Level 7 Leadership

Posted on February 28, 2011 by AndrewPetrick

Level 7 Leadership is a new concept for the business world. It has to do with making a massive impact on a world that is bigger than our own. Level 7 leaders bring about team innovation that disrupts an entire industry. all their own. Level VII is about producing innovations that break the compromises an industry imposes upon its patrons, clients and customers. A compromise is not a trade-off where features and benefits are weighed off against price. Solving a compromise means ridding artificial methods of extracting rents and outrageous profits from consumers.

For example, Southwest Airlines broke the artificial rules that demanded that either you had to buy a two-way ticket or stayover a Saturday night if you wanted to buy a reasonably priced airfare. The airline industry controlled passengers’ buying decisions with their impositions. Southwest changed the way the nation traveled.

Level 7 Leaders beat up the bullies by taking away their weapons. Level 7 Leaders are liberators; they are freedom fighting innovators with a passion all their own.

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Disruptive Innovative Leadership

Posted on January 31, 2011 by AndrewPetrick

I constantly speak of Level 7 Leaders as liberators and compromise busters, who are changing our world.

What is it about them that makes them so different?

Let’s explore a few of the ideas put forth by Harvard business professor Clayton M. Christensen and friends (see articles below)

The first thing that comes to mind is that Level 7 Leaders have an innovator’s DNA [1]; they see the world differently and disruptively. They discoverer their world in five special ways. By:

1. Associating – the ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields

2. Questioning – constantly ask questions that challenge common wisdom (querying why, why not, what if)

3. Observing – scrutinize the behavior of consumers to generate their uncommon business ideas

4. Experimenting – actively try out new ideas in real life through launching pilots or by creating prototypes

5. Networking – meet people with different kinds of ideas and paradigms who live in different knowledge domains

GENERATE

Such compassionate leaders seek disruptive opportunities because established industry leaders will not be motivated to pursue them [2] . The probability of creating a successful, new growth business is 10 times greater if the innovators pursue a disruptive strategy rather than sustaining an incremental growth strategy.

In contrast to sustaining innovations, disruptive innovations appeal to consumers who are unattractive to the incumbents. Although disruptive innovations typically involve simple adaptations of known technologies, entrants almost always beat incumbents at this game because established companies lack the motivation to pursue nontraditional markets.

Bureaucratic dinosaurs target large, obvious markets which invariably get priority over disruptive opportunities. Disruptive innovators understand every major, attractive market that exists today, was at its inception small and informal. Level 7 Leaders can see the major growth markets of tomorrow as small and poorly defined today; more importantly, they see a crying need going unfilled.

LIBERATE

Our heroes focus on taking people out of their pain. They start by doing this quietly and unassumingly in small ways. But when their impact is big the marketplace changes. Level 7 Leaders enjoy windfall markets not for the sake of money but rather because they undo people’s burdens.

So our liberating leaders work in overlooked areas of established markets or they create entirely new markets in which, it seems, no one else can see.

There are two distinct types of disruptive innovations [3]. The first type creates a new market by targeting non-traditional consumers; the second competes in the low end of an established market. Consumers historically locked out of a market because they lacked the skills or wealth, welcome a relatively simple product that allows them to get done what they had always wanted to get done.

These markets typically start out small and ill defined. They don’t meet the growth needs of large companies. And the incumbent feels no pain at first. Because it creates new consumption, the disruptor’s growth doesn’t affect the incumbent’s core business. But as the innovation improves, it begins to pull customers away from the incumbent. And the incumbent doesn’t have the ability to play in this new game.

The second type of disruptive innovation takes root among an incumbent’s worst customers. These low-end product disruptions, that the previously ill-served customer buys, do not create new markets, but they can quite quickly create new growth.

EMPOWER

Once a viable disruptive growth strategy has been defined, Level 7 Leaders learn to nourish these same strategies, so they can survive and eventually thrive in the turbulent entrepreneurial environment they have created for themselves. This includes strategies to unite and empower those who want to jump on the new bandwagon.

These unassuming champions, to support the small army of supporters joining the cause, need to determine which resources, processes and values to leverage to enable their new ventures to succeed. The motivation to process such disruptive innovations “should be urgent” and central to their many new followers who enlist, helping them to create internally innovative processes and to shape yet more liberating plans.

Sources:

[1] The Innovator’s DNA: Dyer, Jeffrey H., Gregersen, Hal B., Christensen, Clayton M., Harvard Business Review, 00178012, Dec2009, Vol. 87, Issue 12

[2] Foundations for Growth: Christensen, Clayton M.; Johnson, Mark W.; Rigby, Darrell K.., MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring2002, Vol. 43 Issue 3, p22-31

[3] Six Keys to Creating New-Growth Business: Christensen, Clayton M.; Raynor, Michael E.; Anthony, Scott D.., Harvard Management Update, Jan2003, Vol. 8 Issue 1, p3-7

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What Has Emasculated Your Training Programs?

Posted on December 1, 2010 by AndrewPetrick

Workshop Spotlight:
Making Sure You Get the Best ROI on Your Training Dollar

You are already suspicious your company’s training program isn’t having lot of impact, but you’re not sure because you don’t specifically measure change in Performance or return on Training investment. You are sure that transferring in-house knowledge and skills would clearly make you more productive but it just doesn’t seem to be happening at a pace you are personally happy with, if in fact, it is really happening at all. For years you have wanted to create this higher caliber capacity to perform, and you are pretty sure you could do it, but somehow it just keeps not happening, at least not the way you want…

Here are FIVE STEPS to make your training initiatives more effective:

1. Move Your Training Structure From Simulation To Real-Time

When you bring your staff to an artificial setting, they come with defensive attitudes, skeptical resistance, and too often, a silly school-child mentality. In a word, they act differently; they wear different hats than in their normal work-a-day life… and that’s a bad thing. Adults learn best when applying newly acquired skills to solve real problems. So bring your learning initiative into their world and not the classroom. We are not saying don’t use your boardroom to teach; we are saying let them apply the training to on-the-job activities. And usually, the real (required) deep down training goal is behavior change, not incremental knowledge accumulation. Positive behavior change is what evolves into true performance improvements.

Oh, and by the way, make sure you give staff at every level plenty of input into designing their skills and know-how learning agendas. They usually know what is critically needed – - much more often than we do.

2. Measure What Matters – - Impact

Very few companies have the discipline to measure the critical factors that produces their unique success. For some, the thought of doing so just seems overwhelming. Attitudinal surveys yield little helpful information, generally. Those same “feedback” surveys in fact do serve as a major deterrent against change initiatives. Change almost always means discomfort. By contrast, hard business metrics are meant to improve and measure leading-edge indicators, such as actual behavior change. Benchmarking new behavior and changed behavior is important. Focusing on improvements measurement will give you a better understanding of what’s happening with your training.

Measuring and deciding what to measure is difficult (and some times complex) work; that’s why so few companies do it. Starting with a comprehensive diagnosis is valuable. This means using validated tools to measure critical performance indicators. If possible, measure against industry benchmarks while taking particular note of the leading companies’ standards of performance and best practices. Most importantly, set up a process for valid comparison of present and future behaviors, so that incremental improvement, or lack thereof, can be easily detected at each measurement interval. By benchmarking against both industry leaders and internal comparisons, training and change initiatives put genuine punch into performance. In other words, we learn from measurement to focus on the most important skills and behaviors that drive our particular business performance.

3. Use Structured Coaching To Deal With Mindsets

Your company’s top team is the most critical factor in driving your improved organizational performance. The quickest way you can get better results is to improve the way your top team creates these results. Most organizations do not intentionally utilize a process to regularly and progressively develop their top team. Further, your top team will need to model the way for improved performance by other teams and individuals throughout the company.

Structured coaching utilizes proven processes for team and individual development. Many management development programs fail to train intact management teams. As a result team members are frequently not on the same page, fail to develop common language and concepts, and do not develop consensus on “how to“ work together as a team. When your team members go through structured coaching together, they develop their own “chartered” processes; as a result they begin to regularly emerge from meetings with a detailed and unified analysis of the opportunities and problems, and how to best attack them.

Further, the structured coaching process inherently works to deal with normal patterns of skepticism and resistance, so they do not become barriers to your learning. Sometimes the process begins with an open discussion of pre-existing and problematic mindsets as well as other myths that inhibit individual and team learning. In so doing it is also possible to create a customized program that allows training to simultaneously occur at different levels, and are real time pointed at the most needful goals, issues and challenges. Structured coaching also goes beyond a focus on just functional skills but also interweaves into the training the soft skills that are so normally overlooked. It is these soft skills that make the critical difference between strife and cohesion. Cooperation and mutual high esteem is the secret ingredient to that elusive, much sought after goal called “synergy”.

Creating a receptive mindset for training before it happens – - and ensuring a supportive environment afterward – - is what structured coaching is all about. What results is genuine behavioral changes that later translates into improved performance. Ultimately, the bottom line improves. In the case of one company, it generated more than a fourfold return on the program’s costs, including the direct costs of travel and training, as well as the oft-overlooked costs of the participant’s time.

4. The Crucible Is Your Sponsorship

The number one cause of failure in training programs and change initiatives is the lack of commitment from the very top. What the leaders do in your organization without exception will permeate your entire company. When your top managers agree with your program goals in principle yet fail to reflect such in their own behavior, they signal to each and every employee that change isn’t really necessary.

Training usually has to start at the top with individuals who have the necessary prerequisites of genuine integrity, consistency and committed drive. Even top managers (who are often in denial) need to learn the necessary skills to be effective role models. They also need to participate in the design and delivery of the training if real measures of performance are to be gained. In most cases, the importance of implementing new skills and behaviors require your top people to go through your targeted training first. Afterwards they can then teach subsequent courses, at least initially, and serve as role models to reinforce the new goals, attitudes and skill growth.

The more committed you, as the top officer, and your team become, the more likely your training initiative will turn into real behavioral and performance change. It’s actually about what you want most.

5. Follow Through With Reinforcement

The final ingredient to guarantee training success is to gain commitment and consensus to begin practicing what was learned in the program – – to begin practicing the new behaviors and skills immediately. The discomfort of implementation needs to be followed up regularly and continuously in every possible way. Management by walking around, talking up good examples, writing reports of progress – –whatever works – – need to be enthusiastically pursued.

After all, old habits die hard. You are absolutely required to reinforce and support the new kinds of behavior after they learned. Design intangible rewards that both leaders and followers will appreciate. Praise is invaluable; voice is crucial. Example is everything! (Also appreciate that monetary rewards while necessary seldom result in the permanent changes you are looking for.)

Yes, steadily modeling the way is absolutely necessary for the success. What you are is what your employees will become. Would you have it any other way? You’re the one building your company and you get to choose how that happens. So what exactly, do you want to do?

Plan to GET BETTER FASTER in a few hours per quarter… but how?

Your Invitation to a Complimentary Call or Visit

Our staff is available to discuss any organizational challenge you are facing. (We promise no sales pitch or obligation – just an opportunity to get clarity on a pressing organizational issue.) To arrange a complimentary, no-strings-attached, conversation please contact Andrew Pe’trick at 204-480-6606 or email andrew@worksystemscanada.com and the right professional will be directed to you as our gift.

Posted in Training, Workshops | Leave a comment

Why Simple Changes Don’t Work

Posted on November 30, 2010 by AndrewPetrick

Does Your Business Lack Systems Thinking?

By Richard M. Jones, Work Systems Canada Principal

Have you ever noticed the simple changes you tried to implement just don’t seem to work, and sometimes you are surprised at how it really shakes out? Why does A + B no longer = C anyway? Furthermore, as our business grows, the old simplicity gets more and more complicated. So, how do we respond to the complexity that running a modern business involves?

Systems Thinking is designed to enhance your ability to understand, model and resolve complex business issues. It helps us to develop the “mental elasticity” needed to anticipate the intended and unintended consequences of you or your organisation’s decisions and understand how those decisions will lead to tomorrow’s business successes or failures. The concept, based on the work of Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, and others helps us to:

  • Understand the complexities of your organization from a systems’ perspective and design solutions that leverage your strengths
  • Anticipate the intended and unintended consequences of today’s decisions
  • View your organization as an interrelated and interdependent system rather than a collection of separate entities (i.e. departments, product groups, business units)

Understanding the power of the tools and concepts of Systems Thinking allows you to understand, model and test business assumptions and decisions. This ability can have a tremendous impact on the contribution you can make to your organization. Thinking systemically will give you the knowledge and tools to:

  1. Improve your “hit-ratio” of good decisions
  2. Become a more valued member of your team by increasing your ability to understand and manage increasingly complex organizations
  3. Model and predict the impact that decisions will have throughout the organization before they are implemented
  4. Avoid short-term thinking that can create long-term problems
  5. Increase your contribution to shaping the strategic direction of your organization

An example of Unintended Consequences

“Patients won’t be so well cared for” – The Discharge Lounge Syndrome

The Discharge Lounge is an interesting example of the phenomenon of unintended consequences.

First some background. One of our clients was the CEO of a large US tertiary care hospital. One of his many challenges was to free up beds for incoming patients. Hospitals beds get paid for by both insurance companies and Medicare on a midnight bed census. If the bed is occupied it is paid for; if empty the revenue is lost. As the costs of running the beds is roughly the same with, or without, a patient in them this is a good source of revenue that was being lost because people were leaving late. To get a new patient in the bed had to be free by about 2 pm often people were discharged too late in the day for a new patient to be admitted. A review of the bed usage revealed a significant amount of income was being lost because of “empty” beds when the midnight census was taken by the payers.

When we looked at why people were leaving late we discovered:

  1. This was often because they were elderly and needed collection by their children who were at work till late afternoon.
  2. Nursing staff were reluctant to call their carers before the Doctor had finally signed of on their discharge as it might get their hopes up falsely
  3. Nursing staff did not see it as a part of their job.
  4. The nurses didn’t like to be pushy with the patient’s relations to collect them early because they had a sense that patient care would be compromised.
  5. Doctors often did rounds first thing in the morning and signed off on patients well before noon.

As a solution the CEO had a Discharge Lounge set up. The lounge was comfortable and created a space for the patients to await pick up. It was staffed by a nurse from 8 am till 7 pm. The patient was still under the hospital care throughout the wait. It was equipped with magazines, newspapers and TV sets.

Though instigated to provide a space for people to await collection on the day of departure it was receiving only a small amount of use. The statistics didn’t add up. About .6 of a patient was using the lounge daily. Yet the statistics showed that patients were departing earlier and the revenues from the beds “freed up” was better than initially forecast. So what was happening?

We were asked to look into this for the CEO. What we learned, unofficially, is that the Nursing staff was extremely reluctant to send people to the discharge lounge. In their view the care would be inferior to that of the Primary Care Unit. As a result they made every effort to get the patient collected earlier. This often involved calling the patient’s primary carer, often an offspring or a sibling, and asking them to pick people up as early as possible. This being the lesser of two evils in their opinion; being pushy was better than compromising their “sense” of care.

In other words, the existence of the Lounge was having the desired effect on staff behaviour but not through the use of the Lounge.

This was a positive consequence. Though the existence of the lounge was actually the spur needed to get the nursing staff to change their behaviour and contact the next of kin earlier so they could pick up their relatives. There is a sad end to this story - over time the lounge costs could not be justified for the small number of users. Not surprisingly, the Lounge was closed after 10 months (over 220 people used it) and the problem of beds not being filled at the midnight started to creep back ………

Need more detail? Read our best practices white paper on helping organizations develop themselves to achieve sustainable breakthrough results:

Breaking the Complexity Barrier

EMAIL Work Systems Canada’s editor andrew@worksystemscanada.com and ask for your copy.

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Don’t Fight the Rising Loonie – - Innovate

Posted on November 29, 2010 by AndrewPetrick

The Canadian dollar is flirting with par, again as in April this year. Some economists are looking for an eventual rise to a $1.15 against the US dollar. A worldwide currency war is in danger of breaking out. Regardless, the loonie is being driven up by the worldwide commodity boom in oil, gold, metals and other natural resources..

What does this mean for small and medium-sized businesses in Canada, and in particular for Canadian manufacturing?

The number of manufacturing jobs has been in great decline since 2002 when not sector employees 2.3 million Canadians. As of September this year that number has been reduced by 580,000 jobs according to economics professor Stephen Gordon at Laval University in Québec City. That’s right, we have lost more than one in four manufacturing jobs.

Furthermore, the primary losses occurred before the 2008 recession began. The decline in manufacturing may seem to coincide with the rise of our Loonie, but is the rising dollar the real culprit?

In the last decade, our resource based exports (oil, gas, metals, pulp, potash, etc.) have doubled from 1/3 to 2/3 of our export revenue. Canadian manufacturing has been the fall guy. (The Loonacy of parity: How a strong dollar is weakening Canada, Globe and Mail, Oct 16 2010) Not a good thing!

So what does this mean to you and I, in terms of the everyday running of our businesses … this downward spiral of manufacturing jobs alongside of a booming natural resource sector?

First, only a few of us are leveraged off a resource -based client. To gain that leverage we might have to reinvent ourselves. That would be a good thing, but how? More on that below.

Second, the confounding effect of a rising Canadian dollar needs to be managed. The rising Loonie may not be cutting into our exporting margins quite as much as we assume. Our company’s net currency exposure depends on what proportion of our revenues and expenses are priced in foreign dollars. Management begins in the analysis of the underlying variables:

  1. We can align our revenues and expenses in the same currency. This seems obvious to us at first but it does take real work to accomplish such. Purchase or lease in US dollars. Leasing gets around the inability of Canadian firms to borrow in US dollars. We can also find other ways to insulate against currency fluctuations. Most of us won’t or can’t do currency hedging so we need to innovate on our expense side. Figure out raw materials. Restructure or relocate labor costs when that is possible. Sometimes imagination helps, sometimes it doesn’t. Asking employees for ideas works quite nicely.
  2. Realize that the rising buck gives us more purchasing power and with it more opportunity. Our money certainly goes further to buy machinery and technology. However, we need to make sure such purchases are innovative enough to make clear differences to the bottom line. And perhaps, for the first time in a long time, we might want to go hunting for acquisitions. Mergers and acquisitions can broaden our customer base and geographic scope. More importantly, we need to discover how very many US businesses want to be taken over right now. Many are desperate for the financing and loans that our Canadian banking system affords us and not them. Others can’t take the heat and would love an exit strategy. Swapping shares may be the easiest way to preserve our precious cash and lower our opportunity costs.
  3. Canadian output per worker in the manufacturing sector has been increasing more than three times as fast as our economy as a whole! This is due to two factors primarily: (1) targeting stronger, more profitable sectors & markets, and (2) focusing on innovation – - both in generating our own, and utilizing that which is beyond us. Our own innovation is the best. However, we gain a great deal of leverage by acquiring outside innovation through direct purchase or by joint venture. This brings us to our third point.

Third, innovation can make a huge difference to the relative price of labor (which is entirely or heavily Canadian domestic for most of us) compared to the cost of capital goods which most of us find to be an imported cost. A high wage environment means we need to learn how to make best use of our labor forces. We need to shift quickly away from simple labor to sophisticated knowledge-based work. This kind of production and manufacturing focuses on higher value, higher innovation goods. New techniques, methods and employee-suggested inventions is at the basis for larger market share and higher margins.

So, to cope with the rising Canadian dollar, we can realign our revenue expense ratio, we can utilize our increased purchasing power, and most importantly we can increase our output through innovation. Innovation is where we can make the most headway in both market share and margin. However, almost every one of us is an under-performer when it comes to innovation. What can we do about that? The first step is nearly always to work on modifying or strengthening our in-house culture.

Here is what needs to be done to develop a culture of innovation:

  1. Realize we are living in an ever-changing business world that is moving at a higher speed than we care to imagine. This requires humility … and not one of us have enough of that. What humility does is allow us to reinvent ourselves. Reinventing ourselves comes from our willingness to change. Most of us want to self justify rather than jump into our ever-changing world. There is always pain in change. So we decide which pain we will have.
  2. Realize, that we as senior-most manager lead by what we sponsor – - we model the way by our example. We can never delegate change or innovation. What we put our heart into is where our followers will go. Reinventing ourselves – - in small ways or big – - starts with you and me. What we sponsor changes our culture..
  3. Setting up a reward system for making a positive difference in work processes, outcomes or creative ideas is the foundation stone for building a culture of innovation. Often the best reward is a combination of open, “gushy” acknowledgment along with the opportunity to further develop the idea or process in question. Secondarily, most workers are more highly motivated by intangible rewards (public praise, plaques, a dinner, tickets to an event, a getaway trip, being sent in an unusual way to represent the company, etc.) than tangible rewards in some monetary form. Showing respect and appreciation are the highest forms of praise. In time, our reward system becomes an imbedded part of our culture..
  4. Build a decision meeting system that asks for input. What seems to inspire our workers more than anything is this: knowing what they say and do makes a difference. In addition to stimulating innovative ideas, allowing staff at all levels to take part in the decision-making process will facilitate transformational leadership development for the future of our company..
  5. If we allow our followers greater freedom to make decisions, then we are enabling them to experiment with new ideas in a safe environment and we thereby challenge them to learn new ways of thinking. (Some prudent caution with this is of course warranted: the authority to make decisions should be offered in a progressive manner, so workers are not overwhelmed and can maintain creative momentum.) With newfound ability to add to the company’s work processes, they are most likely to begin interacting in ways that supports innovation and ultimately influences the future course of the way the company does business. .
  6. We need to learn to generate greater trust and encourage information exchange in a way that flows openly and evenly. In most organizations the natural tendency is to guard information and operate in self-protection mode. As our reward system kicks in and praise is distributed fairly, both trust and openness will begin to rise. Developing candid trust, honesty, frankness and fairness is hard work but reaps huge benefits after time. We need to go to great lengths to avoid the appearance of favoritism or exclusiveness. Above all, we need to be friendly, accessible and approachable..
  7. We usually need to change our vision and mission statements to capture hearts. Too often, they are meaningless to our everyday activities. Further, it is not unusual for them to not capture essence of our company. Good statements succinctly describe what is unique about our service and what is special about our people. When the vision and mission of our firm truly gets inside the minds and hearts of our staff, everything changes. Collaboration and cooperation emerge and innovation follows. .

The bottom line is that we need to realize the best ideas are going to come from the “skin” of our organization. That skin is where purchasing, sales, facilitators and service people meet users and suppliers. Those people operate with the frustrations, problems, pains, desires and hopes of those who would like to see change in us. When we can respond to the sensitivity of our skin, we can begin to identify all sorts of opportunities to innovate to improve the lives of our suppliers, clients and customers. Wouldn’t that be nice?

When these best ideas are developed and implemented, particularly by the people who generated them, we will usually see the rest of our workforce becoming inspired and on fire to continuously look for ways to cut costs, save time, produce more … and generally improve work processes and out comes in unexpected ways. The momentum generated, from such people that we have so empowered, can set us to be fully committed to our vision and mission, and on a course of ongoing innovation and improvement in both process and product. If, as and when that empowerment becomes a part of our culture of innovation, LOOK OUT! The value of the Canadian dollar won’t matter one bit.

Coming Soon: Incremental versus Disruptive Innovation

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Getting Support for our Innovations

Posted on November 26, 2010 by AndrewPetrick

From time to time we all come up with a seemingly great idea or innovation. We are excited and we want everyone to share our joy…  at least at first.  Then reality hits.  Our peers are disinterested and seem to be placating us; those above us give us “the look”, and those we talk to below us, they are hoping it doesn’t take too long because they want to get on with their stuff.  We have all been through it.

Surprise Resistance

If we press on with our idea, and move forward on our best behavior, we can be quite surprised that those we seek to impress, come back at us with feelings that often seem to be somewhat of an attack.

In big organizations and small, the reality about putting forth innovation is that we are dealing with human beings who have anxieties, contrary opinions, and a constant fear: of what any interaction on something new might do to their standing in the group and in the company.  Add to that that most workers carry a basic skepticism about any new ideas.  This seems to be universally true regardless of our stature in our company.

Human Dynamics

To bring about change or institute innovation, we have to deal with human dynamics, dynamics that are anything but easy.   The simple goal is to take our special innovation and communicate it, get enough people to understand it, support it and then go on and make it happen. This means

  1. helping people to communicate,
  2. bringing them around to support your vision, your strategy, your plan, your idea
  3. gaining buy in – - progressively with more and more recruits at every level and key area, and then
  4. implementing it.  Gaining support is the tough part because of the human dynamic.Counterintuitive to Getting Shot Down

John P. Kotter, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School along with co-author Lorne Whitehead in their new book, Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down, have much to contribute in this matter motivation and human change.

They suggest taking a counterintuitive approach to being an advocate.  They suggest starting with a high level of respect and a noble but simple communication of the idea.  Expect resistance and then, at that point, “invite the lions in” to critique the idea.  This is counterintuitive to our natural instinct to marginalize people who oppose us in the least. Rather, it is far better to embrace the naysayers…  and to proceed without judging their reaction and motivations.  Knowing their motivation really does not help the process.

Let the Lions In

By letting the lions in, we inevitably create some fire, some conflict, some drama that draws people’s attention.  We want that attention, it’s hard to get. It’s like a little explosion that they set off for us.  Suddenly people are riveted on us as we are exposed to being attacked.  Here is where the respect part comes in:  everyone is expecting us to counterattack with data and logic, with our positional authority in the company, and with our corporate IQ.

There are four ways people try to kill ideas and innovation: fear- mongering, delay, confusion, and ridicule. Kotter & Whitehead say we will hear things like:

  • Fear- Mongering
  • Sounds like [something horrible] to me!
  • What’s the hidden agenda here?
  • You’re implying that we’ve been failing!
  • Your proposal goes too far/doesn’t go far enough.
  • Aha! What about THIS? [“this” being a worrisome thing that the proposers know nothing about and the attackers keep secret until just the right moment]
  • Tried that before—didn’t work.
  • It puts us on a slippery slope.
  • We can’t afford this.
  • Delay
  • People have too many concerns.
  • Good idea, but the timing is wrong.
  • It’s just too much work to do this.
  • You’ll never convince enough people.
  • Confusion
  • Money [or some other problem a proposal does not address] is the only real issue.
  • What about this, and that, and this, and that…?
  • You have a chicken and egg problem.
  • You can’t have it both ways.
  • It’s too difficult to understand.
  • It won’t work here. We’re different.
  • We’re simply not equipped to do this.
  • Ridicule
  • We’ve been successful. Why change?
  • You exaggerate the problem.
  • You’re abandoning our core values.
  • It’s too simplistic to work.
  • No one else does this.

Now What to Do?

What we do now, at the point of attack is critical. The most effective people, instead of just spraying retaliatory verbal bullets, respond in a way that is, not only respectful, but very short, simple, clear, and filled with common sense.  This amounts to inviting enemy in, let him shoot at you, and not shooting back? Exactly. The opposite of respect is shooting back and gaining their respect is what is critical to our process of persuasion.

The Best Way

When we take the higher ground. We’re the one who comes off as the statesman. It puts us in a better position for our people to be sympathetic to our idea, to listen to us, to move toward us emotionally as opposed to away. The battle for the emotional heart is everything; gaining empathy and support through the heart is the fastest way straight through the crud.

To be a stateman for our innovations we need an astonishing talent for communicating in humble, simple and clear ways. This is not dumbing down. Rather it just means being able to find the best way for people to grasp an issue. Often the best way includes telling stories.

Tell Stories

We don’t mean half-hour stories, but short ones about something that’s happened either within our group or historically in the company. We need to integrate stories into everything. The most basic way humans learn is through stories. Our stories aren’t just intellectual stuff. It’s not just data. It’s hitting at an emotional level and in so doing we carry the day for our idea.

Gain Support and Win Respect

So after we let the lions in, Kotter & Whitehead  say we can do 5 specific things to gain support and win respect for our cause:

  1. Don’t push out the troublemakers; let them in and treat them with respect.
  2. Don’t respond in half-hour speeches that try to drill people into the ground with information, but communicate in ways that are simple, clear.
  3. Don’t let it get personal, no matter how much you want to lash out.
  4. Watch the whole group and don’t get hung up on the one guy who’s attacking you, which is very easy to do.
  5. And the last one is about preparation; don’t wing it: lets spend a few hours of brainstorming with our supporters on potential attacks and responses.

Consider the sample 24 attacks above , asking our self which ones we can imagine coming at you in our company.

If we want to gain support for our innovation we need to strategize like generals and win support like a Abraham, Martin or John.

Posted in Change | Leave a comment

Advancing Jim Collins’ Level 5 Leadership: Levels 6 & 7

Posted on October 15, 2010 by AndrewPetrick

Author Jim Collins (Good to Great & How the Mighty Fall) has given us a useful leadership model in his July 2001 & 2005 Harvard Business Review article
“Level 5 Leadership -The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve”.

It is useful because it gives us both a chronological development sequence as well as outlining distinct and practical leadership attributes. Here is the progression:

Level 1: Achiever

Collins describes this individual as highly capable making productive contributions through individual talent, skills and know-how, as well as honed working habits.

Level 2: Cooperator

We see this leader as a team member who works effectively with others in group mode, jointly contributing to the team’s goals.

Level 3: Organizer

Now, the individual rises to learn management competencies, in organizing people and resources effectively to the pursuit of objectives from on high.

Level 4: Visionary

At this level we see a leader who has the ability to unite people to vigorously pursue a clear and compelling vision; stimulating the collective and catalyzing their commitment to high performance outputs in attaining the dream.

Level 5: Sculptor

This Is Collins key contribution: he discovered that some few business leaders could build “enduring greatness through a paradoxical combination of personal humility plus professional will”.

Now we add what we see as two yet higher levels of leadership development:

Level 6: Humanitarian

This is the skill and attitude to transcend “self” and our personal empires (including the sculptor’s empire). Here we find the empathy and objectivity to see and feel from the perspective of other cultures and individualities’ needs, wants, burdens and hopes. The humanitarian is able to translate this learned “outgoing concern” into unifying words and subsequent movements, on scales both small and big.

Level 7: Liberator

This emancipator goes beyond support from followers to personally lead those followers to relieve the troubles and burdens of an oppressed group. Usually this leader can bust the compromises an industry or government imposes on people. Most often this is done through strategic innovation. Because innovation, at least at first, does not directly affect the status quo, it often begins quietly, going unnoticed until its impact begins to build momentum. At that point, the energy behind the innovation begins to change the world and its old burdensome ways – – people are liberated from the oppression. Liberators are leaders who have developed the know-how and attitudes to bust all sorts of imposed compromise.

Above we have, an outline, a thumbnail sketch of leadership development. We shall have much to say about all of this as we develop this blog. Cheers!

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