.

The idea that the bearer of bad news should not be blamed dates back to Sophocles in 442 B.C. and has been reiterated often in the intervening years—obviously, with only partial success.

Not killing the messenger needs to be instilled deep in the heart of each company’s cultural DNA.

The real question is not whether, but how far, companies will backslide as a result of the current downturn. And, to a great extent, that depends on how much power Wall Street’s short term thinking has lost.

Image credit: sxc.hu