Creative Reaction

I love this recent TED Video, which compares the leadership styles of various orchestra conductors, offering lessons for us all.

“After a decade-long conducting career in his native Israel, Itay Talgam has reinvented himself as a conductor of people in business.”  (from his Bio)

Talgam’s enthusiasm and passion are contagious. Set aside 20 minutes to watch this during your lunch break. It will be good for your soul.

“People can tame all kinds of animals, birds, reptiles, and fish, but no one can tame the tongue.”

Some great advice over at Harvard Business Publishing. If you want to get along with (and keep) your clients, you need to develop a habit of thinking carefully before replying to barbed words.

The advice applies to pretty much any interaction; co-workers, managers, spouses, even TSA at the airport. A few years back on a return trip, a TSA employee  was giving me a hard time as he held up a Ziploc containing three toiletry items. “This is a gallon-sized bag”, said the agent. I said nothing; he was right. I knew I should have used a quart-sized bag, but I didn’t have any when I was packing. I almost interjected that TSA didn’t give me any trouble on the initial leg of my journey. And the items did meet the size & weight requirements. Again he said, “This is a gallon-sized bag”. I kept silent. Perhaps I was simply tired after a long week, but I just stood there looking at him. I refused to argue with him. I glanced over at his colleague for moral support. It worked. He waved me through and the first agent let me continue.

What you really want to say will usually make things worse. Hold your tongue. Reply with kindness and watch the tension melt away.

If you are looking for breakthrough creativity/innovation/customer service/marketing, the last thing you need is employees who merely want “a job“. Meaning, any job where they show up, put in their time, get paid. What you need are team members, together on a mission.

Go read Four Simple Ways to Make Your Employees Happier.

(Ignore the word “Happiness” here; it seems a bit shallow. Think “fulfillment”.)

Excellent, quick post over at Harvard Business Publishing and without giving too much away, having passionate employees starts with owners/managers/CEOs themselves.

(The attitudes of leaders have a huge impact on employees, so there are quite a few posts related to this topic. See The Power of Happiness Part I and Part II,  Attitude Adjustment, the Day-to-Day Management Affects Creativity series, Part I, Part II and Part III  and Negativity is Poison!)

Great post over at Harvard Business. It says it’s about “being happy at work”. I say it’s about leadership. (That’s what happens when you put something on the InterWebs;  you loose control as people can say whatever they want.) Skip the intro, head straight for the 7 ways to be a better leader, and ROCK your business.

It seems happiness is a powerful force, not only affecting people we meet, but also cascading outward through up to three degrees of separation. Being Happy Affects Even Those You Don’t Know, details research carried out over a twenty-year period, offering these astonishing findings.

Study co-author James Fowler says, “To think about the way we’re connected to one another has caused me to take more responsibility for my own actions… If I head home in a happy mood, I’m not just making my son happy, I’m potentially making my son’s friend happy. I’m not just making my wife happy, I’m making my wife’s mother happy.”

Managers and owners, you can already tell where I’m going with this. (See Attitude Adjustment, the Day-to-Day Management Affects Creativity series, Part I, Part II and Part III  and Negativity is Poison!)

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.

“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.

What You Expect From Your Clients is What You Will Get, though from a programmer’s standpoint, perfectly parallels the creative business world, where many speak ill of their clients, claiming “they don’t get it” and often looking down at them. It’s simply absurd; without clients, business would cease. The problem is most rampant where both parties have several layers of bureaucracy; the creative process is stripped of almost all personal interaction and communication breaks down. 

Perhaps it’s stating the obvious that as long as clients are impersonalized as “them” and “they”, good communication and good service simply will not happen, and creative businesses depend on both.

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.

Ed Kless of Verasage Institute has a quick post contrasting empathy and sympathy, the former being a trait that would limit a person’s leadership ability, and the latter being a perfect complement to a person’s leadership ability.

He explains, “Empathy implies that the leader would share in the anxiety of the follower. This would hamper the ability of the leader to lead and therefore not be in alignment with great leadership.” He continues, “Leaders need to be self-differentiated. They need to exhibit a strong sense of self. They need to be autonomous, independent, individualistic, and, yes, sympathetic”.

Managers, take note!