Is your organisation like this?

There was a terrific short article in the current edition of the Australian Financial Review's Boss Magazine (page 18 of November 2008). The article quotes an email sent by an Executive departing GE Money's Australian Business. Here it is ...

Dear Co-Workers and Managers (whoops, 'LEADERS'), I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know what a great and distinct pleasure it has been to type: 'Today is my last day'.

For nearly as long as I've worked here, I've hoped that I might one day leave this company. Now that this dream has become a reality, please know that I could not have reached this goal without your unending lack of support.

In an age where miscommunication is all too common, you consistently impressed and inspired me with the sheer magnitude of your misinformation, ignorance and intolerance ... your demands were high and your patience short, but I take great solace in knowing that my work, as stated on my adhoc reviews, 'meets expectations'. That is the type of praise that sends a man home happy after a 10 hour day.

... If I could pass on any word of advice to the lower salary recipient (because it's good for this AAA+ rated company and their shareholders) in India or China who will soon be filling my position, it would be to cherish this experience because a job opportunity like this comes along only once in a lifetime.

Some people absolutely love slogging 80 hour weeks and get a big sense of achievement whey they get a blanket thank - you - all email from the project manager or a movie voucher for two to thank you for 10 weekends in a row work.

Wow. Do you know any organisations or managers like this?

Innovation is hard work

Most of us would like to be more innovative right? More creative, better at improvising, ingenious and inventive. Not many people seem to strive for unimaginative or traditional any more. And a good thing too.

In the consulting and facilitating work that I do, often clients ask for an innovative approach. Sometimes this just means - we want all the good stuff, but delivered really cheaply! At other times they really do want some of the principles of leadership (and I do believe that leadership does have enduring principles) delivered in a way that will jazz the principles up and make them more accessible and memorable to a jaded audience.

Clearly I prefer one approach over the other. But what I enjoy most of all, is when an organisation wants to actually work on becoming more innovative.

My view is that there has been tons of rubbish written and said about innovation - hopefully this blog doesn't add to that virtual pile. Too often I hear things like:

• That's the job of the creative types.
• We don't have time to be innovative.
• We're going to wait until the creative juices start flowing.
• We're not smart enough to think of the 'next big thing'.
  

While those approaches may be partially valid some of the time, I am firmly of the belief that all of us can be more innovative by working at it. When time is critical, that should be a warning signal to us that innovation could be the factor that makes the critical difference. We can often do something to turn on the tap to get the juices flowing. Last, but by no means least, small and incremental innovations often do lead to the 'next big thing'.

Dr Lauchlan Mackinnon, an Australian researcher and consultant, has developed a useful model for thinking about how innovation works. I like it because it builds on the approach of Jules Henri Poincare, a French mathematician, theoretical physicist and philosopher.

Mackinnon describes four stages of innovation - although in practical terms they may be more iterative than sequential. Mackinnon's four phases are:

• Conscious Activity: The hard work part. Writing down ideas, consciously thinking, calculating, researching, seeking opinions.
  
• Internalisation: Let the challenge go. If the conscious activity phase is associative, this phase is much more unconscious and disassociative.
  
• Stimulus of the New: Don't wait for the light to go off from the first two phases, do something to stimulate the current. Read a book not related to the topic. Talk to someone on the bus about it. Re-transcribe all your ideas in some different way using a mind map, a fishbone diagram etc.
  
• Validation: Check that it will work, and get it ready for implementation.

Sure, it would be great if we could just sit back and wait for the insight to hit us. That does work ... some of the time. But what can we do to give our imaginations and our creative juices some assistance?

I summary - we can work, and work hard on being innovative.

What a neighbour

A couple of weeks ago one of our neighbours died. Bill lived one street away from us and he was an extraordinary guy.

Bill must have been 80 or so, and he was an immensely popular piece of our neighbourhood fabric. Every weekday morning and afternoon - rain, hail or shine - Bill would sit at his front gate with his small dog in his lap and greet everyone that walked past. His timing was based on when the young children who lived in the neighbourhood would be walking to and from their local primary school. Bill and his pooch would happily greet them, have a bit of a chat, wish them well and then see them all again later that afternoon.

Whenever Bill missed a day of saying g'day, you knew something was wrong. It happened once last year. He missed a day or two and when he re-emerged there was no dog. Sadly his dog had died. But only a week or so later Bill and a new pup were back at the front gate and the world was back to normal again.

But a month or so ago I was walking home along Bill's street. It was just after 3pm and there was a huge crowd of children with some mums and dads milling on the footpath. From a 100 metres away I couldn't work out what was going on, but my rapid pace had to slow as I weaved my way amongst prams, trikes and assorted small people.

An icecream van ("Mr Whippy" in the local parlance) was parked on the street and the kids were queuing to get an icecream. I thought to myself: "If it was my kids, I'd dodge the crowds and take them somewhere else".

I didn't think much more about it until the following morning - a Saturday - when my wife and I took our dog for a walk. There was a cardboard sign in Bill's front yard letting everyone know that Bill had passed away earlier in the week.

It became clear then. All the children I had seen the previous day queuing for an iceacream from the van were lining up out the front of Bill's house. Bill's dying wish was that every child who had walked past his house should get a free icecream. What a way to be remembered.

How will you be remembered?

The Ibis and Change

As I ran through a park in Sydney last weekend on a training run, I spotted an Ibis standing on the edge of garbage bin. I had run about 25 km at this stage, so I figured that this would a great spot to have a stretch.

As I re-limbered my tired legs, I watched as the Ibis used its curved beak to lift out rubbish from the bin and drop it to the ground. What struck me was how adept this particular bird was at levering the tops off take-away food containers and the like, so that it could get at the contents.

I'm no ornithologist, but I'm also pretty sure that the diet of an Ibis doesn't generally include hamburgers, Beef and Blackbean or Red Bull.

Maybe it was the exercise endorphins that were coursing through my veins, but as I continued my running journey back across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and home, I thought about people and organisations that are like the Ibis.

What???

Long legged with curvy beaks?

Well, not really. But I do often see people and organisations that have not really adapted to new situations completely. They have made a few minor adjustments - the fiddling around the edges - but they haven't really committed to a change and made the almost evolutionary adjustments needed.

What do I mean?

I'm pretty sure that if you were going to design a bird (or any animal) to scavenge from left over human food, it wouldn't really look like the Ibis. This is not to say that the Ibis isn't reasonably effective at what I saw this one bird doing. Indeed, you could suggest that fishing trash from a bin is much easier than fishing worms, fish and other small creatures from shallow water that the Ibis regularly needs to do.

And that's just the point. Often we stop as individuals and organisations when we have made some of the adjustments necessary to be a little more effective and perhaps marginally more efficient. But is that enough? How would we look if we could start from scratch in designing our work or our lives? Would be different? Would we be better?

Are you an Ibis?

The paradoxes of leadership

Last Friday afternoon I was driving from Sydney to Canberra to visit my mother. I've always found road trips to be great opportunities for thinking and reflection, and on this particular trip I was doing some thinking about a presentation to a client organisation for this week. As I sifted through different ways to present some information, my mind kept pulling me back to the inherent contradictions and paradoxical nature of what it is to be a leader. Consider something like - To lead, one must first follow. I know, I know ... it's almost like haiku poetry!

It's almost a cliche or a truism when we say that we live and work in a world of complexity, ambiguity, contradiction and paradox. But even if it is a cliche, that makes it no less valid.

And here are some of the leadership paradoxes that I scribbled down in my notebook while taking a coffee break ...

Loose & Tight, Work & Play, Lead & Follow, Captain & Coach, Create & Conform, Clarity & Ambiguity, Competence & Commitment, Responsibility & Accountability, Centralised & Devolved, Structured & Unstructured, Innovate & Conform, Rational & Instinctive, Direct & Allow, Inspire & Coax, Teach & Learn, Results & Team, Individual & Team, Change & Consolidate, Conventional & Revolutionary, Doubt & Possibility, Experience & Naivety, Intellect & Emotion, Active & Passive, Like & Respect, Unity & Diversity, Clear & Fuzzy, External & Internal, Culture & Structure, Revolution & Evolution, Rigid & Flexible, Cause & Profit, Shareholder & Stakeholder, Objective & Subjective, Reflection & Action, Certainty & Doubt, Loyalty & Dissent, Honesty & Sensitivity, Passion & Professionalism, Long term & Short term, Decisive & Patient, Risk & Reward, Plan & Evolve, Conservative & Adventurous, Diversity & Homogeneity, Confidence & Humility, Competitive & Supportive, Classical & Rock and Roll, Thinking & Feeling, Me & Us, Now & Later, Egoism & Altruism, Responsibility & Entitlement, Private & Public.

Phew ...

I know that's a long list. But if you have just skimmed over it, go back and read through it again slowly.

Because one of the things that I have learned in more than 20 years of leadership experience, is that a critical job of leaders, at all levels, is being able to balance the seemingly dichotomous nature of paradoxes like those in my list.

But the complication is that you are rarely just reconciling one at a time. The very real complexity is that you must be able to comprehend and synthesise a range of these paradoxes for every task that you undertake, with every team in which you lead or work, and ... just to add some further challenge ... you need to be constantly adjusting your response to these paradoxes over time - because nothing stands still.

So what? How can we do this as leaders?

Daniel Goleman provides us with one useful model in his summary of six leadership styles. (If you haven't read his book written with Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee entitled Primal Leadership: Learning to lead with Emotional Intelligence, you should.)

Goleman's six styles - Visonary, Coaching, Affiliative, Democratic, Pacesetting and Commanding leadership - suggest a range of approaches that can be taken, depending on the time, the task and the team. Leaders need to be able to utilise the appropriate style for the situation and their team. But more than that, they need to be able to comprehend one final paradox.

So what is the final leadership paradox?

Not only do leaders need to adapt their style, but a truly effective leader must also be able to recognise when the time comes for them to relinquish the leadership role and hand the reigns over to someone else. It's our haiku again - Leaders must also be followers.