We should encourage creativity in our frontline coworkers.
This, from David Burkus, author of The Myths of Creativity. In his Harvard Business Review article, David supports this idea with new research from the Journal of Applied Psychology. The study found that “service creativity,” or the creativity of frontline service employees, “directly [affects] customer service ratings.”
The problem in today’s workforce is that most of the time, frontline coworkers aren’t given the freedom to be creative. Here are two reasons I think this is true:
- Perhaps it’s due to the task-oriented nature of their work? This may feed the idea that there is no need for creativity in their roles.
- The other explanation is that expectations of senior level management require work be accomplished as quickly as possible. Creativity takes time. An environment that promotes strict quotas or low call times doesn’t feed creativity.
Burkus points to Zappos as an exemplar of how service creativity actually improves business.
“Zappos is one of the few call centers that measures average call time but doesn’t reward employees with the lowest averages. Instead, they praise the employees who set length records. That’s important given that creative ideas often take time to develop and that productivity and creativity are often at odds with one another.”
Zappos is well known for embracing Holacracy. While many dispute Holacracy’s effectiveness as a business model, one of its main components is that each member of the team determines the best way to accomplish his or her clearly defined roles. There are endless stories about how Zappos call representatives (a role that in most organizations is tedious and uninspiring) use creativity to go above and beyond.
A woman whose husband died called to return a pair of shoes she bought for him. The Zappos representative sent her flowers the next day. A man called looking for a pair of shoes that Zappos’ website showed was out of stock. That Zappos representative personally visited a brick and mortar retailer to buy the shoes and hand-deliver them to the customer.
Employees didn’t have to ask permission to do these things. They just did it. Stories like this get repeated over and over by employees (and bloggers). They make organizations great and WOW customers.
How can leaders help create an environment like this? Approachability doesn’t hurt. Here’s Burkus:
“Managers can play a key role in facilitating the creativity of front-line staff by expressing confidence in their service employees and seeking out employees’ opinions on resolving customer issues or providing service.”
Nothing makes you more approachable than seeking out your coworker’s thoughts and opinions. You show them their views are valuable to you and the organization. The more you invite creative thinking, the more coworkers will embrace it on their own.
Here are 4 ideas to ramp up creativity with your frontline employees:
- Be more approachable. Approachable leaders don’t just improve relationships with coworkers, they improve other business results like creativity, innovation, and in this case, customer service.
- Ask employees for suggestions. Do you have an event coming up? Maybe a production or customer issue? As leaders we tend to go into “fix it” mode on our own. Bring the team in on it! Not only does it help you out, it drives creativity and teamwork.
- Loosen up the reigns. If an employee presents you with a solution to a problem that directly relates to their role in the company and it’ll work, let them run with it! Not everything has to be done one way, or your way.
- Slow down a little bit. Zappos’ thought process on embracing longer conversations with customers produces results that not only increase customer commitment and satisfaction, but also increase employees’ creative thinking, problem solving, and independence. I can only imagine how things might change if leaders took the same approach with their coworkers.
How do you encourage employees to be creative? Could you be doing better or do you not see the need for it? Can you think of any examples of leaders who helped spur your creativity? Let us know!
“Leadership is deliberate: You don’t accidentally have successful teams.”
This was one of the leadership tips retired Lt. Gen. Frank Kearney gave to executives at a recent West Point training. Lt. Gen. Kearney served as deputy commander for the US Special Operations Command, a 62,000 person global enterprise with a $10 billion budget.
In an interview with Business Insider last year, Lt. Gen. Kearney provided six leadership tips he feels business leaders can learn from the US military.
- You’re only as strong as your least experienced team member. “Everyone in the organization is responsible for building and sustaining your brand.”
- You have to know what right looks like for each role in the organization. “Ensuring that people truly fit in the role is one of the most difficult challenges leaders face.”
- You have to talk straight with your people. “You have a responsibility to everyone you bring into the organization…and that means having the courage to give candid feedback.”
- Shared challenges bond team members together. “One of the ways the military builds effective teams is by putting people in extremely challenging training situations together to give them a common shared experience.”
- Effective communication is a three-part process. “Communication in the military happens in three steps: The leader gives orders, the subordinate reflects those orders back, and then the leader clarifies what may have been misunderstood.” This is called “briefback” communication.
- You must preserve your force and their families. “To do your best work, you have to have strength of mind, body, spirit, and family…that’s true for leaders and their teams.”
Lt. Gen. Kearney’s leadership tips are spot on. I encourage everyone to click here to read the full article where Lt. Gen. Kearney provides further detail into why these 6 lessons are essential to effective leadership.
Leadership Tips: Communication “Briefback” Process
I want to focus briefly on point 5: effective communication is a three-part process and the idea behind briefback communication. In order to effectively utilize briefback communication, leaders must speak and listen. Kearney says, “if you listen at all levels of the business, you’ll know what’s being communicated.” And as we all know, most of the errors that happen at work happen because of a breakdown in communication.
While we can all be improving our verbal skills, most of us have more work to do when it comes to listening. That’s why active listening is a key part of our Approachable Leadership model. Without active listening there is no way to achieve understanding. Here are 5 leadership tips to make sure that employees not only feel that you’re listening, but feel that they are being understood.
- Pay attention. Make eye contact. Don’t sit there and think about your response. If you think about anything think about how you will summarize what you are hearing – that will keep you focused on them. Only respond when you have something valuable to say.
- Show the speaker you are listening. Be sure that your nonverbal communication is encouraging. Clarify what you’re hearing. Validate their feelings.
- Provide feedback. Restate what you’ve heard. Reflect on what you’ve heard. And then summarize.
- Don’t judge. Nobody wants to be judged. Do you disagree with something you are hearing? Ask questions to try and understand what you might be missing. People want to feel understood.
- Respond appropriately. Don’t let your feelings get in the way of your understanding or your actions thereafter. If you are tired or angry ask for some time to think things over before you respond. Always question your own understanding before you question someone else.
What do you think about Lt. Gen. Kearney’s advice? Do these military teamwork suggestions apply at work? What kind of listener are you? Do you have any tips and tricks you use to be a better listener that weren’t mentioned here? Let us know!
Companies do better when workers collaborate.
Employees who work in teams produce better results and report higher job satisfaction. It’s been proven over and over again. Most recently by Google.
In 2012, Google decided to ask itself a really important question: why do some Google teams shine while others stumble? When you happen to be Google you have access to some of the smartest statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists and engineers around. They deployed this incredible talent on a quest to find out what makes their best teams click. They dubbed the assignment Project Aristotle.
Project Aristotle researchers looked at teams in every possible way to figure out what set apart the teams that excelled at Google versus the teams that didn’t. Some of the correlations they looked at included:
- Were the teams made up of people with similar interests?
- Were they motivated by the same kind of rewards?
- Did teammates socialize outside the office? How often?
- How did their education backgrounds compare to each other?
- Were teammates outgoing or shy?
- What was the gender ratio of each team?
Do Personality Types, Skills, or Background Predict Team Success? No
Over the course of a year, the researchers looked at 180 teams from all over the company and found no patterns showing that, “a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference.” Each time they thought they had narrowed down a set of group norms (“traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules that govern how we function when we gather”), they would discover another, equally successful team with the complete opposite set of characteristics.
As time went on however, the researchers recognized two behaviors that all good teams shared.
First, all members spoke approximately the same amount of time, a practice known as conversational turn-taking. “As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well…But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.”
Second, good teams all had high average social sensitivity, meaning “they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues.
Coincidentally (or not) conversational turn-taking and average social sensitivity are traits of what’s known as something psychologists refer to as psychological safety. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as:
“a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking…[It instills] a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up…It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.”
What Project Aristotle researchers found was that while there were many behaviors that seemed important to establish as team norms, psychological safety was the most critical. That begged the question…
How do you establish psychological safety?
Sure, you can tell people to do things like listen more, take turns talking, try to pay more attention to people’s feelings and notice when they’re upset, but does that really ever work? Most of the time it just goes in one ear and out the other. After all, who wants to be reminded of proper social decorum?
These changes tend to develop organically. But someone’s got to plant the seed. And that responsibility falls on the leader. That’s what Project Aristotle found. And I agree.
There was one manager at Google who, when confronted with the Project Aristotle research, realized that his team didn’t clearly understand their role in the overall goal of the company nor did they think the work they did had much of an impact.
This bothered the manager so much that he gathered the group off-site to try to get to the bottom of where these feelings came from. Then, once he had them all there, all of a sudden he felt moved to share with them that he’d been battling cancer. He, for the first time, allowed himself to be vulnerable to his team.
The next thing he knew, someone else shared something they’d been dealing with in their personal life. Then someone else shared. It continued on and on this way. It’s like these people, who saw and spoke with each other every day, finally felt comfortable being vulnerable with each other for the first time. One member said:
“I think, until the off-site, I had separated things in my head into work life and life life…But the thing is, my work is my life. I spend the majority of my time working. Most of my friends I know through work. If I can’t be open and honest at work, then I’m not really living, am I?”
There is an undeniable link between the way people feel about work and the quality of work they produce. Leading begins with connection. And connection feeds collaboration.
What makes that manager at Google such a great manager is because he took the first steps toward creating a psychologically safe environment – one where people feel comfortable speaking up when they have ideas, where collaboration is constant.
Here are 5 ways approachable leaders create psychological safety:
- They are available and welcoming. Make a point to walk by and say hello every once and a while. Be sure to smile (with your eyes). And when someone approaches you with an issue or question, don’t make them feel like an interruption.
- They get second opinions. We don’t have to do everything alone. Leaders need advice too. Ask for it. Show your employees you value their opinion.
- They encourage collaboration. If you see two employees chatting (about work life or life life) don’t shoo them away from each other. Be grateful they’re connecting. They will both be more creative and productive.
- They engage in personal conversations. If you have to get out of the office to do it, then get out of the office. Consider a monthly rotation schedule where you take employees to lunch. It’s amazing the barriers you can break down simply by getting outside of ground zero (just think about the Google manager).
- They spread the love. Don’t play favorites. If you notice someone who isn’t contributing ask them what they’re thinking. Try to make sure everyone is included. Be kind to everyone.
What kind of environment do you create as a leader? Do you encourage collaboration or do you make your employees feel like they can’t be seen talking to each other? When was the last time you had a “real” conversation with a coworker?
What do you think about these ideas? We want to know!
Gaining trust is hard, especially for leaders.
One study finds that just being in a leadership position (a power position) makes gaining trust more difficult. Why? Because people in the low-power positions tend to have a natural assumption that those in higher-power positions “place little value on the relationship with them, thus [tend] to behave opportunistically.” This is an example of power-distance, and it can kill a company.
(To learn 7 ways to tell whether you have a power-distance gap with your coworkers click here).
Even when you have a strong relationship with those you lead, this power imbalance is always there in the background. There is always a fear that the leader doesn’t value the relationship as much as the follower. As a leader that is pretty sobering.
Leadership is hard. It’s a big responsibility. You can’t be a good leader if you don’t care about your people. But it’s not enough to care. It is not enough to be trustworthy. To be a great leader, you have to make sure that your people know you care and that they know they can count on you. Gaining trust is a never-ending process.
If you are like me, it bothers you to think that your employees may not fully trust you. So here are some tips on gaining trust that you can use to help reinforce your relationship with others. These are based on 4 factors for gaining trust developed by Wharton School of Business professor Maurice Schweitzer and Fast Company’s Lisa Evans.
4 Trust Building Tips
- Establish credibility: There are many ways to build credibility. You do it by building expertise, mentoring others and being a resource to others in need. In our approachable leadership model the number one way to impact credibility is your follow up and follow through (what we call right action). Be someone others know they can rely on to do what you say. As Ben Franklin says, “Resolve to perform what you ought, and perform without fail what you resolve.”
- Demonstrate warmth: Make others feel at ease and comfortable. Smile (remember you smile with your eyes). Make sure you are listening more than you are talking. I like to think about being a good neighbor.
- Reduce status difference: Evans writes, “To establish trust among employees, Schweitzer recommends managers remove things from their office that reinforce the fact that they have power over the other person. This may be as simple as removing their suit jacket or tie.” De-emphasize the power relationship and emphasize instead the things you have in common.
- Be vulnerable: Be a little clumsy or awkward (I’ve got that one nailed). Tell a corny joke. Don’t act like a boss. Be empathetic and present with the other person. Open your Approachability Window a little.
Approachable leaders naturally build trust. One interesting side note from the studies – psychologists have used these four factors to gain patient trust for years.
Have you ever noticed a lack of trust with those you lead? Do people make assumptions about you just because you are in a power position? What have you done to build trust with those you lead? Let us know in the comments, or share on your favorite social network. Let us know what you think!
