Managing People for Growth

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photo credit: Henson Consulting Group

Before I dig in, let’s clarify that most talent pros distinguish leadership from management. Rather than pit one concept against the other, I think they are both necessary and complementary, and here’s a great post describing how.

It’s important for managers to help people grow at work because the return on the investment is considerable. One of the most engaging aspects of work is professional development, which is always easier if you have a great people manager for a boss. Highly engaged employees deliver more “discretionary” effort, which means they solve more difficult problems, deliver better quality work, and take better care of customers.

Start Here: be available and be present on a regular basis

Managing people takes actual time and needs to be factored into your work load every week. Managing people is not an “extra” you do on top of other responsibilities. It’s a primary activity that gives you leverage to get more done, deliver higher performance, and achieve superior results. If you are still an individual contributor in addition to managing people, and you don’t have time for your direct reports, you need to address that first.

This is true at ALL LEVELS (I’m looking at you CEO’s). Everyone at work needs to discuss priorities, trade-offs, barriers, and conflicts; and get perspective, advice, and support. This is the best thing people managers can offer their direct reports. Discussing the priority and quality of work is the purpose of 1:1’s, not slogging through a tick-by-tick update of an activity list. While it’s useful to keep a shared list of activities for each direct report, it’s a value destroying activity to simply run down the list every week, getting into the details of what did and did not happen.

For a value-adding approach, here’s a few questions that get you deeper into a developmental dialogue:

  • What is the most important thing on your list this week?
  • What’s getting in the way of you accomplishing that?
  • What can I do to help you get it done successfully?

For more on conducting high value 1:1’s check out this treasure trove of advice from Claire Lew at Know Your Company.

Level Up: adjust your approach based on the other person’s needs

If it’s not zero, how much time does it take to manage people? That depends largely on the readiness and needs of the people reporting to you. While making time is a requirement of being a good manager-coach, the amount of time is not a predictor of impact (i.e. more time is not necessarily better). A research study by Gardner to evaluate coaching quality identified 4 coaching profiles comprised of 90 variables. Their research found that the most effective style was not the most time consuming. In fact, the most time-consuming approach was the least effective. The most effective style was about making connections between an employee’s needs and a wide variety of resources.

“Being a Connector is more about asking the right questions, providing tailored feedback, and helping employees make a connection to a colleague who can help them.”

The classic way to guide your coaching behavior is the “tried and true” Situational Leadership model originated by Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey (sadly they conflate the terms leadership and management). This framework helps you identify the needs of your direct reports and adjust your approach to match them using one these four styles:

Become a Master: embrace the management paradox

We all like simplicity, and whenever possible our brains like us to respond with formulas, so we can reserve deep thinking for the highest value puzzles we might face. Managing people may just be the highest value puzzle, so shifting your energy from task-oriented problem solving to people-oriented problem solving can pay back immensely as you move up in your career or your company increases in scale and complexity.

Accepting that managing people is a complex, dynamic, multiplistic scenario requires you to use your best emotional intelligence and continuous effort to be present with each person in each moment. In a word, people are messy. If there’s one thing I learned in graduate school, it’s this statement written on the board by Professor Charles F. Luna: “Things that matter are messy.” I guess here I’m calling people things, but you get the point. If you want to be successful managing people, you have to deal with messy.

Master people managers are able to see any interaction as an opportunity to help a person learn and grow. The problem with people is that growth is almost always uncomfortable and therefore we both crave it and resist it. It gets exponentially harder if you are operating in a business environment with deadlines, safety standards, excellence values, and demanding customers.

To be successful helping people grow, you must embrace the paradox of being both compassionate and demanding. Simultaneously. Use the Management Paradox chart to help you guide your behavior over time. It’s not a recipe, it’s a framework… helpful to diagnose, debrief, or discuss this messy aspect of managing people.

Good luck!

Leaders Are Made, Not Born

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Image credit: Steelforge.com

 

(A.K.A. The 1% Investor Challenge)

I often hear from CEO’s and Investors that one of their strategic guidelines is to “invest in the team” and that talent and culture are strategic differentiators. Based on my experience, I think they mean to find “ready-made” leaders and executive teams and give them money to succeed in their plans. In the past 25 years, I’ve worked with thousands of leaders from front line supervisors to middle managers, and from senior executives to entrepreneurs, founders and board members. Not one of them was a “born” leader.

Successful leaders have many stories about how their experience has shaped their approach to business, people, and customers. Many are “self-made” leaders, having learned quickly from their mistakes, adapted to unforeseen circumstances, or demonstrated relentless curiosity. All great leaders are made over time, with dedicated focus and effort toward personal and professional effectiveness. If you look closely, there is sufficient evidence in someone’s life to inspect and evaluate if he or she is effective in key aspects of “scalable” leadership, but this is too often left unexamined by investors.

Having worked side-by-side with founders at dozens of start-ups, I can tell you the demands on company executives are tremendous. They face high speed, complex, ambiguous, uncertain conditions all day, every day. It strikes me as odd that investors don’t actually “invest” in the leaders of their companies. They hand over millions of dollars to the Founder/CEO to build a company, but they rarely spend any of it on the leaders themselves. I think this is an incredible oversight in diligence, and a gaping hole in fiduciary responsibility. Hope is not a strategy.

It seems unreasonable to assume a CEO (even a serial entrepreneur) will be successful leading a fast-growing, 100+ person organization with no attention to his or her personal effectiveness. Their very nature makes it more likely they will end up like Travis Kalanick than Sheryl Sandberg. Leading a complex organization (anything over 40 people) requires a well-honed set of interpersonal skills, professional presence and strategic talent planning (see Facebook and Google) to be successful. Yet most investors stand by passively while CEO’s and executive teams struggle with leadership basics and burn their money. The failure rate of start-ups is very high… conventional wisdom says 9 out of 10 don’t make it. There is much agreement that leadership and management mistakes are often the main cause of failure.

Recently I’ve approached dozens of venture capitalists and private equity investors with a proposal to invest in their executives through proven leadership tools and programs. Nearly all of them have responded with some form of “that’s nice to consider some day, but we don’t have enough money right now.”

Huh?

What they’re really saying is, we don’t care about the actual people in the company. We make a bunch of investments and hope like hell at least 1 pays back enough to carry the fund. This is called spreading the risk, but is essentially gambling. All that people stuff is too messy and soft to address so they just ignore it.

I think it’s time for investors to start owning the outcomes of their lack of attention to leadership and talent. If you want to make a difference in the world by building companies, you should conduct diligence on your executives, not just the company finances, addressable market and customer traction. If you think talent and culture are strategic differentiators, ensure that proper efforts are being made to develop the CEO and the executive team. Otherwise you’re just hoping some whip-smart founder will somehow figure out how to transfer zero experience working in groups to high impact organizational leadership.

I’m here to tell you that execution matters,
and execution is all about people.

The average Series A deal size in 2016 was $5M. Series B average was $12M, and later stage deals average over $25M. I’ve heard more than one CEO say they put their money on advertising and engineers, not HR. That might get you traction, but it won’t get you sustainable high performance. If you are in the game for a quick flip, I get it. But if you are really trying to build a high performing company, leadership is not “nice to do,” it’s an essential catalyst that unlocks sustainable growth.

Here’s my challenge to any investor willing to test it:

Earmark 1% of your next investment for executive development. If you’re putting in $1M make sure $10K is spent on development for the CEO and the leadership team. If you lay down $10M, certainly a $100K investment in the top team will improve your chances of success. Even better, consider investing 1% of your total fund in the proper resources to support leadership development in the full portfolio. You can achieve much better economies of scale and cross pollination in that approach. You can even develop a unique portfolio advantage by doing this better than other investors. It’s a true value add for your money. And it will pay you back with better performing companies and a pool of talent you can tap over the long haul.

I understand that not all development is worth it, and that some efforts are a complete waste of time. Run your 1% investment like any other A/B test. Identify the intervention and track the progress. If you have any questions about what kind of leadership development works best, feel free to contact me or check in with an executive development specialist you already know.

If just one more of the companies in your portfolio steers clear of the failures of executive leadership your fund will be twice as good. That’s smart money.

Customer Centered Leadership

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Ladies and Gentleman, The Beatles!

If ever there was one best Business Guru, it would have to be Peter Drucker. His work emerged during the height of the Industrial Age and serves as the foundation of management practice in most businesses today. Just like picking your favorite Beatles song (A Day In The Life), it’s kind of hard to boil his work down to one statement. But here’s mine:

Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business (The Practice of Management, 1954).

There is one word in this quote that might need to be modernized, but only because we can assume Mr. Drucker was naturally influenced by his era, and not yet hip to the power of design and the more recent practices of customer empathy. To make the most sense in today’s world, I propose we change the word “create” to “discover” as it better underscores the idea of providing something for a customer versus selling them some new widget. We’ve certainly learned by now that the world will NOT beat a path to your door if you build a better mousetrap (Ralph Waldo Emerson). Customers will flock to your company only if you are solving a problem or fulfilling a need, even if they aren’t aware they have it yet.

Marketing is responsible for discovering customer needs and innovation is responsible for solving them. Hand and glove. Many innovators have an initial customer insight and design a solution for that. Often this is “design for self” where the solution feels right to the one inventing it. I’d say most early stage businesses created only a minimum viable product or have no sustainable advantage, so quickly burn through early stage growth and stall. In today’s Internet fueled, flat world, companies can go through this initial growth stage in a matter of months. In the good ‘ol days of Henry Ford, it could take years to run out of the initial growth stage (perhaps 125, if they don’t get busy quickly at Ford).

The only way out of this problem is to understand your customer intimately, and adapt to the continual pace of change around you. This requires a new kind of corporate framework. The pace of business technology is moving so fast that people are now able to see the real impact of robots, machine learning, and computing power as human jobs are replaced by automation and artificial intelligence. Left to the Industrial model of organization, people are essentially machines who can be replaced with technological advancement. To function in our high tech, rapid change world companies need to build human centered organizations or risk losing all ability to market and innovate. This would be a very bad state for businesses because they would soon be without customers with no human insight, synthesis, or creativity operating within their organization.

Human Centered Organizations

Traditional businesses are built in a hierarchical model that works well in a predictable, stable business environment. In the past several decades, as uncertainty and change increase, there have been plenty of replacement designs proposed (e.g. Holacracy, Heterarchy, etc.). But these distinctions are missing the point, and therefore don’t solve the problem. A human centered organization isn’t a different way to decide or control, it’s purpose-built to enable creativity and collaboration. These are the two essential capabilities underlying the best marketing and innovation functions. Under the dominant hierarchical world, we’re stuck searching for Purple Squirrels to build Unicorns. Wait, What? We’ve designed companies that need extremely rare people to achieve what is now the expected standard of venture capital investments. Sorry, but I can’t help myself, here’s my other favorite Druckerism as it relates to organization design: (Beatles #2=Love Me Do)

No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.

To be successful in today’s world, and achieve the purpose described by Drucker, businesses must enable average human beings to perform at their best. To perform at their best, people need to be well. I’ve covered this part before so I won’t re-hash it here. I will suggest a new label for human-centered organization design for those seeking a simple way to net this out: reciprocity.

Reciprocity

Reciprocity is the organizing principle of a human-centered organization. It is built on the seminal economic insight from the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The essence is that cooperation is natural for humans and better than the rational choice of selfishness. In common terms, we’re talking about “win-win” here. Most traditional organizations are designed to control for selfish/rational behavior and become disengaging as they dehumanize and under value collaboration. A reciprocal organization empathizes with human failings and has support and resources designed into the system to encourage higher order behavior in three ways:

1. Growth Mindset
2. Personal Effectiveness
3. Everyday Presence

When organizations are designed to support employees in these three areas they are far more creative and collaborative. Therefore, they are better able to market and innovate, which is to discover and solve customer problems.

Moving from Performance Management to Performance Dialogue

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I just finished reading Let’s Not Kill Performance Evaluations Yet by Lori Goler, Janelle Gale and Adam Grant. I am in full agreement with the premise of their article: that performance evaluations can have real value to employees. I think it’s clear that understanding “where you stand” is better than having judgments hidden in a black box, only to surprise you when it’s time to discuss a salary increase. After all, open sharing is a natural aspect of constructive human relationships, so it’s destructive to have a secret evaluation going on behind your back.

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Throughout the article they made excellent points, using research to show how most employees would rather have an evaluation than not. I’m not a fan of “killing” reviews, so I am happy to have a solid piece of writing to show that’s not a great idea. Most people would agree that something is better than nothing, and if you’re going to do traditional performance management, I think the approach described at Facebook would be called “best practice.” Best as they point out (among others like Jeffrey Pfeffer) means you gather input from multiple perspectives, evaluate performance over time, and attempt to remove bias from the written discourse (BTW, I love that they are so committed to removing bias, but have to say that most companies I know simply don’t have a “team of analysts” available to conduct that step). Best also includes translating performance ratings into compensation.

Despite the clarity of their points, I still don’t think “best practice” is good enough to make traditional performance reviews worthwhile. Even when done with as much care and diligence as described by Facebook, it’s still a very time consuming, expensive, and unsatisfying process for most participants. It’s still a dreaded, necessary evil that people must suffer through in order to be considered for a raise. I’m not sure how satisfied Facebook employees are with the reviews process, but other research on performance appraisals shows satisfaction levels are well below an acceptable level we’d apply to any other business process. Can you imagine if you accepted a 65% CSAT score as “good enough” in your customer contact center or any kind of product quality standard?

So while something is better than nothing, I think it’s unacceptable that such an expensive investment would be “okay” at anything less than 90% satisfaction for participants.
The trend to “kill reviews” is misguided, but understandable. I think the real problem with performance reviews is more fundamental than the issues of transparency, perspective, and bias. Fixing these issues assumes a paradigm about people and work that is functionally out of date and misaligned with what high performance people need to be successful. Ask one successful entrepreneur when a performance review helped them improve (actually ask them all!). I think that’s um, never. That persona couldn’t even stand getting through school, let alone have a boss give them a rating. Isn’t that a really interesting conundrum? It makes me wonder if there might be other dynamics underlying high performance that we don’t fully understand in the HR and OD bubble.

original-faxTo me, using performance reviews is like using a fax to send information to your insurance company. They need paperwork to justify their actions because their processes and tools are built around audits that review PAPER. Their well-designed controls don’t allow their agents to have email addresses or a printer, so you can’t send an attachment for them to print and file. Because of their sunk costs in legacy systems, customers have to print, sign, scan and fax so their agents have something physical to file. Despite the fact the paper actually originated in some “newfangled” digital transaction. Pretty crazy, huh?
Solving the problems with performance reviews is not about how to deliver them better, it’s about taking a step back to wonder, “What’s the best way to help people perform at their best?”

This might seem like a tangent, but in order to truly fix performance reviews, we need to dig deeper into today’s relevant human performance dynamics and create an entirely new design paradigm. Here are some warm up questions to stretch your thinking and start looking at this problem from other angles:

How do we know if people are doing good work?
How do we know if people are doing the right work?
Why do we care about the answers to those questions?
Why do entrepreneurs achieve so much without getting reviewed?
Why do entrepreneurs succeed without having a boss?
Why do some sports teams overachieve while others don’t?
Outside of business, what are other situations where work quality matters?
What do we know about evaluation in school versus evaluation at work?
What do we know about evaluation in families?
What motivates people to do good work?
How do you measure human output?
Who should measure human output?
What information do people need to perform at their best?
How do salaries get set?
Do bonuses motivate people?
What is performance? How do you know when it’s effective?
When have you experienced a performance insight? How did you get it?
When you have you done your best work?
What makes you call that “your best work”?
Why is the sky blue? (Just kidding!)
What’s the difference between effort and output? Do both matter?
Where have you observed “high performance” in action?
What are the conditions that create high performance?
What kinds of relationships exist in high performance situations?
What kinds of relationships exist in low performance situations?
Are relationships an important factor in high performance?
How does the human brain react to threats? What does it do to our body?
How does the human brain react to challenges? To rewards? To compliments?
What is the language of high performance? Are some words better than others?
Where did the term feedback originate?
What’s different about work today versus work 25–50–100–1000 years ago?

I’m sure you could come up with dozens more questions as you pick apart the situation and begin to wonder with a “beginner’s mind” what performance reviews are all about. The next step is to define a clear problem statement that motivates us to persist in this now completely messy process. This is about finding satisfying answers to these questions:

What problem are you trying to solve?
How do you know you have this problem?

To move us forward more quickly here, I’ll share some of the work I’ve been doing over the past decade while struggling with this persistent and complex challenge so many companies face. It took me several attempts at making performance reviews better before I decided to zoom out and rethink the whole concept. I built “best practice” processes at Citibank, Levi Strauss, and Mercury Interactive before arriving at IDEO, where implementing a best practice review system was abhorrent to even consider. Since I was forced into finding a different way, I adopted IDEO design thinking techniques (When in Rome…) to help me create something that would work there.

I interviewed dozens of IDEO designers and support staff to hear their stories about performance reviews, feedback, and other related topics. I did a review of the literature and conducted benchmarking conversations. Not surprisingly my anecdotal discovery netted strong negative feelings about “being reviewed” but thankfully provided all kinds of cool ideas for making improvements.

Well into the process, I asked a sharp young designer in Boston what he thought of 360 reviews. Instead of answering about his experience receiving a review, he flipped the question and answered about giving them saying, “I don’t have time to give feedback to others!”

Given the supportive and collaborative nature of IDEO folk in general, I was taken aback. I asked him to explain a little more, and he gave me the spark that would fuel my approach from then until today. He described how he didn’t think it fair to give someone half-assed, quick snippets of feedback, and that doing a good job of giving helpful, high quality suggestions is a huge burden in addition to his regular work. In his opinion, it was an extreme disservice to provide feedback that was not well thought out and thorough. People would be counting on that information to learn and grow, and providing anything less than would be damaging and wrong.

I had to steep in those comments among the hundreds of other Post-its I had gathered until I found a pattern to guide my design process. The big insight is to recognize that the person who benefits most from feedback is the person receiving it. Sounds simple, but with closer consideration, it reverses the feedback dynamic from giving to gathering. In my experience, most performance management systems are designed from the perspective of the manager or the company. Seeking to “manage” limited financial resources by differentiating people based on their performance is a controlling paradigm that negates the value of feedback from the git-go.

If instead, we start from the perspective of the individual, the problem statement becomes How can I find out if I’m doing my work properly? and a separate issue of Am I getting paid fairly for the work I produce?

So while performance management is about evaluating performance over time, performance dialogue is about discussing the focus and quality of work.
Over time, I’ve clarified this into to 2 separate conversations people need to conduct at work, each with 2 driving questions:

Conversation 1: Evaluating my performance:
Is this the right work for me to do?
Is this work I’m doing good enough?

Conversation 2: Navigating my career:
Do I have the capabilities necessary to succeed in this job?
What capabilities do I need to progress in my career?

Once divided into these 2 conversations and 4 questions, building a process, tools, and procedures to help answer them looks much different than the performance review we all know and hate today. The associated design questions in the new paradigm might look like this:

Who can help me answer this question?
(Satisfies a need to identify key stakeholders like manager, peers, clients)
What are good ways to gather input from others?
(Based on deep understanding of predictable human dynamics)
How can I make giving input/perspective easy for my stakeholders?
(Places the burden on me not them)
How do a make sense of their answers?
(Leads to tools like a survey I can use to increase my skill/efficiency)
How often should I ask these questions?
(Helps me define the nature of my work)

In its most recent iteration at Thrive Market, I’ve started using a technology platform called 15Five to enable Performance Dialogue and make it scalable and efficient. 15Five provides the organizational reporting framework, a bundle of great question-building tools, and modern ways (like social media) to engage others in collaborative discussions about the focus and quality of work. But technology alone is not sufficient to make this fly. The “self-directing, self-correcting” behaviors we need to achieve personal and professional growth require refined interpersonal skills and attitudes, so we provide a basic training workshop and coaching to help people understand and engage in the process effectively.

So, How Do I Get a Raise?

Compensation is an agreement between an organization and an individual to pay a certain amount of money for a certain amount/type/scope of work. Performance Dialogue has no direct connection to compensation. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

Performance Dialogue ensures work focus and work quality because it is a discussion about work not an evaluation of it.

If you want to have high performance, creativity or innovation in your organization then people need to take risks. If you tie performance conversations to compensation they get corrupted because nobody will share a mistake or challenge under the fear they will get dinged in their rating.

To determine someone’s compensation, you need to evaluate her capabilities against the market. It is a completely different conversation that you have once or twice a year, and is essentially the same process you use when you interview someone for a job in the first place. What does their experience indicate they are the able to do? What job responsibilities can they reliable accomplish? What is the evidence that they are capable of doing the job (and at what level of scope/responsibility/impact)? People with more capabilities generally earn more, so if someone grows in her capabilities, she should get a raise in accordance with what the market would pay her. The fundamental switch here is moving from evaluating performance against goals to evaluating capabilities growth. To clearly distinguish it from Performance Dialogue, I call this process Career Navigation.

Wait, what about poor performers?

Basic performance is a binary problem. Either someone is putting in the effort and making progress or she/he is not. If you determine that someone is no longer interested in putting in the effort, or is substantially unable to do the work, it’s time to part ways. This should be discovered over time via Performance Dialogue and handled long before you engage in Career Navigation discussions. Keeping someone on your team who is not able to do the work is a disservice to everyone involved. Act with care and compassion, but follow through nonetheless.

This is really different

The paradigm shift from manager-led to individual-driven, should not be underestimated as a radical change for most people. In order to engage in Performance Dialogue and Career Navigation successfully, people involved have to operate from a growth mindset, not a fixed one and use inquiry and curiosity (not fear) as the motivation to participate. They also must interact with colleagues, supervisors and clients in a reciprocal partnership and avoid the paternalistic tendencies in most manager-employee relationships.

Behaving with reciprocity does not mean turning the dialogue into a consensus or compromised endeavor that makes everybody feel good. Managers still maintain decision making authority and have the responsibility to ensure goals and standards are met. Employees gain more explicit control over their career options.

The big difference in a reciprocal relationship is the use of questions and agreements, not directives and mandates. It rests on the power of an unconditional, positive question not a passive-aggressive statement disguised as a question. In a Performance Dialogue world, nobody should walk away feeling “tasked” to do something… that’s the old paradigm creeping back. It might take more time up front, but I think it’s better to invest in core development and enable people to become self-directing and self-correcting “creators” over designing a high control system that assumes people are pawns.

Ode to the Karate Kid

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I just saw a  funny Facebook video of my good friend Phil leading what looks like a wedding party in a group “dance” called “Shake Your Foot.”

 

Strangely, I had started this post yesterday, having had some weird dreams about the very same dance the night before… call it coincidence, but I think it’s a deep universal connection that forms between anyone who has ever participated in this whacky ritual.

I’ve used this as an icebreaker or warm up during group leadership events and have shared it with hundreds, nay thousands of people over the years, including a large group of Microsoft executives on retreat in Alaska. More recently I even incorporated it into my “welcome” presentation on my first day at a new job (but that’s another story!).

I credit the great Joe Pounds of YMCA Storer Camps fame for introducing, and perhaps inventing Shake Your Foot. Phil and I learned it about the same time when we were working in the Adolescent Leadership program there. While delivered with the gusto that only Phil can muster, one thing missing from his recent wedding video is the portion fondly known by devotees as the Karate Kid Interlude.

As you may recall from the movie, young Daniel (played by Ralph Macchio) is schooled by martial arts master Miyagi (played by Pat Morita) in an effort to overcome bullying at school. Perhaps the most memorable moment in the movie is the “wax on, wax off” scene, but I digress. We found the “crane kick” in the penultimate fighting scene more inspiring and worthy of endless mimicry, and so it was inserted into Shake Your Foot in lieu of the finger snapping “too cool for school” interlude.

Karate Kid Crane Kick

Standing on one foot with my arms spread wide, crowing like a rooster came pretty easily to me, so I must say I really didn’t get why it was both funny and challenging to most of the people we engaged in this effort. That is until recently, when I was dealing with intense shoulder pain due to a small rotator cuff tear. Suddenly I could barely lift my arm, let alone hold it steady in the uplifted crane position.

Now, feeling a bit ashamed of my lack of empathy for those who struggled with this, I do daily stretches just to stand straight up without pain. I am happy to report that I’m nearing full motion in both arms and am starting to regain some of my former flexibility. Thus my recent re-discovery of the Karate Kid Interlude… it’s nearly impossible for me to stretch my arms up without the catchy Shake Your Foot song invading my focus. It brings a smile to an otherwise arduous exercise so I just go for it… all by myself.

Now if only someone can explain why I’m standing in my bedroom on one foot, crowing like a rooster to my kids…

Innovation or hubris?

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I just finished reading a great article by Austin Carr in Fast Company. He tells the long and sordid story of a multiyear, billion dollar effort by Disney to “overhaul the digital infrastructure” and “change the fundamental nature of Disney’s park experience” for customers. Now that’s an ambitious and exciting call to action! The article struck a chord for me because I just got back from a 5 day vacation at Disney World with my family for our Spring Break.

Disney Crowd

I’ve been to Disney parks more than a handful of times since my kids have been around, starting about 15 years ago. I have to say that I did not experience any appreciable change in this last visit that I would classify as an “overhaul” or certainly not a shift in the “fundamental nature” of the experience. I did notice a few new things here and there and was quite curious about the effort it took to replace paper tickets with an electronic pass. I saw people entering with wrist bands, but my family had little plastic cards like you find in most hotels. I found out you have to be staying in a Disney hotel to get one of the bands. Oh well. They didn’t seem to do anything different than the cards and I didn’t have the kids bugging me to buy yet another little Disney item to stick on them.

The dominant aspect of my experience was waiting. Waiting in lines for rides, waiting for the crowd to move so I could get where I wanted to go. Waiting for the Park Attendant to re-set our cards because the Fast Pass names didn’t align with the fingerprint names recorded within. We discovered this problem when we tried to split up on two different rides and we all got blue signals when we tried to get through the Fast Pass gate. We had three great ride entry experiences each day where the Fast Pass shortened our waiting by as much as an hour (down from 90 minutes to something like 30). We also had to wait for transportation… wait for the Monorail, wait for a bus, wait for a boat. All the waiting made my Disney experience something I had to tolerate on behalf of my 4-year old niece who is currently in the Princess Sweet Spot. But it did not really make me happy.

It was very fun to watch my niece’s eyes light up with all the magic, and my daughters really enjoyed taking their little cousin around and experiencing her joy together. I wonder about princesses as role models, and have some vague concerns with the Disney gender stereotypes, but I’ll leave that for another time. Mostly, Disney is good clean fun and overall I’d say I’m a Disney fan, but I was very glad when the trip was over.

cinderella_laugh

The Reinventing Happiness article made me recall many observations and thoughts I had about how Disney World seems to be falling behind, or appears out of sync with today’s ideas of entertainment. It’s quaint, it’s cute, but it’s aging drastically. In Tomorrow Land I rode gasoline powered cars on the Speedway and experienced a traffic jam as the ride ended (more waiting). My son and I sat there breathing in the gas fumes and listening to the “lawnmower” engines revving and I thought, “This is not Tomorrow, this is Yesterday! Maybe they should partner with Tesla to create a driving experience that’s ahead of our time, showing how solar power can be converted to a quiet, smooth, and exciting new driving experience. That would be cool.

I liked the Disney World mobile app for the map showing ride wait times, and a way to keep track of my Fast Passes, but noticed there was no “digital layer” where I could interact with the rides. Now that I’ve read they recently overhauled their digital infrastructure, this is actually startling. While in line (waiting) with my daughter for the Expedition Everest ride, we used Google to look up “tallest coasters” to see just how scary this might be for us. In the line for Thunder Mountain, we Googled a story on the Chilean miners who were trapped for a month, and talked about why there was a canary in the tubes. These were both interesting discussions to help pass the time while we were in line and both digital (Google) experiences were triggered by the rides themselves. I remember thinking that someone should use the Disney story telling prowess to create a companion experience. I’ve been around app building enough to know it wouldn’t cost that much to make something really cool.

At the Animal Kingdom we discovered the “Up” inspired Wilderness Explorers program. It took some searching, but we found a place to get the book and my younger kids got fully engaged in “earning” the badges. I like workbooks as a learning device, and it was cool to see them with pencils stuck over their ears meeting the various “ambassadors” who shared interesting tidbits with them. But again, I started to imagine many ways a digital companion experience could be designed to make the program more powerful and to connect beyond the Park. I even thought a start-up could have a cool partnership with Disney around storytelling and animal conservation… perhaps linking to Kiva or another micro-financing service to put wells in South Sudan. Could they connect with Salva Dut? That would be really cool!

Lastly, I found it humorous and a bit sad that you can purchase a “chip enabled” mug at Blizzard Beach so you can get an “endless soda” for the day. We tested the machines with our water bottles and found that only an activated cup will make the soda flow. I enjoy a corn dog, an ice cream bar Mickey, and a churro as much as the next guy, but endless soda is simply out of sync with public health and basic wellness. A cool digital experience, but completely wrong from a family entertainment standpoint. Maybe they could do a partnership with Fit Bit or Withings or JawBone or Nike…

Unlimited Soda 2

I did experience Test Track, and even without a Magic Band I could use my “magic” card at the touch points of that ride. It was a good ride and the shortening effect on the line was real for me too. A nice step in the right direction. But I don’t think Disney can claim victory on “reinvention” or “transformation” or “fundamental change” from their billion dollar initiative. Not even close. It’s even worse hearing that they think they are leading with creativity and innovation. They are clearly not. That’s why they had to buy Pixar. They do have a great marketing engine though.

I think they demonstrated many of the reasons why many companies fail at innovation. In fact this would be a great case study article (thanks Austin!) on what NOT to do if you want to address transformation. Starting with a leader who mandates “This better work!” and then puts executives in a “bake off” to see who will win the future CEO job, and ending with a bevy of “back up” consultants costing $100 Million.

From my cheap seats on the sidelines, I think the MyMagic+ team attached to the bracelet idea too early and then set about hammering it in to place. This was not innovation, it was a desperate attempt to remain relevant. So they bounced around with a million ideas from every direction and got overwhelmed by internal politics. Innovation requires a compelling vision to overcome that kind of resistance. Innovation is driven from the “outside in” starting with deep insights into the customer experience and emerging via a disciplined process involving intimate collaboration. I’ve talked about innovation many times before, so I won’t go into it further now.

Waiting in lines and messing with paper tickets are pain points for Disney customers, so you could call that a customer insight. But removing an obvious pain point with solutions that are found everywhere, does not qualify as innovation. It is simply keeping up.

Love is a two-way street

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trains-railroad_00389817

[this post appeared previously on the Bulldog Drummond blog]

Oh Love

Why do you love someone? Not the specific aspects of a specific person, but the broader reasons underlying love. I think it’s because of things like respect, trust, passion and reciprocity. Love is built on deep values shared by both people. This is not a wedding, so I won’t get all religious here, but suffice it to say that love is not about control, it’s about mutual admiration and devotion. If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free.

So why is it that so many businesses rely on intrusion, persistence and repetition to win your love? I think it’s because businesses rarely love their customers the way they expect their customers to love their brands. They are on a power trip. Yes, there are a small number of companies who truly love their customers and provide genuine reciprocal devotion. But not many. In a loving human relationship, there are many things that partners do for each other that have practical value. Like taking out the trash (without complaining) or picking someone up at the airport (a binding social contract according to Jerry Seinfeld). Surely, products have practical value in your life. Isn’t that the whole point? Tide helps you clean your clothes and Toyota helps you get to work… for a fair price.

A practical exchange of value is on the level of paying an employee to do a job. It gets the job done, but is “strictly business.” You pay for the detergent or car, and the company delivers a product that meets your specific needs. But love is on a whole different level. You might even “love” the way your car drives, or the way your detergent smells, but that’s not being in love with the brand. Being in love with a brand requires a deeper, more meaningful relationship… one that goes beyond simply exchanging money for a product. Similarly, being fully engaged in your work requires much more than fair pay for the effort you invest (What is employee engagement?).

Any business that wants to move past a business transaction and into a loving relationship has to start giving more than a product or service. You can’t have it both ways (for long). Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a transactional business relationship. This only applies when a business has decided that love is a better strategy to run their business than a series of practical transactions. But there’s a pile of evidence that love leads to good things.

Elevation

In most businesses, a series of repeated purchases are far more profitable than a revolving door of new customers coming and going after only one try. The Loyalty Effect and Customer Lifetime Value are smart ways to think about evaluating customers over the long term. And Saatchi and Saatchi established the ideal of love marks as the “future beyond brands.” According to them, a love mark “delivers beyond your expectations of great performance and reaches your heart as well as your mind, creating an intimate, emotional connection that you just can’t live without.” So in order to win customers for life, it makes sense to elevate your aspirations and aim for love.

Love Is A Many Splendored Thing, but the stakes are high. You can’t just offer points for repeated purchases as most loyalty programs require. That’s controlling and obvious. Imagine if you only gave your partner a back massage if they take out the trash 20 times without complaining. That looks more like manipulation, and would be a red flag on the health of your relationship.

Every Day is a Winding Road

Both partners have to give fully “above and beyond” the practical value of their existence together to make a loving relationship work. Loving a brand is not all about devoted customers. It’s also about a devoted company. Brand consultants Wolff Olins recommend “thinking less about selling people, and more about enlisting them.” In a Wired interview with former Wolff Olins CEO Karl Heiselman suggests “Unlike the parent-child relationship of the past, or the top-down relationship in the past, companies and people are meeting as equals. It’s much more like a one-on-one relationship you would have with another person. It’s based on reciprocity and honesty and trust” (Check out the Wolff Olins/Flamingo full report).

So what does devotion look like for a brand? It starts with a clear set of values and a strong sense of purpose. Patagonia has stated that they want to save the planet from consumerism. An apparent contradiction for a company that makes clothes and puts out seasonal catalogs to get customers to buy more stuff. But in loving relationships, contradictions are something to embrace and explore together, not to be hidden or avoided. Clearly Patagonia is doing a lot to improve their impact on the planet, and being transparent about their intentions and owning up to their faults builds trust with customers. In an open relationship, there’s no hidden dark side or eventual “gotcha” moment where the truth comes out. There’s an honest, open dialogue about how they can be better.

Being honest and transparent is a great way for brands to demonstrate love for their customers, but there are other great ways. Instead of making every interaction a product push, brands can offer inspiration, insight, or support to their customers between and around purchases. Giving customers something they value beyond the specific product doesn’t have to cost a lot, it just has to feel right to the customer. Sometimes you can just make it easy for a customer by sharing good information or good advice instead of presenting a special offer or feature highlight. This approach to customers is nothing less than a complete re-engineering of advertising from a constant sales pitch to grab your attention, to helpful advice, aducation and inspirational content.

Fools in Love

Sometimes love requires breaking rules based on empathy for a customer’s situation. My family recently took a vacation to France, and while away my Mother-in-law became very sick. She was seriously ill when we left, but had an unexpected setback that suddenly threatened her life. My wife had to return home early, and called Air France to rearrange her flight. Of course this late notice change of plans caused a substantial fare increase of over $1500. The airline was under no business obligation to honor the original fare, so they didn’t. They offered to waive the $150 change fee if she got a letter from the hospital indicating her condition.

This is not love. This is war. We do not fly to France every week, so getting the highest fee for a one-time transaction might be good business. But, I would guess not many people love Air France, which means they’ll choose another airline if given the option. A loving brand would offer support and condolences and make sure she got home quickly with little resistance so she could be with her dying mother.

Brands can be more lovable by setting their customers free to “live their brand” in ways that align with the brand’s values. That’s more than getting people to drink a soda like Mountain Dew or wear a Van’s shoe. Mountain Dew and Vans both show that a real personality attracts a special type of customer into a deeply committed relationship, where they build the brand together into an authentic lifestyle.

The Power Of Love

It’s up to each business to decide if they want to pursue a loving relationship with their customers, or stick to a more businesslike, transactional approach. For some it may be too expensive (or maybe they’re just not ready yet). But there is plenty of research to show that customers actually want to love brands.

A long-term study by The Spending Group found that 48% of American consumers fall into a group they call the New Economic Order (NEO). The research shows that these “NEOs” value factors like design, authenticity, and experience higher than cost. The other 52% fit into a group they call “Traditionals,” who make buying decisions based mostly on the short-term value of a transaction. Both groups are substantial and should be met in an appropriate manner by businesses. But the kicker of the research is that NEO’s account for 77% of consumer spending, which is especially important during difficult economic conditions.

NEOs see products and services as an extension of themselves and seek authentic relationships and meaningful experiences. To win their affections, brands must work hard and offer more than a simple transaction. In the service industry, this is talked about as “surprising and delighting” customers at every turn. Just as you would bring flowers to a friend for no reason at all, brands must provide authentic, non-paying opportunities to connect with their customers if they want to earn loving status. There’s no way these efforts can be a disguised ploy to push product, or it will feel fake or forced to customers. It has to be no-strings-attached, genuine giving.

It’s not easy, but it is possible to establish long-term, committed relationships between companies and customers. And these types of relationships are great for the business and great for the customer.

All You Need Is Love.

Discography:

Oh Love (Green Day, 2012)
If You Love Somebody Set Them Free (Sting, 1985)
Elevation (U2, 2000)
Love Is A Many Splendored Thing (The Four Aces, 1955)
Everyday Is A Winding Road (Sheryl Crow, 1996)
Fools In Love (Joe Jackson, 1979)
The Power Of Love (Huey Lewis & The News, 1985)
All You Need Is Love (Beatles, 1967)

 

 

 

The innovation 2 step

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2stepOne of the longest standing designers at IDEO, Jim Yurchenco recently retired, and they posted a great video of him sharing some of his career lessons.

Jim Yurchenco : Reflecting on 35 Years at IDEO

The part that grabbed my attention was Jim’s statement that you should “never accept done for good, or good for excellent.” He continues by encouraging us to always ask someone you respect to look at what you are doing and say, “What do you think? What could we do better? Does this make sense?”

Innovation is a team sport, never a solo endeavor

While Jim’s first statement is a pithy, memorable bit of wisdom, the second contains the secret to innovation. Innovation is a team sport, never a solo endeavor. Innovation is a creative, iterative, collaborative process that takes place over time… not a single moment of brilliant insight. Sure, there are many insightful moments punctuating each journey, but without input from others those moments drift away, wither into nothing, or fail to hatch.

Input from multiple perspectives is imperative for innovation

Put simply, input from multiple perspectives is a requirement of innovation. It’s not that “aha moment” you have in the shower that’s the key. It’s how you share that idea with others and allow it to be shaped from an insight into an actionable idea that matters.

But even that secret is not sufficient to produce innovation in a reliable manner. You know the go-and-get-feedback routine… you create a first draft, sketch a concept, or even build a working prototype. Then you run it by a bunch of people to gauge their reactions. Some provide good ideas you hadn’t thought of, some just say “cool” and others give you feedback that just doesn’t seem to fit.

Most people take the good reactions as a sign to move forward, discount the worst comments, and perhaps choose a small improvement to add to their idea so they can get on with their plans. But this process doesn’t really transform the idea––it perhaps rounds off a few rough edges, but mostly serves to keep you in your comfort zone with this new idea. The first round of feedback is like an appetizer that gets the party started, but doesn’t really fulfill your needs.

True innovation develops through sharing information and opinions

After watching hundreds of great designers and entrepreneurs go about their daily routines, I’ve noticed they dance with an idea until it becomes something wholly different than what they started with. Sharing the “thing” you’re working on to get reactions, advice, guidance, etc. is just the first of two steps of sharing. The best innovators share the knowledge they’ve gathered in the first step with another set of people to compare the input and make sense of it. Then they start over with the first step and repeat the cycle many times.

The first step is for reactions and ideas on the thing you are working on. The second step is a meta-level “input on the input” discussion where the innovator gains a much deeper level of critique and synthesis that reshapes and improves the input. Instead of just gathering a bunch of single points and comparing them, the best innovators facilitate a spiraling dialog that might look something like this:

Innovator: Why did you say it should be round, but he said it should be square?

Person A: Well, I hadn’t thought about making it square. That’s an interesting point he’s made.

Person B: Yes, I’m sure it must be square because the technology you need won’t fit otherwise. But I see how round would be more appealing now.

Person C: I see how the technology won’t fit, but I really think the user will appreciate a different form. This feels like a compromise. We had this same problem on another project…

Innovation is the relentless pursuit of solving trade-offs until you reach a breakthrough. It’s not easy, and generally not efficient. It takes time, and most importantly, it takes input from others. Don’t hide your ideas and early concepts—get out there, ask for input and ask again (and again) until you refine and shape your idea into something truly excellent.

Culture is a capability

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A culture defines the normal way people behave in a particular group. It provides the cues, boundaries, guidelines and encouragement that help individual members of a group know what is right and what is wrong. Culture guides decisions that result in actions. The best way to understand a culture is to pay attention to actual behavior and study evidence created by the people of a particular group. It’s also great to compare groups in order to discover similarities and differences in their cultures, which is what the field of Anthropology is all about.

Image by David Rowan

Image by David Rowan

Get Specific

In the context of a company, I often hear people say things like, “We have a winning culture here,” or “We’re building a culture of innovation,” or “Our culture is defined by our values,” etc. These could all be true statements, but they are not very useful as descriptions of their particular cultures.

To describe a culture you need to identify specific, notable ways that people interact and find evidence that these ways are useful by the members of that particular group. If a company has a culture of innovation, we should be able to observe characteristics and behaviors by the people there that result in innovative outcomes. We should find artifacts of that behavior that are cherished and celebrated as the great examples of what the call innovation.

If the culture is strong there should be stories about how a certain leader did something unusual or even strange to other companies that resulted in a great outcome. This is why “founder stories” are so important to young companies. They describe the key insight or heroic behavior of the people who start a company and allow others to act in similar ways to get similar outcomes… resulting in a consistent pattern of behavior (culture!).

There is no “best” culture

I’ve had the great privilege of working in some of the world’s most innovative companies (as defined by Fast Company magazine) including IDEO, Charles Schwab, Levi Strauss, and Hulu. One thing I can say about all of them is that leaders there believe their cultures are a significant reason for their success. Another thing I can say, having been up close and personal in all of them, is that they are each distinctly different from the others. So while they may all have “winning” or “innovative” cultures, there is not a common culture across them. Behaving one way at Levi Strauss could actually get you fired at Hulu and vice-versa.

To understand what is innovative at IDEO, you just have to listen to the stories they tell each other about great moments in the company’s history. In fact, so many people ask IDEO about their culture, nearly any person who works there can point to examples of their innovative behavior that resulted in breakthrough product designs like the first Apple mouse or the Crest Neat Squeeze toothpaste tube.

What every leader should know about culture is that it has to be defined, built and actively managed if you want it to help your business succeed. In most cases, culture should be defined in response to a business problem, not in advance of one. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as “the best” culture that could be built first and then applied to any business problem. So just like a supply chain for making shoes would be different than a supply chain for making cars, each culture should be constructed to address the unique challenges of the business at hand.

Culture is not a statement of ideals

Culture should not necessarily be a reflection of the founder, CEO or executive team—although leaders must behave in accordance with the culture or it is unlikely that others will follow. Lip service to a value like customer service, followed by actions that don’t treat customers well will not build a customer-centered culture. All of the advertising dollars in the world will not make airline customers feel treated with respect if they are dumped from flights for unexplained reasons even if there’s a video of the CEO pronouncing that he personally cares for every customer who flies with them. A founder is often an architect of the cultural blueprint, but cultures are dynamic and change over time. What worked for the original 20 team members may not scale and should be adjusted to the demands of the business over time. Retain the essence but refine the whole.

Culture is not simply a values statement or a manifesto. Culture is a capability that provides direction and support to every member of an organization in order to achieve a strategic objective. Great leaders understand that culture  should be carefully managed to achieve their organization’s full potential.

[This post also appears in the Bulldog Drummond blog Uncommon Sense]

Get addicted to curiosity

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Feedback is dead. Long live feedback! Here’s some feedback for you: feedback is a red herring. Feedback is an elusive, somewhat repulsive, and sometimes destructive tactic to direct employees towards higher performance. Managers have been schooled for the past 25 years to make feedback a central aspect of their people practices, under the great intention of helping workers see where their efforts are on track and where they are not. It’s often presented under the guise of “development” where employees grow and improve in their careers by knowing what they are not doing right. For the most part, I believe these efforts are intended to help people perform better, but I think the whole concept of feedback is a wild goose chase… a fallacy built on outdated concepts of people and work.

Feedback is a machine language

The root of the problem is that most companies are designed in the industrial model of work where they don’t care much about what their people think of them. Henry Ford (who will serve as our poster child) is famously attributed with the quote “Check your brains at the gate” because he supposedly wanted people to simply follow established procedures and not mess up the assembly line. This worked really well back then to get consistency, scale, and efficiency but has some serious downsides for current organizations that depend on knowledge, creativity, and communication.

We’re now clearly beyond the Industrial Age and smack in the middle of the Idea Economy. And since ideas come from people (not machines), we should adjust our language and use better terms to describe how people behave while working together.

Feedback is for robots

According to Marshall Goldsmith, the top guru of the executive coaching world, there are only two problems with feedback: 1. People don’t want to hear it, and 2. People don’t want to give it. Well, that explains why we have formal processes and lots of rules to make sure feedback is given in a typical company. In his book, What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There, Goldsmith provides lots of good advice and useful tips on how to manage feedback successfully. In it, he agrees that the term “feedback” should be changed, so he suggests we use “feed forward.” (Pardon me, and I mean no disrespect, but there’s got to be a better term.)

Feedback is not a human word—it’s a machine word. It emerged as a verb in the mid-1860s in descriptions of mechanical processes and in 1909, Physics Nobel laureate Karl Ferdinand Braun used the term “feed-back” as a noun to refer to undesired coupling between components of an electronic circuit. It jumped into the language of business organizations in the late 1970s as systems thinking began to influence management practices.

You might think it’s just semantics, but to get a more human and less robotic understanding of this situation, let’s start with the terms we use to describe key roles people play at work in a typical industrial organization: executive, manager and employee. Executives set direction, managers direct implementation, and employees accomplish tasks. This is a “top-down,” or hierarchical structure, that works exceptionally well when a market opportunity is clear, a product is established, and execution at scale is the primary function of the corporation. Feedback is what happens when a manager tells an employee that his work is not aligned with the plan. This is a method of control and mimics the operations of a mechanical process perfectly (i.e. a thermostat is a feedback mechanism for a furnace).

In business or life situations where creative output is required (i.e., direction is unknown or ambiguous, a sufficient answer has not been found to solve a problem, or existing tactics are no longer working effectively) a mechanical process is ineffective because there is nothing to control. These situations require human power to discover and invent a path forward—or create.

Curiosity is a positive addiction

So here’s another analysis of feedback. There’s only one problem with feedback: it doesn’t describe what creative people do at work. Creative people are curious. In fact, they are addicted to curiosity. They never stop asking questions and they use what they find out to explore the world, to learn and to grow. They can’t help themselves. As a direction is being laid out they get antsy and before you know it, their hands go up and a question blurts out. Growth is exciting and releases positive chemicals in your body that amp you up. Often the effect comes from a simple question like, “Why?” In a hierarchical organization, this is shut down and the person is considered a problem because they are challenging authority. In a creative organization, questions fuel forward progress.

Being curious is an easy thing to imagine yourself doing. Being concerned about doing a good job, helping others, and making a difference in the world comes naturally to most of us because they are fundamental desires of being human. On a more basic level, being curious about how you are perceived by others is key to social survival.

Here are some examples of questions curious people ask: What do you think? How can we make these things happen? Do you have any suggestions for how I could do this better?

Curiosity is something that is innate to everyone; it’s an attitude, a mindset, or a drive to explore and discover. However, being effectively curious does take some focus and practice.

Being effectively curious

First, recognize that you can be curious along a spectrum, from immediate to long-term, and the types of questions you might ask are different for each end of the spectrum. Immediate curiosity is “in the moment” and long-term curiosity is more reflective and periodic. In the moment, you ask very specific questions and explore options for next steps as a result of an immediate action. A question as simple as, “How does this feel to you?” will bring you new insights from others in the same moment. Or you can play a little game called “likes and wishes.” What do you like about this? What do you wish about this? The intent behind these types of questions is to explore and expand, not to confirm or deny. That’s being curious versus being defensive or obsessive.

Occasionally, you step back to see if you are making progress toward a longer-term goal by asking questions about patterns in your experience. This is the long-view about big picture things in your life or business. In this mode, you are asking, “Is this really what I should be doing with my time?”

Second, you need to make it easier for others to satisfy your curiosity. Nobody responds well to sharp inquisition or challenging questions without a little context. A question like, “Why’d you do that?” Can actually shut somebody down and provoke an answer like, “None of your business!” When you ask a question, help people answer you by expressing your goal, desire, or intent. This converts people to collaborators who are helping you solve a problem versus give you the answer. It also ensures that the advice you get is aligned with where you want to go. As the saying goes, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.” Without some intention, you will get such a broad array of input from others that you can’t make sense of it.

Finally, recognize that sometimes people are shy about sharing their thoughts because they aren’t sure why you really need their advice, and there’s some social risk in their sharing critical opinions. What if you get offended and your relationship is damaged by their critique? What if they get a reputation for being a jerk? Or perhaps they haven’t noticed any issues with your approach, and they can’t think of anything to offer. So it’s very helpful to provide an invitation to the discussion. This serves as an opening in your own thinking and encourages others to offer more than a platitude like “looks good!”

You’ve probably heard someone ask, “How am I doing?” only to get a simple response like, “Fine!” This is not a valuable learning exchange, and the burden to improve it is on the asker of the question, not the provider of the answer. Curiosity drives you to a more involved exploration. If you want to know how you are doing, you have to help someone share her opinion in a sequence that leads to a meaningful exchange:

1. Express intent (I’m trying to…)

2. Disclose a concern (but I’m concerned that…)

3. Invite input (can you help with this?)

4. Explore with curiosity (how would you do it?)

Do this with several people and you’ll have a rich set of ideas to help you make good decisions and accomplish your goals, which will lead you to an ever-stronger addiction to curiosity.