Creative Reaction

Great article over at Harvard Business Publishing’s Discussion Leaders about the difficulties of leadership when morale is low, mentioning two issues in particular; a lack of faith in management and the high amount of workplace anxiety due to job cutting. For the middle manager, the challenges are doubly difficult - as you are managing your staff in difficult times, your own job may be at stake.

What to do? The article offers this advice:

• Make the most of the situation, focusing on what is positive.
• Communicate, separating facts from rumors.
• Collaborate, working together to solve issues creatively
• Focus on results; not presenteeism and busy work.

Ultimately, the challenge is to be stronger as your company works its way out of the current downturn, moving ahead of your competitors.

Is the end of management near?

These are some of the questions asked on Harvard Business Publishing’s Conversation Starter blog. The post itself has to do with larger corporations, though clearly applies to smaller companies as well. In a day and age where creativity is necessary for success, yes even survival, managers must adapt quickly and foster creativity.

Harvard Business School professor (and researcher) Teresa Amabile opines that we will need to reinvent management in order to:

• Enable collaboration by people with diverse perspectives on a problem
• Respect the fact that creativity thrives in situations where there is slack and redundancy.
• Rethink job design and incentive systems in light of what really motivates creativity: intellectual challenge and public affirmation.
• Manage as though we expect creativity from everyone — not just isolated “lone geniuses”

Much of this is antithetical to “conventional wisdom”, but that’s the one of the keys to success, isn’t it? Sensing when conventional wisdom is passé and reinventing the “rules”.

“You need to have muscles. You need to have muscles on your muscles! You need to have muscles on your eyeballs!”
-Reg, Bouncer for the Salty Spitoon

Three Traits of a Tough Leader is a brief post on leadership traits on Harvard Business Publishing’s Blog, and despite the above SpongeBob quote, the traits all have to do with inner strength.

Toughness, defined by the author as inner resilience and character, is often overlooked, and yet is an essential leadership quality.

“Toughness matters because you need a leader who has the wherewithal to stand up for what she believes in, as well as stand up to others to achieve team and organizational goals.”

(I find humor in that the author apparently lacks the toughness to stand up to the politically-correct grammar-rewriting Nazis. Counting skills come into question as well, since there are actully four traits listed, in boldface type, no less. But I digress; I really like the post.)

Anyways, the four traits common to tough leaders are that they:

1. Defuse tension
2. Get up off the floor (when knocked down)
3. Let off some steam (in a good way) and
4. Are humble (which seems to be counter-intuitive)

It take a tough man to make a tender chicken. Likewise, being humble and “owning up to failure, is not a weakness; it’s a measure of strength.”

(I’ve written about the freedom to make mistakes in Making Mistakes Must Be Corporate Policy  and Making Mistakes Must Be Corporate Policy II)

Good reading. Check it out, then see where you might stand some toughening up.

37Signals had an excellent post last Spring entitled Sleep Deprivation is not a Badge of Honor, in which David speaks frankly to recovering workaholics (myself included). His apt analogy equates “borrowing” sleep with borrowing money from a loan shark; you pay a high interest rate with high stakes.

The costs of not getting a healthy amount of sleep include:

• Stubbornness
• Lack of creativity
• Diminished morale
• Irritability

I would dare say this is rampant problem. In fact, creative people tend to brag about how little sleep they got (along with other aspects of the previous evening’s exploits). This is clearly to the detriment of business and creativity.

Managers and owners, adequate rest is all the more vital for us! We must be “always on”. Being well-rested enables us to be agile, keep a healthy perspective, be able to make decisions quickly, and have the emotional energy to inspire others. Our employees depend on us.

Aside from strongly encouraging (and allowing!) employees to get healthy amounts of sleep, and leading by example, is there more that we can do? Do we have a “napping” policy and the means to accommodate napping? Do we downplay the “masochistic sense of honor about sleep deprivation” in our offices? Do we manage our businesses in a way to allow our employees to “have lives”, being able to spend time with their families, be involved in creative endeavors, volunteer their time and/or spend time outdoors, perhaps by shortening the work week?

We owe it to ourselves and our employees. (And our employees should give their best to us and each other.)

“Don’t care what people say, I got my attitude”
-”Attitude” by Bad Brains

I’m definitely not one of those vapid “positive attitude” people. While a positive attitude is foundational to shaping thoughts and leading to actions, it means nothing in and of itself.

So when I clicked on Phil Gerbyshak’s 5 Ways to Make a Positive Attitude and it opened by wishing me a “Happy Positive Attitude Day” I almost closed the web browser window in disgust. Once I realized it was grounded with elements of gratitude and perspective, I continued to read.

I find a lot of what passes for “Positive Attitude” is actually perspective. Good things and bad things of various degrees happen to everyone every day; keeping things perspective helps us moving forward through the bad stuff. I would put the first three tips into that category. So, here they are:

1. Reframe the situation.
2. Count your blessings.
3. Give thanks to those who’ve helped you.
4. Read or listen to something that makes you smile.
5. Smile or make a silly face for no reason.

So why am I blogging about this? As owners and managers, our attitudes have an huge impact on everyone around us; it is vital for us to keep our attitudes in check, if for no other reason than that it’s good for business. (See my Day-to-Day Management Affects Creativity series, Part I, Part II and Part III  and Negativity is Poison!)

An excellent post at Harvard Business Publishing discusses how the best leaders are especially prone to burning out and slipping into behaviors that are counter-productive. Fortunately the intent of the article is to prevent this from happening. What is required are four daily habits that the author equates in importance with eating and sleeping. (You’re eating and sleeping, right?)

1. Listen to life’s quiet wake-up calls.
2. Practice mindfulness. (Paying attention to your mind, body, heart and spirit by finding a few minutes of quiet time alone each day.)
3. Find hope, which actually helps us to counter the negative effects of life’s pressures and burdens.
4. Practice Compassion. There are always people close to us whom you can help (if you are paying attention).

Leaders/managers/bosses have a dramatic impact on the lives of almost everyone they encounter, for good or for bad. Recommended reading!

In Let People Fail over at HR World, S. Caron encourages managers to back off and not redo employees’ wrongly implemented tasks the right way, otherwise employees will be deprived of a valuable learning experience. Worth reading, especially if the advice seems counter-intuitive.

This is a perfect tie-in to today’s inspirational quote over at Make it Great:
“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” - Nelson Mandela

As I wrote earlier, it is experience and learning from mistakes which allow for the biggest opportunities for personal growth and innovation. If we are to retain our employees by fostering an atmosphere of growth and trust, we have to think long-term.

Yesterday we looked at Google’s Our Googley advice to students: Major in learning, where we got a good look at what Google looks for in its employees. Today we look at how Google attracts its talent and we need to look no further than Google’s Top 10 Reasons to Work at Google. (Go read it.)

How many of you have articulated your own company’s vision so well? How many of you are challenged to make your own departments or workplaces just as inspiring? How many of you want to work for Google now? What if they promise never to use the word “googley” again? Well, that’s what they want; they want people to desire to work there. And they get 100,000 job applications each month!

Of course, they are not simply looking for people who want to work there; they are looking for people who deserve to work there. And it’s getting harder and harder as they have doubled in size in each of the last three years.

Google is known for measuring and tweaking pretty much everything, and even its procedures for finding qualified employees are starting to implement statistics, formulas, and automation as detailed in this NYT article. (free subscription required.)

As I’ve said many times, Google’s efforts and money are proportional and make good business sense for Google; likewise, our company’s efforts must make business sense for us.

“Management guru Peter Drucker noted that companies attracting the best knowledge workers will ’secure the single biggest factor for competitive advantage’”.  Drucker’s quote appears on The Official Google Blog; clearly Google recognizes this fact. You don’t have to be Google to appreciate this fact for yourselves; all of us need a competitive advantage.

Pure schadenfreude. This tale of a well-meant, but poorly implemented idea is equally delightful and cringe-worthy. Paint Chips tells the story of the Esquire, “a building of high-end duplexes and spacious lofts”, where the “building’s board decreed that each floor would be allowed to choose the exterior colors of their doors, as well as each door’s jambs, lintel and sill.”

The building’s tenants are largely creative & intellectual types and no framework for the decision was mandated. At the time of writing, 16 months later, only one of the seven condo floors had reached consensus.

This well-written account has so many lessons, it’s simply too hard to pick one, though if I have to, it would be that constraints are a necessary and healthy component of creativity. Add your own in the comments.

A few days ago in Workweek Creep, I made the statement that “having evenings and weekends to spend time with our friends and loved ones, and to take care of our responsibilities is what’s best for all and what’s best for our businesses” and HR World, substantiates that statement for me. “Studies have shown that too much work can lead to a variety of stress-related illnesses that sap workers’ vitality, making them more prone to errors on the job, absenteeism, burnout and turnover.” 16 Ways to Encourage Work/Life Balance in Employees offers advice to help us keep our employees happy, healthy and productive.

While all of the tips are worthwhile, I’m sure they listed this one first for a reason: “Management support for work/life balance is critical, and it must come from the top. Too often, the perception that hard work is the only way to rise in a company keeps employees at the grindstone, working themselves into illness. Top executives can set examples of good work/life balances”.

Read the rest for yourselves, and see if there’s something you could implement to better the lives of your employees.

This longer than usual 3-page article in BusinessWeek is aimed at management geeks, and applies to creative businesses only in a general way, yet it covers some very important issues.

Matching the Right People to the Right Jobs is just as critical to a company’s success as a great product or service. Sometimes employees are promoted into management even though they lack management skills. Sometimes businesses grow and it’s hard for managers to delegate their growing responsibilities. Sometimes the industries change. The article covers all of these cases, plus a few more, also discussing when it’s best to bring in outside consultants.