Creative Reaction

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!

This BusinessWeek post, Three Steps to Calming Angry Customers, can be applied to any number of business and day-to-day situations, assuming, of course, you are actually trying to help the angry individual.

Tom Murphy, director of the Human Resiliency Institute (nice) at Fordham University, has created a three-step process for dealing with angry travelers as he trained JFK International Airport’s 500 employees. Simply stated, the steps involve being calm, giving detailed, truly useful answers, and brainstorming together with the hopefully now calmer individual to solve his problem. A quick, worthwhile read. Just make sure you leave hostage negotiations to the pros.

This Signal vs. Noise post, Finding the natural size for your company, reminds me of one of my favorite business books, Small Giants, (subtitled, Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big).

David of 37Signals speaks of the “perception that companies must always be growing or they’re dying”. He continues, ”I think that’s a harmful dichotomy that leads to the death of perfectly viable companies in their quest for constant growth”. I’m sure the author of Small Giants would heartily agree.

While the main theme of Small Giants is outstanding customer service, what I find refreshing is its relentless focus on relationships. Quoting (possibly paraphrasing) a passage on some of the characteristics of a Small Giant, “the businesses exhibit exceptionally intimate relationships with customers and suppliers, based on personal contact, one-on-one interaction and mutual commitment to delivering on promises. The founders/leaders take the lead in this regard. They are highly accessible and absolutely committed to retaining the human dimension of the relationships.”

Small Giants is nothing short of inspirational, as it reminds business owners, myself included, of the positive impact we can make on both the individuals with which we come into contact and the communities we serve. In fact, I’ve purchased at least three or four copies to give to clients and business associates.

Perhaps 37Signals will find it’s way into a future edition of Small Giants.

Possibly before some of us were using e-mail, Edward M. Hallowell, M.D. was writing about the importance of face-to-face communication and the drawbacks of e-mail and even telephone calls. He speaks of the “human moment”, ”an authentic psychological encounter that can happen only when two people share the same physical space.” The Human Moment has, according to Hallowell, two prerequisites, “people’s physical presence and their emotional and intellectual attention.”

His theory, explained in a 1999 Harvard Business Review article, The Human Moment at Work, (the first page of which is available for free here) was later expanded into a book, though one aimed at a much broader audience.

Boston.com features a great article with Hallowell’s ideas in a business setting in its jobs section, specifically as it applies for young workers entering the job market, and with some excellent insights. Worth reading.

It would be hard to argue against the theory that Human Moments, featuring face-to-face interaction, are essential to human well-being.

Being intrigued by the above articles, I just checked out Hallowell’s Human Moments: How to Find Meaning and Love in Your Everyday Life from the Library. Look for additional mentions of this book in future posts.

An article in RainToday, primarily written for consultants, has an interesting article entitled, The Death of the Business Phone Call, which explains the many the pitfalls of e-mail.

In a few sentences, “If your goal is to communicate clearly and efficiently with prospects and clients, relying too heavily on email can easily lead your digital conversation into the weeds. Even if someone emails you first, often the best way to respond is by picking up the phone.”

So, before you click on “Reply”, think, “what is the best way to respond to this?”. 

“Rarely does any dialogue end with the prospect’s question and my answer. The response to any query is usually followed by a clarifying question or two of my own, which can make email cumbersome. The most effective way to accomplish ongoing dialogue is via live conversation – the kind where lips move.”

Harvard Business School Working Knowledge has an article today on creativity within business, featuring HBS professor Teresa Amabile, whose research we mentioned in September 2006.

The article largely focuses on the environment created by managers, and its effect on employees’ “inner work lives” - “thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and motivations”. This inner work life “directly influences creativity and other aspects of performance.”

Quoting professor Amabile, ”managers are not in tune with the inner work lives of their employees; nor do they appreciate how pervasive the effects of inner work life can be on performance.” Ouch.

So what should managers do? ”Support employees’ progress in their work every day. Set clear and meaningful goals for them; provide direct help, versus hindrance; offer adequate resources and time; respond to successes and failures by drawing on the experience as a learning opportunity, not just a moment to praise or reprimand; and establish a culture where people are treated with respect.”

There’s quite a list there; perhaps one thing to work on each day or week or month. Clearly, sharpening these skills is well worth the effort, as this kind of culture provides what may be the best work incentive available, “the desire to do something because (the employee) find(s) it deeply satisfying and personally challenging” which “inspires the highest levels of creativity, whether it’s in the arts, sciences, or business”

Lots of meat here. Digest it slowly.