“In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.”—Eric Hoffe

People who become executives begin their careers as functional or technical specialists. A specialty is the basis on which to grow new, diverse expertise and ultimately either choose to stay on the specialist ladder or move to management.

As a person moves from first time manager, to managing others, to managing groups, to managing an organization; work continuously broadens, organizational dynamics and politics become increasingly complex and require an evolving set of priorities.

A leader’s awareness and their speed of adaptation in a new role influence the organizational culture, employee engagement, client loyalty and financial results. The keys to a leader’s success? Knowing yourself; assessing preparedness and requirements of work, being clear about internal and external measures of success, being honest with oneself about personal readiness, ways to maintain resilience and creating trusted connections with others.

Mentors and role models all serve to give feedback, provide perspective and increase awareness. They can be our trusted advisors and the ones who we can rely on to tell us the truth. They can become the accelerator of a leader’s success.

The tendency towards self-delusion increases the higher a leader/manager ascends the organizational hierarchy. The higher one climbs, the more placating peers and subordinates become, resulting in acute insulation and putting leaders in a type of vacuum away from constructive feedback. What’s the culprit? Isolationism, a relative lack of honest, critical, and corrective feedback, all part of a phenomenon that conventional training and development practices, in style and substance, cannot adequately address.

That’s where Leadership Assessment and 360 feedback can play a proactive role to provide information for self insight. We all have blind spots or areas where personal growth once areas, when identified, can improve our effectiveness.

The following graphic illustrates how to use feedback and create a plan for growth.

• Step one is to have information through a 360 assessment or Leadership Assessment
• Step two is having someone who can review your assessment data with you and discuss your strengths and areas for development, such as a mentor
• Step three is to create a plan for growth and change
• Step four is ongoing practice to master new behaviors
• Step five is meeting with your mentor to discuss success or times when you weren’t so successful and determine improvement tactics

This diagram illustrates the following points:

• We all learn from examining how similar our self perception is to our public perception
• The closer the self and public perception are aligned, the more authentic we are “coming across” and the more comfortable we are in our own skin
• Having a mentor who can give us feedback about a self assessment or a 360 broadens our perspective and can help us reframe or coach us on areas which are more difficult ones to change
• Practice is key. Growth as a leader requires practice, feedback and acknowledgment that practice is not an event. Rather it’s ongoing and takes time to fully master behavior change.

This is a guest post from Lindsey Caplan. Lindsey specializes in applying the principles of Improvisation and storytelling to organizational development and leadership, most recently as a member of the Education team at DreamWorks Animation. She blogs at www.lindseycaplan.com. Follow her on Twitter @Improvtools4biz

Every moment and in every interaction we are capable of choosing our “performances” and how we act, behave, and respond in a given situation.

Often our performances, and our reactions are habitual, instinctive, and we aren’t even aware of the mindset that’s ingrained in us or our companies.

But is this mindset decreasing your organizational capacity for innovation?

It’s possible these two little words are killing the innovation and creativity of your team:

“Yes, But”.

Reflect on how you and your company respond to new or untested ideas. Do you “but” ideas to death? And in doing so, do you cast a negative light on risk-taking, failure, and openness.

The unconscious performance might look like this:

“Yes, but it won’t work”

“Yes, but we don’t have the time”

“Yes, but we tried something similar before and it didn’t work”

Researcher Shawn Achor from Harvard tells us 75% of or job successes at work come from optimism, our ability to see stress as a challenge instead of a threat, and social support at work.

When we are met with a “yes, but” attitude to our ideas and innovations, it can be difficult maintain the motivation to do our best work and to feel support for our contributions.

I’m not advocating a company full of just “yes” men. Instead, we can choose a performance that involves less judgement, more open-mindedness, acceptance of others ideas, and a willingness to build on ideas instead of rejecting them.

Luckily, research from Achor (and others) tells us we can train our brain to become more positive. Through practice and habit building, we can learn to scan the world through a lens of positivity, instead of negativity and to create more conscious performances that involve the words “Yes, and”, instead of “Yes, but”.

Think about all of the performance choices you have every day. How can your performance increase and not block the flow of ideas, open communication and an open mind.

“But….” , just give it a try!

Young Ingvar Kamprad used unexpected cash from his father – a gift for good exam results – to found IKEA. He lived near furniture makers so reacted by selling furniture. He reacted to a boycott from local rivals by producing his own furniture.

Kamprad’s first designer reacted to not being able to fit a table in a car by creating the first flat pack. Then Kamprad reacted to his showroom burning down by building a huge replacement. He reacted to excessive customer demand by starting self-service.The IKEA strategy came from clever reactions to great unplanned opportunities.

Unplanned opportunities may be your best chance of creating a great strategy so you need to be constantly looking for them. Evidence supports the idea that the most successful entrepreneurs and leaders are fantastic at noticing opportunities. And the greatest opportunities come from reactions to unplanned events.

Does this problem let us start again and do it better?

What can we do today that was impossible yesterday?

Is our plan still working? How can we take advantage of events?

Any fool can produce a plan. The genius is in seeing how new events open up new possibilities for the old plan. Or even entirely new plans that weren’t possible when the old plan was written.

The planner is continually sifting through events for evidence about how well the plan is working. He wants to see new opportunities for achieving his objectives. Or new objectives that were previously impossible.

Most corporations have an annual planning cycle. They spend some time (usually not enough!) thinking about what they want to achieve. They produce a document that lists a series of objectives, priorities, and even tasks. The moment the plan is printed it is viewed as complete.

Some people follow the plan. They pretend (or believe) that it’s perfect. Some managers insist the plan is followed as a point of principle. The plan demands a response from senior executives, senior managers, managers, and professionals. Every level of the hierarchy produces their own version of the master plan – sometimes the process takes nearly a year of cascaded documents!

So it’s worth asking a few questions:

What happens when the assumptions in the plan are wrong?

How do employees challenge the assumptions in the plan?

By the time the planning is complete, will the plan already be out-of-date?

Other people ignore the plan. They don’t read it. And they certainly don’t think it has anything to do with the day to day of their job. They may react to events but the way that they react to events seldom changes. They understand the limitations of plans – the contradictions, the ignorance and lack of specific detail. They don’t understand the power of plans to shape responses to events.

The danger is following the plan too slavishly (without responding to events) will lead the company efficiently in the wrong direction. The right plan can be made wrong by events. The danger of not following any plan is that actions are out of step with each other, may stop any plan working or fail to improve the impact of everyone working together.

It’s difficult for some people to accept that reacting (not just planning) is a good thing. Managers have been taught the value of being (or looking!) organised. They have learned that being ‘proactive’ is what the business world wants. They have been told that being reactive is a bad thing.

The good news is that openly discussing the benefits of reacting and the limits of planning is healthy for the business. There is something for everyone in the idea. It can bring together those who believe all plans work and those who believe that the day to day is all that matters. Both are right. And wrong.

Another practical challenge is making room for both kinds of strategy in the formal ways that your team or company is organised. Strategy is more effective if it is adapted throughout the year. Some of this is adjustment in the way that the strategy is executed. Individual managers and colleagues figure out how to react to circumstances in order to deliver the official plan.

But some changes to objectives, plans, and direction benefit from being brought back into the formal strategy. It’s a way of acknowledging that has changed. It’s a method for encouraging effort to be focused on new opportunities. It can reduce the negative impact of too many alternative approaches. And it’s a lot more effective than simply planning, closing your eyes, and waiting for the results at the end of the year! You’ll know that you’re getting better at reacting (not just planning) when you find that some of the greatest achievements of the past year were not part of the plan at the start of the year.

Your approach to planning will be more fluid. You will include options for moving in other directions if circumstances change. You will examine what if scenarios while planning. You will become smart and fast enough to recognise a fantastic new opportunity (or an awful new threat) while there is time to react intelligently. And use them to better achieve your ambitions.

You will make ‘fire-fighting’ part of your strategy. And you will include more of the people who do the reacting on a day to day basis. Middle managers, supervisors, and people working at the front line – they can all help to recognise a need for clever reactions to real world events and circumstances.

Careful though because reactions to situations can be counterproductive. Unplanned actions can work against the strategy. People can make ad hoc decisions that make sense to them but not to the bigger picture. Or many unplanned actions can make sense individually but not together. The point here is not to encourage excessive chaos. Instead you want channelled initiative and creativity

Jay Galbraith describes the “reconfigurable organization” and argues that this type of organization must be able to reconfigure itself by forming teams and networks across organizational departments. As organizations continue to globalize, this ability to form partnerships becomes more and more complex. Galbraith also wrote that “the long-term human resources role is to build social capital by creating richly connected interpersonal networks across the organization.” Strong social networks within organizations can be a valuable competitive advantage in organizations and HR leaders are perfectly poised to ensure those networks remain strong. They are the people department after all.

This social power is especially important as Millennials continue to infiltrate workplaces. Millennials utilize technology with ease, and regularly engage and connect with their social networks. Thirty Percent of Millennials write openly about themselves online (Accenture, 2010), and I suspect that percentage is higher in 2012 than it was in 2010. The technology is a means to connect to them, not the actual connection itself. Most are unable to fathom life without these social networks: real or virtual. They were raised in a world where social media allowed them the freedom to interact with anyone they wanted to, and where the quality of a person’s ideas determines a person’s status, not their job title. They fundamentally believe that digital assets and knowledge are free. Other generations merely wish to believe this. HR leaders must learn to ride these trends, not just attempt to regulate them. Truly effective HR leaders will use these networks to the organization’s advantage, and increase its overall effectiveness by doing so.

Accenture. (2010). Jumping the boundaries of corporate IT: Accenture global research on Millennials’ use of technology. Retrieved from link.

Galbraith, J. (2000). Designing the global corporation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

This is part One of a series I will be doing this summer on leadership by and from HR.

Tim Vanderpyl is a Certified Human Resource Professional (CHRP) with Canada’s largest catholic healthcare organization. He holds a Master of Arts in Leadership from Trinity Western University and is working toward a Doctorate in Strategic Leadership at Regent University.

Happy Friday

While they also have research backing up their claims, Davenport and Manville make this case through twelve case studies divided into 4 sections. Part One covers participative problem solving with cases from NASA to McKinsey & Co. Part Two considers the use of technology and analytics to aid decision making with cases EMC and the Charlotte-Mecklenberg School System. Part Three examines how organizational culture and power structures guide decision making with cases from EMC, Vanguard and ancient Athens. Part Four asserts the all leaders ought involve the entire organization with cases from Media General and the fascinating start-up TweezerMan.

We ultimately tend to rewrite organizational decisions as attributable to one man or woman. Judgment Calls argues that all decisions are made better by considering the knowledge present in the organization. In making that argument, they ensure that at least these twelve stories will not be rewritten.

A picture is worth a thousand words; clichéd but true. This illustration may also become clichéd, but whenever I see it, I grin and nod. Although the Promised Land lies within that magic circle, most of us can’t break out of our comfort zone. Recently, the Apple Corporation has shown the world a glorious example of how big business creates magic. No doubt, many CEOs will try to replicate the principles that catapulted Apple to the most valuable company on the face of the earth. Will they be able to do it?

One thing is certain; the place to start is the corporate culture. Magic can’t happen in cultures that don’t worship innovation. Innovation starts with leadership. Leaders must encourage creativity and teamwork, as well as processes and systems that nurture the concepts and execute the results. Most big company cultures are not innovative. Oh yes, they talk about innovation in their annual reports and their mission statements. But this isn’t the Apple, Google or Amazon type of innovation.

Take a look at your organization. How many of these traits are evident? If the answer is “not many”, then your CEO has a whack of work to do because this is the culture that moves companies from the comfort zone to the magic zone.

1. Inaction is frowned upon. Innovators don’t put ideas before committees or tolerate whining about not enough resources such as staffing, data or funding.
2. Fire, Ready, Aim is the mantra. I’m not suggesting you bet the farm on a big idea. Give the innovation your best shot now, in a “measured bite” rather than waiting months for all the information that might reduce risk.
3. Failure is lauded. Be proud of giving novel initiatives a try. “What did you learn along the way? How will you make it better next time? When will that be? And by the way, what can I do to help?”
4. Every innovation is applauded. Celebrations are held for anyone who has found a better way to get the job done. That includes receptionists, loading dock workers and accounting clerks.
5. Successful innovations are corporate folklore. We know this goes on at Apple — employees are still talking about Woz. There isn’t a better way to impress potential hires than telling the story of how Max, Chris and Marion . . .
6. The leaders have track records of innovation success. These are the people who stimulate innovation and permeate the culture to every nook and cranny of the company.
7. The organization reeks of pride. Product displays, success stories are everywhere – on the walls, in the newsletters, online in social media.

Until the new economy, big business wasn’t expected to innovate. Innovation was the way of the entrepreneur. The giant’s power, expressed in market or balance sheet clout gave them a ticket to pass go, and most have taken the easy way out. They’ve acquired, beaten smaller players into submission and expanded, geographically. But now, in Apple, Google and Amazon we have examples of innovation at such staggering levels that I suspect investors will demand more of big conventionalists. In highly concentrated industries, leaders will no longer have the luxury of acquisition to drive growth. The pressure will be on them to “stop minding the store” and “start building new stores.” Now.

The strategy book is divided into two main sections. The first is McKeown’s take on the important steps of strategy, starting with strategic thinking and moving forward to planning. The Strategy Book goes beyond simple planning models of picking a market position. While it covers this, there are also hat tips to emergent strategy thought leaders by warning organizations to stay flexible. The second half of the book offers a survey of strategy tools, starting with SWOT and including everything from Porter’s Five Forces to BCG’s growth share matrix.

It would be hyperbole to claim that McKeown’s The Strategy Book is the “know all, be all” of strategy. However, it’s not an understatement to claim that it may be the best starting point for learning to lead strategic.

Recent research led by Crystal Hoyt, however, has brought a new perspective to the debate. Hoyt’s team sought to examine the impact of each belief on ones ability to identify with a leadership role model and act in line with that identification. The researchers divided participants into two groups, one group was primed to believe that leaders were born and the other was primed to believe that leaders were made. Each group was then shown a leadership role model and tasked with completing a leadership task (delivering a speech to a group of followers). The research found that those in the “made” category were more likely to identify with their role model and demonstrated more confidence and less anxiety before performing the task. The “made” group also performed the task significantly better.

The implications from this research add another layer to our understanding of just how irrelevant the debate is. The evidence implies that it doesn’t really matter whether leaders are born or made, what matters is whether a person believes that they can develop into an effective leader, or improve their leadership ability. These implications suggest that, in leadership development, perhaps we should start by teaching this growth mindset and letting future leaders know that no matter how much nature gave them, nurture can take them a lot further.

David Burkus is the editor of LeaderLab. He writes, speaks, and serves on the faculty of management at Oral Roberts University’s College of Business.