Where to start when you’re a new manager in a fast scaling organization? Recommended resources to help you shift from achieving results by doing the work yourself to achieving results through guiding and coordinating others and creating an inspiring team culture. In an organization that is scaling fast, scaling culture is vital. Team management is the key.
No affiliates, no commercial interests, just sharing effective practices and inspiring ideas.
Read MoreThe intentional cultivation of a positive culture can make your organization more successful; it differentiates you, gives energy, and helps with decision making and solving problems.
To create culture, leaders and managers can develop not only skills and competencies in things like people management and strategy, but also develop their mental and emotional capacities. The overall mindset shifts from the individual to the collective.
Read MoreIn times of crisis we need robust systems to guide us toward our best thinking. The tendency is to gravitate toward the familiar for comfort, or quickly jump on the first idea instead of generating multiple ideas. To imagine the future in a positive light, you need to get in a possibility space.
Here’s examples of businesses using purpose to help them pivot.
Read MoreOrganizations that want to innovate are consistently held back by three things: fear, familiarity bias, and wanting to keep legitimacy by fitting in. To counter this apply purpose, psychological safety and diversity. You will get more daring, creative results.
Read MoreWhen things don’t go according to plan, by working to understand how things really you can better improvise and make informed trade-offs. By staying present and practicing improvisation, your ideas stay relevant to how things actually are.
Read MoreIf you are in a leadership position, now is the time to cultivate conditions for people to do their best thinking. When you create calmer conditions through your own presence and attention, you are also creating space for trust to emerge.
Read MoreThings I often help leaders and organizations with, I now need for myself, to regroup and pivot, and to be ready and in good shape for what comes next.
Read MoreTalented people are just waiting for the opportunity to apply themselves and feel alive at work. How will you lead innovation by creating an innovative place to work?
Read MoreMeaningful innovation breakthroughs for customers are often paralleled by inner-journey breakthroughs by the innovators. This inner-journey happens at an individual level and an organizational level. It materializes at the customer level. This is what I call “holistic innovation.” The 4 elements of organizational culture essential for holistic innovation include: Service and Purpose for the Greater Good; Collaboration; Inclusion; Learning Culture
Read MoreWe have at this moment perhaps more opportunity than ever to improve and shape the world in profound ways. I’d propose that it’s essential to work on our self-awareness at the same time that we work on big systems-level problems and opportunities. While we train rigorously in technical subjects, we can train ourselves to have a creative vision for how to apply them to improve the world.
Read MoreDaring to tell stories that spring out of our longing, injustices and deeper truths inevitably put us on the edge where we start to envision a different future, rather than just coping with "the way things are."
Read MoreTo get into a creative mindset or be innovative, do something active, not just think and spin about your situation. If it’s in the spirit of play, all the better.
In the following exercise we restate judgments as neutral questions or statements and then generate multiple versions of our story about how things are and why. It’s a series of prompts to take you into a creative improv exercise, which will almost assuredly make you laugh and get you unstuck.
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Ironically, the more successful we are in a given area, the harder it can become to take risks that are necessary for creative progress. Why would we pursue risks that entail possible failure, shame and vulnerability? If we operate in a win-or-lose paradigm, and especially if we believe the hype, it’s hard to take risks that are truly experimental...
But we can learn to work skillfully with the monkey mind…
Read MoreAs the creative mindset gets familiar, you will discover that it’s a natural part of you. You need your creativity to find new solutions to any kind of problem, in any kind of business, whether it’s building a bridge, managing a team, or installing a boiler system. The more we reclaim our creativity, the more likely we will thrive personally and make our organizations more engaging.
Read MoreTo tap the creative mindset and get to truly new territory, you’ll often get the best mileage when you deliberately put yourself in the path of the unfamiliar. This is why so many people love traveling, but you can do it in your familiar environment. In fact, here is where is may count the most.
A sign that we are stuck? We can only come up with one interpretation of a situation, a person, or information, and we are holding on to it like a dog on a bone.
Read MoreThough presence is something performers and artists spend hours practicing and refining, anyone can learn it. Mindfulness and awareness arise out of it.
In relation to the creative mindset, everyday presence comes from being unified with the situation, from dropping our stories and having a moment of equanimity and true openness, not needing to control things.
Read MoreConsciously shifting between inner and outer awareness is endlessly fascinating and often a lot of fun. You can practice shifting your focus from listen to the environment, back again to your internal dialogue. You'll never be bored standing in line in the airport again.
Read MoreThis 1991 talk by John Cleese still hits the nail on the head for me in describing the conditions that foster creativity: what is needed, what can get in the way, what it is and isn’t. Cleese says something pivotal, namely that “Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating… an ability to play.” He goes on to explain, “Creativity is not an ability that you either have or do not have.” Cleese also cites historical psychological and biological research on creativity, and offers a stab at a research-based model for creativity-- and cites why it’s difficult to make a model.
Read MoreMaybe it seems like a big leap to suggest that passive entertainment and lack of kindness are somehow related, but Simone’s recent post on Starting A Revolution of Kindness inspired me to reflect on this.
When people become insensitive, they can’t be kind. Passive entertainment makes us numb, and when we are numb we become insensitive. As sociologist Brene Brown writes, “You cannot selectively numb emotions.” That numbness leaves us feeling more isolated, disheartened, even hopeless or aggressive. Not on the kind end of the continuum.
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