CHAPTER 6
Search for Opportunities
JOE BARSI HAS A SAYING taped to his computer that reads, “If you have not endured the most difficult, you cannot become the most successful.” Leaders like Joe understand that you don’t get any place different if you just keep doing the same things over and over again. Getting out of routines and ruts requires treating every job and assignment as an adventure. This involves putting your head up and looking all around, and being willing to invest your time and energy in finding out about other possibilities.
Joe’s personal-best leadership experience involved reviving a branch office of one of the world’s leading global third-party logistics providers, and this required changing their business-as-usual environment. Joe got everyone on the team to adjust their focus, to start focusing outward rather than inward, and to spend time not just understanding customer requirements but actually getting out of the office and meeting face-to-face with them. Joe himself started looking around for areas where they could further expand their customer focus, which resulted in many little actions, such as extending the opening and closing hours of the office so that services were available over a longer time period, conducting business reviews with their top ten customers, and analyzing their competitors for best practices in their industry.
They spent considerable time and energy gathering data to learn about how they could do their jobs better and provide enhanced services. Joe also realized that many people had a lot more product and transportation experience than he had, and he challenged them to share that experience not just with one another but with him as well. “How are we going to work together to improve this business? What will we have to do differently?” Joe asked them. At the end of two years, net revenue increased by over 140 percent, and they went from one of the lowest-ranking offices in the company to a top-thirty branch.
Sometimes challenges find leaders, and sometimes leaders find the challenges; most often, it’s a little of each, as in Joe’s situation. What Joe did is what all exemplary leaders do. He looked outward, keeping up with changing market trends and remaining sensitive to external realities. He convinced others to take seriously the challenges and opportunities that were ahead of them in the future. He served as a catalyst for change, challenging the way things were being done and convincing others that new practices needed to be incorporated to achieve greater levels of success.
Like Joe’s story, personal-best leadership cases are all about significant departures from the past, about doing things that have never been done before, and about going to places not yet discovered.
Change is the work of leaders. It’s no longer business as usual, and exemplary leaders know that they have to transform the way things are done. Delivering results beyond expectations can’t be achieved with good intentions. People, processes, systems, and strategies all have to change. And all change requires that leaders actively seek ways to make things better—to grow, innovate, and improve. Exemplary leaders make the commitment to Search for Opportunities to get extraordinary things done. They make sure they engage in these two essentials:
- SEIZE THE INITIATIVE
- EXERCISE OUTSIGHT
Sometimes leaders have to shake things up. Other times they just have to harness the uncertainty that surrounds them. Regardless, leaders make things happen. And to make new things happen, they rely on outsight to actively seek innovative ideas from outside the boundaries of familiar experience.
SEIZE THE INITIATIVE
When people recall their personal-best leadership experiences, they always think about some kind of challenge. Why? Because personal and business hardships have a way of making people come face-to-face with who they really are and what they’re capable of becoming. They test people, and they require inventive ways of dealing with new situations. They tend to bring out the best in people. When times are stable and secure, however, people are not severely tested. They may perform well, get promoted, and even achieve fame and fortune. But certainty and routine breed complacency.
Meeting new challenges always requires things to be different than they currently are. You can’t respond with the same old solutions. You have to change the status quo. And that’s exactly what people did in their personal-best leadership experiences. They met challenge with change.
The interesting thing about this is that we didn’t ask people to tell us about change. They could discuss any leadership experience they chose—past or present, unofficial or official; in any functional area; in any community, voluntary, religious, health care, educational, public sector, or private sector organization. But what people chose to discuss were the changes they made in response to the challenges they faced. Their electing to talk about times of change underscores the fact that leadership demands altering the business-as-usual environment. There is a clear connection between challenge and change.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a Harvard Business School professor, investigated the human resource practices and organization designs of innovation-producing organizations, seeking to learn what fostered and what hindered innovation in corporations. Our study and Rosabeth’s were done independently of each other, in different regions and periods in time, and with different purposes. We were studying leadership; Rosabeth was studying innovation. Yet we arrived at similar conclusions: leadership is inextricably connected with the process of innovation, of bringing new ideas, methods, or solutions into use. To Rosabeth, innovation means change, and “change requires leadership … a ‘prime mover’ to push for implementation of strategic decisions.”1 Her cases and ours are evidence of that.
The study of leadership is the study of how men and women guide others through adversity, uncertainty, hardship, disruption, transformation, transition, recovery, new beginnings, and other significant challenges. It’s the study of people who triumph against overwhelming odds, who take initiative when there is inertia, who confront the established order, who mobilize people and institutions in the face of strong resistance. It’s also the study of how men and women, in times of constancy and complacency, actively seek to disturb the status quo and awaken others to new possibilities. Leadership, challenge, and seizing the initiative are inextricably linked. Humdrum situations simply aren’t associated with award-winning performances.
That’s exactly the attitude that Arvind Mohan displayed when he was hired as a new manufacturing engineer at a high-technology firm just before a major industry downturn and two rounds of layoffs. Instead of being overwhelmed by this situation, he was determined “to take initiative instead of feeling helpless.” He understood that the company was trying to streamline its cost structure to mitigate the industry’s cyclical nature, and he had some ideas about how they could reduce the required lead time from customer order to delivery.
When he approached his manager, he found that her attention was more focused on dealing with current, and dire, problems. Refusing to be discouraged by this crisis, Arvind told her, “ ‘There is not much activity on the floor right now. Besides, you’ve always encouraged me to think out of the box. You’ve seen the preliminary numbers I’ve put together. How about I work with the production team and see what I can come up with?’ Intrigued with my initial analysis, she gave me the go-ahead.”
When Arvind explained that he had some ideas about how profits could be improved by increasing production throughput, the assembly line manager shot back, “Manufacturing is not the issue! We have long lead times because sales cannot get customers to order more frequently. You need to talk to sales.” Wanting to turn the manager’s cynical view into a positive outlook, Arvind said, “I agree. Why don’t we start, however, by looking at our production efficiency?” Intrigued by his proposal and by the opportunity to learn from what Arvind proposed, the manager gave the green light to proceed. Arvind picked one of the smaller production lines to experiment with, simulated different production scenarios, and found that they could increase throughput by nearly 50 percent.
Buoyed by this success, Arvind convinced his manager to bring sales into the mix. When he broached the possibility of reducing the window time between customer order and delivery, their sales rep thundered: “The last time I pushed my accounts to order more frequently, they ended up going to another vendor. I can’t let that happen again.” Again, Arvind was not dissuaded. He suggested that they visit one of Toyota’s factories and learn about how they trend down on lead-time by sharing the resultant cost savings with their customers. Sales got excited about this possibility, and in the course of six months, they were able to convince all of their accounts to increase their order frequency.
This experience taught Arvind that “if you can think of ways to improve the process, you should take it.” This means you have to stop simply “going through the motions” when it comes to doing your job. It’s a lesson all leaders need to learn. Even if you’re on the right track, you’re likely to get run over if you just sit there. To do your best as a leader, you have to seize the initiative to change the way things are.
Make Something Happen
Some standard practices, policies, and procedures are critical to productivity and quality assurance. However, many are simply matters of tradition, which is what Pat Oldenburg observed when he joined McAfee, the maker of computer security software for business and home. Pat decided that some changes were needed; and rather than wait for someone else to initiate them, he took it upon himself to do something about the way his team measured their effectiveness. He got everyone together and proposed a new idea that would free up valuable time and deliver information that everyone wanted:
I started the meeting by reflecting on my experience at my old company, and how we moved from a model of reporting on numbers of activities to a model of reporting on other value-added things like prospects served and revenue assisted. I told the team that the current method was not scalable at the company, and a change had to be made. I said that scalability and resources are the big issue, but that one thing was to implement one-to-many sales calls. These calls would move from a reactive activity to a proactive one, as our team would host two to three calls per quarter with forty to fifty prospects attending each call.
Pat could sense that the team was hesitant to take on this initiative—hosting informational calls with clients—because no one had been thinking there was any reason to do things differently. Sensing their hesitation, he proposed that they could host one call the first quarter and continue taking the sales calls as normal. The team agreed, and they hosted their first roundtable reference call several weeks later, with more than ninety separate prospects in attendance. The call was subsequently featured in the chief marketing officer’s internal newsletter, saying that the team had successfully fused marketing and sales activities in a productive way. With the positive press and the rave reviews from various sales reps, the team immediately began planning the next quarter’s calls, drafting new guidelines that emphasized using roundtable reference calls over one-to-one sales calls unless absolutely necessary. Pat says that as “we continue to develop the roundtable program, we are surveying participants and employees about ways to continue to change the format and content of the calls, and will continue to challenge the status quo to deliver the largest benefit to our customers that we can.”
As Pat experienced, new jobs and new assignments are ideal opportunities for asking probing questions and challenging the way things are done. They are the times when you’re expected to ask, “Why do we do this?” But don’t just ask this when you’re new to the job. Make it a routine part of your leadership. Treat today as if it were your first day. Ask yourself, “If I were just starting this job, what would I do differently?” Then do those things immediately. This is how you’ll continuously uncover needed improvements.
And don’t stop at what you can find on your own. Ask your colleagues and direct reports about what really bugs them about the organization. Ask what gets in the way of doing the best job possible. Promise to look into everything they bring up and get back to them with answers in ten days. Wander around the plant, the store, the branch, the halls, or the office. Look for things that don’t seem right. Ask questions. Probe.
Leaders like Joe, Arvind, and Pat are fundamentally restless. They don’t like the status quo. They want to make something happen. They want to change the business-as-usual environment. Research clearly shows that managers who rate high in proactivity are assessed by their immediate managers as more effective leaders.2 MBA students who rate high on proactivity also are considered by their peers to be better leaders; in addition, they are more engaged in extracurricular and civic activities targeted toward bringing about positive change.3 Similar results about the connection between proactivity and performance have been found among entrepreneurs, administrative staff, and even college students searching for jobs. Proactivity consistently produces better results than reactivity or inactivity.4 In our research, we’ve found that proactive managers score higher than average on the leadership practice of Challenge the Process; this inclination is independent of both gender and national culture.5 Everyone performs better when he or she takes charge of change.
Leaders at all levels work outside their job descriptions and see opportunities where others don’t. They don’t wait for permission or instructions before jumping in. You make something happen when you notice what isn’t working, create a solution for the problem, gain buy-in from constituents, and implement the desired outcome.
Consider these two examples from Starbucks. One store manager purchased her own blender to create a drink she invented because the company (at that time) didn’t want to invest in blenders. She took the initiative, created the product in her own store, and tested it with her customers. As more and more people requested the product, the company ultimately ended up being convinced to invest in the drink. Since then, the Frappuccino has brought hundreds of millions of dollars to Starbucks. Another store manager had a passion for music and began playing a variety of different types of music he liked at his store. Customers kept asking to buy the music, but it wasn’t for sale. So this manager approached Starbucks executives and asked, “Why not compile our own CD or tape? Customers would snap it up.” Now CDs are sold in almost every one of the coffee shop locations.6 These store managers were not corporate executives, but they took the initiative to make something different happen. And that’s what leaders do. They take the initiative.
When thinking back on his early career experiences as a financial analyst, Varun Mundra realized that “when I did question the status quo, when I did come up with innovative ideas, when I followed through with the changes I suggested, got feedback, understood my mistakes, learned from them, and was open to improvements, I won the respect of the people around me.” As they say in basketball, none of the shots you don’t take ever go in the basket. You’ve got to make something happen in order to score some points. That’s the key insight Varun had when he took the initiative. “It did not matter as much whether the changes were as effective as hoped for,” he told us, “but the fact that someone was ready to stand up and challenge what everyone else used as the norm was generally enough to get something started.” As Varun’s experience attests, you need to give everyone on your team the chance to search for better ways of doing things and to step forward and take initiative.
Encourage Initiative in Others
Change requires leadership, and every person, down to the most junior member of a team, can drive innovation and improvements in a team’s processes. This was precisely what John Wang, senior software engineer at Visa, remembers about the environment at his job after graduating from college. His manager fostered an atmosphere that supported experimentation and innovation, which allowed him and others to find little areas where they could improve existing processes and complete their assignments faster and more efficiently. One such area was the weekly backup process for the group’s main file server. John recounts,
As junior engineers, we were placed in charge of this job, under the supervision of a senior engineer. My group had a tape backup unit that would finish recording the first tape in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, the backup process required two tapes to complete the backup. We were forced to initiate the recording of the second tape after one of us got to the office the next morning, which delayed the backup process. My coworker and I wanted to change the process, and we explored various alternatives. We found a better backup tape drive; however, this unit was quite expensive!
We were a little nervous about requesting this hardware upgrade, but since we had been previously encouraged to take the initiative to improve any processes during our induction into the department, we decided to offer our suggestion to our supervisor. To our surprise, he was very pleased that we had found a way to improve the backup process and immediately placed an order for the tape drive. He also mentioned our discovery to the manager. Our manager praised our initiative in finding a better way of running backups. This encouragement gave us clear positive feedback and the courage to find other suggestions over the next few years to improve our departmental processes. Indeed, this episode gave everyone the clear signal that suggestions were truly welcomed.
The lesson that John took to heart is one that leaders deeply appreciate: “giving everyone—even junior members of a team—the opportunity to take initiative can result in unexpected positive changes.” Another benefit John pointed out was that by allowing the junior engineers to work on this issue, their senior manager was able to focus his attention on other pressing issues, which benefited him individually and the group as a whole. “This principle is one that I have tried to implement in my own life,” John says, “giving people I work with a chance to do things differently than I would. This means I also get a chance to focus on other things that need my attention.”
As John’s experience illustrates, leaders seize the initiative themselves and encourage initiative in others. They want people to speak up, offer suggestions for improvement, and be straightforward about their constructive criticism. Yet when it comes to situations that involve high uncertainty, high risk, and high challenge, many people feel reluctant to act, afraid they might make matters worse.
We asked constituents about the extent to which their leaders “seek out challenging opportunities that test his/her own skills and abilities.” We also asked them about the extent to which their leaders “challenge people to try out new and innovative ways to do their work.” Comparing those leaders who reported that they “almost always” challenge themselves and others to those who “almost never” or “sometimes” engaged in these behaviors yielded quite dramatic (and statistically significant) differences in how people felt about their workplaces. Those people who felt that they were challenged, and who observed that their leaders were also challenging themselves, experienced between 25 to 35 percent stronger feelings of pride, motivation, and team spirit. The biggest difference between the two groups was in how they viewed their leaders’ effectiveness. The least challenging leaders earned evaluations from their constituents that were nearly 40 percent lower than those received by leaders viewed as seeking out challenges for themselves and their teams.
There are a number of ways you can create conditions so that your constituents will be ready and willing to seize the initiative in tumultuous as well as tranquil times. First, create a can-do attitude by providing opportunities for people to gain mastery on a task one step at a time. Training is crucial to building people’s ability and their confidence that they can effectively respond to and improve the difficult situations they face. During periods of rapid change, it may seem as though there’s no time to stop for training, but this short-term thinking is sure to doom the organization. The best leaders know that the investment in training will pay off in the long term. People can’t deliver on what they don’t know how to do, so you have to upgrade capabilities continuously.
Another form of preparation is mental simulation.7 Playing a scenario through in your mind until you can picture it frame by frame is a terrific way to encourage and support initiative. Asking people to imagine the steps they will take before they enact them is a powerful heuristic strategy for giving people the confidence that they can act when the real situation requires it. It’s much the same as practicing fire drills, except that you run them in your head.
In addition, find ways for people to stretch themselves. Set the bar incrementally higher, but at a level at which people feel they can succeed. Raise it too high, and people will fail; if they fail too often, they’ll quit trying. Raise the bar a bit at a time, and eventually more and more people master the situation and build the self-confidence to continue moving the bar upward. You can also foster initiative by providing visibility and access to role models, especially among peers, who are successful at meeting the new challenges. Seeing one of their own succeed in doing something new and different is an effective way to encourage others to do it too.
Challenge with Purpose
Leaders don’t challenge for challenge’s sake. It’s not about shaking things up just to keep people on their toes. Individuals who criticize new thoughts and ideas or point out problems with the ideas of others without offering any kind of alternate options are not challenging the process. They are simply complaining. Leaders challenge for meaning’s sake. They challenge, often with great passion, because they want people to live life on purpose and with purpose. What gets people through the tough times, the scary times—the times when they don’t think they can even get up in the morning or take another step—is a sense of meaning and purpose. The motivation to deal with the challenges and uncertainties of life and work comes from the inside, not from something that others hold out in front of you as some kind of carrot.8 The challenges that leaders raise are always accompanied by a drive to do something themselves to resolve and improve the situation, not simply complain.
The evidence from our research, and from studies by many others, is that if people are going to do their best, they must be internally motivated.9 Their tasks or projects must be intrinsically engaging. When it comes to excellence, it’s definitely not “What gets rewarded gets done”; it’s “What is rewarding gets done.” You can never pay people enough to care—to care about their products, services, communities, families, or even the bottom line. After all, why do people push their own limits to get extraordinary things done? And for that matter, why do people do so many things for nothing? Why do they volunteer to put out fires, raise money for worthy causes, or help children in need? Why do they risk their careers to start a new business or risk their security to change the social condition? Why do they risk their lives to save others or defend liberty? How do people find satisfaction in efforts that don’t pay a lot of money, options, perks, or prestige? Extrinsic rewards certainly can’t explain these actions. Leaders tap into people’s hearts and minds, not merely their hands and wallets.
Arlene Blum knows firsthand the importance of challenging with purpose. Arlene, who earned a doctorate in biophysical chemistry, has spent most of her adult life climbing mountains. She’s completed more than three hundred successful ascents. Her most significant challenge—and the one for which she is best known—was not the highest mountain she’d ever climbed. It was the challenge of leading the first all-woman team up Annapurna I, the tenth-highest mountain in the world. “The question everyone asks mountain climbers is ‘Why?’ ” Arlene explains,
and when they learn about the lengthy and difficult preparation involved, they ask it even more insistently. For us, the answer was much more than “because it is there.” We all had experienced the exhilaration, the joy, and the warm camaraderie of the heights, and now we were on our way to an ultimate objective for a climber—the world’s tenth-highest peak. But as women, we faced a challenge even greater than the mountain. We had to believe in ourselves enough to make the attempt in spite of social convention and two hundred years of climbing history in which women were usually relegated to the sidelines.10
In talking about what separates those who make a successful ascent from those who don’t, Arlene says, “The real dividing line is passion. As long as you believe what you’re doing is meaningful, you can cut through fear and exhaustion and take the next step.”11
Why concern yourself with purpose and meaning? After all, people in the workplace aren’t volunteers; they’re getting paid. However, it’s precisely because people are getting paid—precisely because they are eligible for bonuses and other awards—that you ought to be concerned. If work is seen solely as a source of money and never as a source of fulfillment, organizations will totally ignore other human needs at work—needs involving such intangibles as learning, self-worth, pride, competence, and serving others. Employers will come to see people’s enjoyment of their tasks as totally irrelevant, and they will structure work in a strictly utilitarian fashion. The results will be—and already have been—disastrous. Just take a look at the costs of recruitment and retention these days. Have big stock option plans or huge signing bonuses really done much to make organizations successful? There’s very convincing evidence that reliance on extrinsic motivators can actually lower performance and create a culture of divisiveness and selfishness, precisely because it diminishes an inner sense of purpose.12
EXERCISE OUTSIGHT
You need only to scan the headlines to know how dramatic the changes are that influence people’s lives at home and at work. The old norms are being replaced by still uncertain ground rules. Recent research on the sources of innovation clearly indicates that the most disruptive and destructive innovations can wreak havoc on even the very best companies.13 The only effective response from leaders is to anticipate the disruptions and get ahead of the curve. For sure, they can never afford to be behind it. So where do new ideas for products, processes, and services come from?
Look Outside Your Experience
Surprisingly, researchers find that innovations come from just about anywhere.14 According to a global study of CEOs, two of the three most significant sources of innovative ideas are actually outside the organization.15 Sometimes ideas come from customers, sometimes from lead users, sometimes from suppliers, sometimes from business partners, and sometimes from the R&D labs. What this means is that leaders must always be actively looking for the fuzziest signs and intently listening to the weakest signals to anticipate the emergence of something new over the horizon. This means honing your “outsight”—the capacity to perceive external things—and helping your constituents develop that ability as well.
Studies into how the brain processes information suggest that in order to see things differently and hence creatively, you have to bombard your brain with things it has never encountered. This kind of novelty is vital, explains neuroscientist Gregory Berns of Emory University, because the brain, evolved for efficiency, routinely takes perceptual shortcuts to save energy. Only by forcing yourself to break free of preexisting views can you get your brain to recategorize information. Moving beyond habitual thinking patterns is the starting point to imagining truly novel alternatives.16
Because the human mind is surprisingly adroit at supporting its deep-seated ways of viewing the world while sifting out evidence to the contrary, Marie Capozzi, Renee Dye, and Amy Howe, with McKinsey & Company, suggest that the antidote is direct personal experience: “Seeing and experiencing something firsthand can shake people up in ways that abstract discussions around conference room tables can’t. It’s therefore extremely valuable to start creativity-building exercises or idea generation efforts outside the office, by engineering personal experiences that directly confront the participants’ implicit or explicit assumptions.”17 Consider what one North American specialty retailer did in seeking to reinvent its store format while improving the experience of its customers:
To jump-start creativity in its people, the company sent out several groups of three to four employees to experience retail concepts very different from its own. Some went to Sephora, a beauty product retailer that features more than 200 brands and a sales model that encourages associates to offer honest product advice, without a particular allegiance to any of them. Others went to the Blues Jean Bar, an intimate boutique retailer that aspires to turn the impersonal experience of digging through piles of jeans into a cozy occasion reminiscent of a night at a neighborhood pub. Still others visited a gourmet chocolate shop.
These experiences were transformative for the employees, who watched, shopped, chatted with sales associates, took pictures, and later shared observations with teammates in a more formal idea generation session. By visiting the other retailers and seeing firsthand how they operated, the retailer’s employees were able to relax their strongly held views about their own company’s operations. This transformation, in turn, led them to identify new retail concepts they hadn’t thought of before, including organizing a key product by color (instead of by manufacturer) and changing the design of stores to center the shopping experience around advice from expert stylists.18
Of course, the process doesn’t have to be quite so elaborate, and it can take place right where you are today. Consider what Heidi Castagna, director of sales initiatives at Seagate Technology, did to scan the horizon.19 Heidi leveraged the resources within various subscription services supplied by her company to understand how other firms were reacting to the economic downturn. She attended workshops and meetings dedicated to sharing best-in-class sales enablement models and practices. She spoke with consultants who specialized in helping make sales organizations more efficient. From these activities, Heidi was able to actively learn what had become important to buyers and what was working well for other companies. She successfully looked beyond the “four walls” of Seagate to learn about ideas and perspectives that would have otherwise been unknown to her. By combining her experience with this outsight, she was able to determine the important core messages and meanings from these various sources in order to best understand how she and her group could be innovative and stay ahead of the competition.
Leaders like Heidi understand that innovation requires more listening and greater communication than routine work does. Successful innovations don’t spring from the fifty-second floor of the headquarters building or the back offices of City Hall. You have to establish relationships, network, be connected, and be out and about. Changing the business-as-usual environment requires staying in touch with the world around you.
Promote External and Internal Communication
You can expect demand for change to come from both inside and outside the organization. Too often, however, managers cut themselves off from critical information sources over time because they’re so busy trying to build an organization that will be operationally efficient and self-sustaining. And when the pressures for profit and efficiency are greatest, these managers may even mistakenly act to eliminate or severely limit the very things that provide the new ideas they need to weather the storms of uncertainty—by cutting the budgets for travel and training, for example. Unless external communication is actively encouraged, people interact with outsiders less and less frequently, and new ideas are cut off.
This was precisely the conclusion of classic studies by MIT Sloan School of Management professors Ralph Katz and Tom Allen.20 They examined the relationship between how long people had been working together in a particular project area—what they called “group longevity”—and three areas of interpersonal oral communication (intraproject, organizational, and professional communication) for the project groups at various stages of their existence. Each team’s technical performance was also measured by department managers and laboratory directors.
The higher-performing groups had significantly more communication with people outside their labs, whether with organizational units, such as marketing and manufacturing, or with outside professional associations. Intriguingly, however, groups that had been together the longest reported lower levels of communication in all three areas and “were significantly more isolated from external sources of new ideas and technological advances and from information within other organizational divisions, especially marketing and manufacturing.”21 The long-lived teams cut themselves off from the kind of information they needed the most to come up with new ideas, and thus reduced their performance. They’d been together so long, it appears, that they felt they didn’t need to talk to outsiders; they were content just to talk to each other. It’s easy to understand how some workgroups and organizations become myopic and unimaginative. The people themselves aren’t dull or slow witted; they’ve just become too familiar with their routines and too isolated from outside influences.
Sudeep Padiyar, software development manager at Cisco, appreciates the importance of having a free flow of ideas with his team, and makes sure that no one works in a silo. He believes that “problems and their solutions are both collective team efforts, and that reduces the pressure and burden from individuals.” He has removed organizational boundaries and encourages everyone on the team to take initiative. Sudeep has organized technical seminars and brainstorming sessions in which guest speakers as well as technical leaders are invited to share experiences and ideas. These internal and external communication mechanisms, he says, have substantially increased the sharing of ideas and have resulted in innovative solutions to technical challenges that the team had been dealing with previously. In addition, they use wikis for team members to pose their questions, thoughts, and solutions on an intranet site to which the engineering community has access. The stimulating and thought-provoking discussions on these online message boards have helped people solve complex problems collectively. According to Sudeep, “The free flow of ideas and access to the best brains in the industry have created a channel that enables innovation to thrive and problems to have elegant solutions in quick time.”
Just as Sudeep did, you’ve got to tap into the rich field of ideas that exist outside your own borders. It is imperative that you listen to the world outside. For example, P&G has moved from an internal to an external focus when it comes to looking for innovations. These days more than one-third to one-half of their new products have elements that originated from outside the company or have key elements that were discovered externally. This is quite a shift for a company that had previously developed almost all of its new products internally or had acquired other companies in order to buy the new offerings. You never know just where a great idea will come from, which means that you have to both remain connected and increase your connections.22
Look Out for Good Ideas
On a visit to Northern California, we stumbled across some extremely important advice for leaders. Exploring the Mendocino coast, we picked up a pamphlet describing a particular stretch of shoreline. Printed boldly across the top of the first page was this warning: “Never turn your back on the ocean.” And why shouldn’t you turn your back on the ocean to look inland to catch a view of the town? Because a rogue wave may come along when your back is turned and sweep you out to sea, as it has many an unsuspecting beachcomber. This warning holds lifesaving advice for travelers and leaders alike. When you take your eyes off the external realities, turning inward to admire the colorful scenery in your own organization, you may be swept away by the swirling waters of change.
You must continuously scan the external realities. To be sure, innovation requires insight—the ability to apprehend the inner nature of things—but it also requires even keener outsight. When you keep the doors to the outside world open, ideas and information can flow freely into the organization. That’s the only way you can become knowledgeable about what goes on around you. Outsight is the sibling of insight, and without it innovation cannot happen. Insight without outsight is like seeing clearly with blinders on; you just can’t get a complete picture.
In testing and observing three thousand executives over a six-year period, professors Clayton Christensen, Jeffrey Dyer, and Hal Gregersen noted that the important “discovery” skill relevant to innovators was associating. This involves making connections across “seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas.”23 One powerful method for making associations is through the use of analogies, according to McKinsey & Company consultants. They suggest that by forcing comparisons between one company and a second, seemingly unrelated one, you can make considerable creative breakthroughs. Consider how you might stir the imagination by starting a discussion with your colleagues about such questions as:24
Put yourself into new situations. Confront existing paradigms. Adopt an inquisitive attitude toward others’ opinions and insights. These are methods that will keep your eyes and ears open to new ideas. Remain receptive and expose yourself to broader views. Remove the protective covering in which organizations often seal themselves. Be willing to hear, consider, and accept ideas from sources outside the company. If you never turn your back on what is happening outside the boundaries of your organization, you will not be caught by surprise when the waves of change roll in.
Treat Every Job as an Adventure
Leaders personally seize the initiative, encourage others to do the same, and actively look everywhere for great ideas, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t make extraordinary things happen if they’re leading a project that’s been assigned to them. They don’t have to wait to start their own business to change the business-as-usual environment. When we asked people to tell us who initiated the projects that they selected as their personal bests, we assumed that the majority of people would name themselves. Surprisingly, that’s not what we found. Someone other than the leader—usually the person’s immediate manager—initiated more than half the cases. If leaders seize the initiative, then how can we call people leaders when they’re assigned the jobs and tasks they undertake? Doesn’t this finding fly in the face of all that we’ve said about how leaders behave? No, it doesn’t.
The fact that over half the cases were not self-initiated should come as a relief to anyone who thought he or she had to initiate all the change, and it should encourage everyone in the organization to accept responsibility for innovation and improvement. If the only times people reported doing their best were when they got to choose the projects themselves or when they were the CEO, the majority of leadership opportunities would evaporate—as would most social and organizational changes. The reality is that much of what people do is assigned; few get to start everything from scratch. That’s just a fact of organizational life.
Stuff happens in organizations and in people’s lives. It’s not so important whether you find the challenges or they find you. What is important are the choices you make. What’s important is the purpose you find for challenging the way things are. The question is this: When opportunity knocks, are you prepared to answer the door? Similarly, are you ready to open the door, go outside, and find an opportunity?
Even if you’ve been in your job for years, treat today as if it were your first day. Ask yourself, “If I were just starting this job, what would I do?” Begin doing those things now. Constantly stay alert to ways to improve your organization. Identify those projects that you’ve always wanted to undertake but never have. Ask your team members to do the same.
Be an adventurer, an explorer. Where in your organization have you not been? Where in the communities that you serve have you not been? Make a plan to explore those places. Take a field trip to a factory, a warehouse, a distribution center, or a retail store. If you’re in an educational system, go sit in on the class that was once your favorite subject. How’s it different today? If you’re in city government, go to a department that really intrigues you. If you’re in a professional services organization, go on a site visit with someone in a different practice.
Consider what happened when the chief executives of many large corporations got out of their offices and looked around their organizations from the ground floor, as profiled on the TV show Undercover Boss. 25 On the show, executives (in disguise) work the frontline jobs of their organization to see firsthand how their corporate mandates play out in the real world. Waste Management’s Larry O’Donnell revealed, “In my role as COO [chief operating officer], there are many policies I create that you all have to live with. Now that I’ve made a connection with the people who do the hard jobs at this company, I’m going to be a better manager. I have a whole new appreciation of the impact my decisions have.”26
You don’t have to be at the top of the organization to learn about what’s going on around you. Be on the lookout for new ideas, wherever you are. If you’re serious about promoting innovation and getting others to listen to people outside the unit, make gathering new ideas a personal priority. Encourage others to open their eyes and ears to the world outside the boundaries of the organization. Collect ideas through focus groups, advisory boards, suggestion boxes, breakfast meetings, brainstorming sessions, customer evaluation forms, mystery shoppers, mystery guests, visits to competitors, and the like. Online chat rooms are great venues for swapping ideas with those outside your field.
Make idea gathering part of your daily, weekly, and monthly schedule. Call three customers or clients who haven’t used your services in a while or who have made recent purchases, and ask them why. Sure, there’s email, but the human voice is better for this sort of thing. Work the counter and ask people what they like and don’t like about your organization. Shop at a competitor’s store or, better yet, anonymously shop for your own product and see what the salespeople in the store say about it. Call your organization and see how the phones are answered and how questions are handled. Make sure that you devote at least 25 percent of every weekly staff meeting to listening to outside ideas for improving processes and technologies and developing new products and services. Don’t let staff meetings consist merely of status reports on routine, daily, inside stuff. Invite customers, suppliers, people from other departments, and other outsiders to your meetings to offer their suggestions on how your unit can improve. Keep your antennae up, no matter where you are. You can never tell where or when you might find new ideas.
TAKE ACTION- Always be asking, “What’s new? What’s next? What’s better?”
- Do something each day so that you are better than you were the day before.
- Be restless; don’t let routines become ruts.
- Put yourself in new situations; take on a new project at least once a quarter.
- Find out if “the way things are done around here” still makes sense. If it doesn’t, do something different.
- Ask your customers (clients, suppliers, and so on) for their ideas about what you (and your organization) can do better.
- Go on the Web each day and search for something related to what you do. Also visit sites that are totally unrelated to your business.
- Design work so that it’s intrinsically interesting.
- Seek firsthand experiences outside your comfort zone and skill set.
- Talk with folks outside your organization’s four walls; encourage others to do the same.
Notes
1. R. M. Kanter, The Change Masters: Innovation for Productivity in the American Corporation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 125.
2. J. M. Crant and T. S. Bateman, “Charismatic Leadership Viewed from Above: The Impact of Proactive Personality,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 21, no. 1 (2000): 63–75.
3. T. S. Bateman and J. M. Crant, “The Proactive Component of Organizational Behavior: Measures and Correlates,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 14 (1993): 103–118; T. S. Bateman and J. M. Crant, “Proactive Behavior: Meaning, Impact, Recommendations,” Business Horizons 42, no. 3 (May–June 1999): 63–70; and J. M. Crant, “Proactive Behavior in Organizations,” Journal of Management 26, no. 3 (2000): 435–463.
4. See, for example, J. M. Crant, “The Proactive Personality Scale and Objective Job Performance Among Real Estate Agents,” Journal of Applied Psychology 80, no. 4 (August 1995): 532–537; J. A. Thompson, “Proactive Personality and Job Performance: A Social Capital Perspective,” Journal of Applied Psychology 90, no. 5 (2005): 1011–1017. See also S. E. Seibert and M. L. Braimer, “What Do Proactive People Do? A Longitudinal Model Linking Proactive Personality and Career Success,” Personnel Psychology 54 (2001): 845–875; D. Goetsch, Effective Leadership: Ten Steps for Technical Professions (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2004); and D. J. Brown, R. T. Cober, K. Kane, P. E. Levy, and J. Shalhoop, “Proactive Personality and the Successful Job Search: A Field Investigation of College Graduates,” Journal of Applied Psychology 91, no. 3 (2006): 717–726.
5. Our sample involved managers from both the United States and Switzerland. See B. Z. Posner and J. W. Harder, “The Proactive Personality, Leadership, Gender and National Culture” (paper presented to the Western Academy of Management Conference, Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 2002).
6. H. Schultz and D. J. Yang, Pour Your Heart into It (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 210.
7. For detailed information on mental simulation, see G. Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 45–77; see also G. Klein, The Power of Intuition: How to Use Your Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work (New York: Currency, 2004).
8. The finding that how we deal with challenge comes from the inside was dramatically related by V. E. Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy (New York: Touchstone, 1984; originally published in 1946).
9. See E. L. Deci with R. Flaste, Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation (New York: Penguin, 1995). See also D. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates You (New York: Riverhead Press, 2011); and K. W. Thomas, Intrinsic Motivation at Work: What Really Drives Employee Engagement, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2009).
10. A. Blum, Annapurna: A Woman’s Place, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1998), 3.
11. P. LaBarre, “How to Make It to the Top,” Fast Company, September 1998, 72.
12. For a discussion of myths and truths about financial incentives, see J. Pfeiffer and R. I. Sutton, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006), 109–134. See also A. Kohn, Punished by Rewards (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993).
13. See R. Foster and S. Kaplan, Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market—and How to Successfully Transform Them (New York: Currency Doubleday, 2001); C. M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997); C. M. Christensen, S. D. Anthony, and E. A. Roth, Seeing What’s Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004); and G. Hamel, The Future of Management (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007).
14. See, for example, S. Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (New York: Riverhead, 2010); J. Ettlie, Managing Innovation, 2nd ed. (Burlington, MA: Butterworth-Heineman, 2004); E. von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); and T. Davila, M. J. Epstein, and R. Shelton, Making Innovation Work: How to Manage It, Measure It, and Profit from It (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing, 2006).
15. IBM, Expanding the Innovation Horizons: The Global CEO Study 2006 (Somers, NY: IBM Global Services, 2006).
16. G. Berns, Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2008).
17. M. M. Capozzi, R. Dye, and A. Howe, “Sparking Creativity in Teams: An Executive’s Guide,” McKinsey Quarterly, April 2011.
18. Capozzi, Dye, and Howe, “Sparking Creativity.”
19. This example was provided by Alex Jukl.
20. R. Katz, “The Influence of Group Longevity: High Performance Research Teams,” Wharton Magazine 6, no. 3 (1982): 28–34; and R. Katz and T. J. Allen, “Investigating the Not Invented Here (NIH) Syndrome: A Look at the Performance, Tenure, and Communication Patterns of 50 R&D Project Groups,” in Readings in the Management of Innovation, 2nd ed., ed. M. L. Tushman and W. L. Moore (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1988), 293–309.
21. Katz, “The Influence of Group Longevity,” 31.
22. L. Huston and N. Sakkab, “Connect and Develop: Inside Procter & Gamble’s New Model for Innovation,” Harvard Business Review 84, no. 2 (March 2006): 60.
23. C. Christensen, J. Dyer, and H. Gregersen, “The Innovator’s DNA,” Harvard Business Review 87, no. 12 (December 2009): 60–67.
24. Capozzi, Dye, and Howe, “Sparking Creativity.”
25. On February 7, 2010, the CBS television series Undercover Boss premiered to a staggering 38.6 million viewers, the most watched premiere episode of any reality series in the history of television. It was the most popular new show of the 2009–2010 television season.
26. Quoted in S. Lambert and E. Holzman, Undercover Boss (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011), 41.