Does it have to be the leader who comes up with new ideas?

It’s certainly part of the job.

Somewhere in every leader’s job description is something about formulating and managing strategy so it’s definitely in the mix, but must it be their job and their’s alone?

No matter how good a leader you are, there’s one cliché you can’t outrun: nobody is as smart as everybody. And nobody can have as many ideas as everybody can have together.

That’s just maths.

The equation? Great stuff is more likely when you have more people dreaming up great stuff.

So if you’re looking for a source of red hot ideas on how to improve service, cut costs, sell more, or any other kind of innovation … don’t just look in the mirror.

Go to the front line, ask a question, and get your pen out.

Most employees deal with more problems, complaints, issues and snafu’s in a day than you’ll hear about in a month. They’ve been struggling against the system for years and are chock full of ways to improve everything from the voice mail message to the value proposition.

If only you’d ask.

And that’s a BIG point.

A my-door-is-always-open policy never really works. People are too busy, too shy, or just don’t think their idea is important enough to cross the boundary – even if it’s as simple as sticking an envelope in a suggestion box.

Innovation isn’t a waiting game. It’s farming — sow the seed that ideas are important, provide a climate that encourages them to show their heads and grow towards the sun. Reward anyone who helps them on their way.

In other words, you have to ask for help and then show — through action and attention — that ideas are worth nurturing. That ideas have value.

The upside is plain to see. Highly engaged employees actively looking to innovate and serve customers better.

As a leader, you probably can’t stop yourself having ideas, but remember that you’re not alone.

Don’t wait. Seek out and encourage your colleagues, cultivate the ground and shower the best ideas with follow-through.

Boiled down to it’s essence, leadership is about looking at the lay of the land and making decisions. From which emails to answer to which investments to make, via hirings and firings and meeting agendas.

As the saying goes, there’s no such thing as the right decision, just a good one — most of which are equal parts analysis, advice, time pressure and honesty, all shaken together with a jigger of gut.

It’s that jigger of gut I’m interested in here.

How do you hone it and how can you help others do the same?

Decision Muscles

Decision making is a muscle. There’s no tissue involved but to get movement you have to contract it all the same. And more contractions make for stronger muscles.

But good decisions don’t come from muscle-bound hubris, they come from careful practice in the school room of experience where you learn lessons along the way. Lessons like: nothing is really black-and-white, everything is a compromise, and any decision is better than indecision.

It’s an old, old story. The fresh young thing asks the wise and successful owl, “How did you achieve so much?”

“Good decisions.”

“And how do you make good decisions?”

“Experience”

“And how do you get experience?”

“Bad decisions.”

Learning Opportunities

Being a dictator may be the fastest way to move things along and it’s certainly the easiest way to slow things down, but that kind of control comes at a cost. Every decision you take is a learning opportunity lost to somebody else.

Of course, some decisions are yours and yours alone. But they’re rare.

More often than you think, somebody else is better placed and better served to make the call. You can give guidance if you like, walk them through options and tease out their thinking, but if you want your people to grow you have put them in play and let them learn.

They’ll make mistakes and choose paths that you wouldn’t. They’ll gain experience too.

A jigger of gut isn’t made of instinct. It comes from exercise, practice and time on the field. Whenever you can, step out of the game and ask somebody else to make the call. You’ll probably get a good decision, and you’ll certainly get a stronger team.

If you want the time to do good stuff, stop doing stuff you’ll never do well.

Partly attitude and partly system, here’s a plan for doing good stuff:

Push back

Don’t just say Yes every time something crosses your mind, your desk or your In-box. Giving yourself an easy time when accepting requests (especially from yourself) guarantees a hard and frustrating time under a big ticking clock as you try to deliver.

Avoid arm length to-do lists, missed deadlines and low quality by being honest about schedules, commitments and priorities.

Prioritise your list

I remember an executive saying, seemingly without irony, he had seven number one priorities, (no surprise at the end of the year then). Rank everything that you put on your list.

If you’re working for others or in a team, prioritising is team-work. This is important for skippiness!

Finish what you start

This can mean getting to the finish line (yay!) but sometimes it means stopping what you started before the end because you (and your team) realise it’s a waste of time or it’s just not coming together.

It’s often a close call; there’s a fine line between pushing through adversity and bloody mindedness. Seth Godin wrote a whole (little) book, The Dip, on deciding if or when to quit. There’s a Change This version here.

What about you?

How do you make sure you’re working on the good stuff? How do you push back and help out at the same time?

This morning, as I came home from the pool a mother and toddler walked up my street. As I folded my bike and fumbled with my keys the pair stopped outside my gate and I overheard the mother ask, “What would you like for your birthday, if you could have anything?”

Her little boy didn’t have to think, and I didn’t have to “overhear” the answer; the whole street is in on the secret.

I’ll come back to his answer in a minute, but for now, this question reminds me of the “King for a Day” question, variations of which often pop up in strategy offsites, particularly for early stage projects.

I was introduced to this idea by a grey haired old managing partner type facilitating a meeting with our team when we couldn’t agree anything about our new product initiative. Coming back from a break, he changed the tack of the meeting by asking each of these questions in turn, making us write down our answers privately before a group discussion at the end.

What would you change?

1. Imagine you’re about to meet a clairvoyant who can actually see the future. You have one question – what do you ask?
2. It is now five years in the future. The project has been fantastically successful. You’re about to be interviewed by a journalist about what you did to make the success. What three things will you tell the journalist made the most difference?
3. Same scenario except the project went badly. Now what do you say?
4. What are the first three actions you will take out of this session?
5. And finally the King for a Day question. You have the power to make any change to the “system” (usually political, market, sociological or technological) that you like. What would you change to make the project more successful?

The whole session — private writing and open discussion — ran a couple of hours, but by the end we’d moved forward, driven issues on to the table, and had a half decent action plan for what to do next.

The King for a Day question itself can seem a bit facile. “If I were King for a day I’d make a law that every customer in our target market has to buy our product,” for example, isn’t very helpful. Or is it? Answers like this may point to a member of the team who isn’t convinced about the product or marketing (which is a big deal in a small team), or they could be highlighting a weakness in the regulatory framework that effectively excludes start-ups so there’s a risk the new product won’t have a fair chance with tenders in its chosen market (which is a very big deal in any team), or something else entirely. Who knows until you bring it into the open?

I’ve used versions of the questions many times since, and king-for-a-day often provides the liveliest and most productive debate. Time spent exposing issues and deciding actions is always good time in my book.

I’m sure the mother on my street wasn’t interested in the strategic concerns of a nebulous product team, but her question served the same “exposing and deciding” purpose as king-for-a-day; cutting to the chase, what’s next?

The prince in my street hollered his answer, “I WANT A GREAT BIG SPANNER.”

Four years old maybe, but this little fella has things to do, and he knows what he needs to get it done.

What about you?

In the last five years I’ve run well over 6000 miles in marathon training. Over that period I’ve been completely sidelined with injuries for over 30 weeks and have run with niggling problems for maybe a third of the time.

There are two things I should point out about that last paragraph: motivation is not a problem, I run every day it’s remotely possible; and, these kind of stats are not unusual for a marathon runner.

Over those five years I’ve used 16 pairs of running shoes and a set of specially made orthotic insoles. Without going in to the glorious marketing-speak of individual running shoe models it’s a fair assumption that my equipment choices have made running easier and less stressful on my body. Right? Or, without all those shoes I’d be injured even more. Right?

Maybe not.

Over the summer I read Christopher McDougall’s book, Born to Run, which promotes the idea that humans have evolved to run, and running shoes aren’t good for us. Apparently:

“there’s no evidence that running shoes are any help at all in injury prevention. In a 2008 research paper for the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Dr Craig Richards, a researcher at the University of Newcastle in Australia, revealed that there are no evidence-based studies — not one — that demonstrate that running shoes make you less prone to injury.”

My assumption: I need running shoes. The reality: I don’t need running shoes.

Everything I thought I knew is wrong.

What assumptions do you have, impacting your organisational life every day, that stand on no evidence?

The Science of Motivation

Here’s a possible example. In his recent TED Talk on the Surprising Science of Motivation Dan Pink highlighted the ineffectiveness of extrinsic motivators, such as bonuses, most of the time. Despite much of this research being 50 years old, many (most?) managers still rely on the wrong headed ideas of how to get things done.

The key lesson:

“There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does […] If we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks we can strengthen our businesses […] and maybe, maybe, maybe we can change the world.”

What to do when everything you know is wrong

So much for running shoes and extrinsic motivators. What do you do when something comes along that challenges your assumptions? Instinct may be to turn away and go back to the devil you know. Try this instead:

Stop – just think about it for a moment, is it even remotely possible that what has always seemed true, is maybe not the whole truth? Does this new thing nudge up against problem that just seems a part of the woodwork? Be open to possibility.

Look – dig into the the data. Strip away all the personality of the issue, what does the cold steel of a few facts show you?

Listen – who else is talking about this? Can you trust them? Ignore the doomsayers, trolls, the collapsoconomists and anyone with a vested interest in the status quo. Somebody, somewhere is looking at the edges of this thing. Find them.

Listen again – this time to your gut.

If you do all this and the world looks different … act.

My running world looks different. I’ve ditched the shoes for now. I’m not running marathons barefoot yet (although some people do) and I’ve had to make friends with a my blisters, but I am running again. And funnily enough … I feel stronger.

Every manager has to deal with uncomfortable situations from time to time.

From giving constructive feedback to letting people go, difficult conversations are part of life.

If you’re not sitting down with a troublesome member of your team, and dealing with the stuff that’s so troubling, then you’re not managing — you’re ignoring/avoiding/ evading/bailing/hiding/running-away-from and not living up to your responsibilities.

Some of the most difficult conversations involve key players who aren’t living up to their responsibilities or your expectations; worse still if the problem is a fellow founder.

• Deal with problems early — don’t wait for a mythical right time. Give feedback (good and bad) as near to the source as possible. Immediate and direct is better than delayed and fudged.
• Use direct language — “you’re not pulling your weight” isn’t very helpful; “I’m really frustrated that each new feature takes much longer than your original estimate,” is.
• Write it down — the more difficult the conversation or the more likely you are to chew over your words, the better it is to use notes. I make sure I can stay on track by looking at my crib sheet and saying “Let me make sure we’ve dealt with everything. Oh yes, …”

No amount of experience or preparation ever makes these situations easy, but leadership means entering the discomfort and dealing with the issue.

One final point — don’t tell them how difficult it is to say this stuff. You may think it helps to get them on your side. It doesn’t. If it’s hard for you to say, it’s even harder to hear – so stop thinking about yourself and try to empathise; this conversation is not about you.

1. Listen
2. Take heed of
3. Pay attention
4. Lend an ear
5. Take note of
6. Tune in to
7. Attend
8. Hear
9. Understand
10. Act on what you learn

I came across Taylor Davidson’s How to Fail post through John Wilken’s Our Start Up Story blog. Imitating John I’m going to add my tuppence to three of Taylor’s topics: Meet to discuss, Build prototypes, mock-ups and samples, and Focus on the long-term.

Meet to discuss

I have previous on this topic, having written here on effective meetings and ten ways to ruin a perfectly good one. We’re all experts on how to ruin meetings on a practical level but one of the biggest man-hour traps of all is a meeting-as-talking-shop. As Taylor says,

If you need meetings to “get everyone on the same page” then you have bigger problems the meeting will probably not address.

So many companies have meeting cultures with managers running between days scheduled back-to-back. Almost everyone could benefit from fewer meetings. I’ve found the best way to break a meeting-as-update culture is to force managers our of their offices to perch on the edge of someone’s desk, finding out how things are going, what roadblocks they’re having to deal with, and offering support and connections. Fifteen minutes of this can save man-days of meeting time.

All of my best manager/managed relationships (in either direction) have involved this style of management-by-arse-on-desk.

Meetings, when you have them, should really only be held for one reason – to make decisions. I confess to a secret secondary objective of team-bulding. Teams get built faster when they’re active (discussion with the purpose of making a decision) rather than passive (pretending to listen to John’s update when really worrying my own update that I’m about to give or have just given).

Meetings are certainly not to stroke anyone’s ego. Don’t go to meetings just because you have an opinion, are flattered to be asked, or just to be busy. Don’t call meetings to find out about things (go sit on desks). Don’t invite people simply so they won’t be offended.

If it’s your meeting, ask who you really need in order to make the decision? Invite them. Discuss with a purpose. Make the decision. Move on.

Build prototypes, mock-ups and samples

The thinking goes like this; don’t build the whole thing, but build something that looks like the whole thing, so we can see if the whole thing (kinda) works. It seems to make sense. But as Taylor points out,

“Nothing saps the spirit more than creating mockups and designs without making progress toward a completed product. Most often the product cannot be created exactly as it is designed, and thus it is important to learn through working on the product itself, not the design.”

Having wasted far too much time and money over the years on mock-ups, I have an idealistic two stage process in mind whenever I start something.

First, boil the idea down so you can explain it with one graphic and two sentences.

Second, when everyone gets it, build the simplest version that people will appreciate enough to get a definable benefit from, and iterate.

This is the launch early, launch often philosophy – which doesn’t mean launch buggy code, or a boat that leaks, or a pacemaker that can’t stand walking past a speaker magnet. Launch a simple version that works brilliantly, and then improve it every day.

Focus on the long term

This is probably the hardest one for a planner like me to do something about, and the one I struggle to overcome every day. I love change, I see “a rich landscape of opportunities” and my job has always involved working out how to get there. Vision is great, but what to do today? I’ve developed a system that seems to work for me called GOYA management.

Get Off Your Arse. (The name at least was inspired by my old hero Frederick Herzberg’s famous Harvard Business Review article which debunks KITA management, and everything else on the way). GOYA is what I tell myself to do after I’ve worked out what I want to achieve, how I propose to achieve it and what I won’t be able to do because I’m doing the other stuff (which all fits into my personal planning joy). So then I tell myself “GOYA and do it.” The planner in me prints out special note pages with sections headings. My inner manager lifts my chair and puts me to work.

So that’s my homage to Taylor Davidson’s How to Fail. Make sure you take a look at the original, what are your lessons learned?

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I have a Jura coffee machine at home. I bought it because I love coffee and the Jura is a fantastic machine that makes GREAT coffee that is consistently, wonderfully, perfect.

When I turn the Jura on, it goes through a little routine that heats the water and cleans things out. It takes about 45 seconds. And then, it is … ready. I don’t have to guess. I didn’t have to read the manual to discover that readiness follows the heating-rinsing routine. The machine tells me. The little LED display goes from Heating, to Rinsing, to Ready.

And every morning I think – as I press the button and breathe deep – wouldn’t it be lovely if everything was so well behaved, and told you when it was ready for action. The idea, the plan, the presentation, the product, the team, the soufflé.

Sometimes it’s obvious. Most of the time, not.

Take the guesswork out. Test. Get out of the building, and test.

Put together your best version of the answer. Take it on the road. Talk and listen. Test.

What do you think? Is it ever too soon to test?

Image copyright: captainmcdan via Flickr

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

Calvin Coolidge, 30th US President