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Simple Tools For Creating A Highly Innovative Culture

August 5, 2013 Matt Tenney

Simple Tools Applied at HopeLab That Can Help Your Organization to Be More Innovative

Chris Marcell Murchison guides HopeLab’s efforts to create an organizational culture that values learning and innovation. In his 25-year career in the public and private sectors, Chris has focused on staff and organization development. Prior to joining HopeLab, he was with Charles Schwab Corporation in San Francisco, where he was Director of Talent Management and Development after first serving as Senior Manager, Schwab Technology Education, overseeing the development of career development and management development programs.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Chris, which you can enjoy as well:

Chris, for those of our readers who have never of heard of HopeLab, could you tell us a little about some of the innovative projects that HopeLab has created?

At HopeLab, we often say we’re harnessing the power and appeal of technology to improve human health and well-being. We use a research-based, customer-focused approach to creating products that are both fun and effective.

Two of our best-known products are Re-Mission and Zamzee. The Re-Mission games are designed to support young cancer patients as they fight their disease. In fact, our research indicates that playing Re-Mission motivates young cancer patients to stick to their medications more consistently, which is a critical part of successful cancer treatment. Our Zamzee product combines an activity meter and a motivational website to inspire tweens to move more. Our research on the Zamzee experience, from a 6-month study, indicated that use of the product can increase physical activity as much as 59%!

A hallmark of HopeLab’s work is the extensive research we do during product development. We engage our end users directly in the development processes and make every effort to ensure that the products we produce will have meaningful impact on health and well-being. HopeLab’s future work will focus on how we can leverage what we’ve learned about motivating healthy behavior to support human resilience. Resilience is actually a great umbrella for all the work we have done to date and I am excited to see what our next big idea will be!

As the VP of staff development and culture, you are responsible for creating a culture that is highly conducive to innovation. Would you share the top three strategies and/or tactics that you employ to make this happen?

Culture is influenced by so many things – values, leadership, relationships, HR policies, etc. We have experimented with all of these and more at HopeLab. Today, I would say that the three most highly leveraged tactics are the following:

Build the skills and systems to support high quality conversations in the organization – conversations typified by curiosity, authenticity and integrity
Create an environment in which employees believe they are accountable for the whole of the organization and its success, where they take 100% responsibility for their experience in the organization
Create work processes and systems that allow individuals and the organization as a whole to experience progress towards meaningful goals

My opinions here are influenced by my experience nurturing culture at HopeLab and my exposure to a wide variety of innovative organizational development and leadership practices. I believe making an intentional investment in building your organization’s culture can enhance your ability to do innovative work and make a positive impact in the world, for your employees and the people your business serves. I continue to learn about the many dimensions of culture every day. As my exposure to other organizations and cultures expands, I am certain my thinking about culture will evolve. I see this as good, because every work community is different and, as a result, there are different levers for catalyzing a thriving culture.

You do a lot to support your people’s well-being. Why do you think it’s so essential for innovation that leaders show their people that they truly care about them, and follow through to ensure that their people actually experience high levels of well-being?

We have a great wellness program at HopeLab. We call it HOGS, which stands for Health and Other Good Stuff, and it is based on the concept of energy management. If we are investing wisely in our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy, we are more likely to be purposeful and energized humans. And if as individuals we are engaged energetically, we can collectively create an engaged workplace that has greater potential to accomplish great things!

Additionally, at the core of well-being is resilience – the ability for individuals and organizations to respond positively in the face of change and adversity. The science informing our R&D work indicates that, as humans, cultivating a sense of purpose, connection and control can help us tap into our innate resilience. I think these are powerful insights that can be directly applied to individuals in the workplace. Adversity can take on many forms at work, large and small. A culture that supports employee’s sense of meaning and purpose, helps them connect meaningfully with colleagues, and creates processes where employees have a sense of control and accountability are likely to support well-being as well as enhancing resilience in the face of challenges. And, again, if your employees are engaged, well and resilient, your workplace will be more likely to thrive and innovate.

Not all organizations have access to the levels of funding to which HopeLab has access. What are some low-cost ideas that a leader could apply to show her people she truly cares about them?Culture work does not have to cost anything at all. Ultimately, building an organizational culture is building a community of people. This means attending to how we interact with one another and the quality of our relationships. Investing time and energy at that level, versus dollars, can have a real impact on productivity and job satisfaction.

What does investing in relationships look like? It means making time to authentically connect with others, having quality conversations (in supervision, performance reviews, team meetings, etc.), inviting and offering feedback, listening well, having fun together, participating in meaningful experiences together, and more. In these interactions, so much can be gained from kindness, appreciation, openness, and support – all actions that don’t have to cost anything but your time and attention. I am struck by impact of a simple “good morning” or an expression of true caring. An organization devoid of these basic virtues is, in my opinion, not sustainable.

Thanks for reading this post! As a gift, I’d like to give you this excellent eBook for FREE!

Just CLICK HERE, and I’ll send you this eBook, featuring chapters from John Spence, Jeff Klein, Charlie Kim, Michael Carroll, Ted Prince, David Marquet, and Ben Lichtenwalner.

Communication, Great Cultures, Innovation, Interviews

Surprising Links Between Cockroaches, Compassion, and Profits

July 10, 2013 Matt Tenney

A Guest Post that Appeared on The Huffington Post on the Surprising Links Between Cockroaches, Compassion, and Profits

On a recent Saturday morning, when walking into my guest bedroom, I noticed that a rather large palmetto bug (a.k.a. cockroach) had found its way into my home. This happens occasionally during warm months. Usually the bugs are on their backs, near death, or already dead. However, this one was spunky!

I practice catch and release with these critters (I’ll explain why in a moment), covering them with a cup, then sliding a thin piece of cardboard under the cup, carrying the critter outside, and quickly sliding the cup off of the cardboard. This sends the bug falling safely onto the earth, where they usually scurry off to hide from the light.

The little feller I released on this particular Saturday didn’t like the idea of falling safely to the earth and decided to fly: Not just to break his fall, he really started flying! In fact, he flew right back at me. I stepped to the side quickly to get out of the way and when I looked to see where he had landed, I couldn’t find him. There were only a couple places to hide on my small porch – under my running shoes, or on me.

To read the rest of this post, please click here to see it at the Huffington Post.

Thanks for reading this post! As a gift, I’d like to give you this excellent eBook for FREE!

Just CLICK HERE, and I’ll send you this eBook, featuring chapters from John Spence, Jeff Klein, Charlie Kim, Michael Carroll, Ted Prince, David Marquet, and Ben Lichtenwalner.

Great Cultures, Innovation, Matt's Insights, Servant Leadership

How to Create a Highly Innovative Culture (Part 2)

July 1, 2013 Matt Tenney

Last week, in Part 1 of this post, we clarified what innovation is, and discussed how we can predict whether or not someone will be innovative based on the strength of a cognitive bias called the status quo bias. Here in Part 2, we’ll discuss how to apply this knowledge toward creating a highly innovative culture.

Because of the skill required to work with highly innovative people, organizations that are fortunate enough to have such people on their team often find it quite difficult to keep them on the team.

This is especially true for large organizations. Nothing will drive away highly innovative people more quickly than high levels of bureaucracy. Most large organizations become increasingly bureaucratic as they grow. As a result, they drive away innovators and gradually become less innovative as an organization.

There are, of course, exceptions to this general trend. It is possible, even in large companies, to create a culture that attracts and retains highly innovative people and, perhaps more important, helps people who are not naturally very innovative (the vast majority of people) to be more innovative as well. The key ingredient for creating and sustaining such a culture is being committed to serving and caring for our employees.

Two excellent examples are Google and the software giant, SAS, which are among the most innovative companies in the world. Every year, these two companies are also both highly ranked among the best companies to work for. On the 2013 list of the Fortune Magazine Best Companies to Work For, they were listed as number one and two, respectively.

The examples of how Google works to care for employees are almost legendary. They include free, on-site haircuts; gyms; pools; break rooms with video games, ping pong, billiards and foosball; on-site medical staff for easy doctor appointments; and the option to bring one’s dog in to work.

But Google didn’t invent this type of incredible workplace culture. They actually emulated the culture at SAS, a company that has produced absolutely phenomenal business outcomes. SAS has posted record earnings for 37 consecutive years, including $2.8 billion in 2012. CEO Jim Goodnight often says that the secret to their success is taking care of their employees.

One reason serving and caring for our people is so effective for building and sustaining a highly innovative culture is that when we truly care about our people and are committed to helping them grow, we don’t stifle innovation by worrying about our own position. Instead of thinking that we have to come up with all the good ideas to look good as leader, we are happy when our team has great ideas. Leaders who are more focused their own performance, instead of on leading their people well, tend to micromanage, which erodes trust and crushes innovation.

When we truly care about our people and are committed to helping them grow, we are also much more likely to trust them and give them high levels of autonomy. Providing high levels of autonomy is one the most important elements of attracting and retaining those rare, highly innovative people who abhor bureaucracy but can add so much value to our organization.

Perhaps more important, serving and caring for our people can help employees who are not naturally innovative to become more innovative. Most people have a fairly high status quo bias. As we discussed in Part 1 of this post, this means that they are very unlikely to suggest and act on ideas that are contrary to the status quo – i.e. ideas that are innovative – because of their fears of rejection and not fitting in and, in the case of the business world, fear of being fired.

When we are focused on serving our people and consistently caring for them, these fears are alleviated. With consistent care and trust, our people trust us more, and they know that we will not fire them for taking appropriate risks and making mistakes. The more secure people feel, the more likely they are to suggest and act on innovative ideas. We are essentially removing the status quo bias by removing the status quo.

Jim Goodnight of SAS offers a great example of just how powerful this can be. In the fall of 2008, the Great Recession was imminent. SAS faced the same issues that every other company in the analytics software industry faced. Sales plunged due to the budget cuts almost every business was making in preparation for what seemed like a long downturn. Other companies in the industry started laying off large numbers of employees.

But Goodnight’s response to the recession was dramatically different, as Mark C. Crowley, author of Lead From The Heart: Transformational Leadership For The 21st Century, describes in an article he wrote for FastCompany:

“In early January 2009, Goodnight held a global webcast and announced that none of its 13,000 worldwide employees would lose their job. He simply asked them all to be vigilant with spending and to help the firm endure the storm. ‘By making it very clear that no one was going to be laid off,’ Goodnight told me, ‘suddenly we cut out huge amounts of chatter, concern, and worry – and people got back to work.’ What likely will be astonishing to many is that SAS had record profits in 2009 even though Goodnight was perfectly willing to let his then-33-year track record of increased profit come to an end.

“At 70 years old, Goodnight holds the conviction that ‘what makes his organization work are the new ideas that come out of his employee’s brains.’ He therefore holds his employees in the highest esteem. So while he fully anticipated that the recession would constrain the firm’s short-term revenues, he instinctively knew that his team would produce breakthrough products while his competitors were cutting costs. And even four years later, his commitment to his people has paid off handsomely. Said Goodnight, ‘new stuff we’re rolling out this year is going to take the market by storm.’”

Thanks for reading this post! As a gift, I’d like to give you this excellent eBook for FREE!

Just CLICK HERE, and I’ll send you this eBook, featuring chapters from John Spence, Jeff Klein, Charlie Kim, Michael Carroll, Ted Prince, David Marquet, and Ben Lichtenwalner.

Great Cultures, Innovation, Matt's Insights, Servant Leadership

How to Create a Highly Innovative Culture (Part 1)

June 24, 2013 Matt Tenney

In the business world today, “innovation” is quite the buzzword. We’ve all likely heard things like “innovation has to be a top priority in our organization,” “we must be continuously innovating,” “innovation this,” and, “innovate that.” Although the word is used often, there seems to be a lack of clarity on what innovation actually is. In Part 1 of this blog post, we’ll discuss some fascinating research on profitability from the prestigious Perth Leadership Institute that clarifies the issue, and will lay the foundation for how we can create a highly innovative culture in our organization, which we’ll discuss in Part 2 of the post.

Dr. Prince, the founder and CEO of the Perth Leadership Institute, conducted groundbreaking research that links the personality traits of managers directly to impacts on gross margin and expenses. Each personality trait is the result of what is known in Psychology as cognitive biases. Although Dr. Prince found 10 cognitive biases that have significant, direct impacts on gross margin and expenses, there are two biases that, according to his research, have the greatest impact on the bottom line.

One of them, the status quo bias, is also an excellent predictor of whether or not a person will be innovative. The research of the Perth Leadership Institute shows very clearly that innovation has a tremendous impact on gross margin. In fact, we can predict quite accurately how a manager will affect gross margin simply by measuring how innovative that manager is.

Even intuitively, I believe this makes perfect sense. There is a direct correlation between how unique a product or service is and the price someone is willing to pay for it. Thus, the more innovative someone is, the more likely she is to create products and services that add value for the consumer, which also increases the profit margin for the organization offering the product or service.

The status quo bias results in a strong preference for maintaining things the way they have been. It is based on our need to fit in. As you might guess, most people have at least a moderately strong status quo bias. The need for belonging is one of the most powerful human needs, and doing things that buck the status quo can certainly be associated with taking the risk of not being accepted by others. Unfortunately, the stronger this bias is in a person, the less likely he is to come up with innovative solutions to problems that add value to his organization or for customers.

A person with little or no status quo bias is a person who will consistently innovate. This is the type of person who has no problem suggesting and acting on ideas that are completely outside of the proverbial box, even if that idea is rejected as silly by numerous people over long periods of time. In others words, someone with little or no status quo bias typically doesn’t care what other people think about them or their ideas. A good example is the late Steve Jobs, who was known for being one the most innovative people of our time, and also for being a bit of jerk.

One thing you might have noticed in the description above is that creativity was not mentioned. Perhaps the most common misperception about innovation is that it is synonymous with creativity. Although creativity can assist in innovating, it is certainly not necessary. In fact, there is research showing that people who are “too creative” are actually very unlikely to innovate.

This is because innovation has a lot more to do with execution than it does with creativity. Someone who has too many creative ideas often never sticks with one of the ideas long enough to create the disruption in the field, marketplace, etc., that we refer to as an innovation. The most important element of being innovative is the ability to stay with an idea long enough, even in the face of significant opposition, to actually make the idea a reality and have it adopted by at least a small group of people.

A perfect example of this is Bill Gates, another one of the most innovative people of our time. Gates did not create DOS, which was the foundation on which Microsoft was built. He bought DOS from people that were likely much more creative than him. But those people weren’t innovators. They didn’t have the vision and the guts to stick with their idea for years, despite having no real market for it, until the market emerged around their idea. But Bill Gates did. He is an innovator.

In Part 2 of this post, which will appear next week, we’ll discuss the ironic and surprising essence of applying this knowledge toward building a more innovative culture in your organization.

Thanks for reading this post! As a gift, I’d like to give you this excellent eBook for FREE!

Just CLICK HERE, and I’ll send you this eBook, featuring chapters from John Spence, Jeff Klein, Charlie Kim, Michael Carroll, Ted Prince, David Marquet, and Ben Lichtenwalner.

Great Cultures, Innovation, Matt's Insights

3 Rules for Leading Productive Meetings

April 24, 2013 Matt Tenney 2 Comments

Do you walk away from meetings feeling as though your people have provided excellent input and innovative solutions for dealing with the issue at hand?

If not, you may be violating three essential rules for leading productive meetings.

I recently had lunch with one of my mentors and business colleagues, Dr. Ted Prince, founder and CEO of the prestigious Perth Leadership Institute. As a trainer for the Perth Leadership Institute, I always welcome the opportunity to have one-on-one time with Dr. Prince because I usually walk away with some new gem of insight that helps me to be a better trainer and/or to be a better leader.

This recent lunch was no exception. Although at Perth we are focused very intently on helping leaders improve their direct impacts on gross margin and expenses, Dr. Prince spent 20 years leading numerous companies, including a publicly traded company, as a CEO or as a board member, so he also has a lot of wisdom regarding how to deal with people.

During our lunch, the topic of listening came up, which reminded him of three essential rules for running productive meetings, which he had recently taught to some executives he was coaching.

The three rules for leaders to follow if we want to have the most productive meetings are:

Speak last
Speak less than 10% of the time
Don’t offer opinions

Speak Last

As leaders, many of us often think that we’re supposed to be the one with all the great ideas. But great leaders know that to be most effective we need to surround ourselves with people that are smarter than us (which is pretty easy for me) and find ways to get them sharing ideas as frequently as possible. Speaking last is a great way to make sure this happens. When we speak first, we can create unconscious boxes that people might not feel safe deviating from. By making the effort to get our people talking before we share any of our own thoughts, we ensure that we have the best chance of getting fresh new ideas that we might have never heard if we shared our ideas first.

Speak Less than 10% of the Time

When we do speak, it should be at most 10% of the time, and primarily to ask questions of our people. We already know what we think about the topic. The only way we’ll discover solutions that are potentially better than the ones we have is to get our people talking as much as possible. In this way, they are likely to either create a solution or provide some new way of looking at an issue that allows us to arrive at a solution that we never would have seen had we tried to do it all on our own.

Don’t Offer Opinions

Our goal should be to create an environment where people feel really safe to share whatever ideas they have. The moment we start offering opinions about the topic in general or, worse, an idea shared by our people, we increase the level of fear people will have about sharing their ideas, and decrease the likelihood that we will get truly innovative solutions from our people.

Do you follow a version of these three rules when you lead meetings with your people?

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Communication, Innovation, Servant Leadership

The Intersection of Compassion and Innovation – Interview with Suz Burroughs

April 21, 2013 Matt Tenney

An interview with innovation and design thinking expert Suz Burroughs, looking at the intersection between compassion, wakefulness, and innovation.

Suz is an independent consultant and a visiting professor of innovation at the Bill Greehey School of Business at St. Mary’s University. Suz is working toward a certification as a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher and developing online emotional intelligence training programs in addition to brand consulting and creative facilitation. While working at Google, Suz was an early member of the Global Innovation Program, worked to create learning experiences for senior leaders, produced online learning programs, and always had at least one social responsibility project going at any time. Connect with Suz at suzburroughs.com.

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Innovation, Interviews