The American Management Association asked 500 CEOs the question: “What must one do to survive in the twenty-first century?” The top answer? “Practice cre- ativity and innovation.”24 Effective leaders find ways to promote creativity and innovation particularly in the departments where it is most needed. For example, some organizations, such as hospitals, government agencies, and non-profit organi- zations, may need frequent changes in policies and procedures, and leaders can
LEADER’S BOOKSHELF
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
“Big changes can start with very small steps. Small changes tend to snowball,”
write authors Chip Heath, a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stan- ford University, and Dan Heath, a senior fellow at Duke University’s Center for Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship.
“But this is not the same as saying that change is easy.” Indeed, the stories told in Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hardillustrate just how difficult change can be, whether it is a personal change such as losing 40 pounds or an organizational change such as improving how employees treat customers.
A THREE-PART FRAMEWORK FOR CHANGE
Switchoffers some solid advice that can be applied to both individuals and orga- nizations that need to change. Here is a quick summary of their three-step plan for change:
• Provide Direction: Look for the Bright Spots. The first step involves setting a clear direction and scripting the moves that can help people get there. A key point here is to focus on the positive.
Many people facing a need for change are demoralized and depressed. To bring about change, leaders shift peo- ple to thinking about things they have done in the past that were positive and
how to do those kinds of things more often. To help solve the chronic malnutrition problem in Vietnam, for example, the Save the Children organization stopped looking at what was wrong and instead looked for the children who were well-nourished, learned what their parents were doing, and taught the parents of undernourished children to follow the same steps.
• Get Emotional: Motivate People to Change. Why do charitable organiza- tions use photos of needy children to attract donations? Because they appeal to people’s emotions. The lesson is that people don’t “think”
their way into a new behavior.
Change depends on changing emo- tions. Microsoft leaders kept telling a group of programmers that customers couldn’t figure out how to use a new feature, but the stubborn program- mers thought their software was brilliant. Only when the programmers actually watched customers strug- gling with using the feature and becoming frustrated and unhappy did they start looking for ways to make it more user friendly.
• Shape the Path: Make Change More Comfortable. Old habits die hard, but the opportunity for change
to take hold is enhanced when the new habits are more comfortable.
One of the best illustrations of this step comes from Bart Millar, a teacher in Portland, Oregon, who transformed his classroom by getting the most dis- ruptive students to come to class early and sit in the front row. How did he do it? He put a comfortable sofa at the front of his history classroom. It didn’t take long for the students who used to be back-seat wisecrackers to start showing up early enough to get the cool seats.
TEST YOUR CHANGE LEADERSHIP One of the most interesting features of Switch is the use of “Clinics,” which are sidebars describing real-life situations needing change. Readers are invited to apply what they’ve learned from a partic- ular section of the book to craft a change strategy. Then, the authors describe what actually happened and what they would advise based on their change research.
The numerous rich examples, combined with research pulled from the fields of psychology, sociology, and other fields, makeSwitcha fun, inspiring read.
Source: Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, is published by Broadway Books.
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promote creativity among administrative workers. For companies that rely on new products, leaders promote the generation and sharing of ideas across departments and, increasingly, with outsiders.
Creativityis the generation of ideas that are both novel and useful for improving efficiency or effectiveness of an organization.25 Creative people come up with ideas that may meet perceived needs, solve problems, or respond to opportunities and are therefore adopted by the organization. However, creativity itself is a process rather than an outcome, a journey rather than a destination. One of the most important tasks of leaders today is to harness the creative energy of all employees.
Instilling Creative Values
Leaders can build an environment that encourages creativity and helps the organi- zation be more innovative. Fostering a creative culture and promoting collaboration will spread values for creativity throughout the organization.
Foster a Creative Culture For creative acts that benefit the organization to occur con- sistently, the interests and actions of everyone should be aligned with the organization’s purpose, vision, and goals, and leaders should make a commitment of time, energy, and resources to support creativity.26One popular approach is to provide anidea incubator. An idea incubator provides a safe harbor where ideas from people throughout the orga- nization can be developed without interference from company bureaucracy or politics.27 Companies as diverse as Yahoo, Boeing, Adobe Systems, and UPS have used idea incu- bators to make sure good ideas don’t get lost in the day-to-day organizational system.
To build a culture that encourages corporate entrepreneurship, leaders encourage the creative spirit of all employees by promoting cultural values of curiosity, openness, exploration, and informed risk-taking. At W. L. Gore, best known for Gore-Tex fabrics, leaders basically did away with the rules so that people feel free to explore and experiment. There are no bosses at Gore; people explore ideas on their own and recruit others who believe in and want to work on the idea. That’s how Gore got into businesses as diverse as Glide dental floss, Ride-On bike cables, and Elixir guitar strings.28One important outcome of entrepreneurship is to facilitate idea champions.
Idea championsare people who passionately believe in an idea and fight to overcome natural resistance and convince others of its value. Change does not happen by itself.
Personal energy and effort are needed to successfully promote a new idea.
A creative culture is an open culture that encourages people to look everywhere for new ideas. Leaders promote openness by rotating people into different jobs, allowing them time off to participate in volunteer activities, and giving them oppor- tunities to mix with people different from themselves. One aerospace company uses the phrase Get out of Kansas! to stress the importance of looking for novel ideas in the world outside company walls.29 Leaders can also give people opportunities to work with customers, suppliers, and people outside the industry, which contributes to a flow of fresh ideas. Executives at Productos Cementos Mexicanos ride in cement trucks to get ideas about customer needs, for instance.30
Promote Collaboration Although many individuals have creative ideas, creativity soars when people work together. Rather than leaving people stuck in their departmental silos, smart leaders find ways to get people communicating and collaborating across bound- aries. Creative collaboration is one of the most important activities leaders can support for a creative culture.31That’s one reason companies use cross-functional teams and self- managed teams, as described in Chapter 10. Some remodel their physical spaces so that NEW LEADER
ACTION MEMO
Complete the exercise in Leader’s Self-Insight 15.3 to see if you have a creative personality.
472 PART 5THE LEADER AS SOCIAL ARCHITECT
Creativity
the generation of ideas that are both novel and useful for improving efficiency and effectiveness of the organization Idea incubator a safe harbor where ideas from employees throughout the organization can be developed without interfer- ence from company bu- reaucracy or politics Corporate entrepreneurship internal entrepreneurial spirit that includes values of ex- ploration, experimentation, and risk taking
Idea champions people who passionately believe in a new idea and actively work to overcome obstacles and resistance
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people from different areas work side by side on a daily basis. Many companies use internal Web sites that encourage cross-organizational collaboration. For example, Arup Group, a British engineering services company, developed an online “knowledge map” that shows the company’s different areas of expertise and how departments and employees are connected to one another in terms of important information flows.32
A recent approach to promoting one-on-one collaboration is speedstorming.
Speedstorming, as the name suggests, was inspired by the phenomenon of speed- dating. It uses a round-robin format to get people from different areas talking together, generating creative ideas, and identifying areas for potential collaboration. People are divided into pairs, with each person from a different department, and given a specific topic with a goal of generating ideas to pursue collaboratively by the end of each three- to five-minute round. By the end of the session, the goal is for each participant to have formed ideas for creative collaboration with several others. Speedstorming can be a fun experience that enriches existing approaches to collaboration.33
Leading Creative People
Many organizations that want to encourage change and innovation strive to hire people who display creative characteristics. However, recent research on creativity suggests that anyone can learn to be creative and can get better at it with practice.34 That is, everyone has roughly equal creative potential. The problem is that many people don’t use that potential. Leaders can help individuals be more creative by facilitating brainstorming, promoting lateral thinking, enabling immersion, allowing pauses, and nurturing creative intuition, as illustrated in Exhibit 15.4.
NEW LEADER ACTION MEMO
As a leader, you can help the organization be more innova- tive. You can encourage values of curiosity, openness, and exploration, and give employ- ees time to work with people outside their normal areas. You can build in mechanisms for cross-functional collaboration and information sharing.
EXHIBIT 15.4 Tools for Helping People Be More Creative
Speedstorming using a round-robin format to get people from different areas talking together, generating creative ideas, and identifying areas for potential collaboration
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CHAPTER 15LEADING CHANGE 473
Facilitate Brainstorming One common way to encourage creativity is to set up brainstorming sessions focused on a specific problem or topic. Assume your organi- zation faces a problem such as how to reduce losses from shoplifting, speed up checkout, reduce food waste, or lessen noise from a machine room. Brainstorming uses a face-to-face interactive group to spontaneously suggest a wide range of crea- tive ideas to solve the problem. The keys to effective brainstorming are:35
1. No criticism. Group members should not criticize or evaluate ideas in any way during the spontaneous generation of ideas. All ideas are considered valuable.
2. Freewheeling is welcome. People should express any idea that comes to mind, no matter how weird or fanciful. Brainstormers should not be timid about expressing creative thinking. As a full-time developer of ideas at Intuit said,
“It’s more important to get the stupidest idea out there and build on it than not to have it in the first place.”36
3. Quantity desired. The goal is to generate as many ideas as possible. The more ideas the better. A large quantity of ideas increases the likelihood of finding excellent solutions. Combining ideas is also encouraged. All ideas belong to the group and members should modify and extend ideas whenever possible.
Brainstorming has both ardent supporters and intense critics, but it remains the most common way leaders use groups to generate new ideas.37 Leaders are
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