It is clear that organizations that can create workplaces where all talent can bring forth their best, will be the best situated for success. However, I must admit that the work is long and hard – and progress is slow. But it is too important to waiver. So, I’d love to hear. What is your organization doing to tap into the potential that diversity and inclusion bring?
An artist looks at their work in a totally different frame of mind than does a mechanic. The artist sees infinite possibility. The mechanic sees a problem to be solved. The artist has a vision. The mechanic has a job. The artist works in iterations, continuing to add to the creation what is needed. The mechanic works by elimination, until the source of the dysfunction is found. The artist creates, the mechanic fixes.
As a leader, you are often in the “mechanic mode”. People bring you problems to be solved, work to be done, decisions to be made, dilemmas to be fixed. And that is a valuable and ever-present part of the role you play.
But how often do you play the role of creator?
In November 2014, Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, the billion dollar on-line shoe retailer, announced the company was moving to holarchy, an organizational structure with no job titles and no managers.
Instead of the typical hierarchy, fraught with bottlenecks, slow decision making, and concentrated power, the company will be organized into 400 circles, with each circle having a number of roles. The intent is “radical transparency” and extreme adaptability. In this model, the CEO has less power and all employees are expected to lead and to act entrepreneurially. Zappos and its 1500 partners (you and I would call them employees) will be the largest company to date to attempt this type of organizational structure.
Let me explain what I think works with this model, as well as what bothers me about this model.
A few weeks ago I friend told me she was “so proud of my success” – which gave me pause. Was I really successful? By whose measure? Why did it make me uncomfortable to consider myself successful?
And in that same day I stumbled across the notion of a continuum of success – that we move from Survival to Stability to Success and finally to Significance. I thought it would be a fine thing to blog about – but the reality is that I’ve struggled for two weeks to pull together some cogent thoughts about the topic.
None the less – the time has come to share. So this post will be a combination of known and unknown, comfort and discomfort. And with that, I’m hoping to spark a conversation so that your thoughts can help me make more sense of this topic.
My Dad used to observe that I could squeeze more into one day that anyone he knew. And he was right. There was a plan, executable down to 15 minute increments. The pace was fast and unrelenting. Work – kids – exercise – community work – school – church – cooking – cleaning – errands. The day was a blur, but boy oh boy, could I get a lot of things done! At least on some days. However, on most days, the long task list overwhelmed me, and by Friday evening it was all I could do to order in pizza and collapse on the couch.
How I wish Greg McKeown’s book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, was available 10 years ago. It provides a great guide on how to move from being buffeted from the trivial many to living in the essential few.
Gallop just released the results of a study with Purdue, measuring the degree to which graduates have “great jobs,” through successful and engaging careers, and are leading “great lives,” by thriving in their overall well-being. They distilled their findings into six key college experiences that contributed greatly to well-being. Yet few college graduates that Gallup studied achieve the winning combination. What were the six key college experiences, and what can we do to help them achieve them more often?
Say the word hazing and we immediately think of college fraternities and high school locker rooms. The idea that if you want to be “one of us” there is a price of admission – sometimes embarrassing, sometimes requiring great sacrifices, sometimes acts of daring, and sometimes outright danger or death.
It’s not called hazing at work. It’s called things like, “just the way we do things here,” or “our culture,” or “orientation”. None the less, many organizations have strange (and less than helpful) rituals designed to test new members before they become a part of the group.
When I worked in manufacturing, it was standard practice to monitor noise levels and also to test the hearing of those that worked in high decibel areas. We were proactive in managing noise levels, mandating hearing protection and taking steps to avoid hearing loss.
Today we are all faced with incessant noise – perhaps not the high decibel, cover your ears, kind of noise. More of the ever present chatter – of the TV, radio, email, social media. We are bombarded with information 24/7. Some is wanted – like my Pandora radio station, or emails from clients, or Facebook posts from friends, or or RSS feeds that cause me to pause and think about things differently, or texts that transmit information in a few seconds rather than a few minutes. But there is a heck of a lot of clutter or “noise” that one must endure to find that which is valuable.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve not found the answer to this. So I’ll share five things I do to build some “silence” into my life – and ask you to chime in and share to help us all.
The idea of pivoting comes from lean startup – starting with a business idea and testing it in the real world with real customers (potential customers at this point) very early and very often. You test and explore and learn as an early step with a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) or just enough to get started. The hard reality is that more ideas fail due to not finding a market than due to poor execution. Build it too fully without testing it with the market and you are likely to miss the mark. You tend to overbuild. You might miss some brilliant insight from a customer that makes a real difference in your product or service; one that you would have never stumbled upon in the inner sanctums of your garage or home office. In lean lingo – one learns quickly, fails fast and avoids the tendency to over-engineer or perfect things before the customer (and their wallet) has their say.
As you test and learn and fail, you “pivot” or make changes and tweaks that make your product or service or business model better. You don’t lose sight of your goal; you just recognize that the path to get there might look like this:
So today I share with you a real life story of pivots and of persistence. And it is my story.
I was intrigued, and then, dismayed after a pit stop in a chain gas station on a trip to North Carolina. Attached to the inside of the door of the women’s restroom was a large, laminated poster – proudly outlining the 12 steps for cleaning said restroom. At first glance, I was thrilled that the establishment took this so seriously, as I really like clean public restrooms. However, a deeper look, gave me a touch of disbelief first and then a reminder of my despair about our education system.
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