Innovation Perspectives - Where's Your Innovation Friction?

This is the eighth of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on 'How should firms develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives (e.g., for teams) to encourage successful innovation?'. Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Braden Kelley

When it comes to creating an innovation culture, often people make it far too complicated. If you're part of the senior leadership team and you're serious about innovation then your job is simple - reduce friction.

If you're serious about innovation and you're not a senior leader, then your job is to do what you can to convince senior leadership that innovation is important. Then, gently help your execs see the areas of greatest friction in your organization so they can do something about it.

When it comes to creating a culture of innovation, the most frequently cited area of friction in organizations is the acquisition of resources for innovation projects (the infamous time and money). Senior leaders serious about innovation must eliminate the friction that makes it difficult for financial and personnel resources to move across the organization to the innovation projects that need them (amongst other things).

But this particular impediment is just a part of a much larger barrier to innovation - the lack of an innovation strategy. When senior leadership commits to innovation and sets a strong and clear innovation strategy then policies and processes get changed and resources move.

I recently ran a poll on LinkedIn asking people to identify their organization's biggest barrier to entry. 548 people responded and 58% of respondents identified either the absence of an innovation strategy or the psychology of the organization as the biggest barrier. 'Organizational psychology' came out on top with 32% of the vote, with 'Absence of an innovation strategy' a close second (26%). Other choices in the poll included - 'Organizational structure', 'Information sharing', and 'Level of trust and respect'. See the poll results and comments here.

A second major area of innovation friction is the movement of information. Too often there is information in disparate parts of our organizations that remains separated and unknown to the people who need it. Organizations that reduce the friction holding back the free flow of relevant information to where it is needed will experience a quantum leap in not only their product or service development opportunities, but in many other parts of their organization including sales, marketing, and operations.

So, what are the areas of friction that are holding your organization back from reaching its full innovation potential?

What are the barriers to innovation that have risen in your organization as you struggle to maintain a healthy balance between your exploration and exploitation opportunities?


My contribution to the body of innovation literature out there will be published this fall from John Wiley & Sons and focus on some of these issues.



You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on 'How should firms develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives (e.g., for teams) to encourage successful innovation?' by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Innovation Perspectives - Challenge Your Specialists

This is the sixth of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on 'How should firms develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives (e.g., for teams) to encourage successful innovation?'. Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Michael Soerensen

Challenge your specialists, to help you develop an innovative culture!

After you have checkmarked all the essentials of getting your company to focus on innovation - tools, workshops, gurus, funding, and management buy in - you are now faced with the biggest challenge:

How to develop and maintain it!?

First, try to SWOT what you need to succeed - HR competencies, communication, internal marketing, ROI methods, nifty design, IT...

Why start doing this halfhearted, when you already know that you don't possess these skills?

Many innovative efforts - even with the largest funding and management buy in - have failed because these key elements were not done properly. Instead of failing, make sure that you get carte blanche to tap into your company's specialists:

HR - They are brilliant at helping you tackle the different sub-cultures of the company - and knowing how to get them involved!

Sales & Marketing - They can help you design a marketing plan and a pitch - and your webmaster probably knows some mind-blowing methods of spreading the word on your intranet!

Finance - The numbers people will love the challenge of setting up that awesome spreadsheet on the innovation ROI!

Production & Engineering - These hands-on groups will be pleased to evaluate - and test - the groundbreaking new product ideas!

IT - Don't forget them - they are vital!


All of above are savvy specialists, who know their way around their subjects, and if you involve their key competencies in the challenge, you will be on the road to success - harnessing their vast knowledge and dedication.

And a great side effect is that you will get ambassadors and lobbyists working for your project, in every vital and strategic corner of your company!

After you do the above, don't forget to play your part:

• Publish all results... good or bad!
  
• Support, support... and support everybody involved!
  
• Make sure to announce any progress - personally - and throughout the company!
  
• Embrace suggestions to your project with enthusiasm!
  
• In general, spread kudos and karma to everyone helping you out!

And finally - keep challenging your enrolled experts and specialists, with important new tasks!



You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on 'How should firms develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives (e.g., for teams) to encourage successful innovation?' by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Michael Soerensen is CMO at Nosco.dk, a danish company, creators of the SaaS innovation platform; Idea Exchange. Michael is a serial entrepreneur, and after great successes and learnful failures he is now truly at home with his buddies at Nosco.

Innovation Perspectives - Building Deep Innovation Capabilities

This is the fifth of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on 'How should firms develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives (e.g., for teams) to encourage successful innovation?'. Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Rowan Gibson

When I go into a large company, one of the first questions I usually ask is this:

"Does your organization have a worldwide innovation infrastructure where anyone, anywhere can get access to the cash, the talent, and the management support they need to turn their ideas into market success stories?"

No prizes for guessing the answer. Most companies claim they want to encourage creativity, risk taking, and rule breaking, but what you invariably find is that their management infrastructure and corporate culture actually inhibit these things. Talk to successful innovators in any large company, and you will probably hear a familiar story: "I succeeded despite the system." But if would-be innovators can only succeed in an organization despite the system - if they have to fight their way heroically through a minefield to push their ideas forward - then by definition, innovation is not a systemic capability in that organization, nor is it a core value that is deeply ingrained in the corporate culture.

For innovation to become a core competence and a tangible cultural value, there has to be a substantial degree of internal consistency between processes, metrics, reward structures, rhetoric, and top management behavior - and it is precisely this synchronicity that is lacking inside most companies.

Let's take structure. In the majority of organizations, innovation is still forced to live in a disconnected silo like R&D, New Product Development, a Skunk Works, an incubator, or a New Ventures division, where it neither involves nor infects the rest of the organization. By their very nature, these enclaves lead a solitary existence, operating as an adjunct to the real work of the company, and in my experience they produce very few ideas that ever make a big impact on a company's profits.

If we want to create the kind of structure that is required for opening up innovation broadly to the organization and to people outside it, we need to think about the social systems or institutional structures that have proven to be most conducive to innovation - universities, cities, industry clusters like Silicon Valley, or, most recently, the Web itself. What creates the vibrancy and serendipity in these structures is the matrix of ever-changing human connection and conversation. However, in a large organization, over time, the conversational patterns tend to become etched in stone. There are fixed reporting lines, committee groups, task forces, and so forth. Companies tend to consign innovation to a small cadre of 'experts' in specialized departments, and they end up having the same people talking to the same people, year after year, so they lose that conversational richness. In many ways, the organizational chart actually inhibits rather than increases the chances of making random, serendipitous connections.

To make innovation a pervasive and corporate-wide capability, the responsibility for innovation needs to be broadened beyond traditional structures and spread throughout a company's businesses and functions. This is exactly what happened to quality in the 1970s and 1980s when it ceased to be the exclusive responsibility of a specific department and, instead, became distributed to every corner of the company. What is required is a similarly systemic infrastructure for innovation that starts at the corporate level and infiltrates every part of the organization chart. An infrastructure that makes managers accountable at all levels for driving, facilitating, and embedding the innovation process into every nook and cranny of the culture.

The best innovation infrastructures I have seen are linked directly to the CEO and include a global Vice President of Innovation (VPI), regional VPI's, business unit innovation officers, innovation boards, innovation consultants and innovation mentors. These new, pro-innovation structures are designed to actively foster interaction across the organization and to distribute the responsibility and expertise for innovation throughout the company. They destroy the structural silos that usually separate people, ideas, and resources, and create a high level of cross-boundary connection, conversation, and collaboration.

In addition to building such an infrastructure to orchestrate and support innovation from everyone and everywhere, companies need to create the cultural conditions that serve as catalysts for breakthrough thinking. It's not enough to simply list innovation as a core value in your corporate mission. When companies refer to innovation as a value, most of them are using the wrong term. If an organization has not yet succeeded in making innovation a truly tangible core value for all its employees, the leadership team should be calling innovation an objective or a commitment, not a value. Innovation may well be something the leaders consider to be an imperative, and that they plan to put considerable effort into, but that does not mean that it has yet become a deep value for the company. Talking about innovation - using it as a slogan in an advertisement or on a corporate letterhead - does not make it a value. Values are less about what you say and more about who you are. They define the beliefs an organization holds deep down about what is important and right, and they drive the way its people behave on a consistent basis. It is absolutely crucial to make this distinction.

For innovation to become a genuine value, it has to be deeply internalized and clearly tangible to an organization's employees. It must be something, as Marcus Buckingham might put it, that helps to "change the daily rituals" and "introduce new heroes and language" throughout the organization. It becomes the net sum of a whole variety of messages and behaviors. In fact, in many ways, it is not really something a company can work on directly; it is something that comes from addressing a lot of other issues.

Innovation can only become a true value in a company through collective learning across all its levels, functions, and businesses - usually over considerable time. People need to not just hear that ideas are welcome from everyone and everywhere, or that rule breaking and risk taking are encouraged, or that ideas are allowed to fail without incurring punishment; they need to experience these things every day. That is when a corporate value becomes tangible enough to guide patterns of behavior across the entire organizational culture.

There are certain mechanisms a company can employ and institutionalize which can help to make innovation a tangible core value. They include things like consistent messaging from leaders (in both word and deed); a discretionary time allowance for reflection, ideation, and experimentation: broad-based innovation training; an open market for ideas; easy access to incremental seed funding; management structures for mentoring and support; and incentive and reward structures that encourage challenging the status quo, risk taking and entrepreneurship.

When these mechanisms become firmly ingrained in the corporate culture they provoke the right attitudes in people. Employees get the feeling that they are part of a vibrant, innovative company. They get hooked on the excitement and energy of innovation. They find it stimulating to work in a collaborative, open culture. They see that innovation is not just management rhetoric but a widely held and deeply embedded value. And they automatically begin to demand more innovation from themselves and their peers. Thus, the demand for innovation ceases to be the sole province of the CEO or other top level executives. It starts to be driven from all levels of the organization. This is what it takes to make a corporate culture more conducive to innovation.

HR professionals can add a lot of value here. Their challenge should be to create a company culture where everyone in the company is responsible for innovation - whether as an innovator, mentor, manager, or a team member. That means that all HR systems - pay, spot awards, the long-term incentive plan, the balanced score card objectives - need to be hardwired into the company's innovation strategy.

The bottom line: building a deep innovation capability requires a systemic approach. It requires your company to patiently assemble all of the above components, and to put the necessary drivers in place so that your corporate innovation system becomes sustainable.



You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on 'How should firms develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives (e.g., for teams) to encourage successful innovation?' by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Rowan Gibson is widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on enterprise innovation. He is co-author of the bestseller "Innovation to the Core" and a much in-demand public speaker around the globe. On Twitter he is @RowanGibson.

Listening to Employees is a Best Buy

by Robert B. Tucker

Several years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on an unusual cost-cutting move by electronics retailer Circuit City. The chain abruptly fired their top-producing veteran salespeople and replaced them with lower-wage new hires.

When Circuit City went bankrupt last year, you had to wonder if decisions like that were at least partly to blame.

Meanwhile in Minnesota, retailer Best Buy took a different approach. They began to focus on creating a deeper dialogue with the firm's 160,000 employees spread out amongst 1,150 stores across the United States and China, Mexico, England and a growing number of countries.

Best Buy began experimenting with social networking technologies centered upon the company's intranet site. They started conducting weekly online polls of employees. They set up wikis for people with common interests to brainstorm together. They invited senior managers to participate in agenda-free town hall meetings. And they established a "listening chair" where employees could survey other employees on such questions as "Do you think the Geek Squad uniform needs updating?"

When they started listening in earnest, employee turnover stood at 81 percent a year. Three years on, it had dropped to 60 percent. Last year, it was down to 49 percent.

All of this hyper-listening didn't just happen. And it wasn't something decreed by senior management.

Jennifer Rock was a mid-level marketing manager when she became aware of what lack of communication was costing her company. Highly analytical and a self-described 'Type A' person, she noticed that stores with higher than average employee engagement levels and lower than average turnover rates tended to be stores that outperformed the others in sales growth and sales per employee. But merely noticing an opportunity doesn't do any good.

To her credit, Jennifer took action. She created a new position for herself, Director of Intranet and Dialogue.

Next she and her team developed a clear mission: to use every low or no cost means possible to help Best Buy become extraordinary at communicating with employees (not just at them), and to connect employees with information and with each other as well. The goal of all this was to add to business success by helping the individual employee succeed.

If you've attended one of my keynotes lately or participated in my new "Innovation is Everybody's Business" in-house workshop, you have heard me rave about what Jennifer Rock and her team have accomplished. You have heard me extol this group of quiet revolutionaries for their innovativeness in seeing a problem, and stepping up to the challenge of solving it using every trick in the innovator's toolkit. And you no doubt heard me point out that developing one's innovation skills may be the smartest career move you'll ever make - especially if you want to become indispensible.

And you may have heard me say that Jennifer Rock represents the future of the innovation movement.

When I visited with Jennifer recently in Minneapolis, I asked her why would any company, especially a quarterly-results obsessed American company, give a hoot about listening to its employees, especially now? Why would they add headcount (Jen's team has climbed to eight people) when competitors were busy chopping heads?

Jen's unflinching response: Because she and her Intranet and Dialogue Team sold senior management on the bottom-line benefits of listening to employees. "Our success boils down to the interaction between one customer and one employee," Jennifer said. "Is that employee happy and productive and informed and excited? We need to know that employee's state of mind better than anyone else in the company."

Though we are loathe to admit it, the global economic crisis disrupted the Innovation Movement as more and more firms went into survival mode. A new survey conducted by Chuck Frey of InnovationTools.com suggests that most initiatives are in a holding pattern at best, and there is little enthusiasm for broad-based, enterprise-wide initiatives. CEOs and senior executives admit they are just too distracted with more immediate issues. But meanwhile, they are suddenly, desperately in need of more people like Jennifer Rock. As John Draper, senior VP marketing for Mead Consumer Products told me:


"I need people to be less risk averse, I need them to rattle the cage, challenge what we do and look for new ways to do things."


Jennifer and her team realized the impact of what their team was doing when company leaders decided to reduce the employee discount. "The move set off a firestorm with employees," Jennifer recalled. "On the Watercooler [an online forum] hundreds and hundreds of employees talked about what this discount meant to them, and what it meant to customers, since employees could try out products and recommend them to customers. People wrote in to suggest other ways the company could save money without touching the employee discount."

And company leaders changed their mind and rescended their decision.


"They said to us, 'The next time you see a groundswell like this and we are unaware of what's happening, you have our permission to kick down our door. Don't even knock. We need to know.' And that's when we thought, 'Wow, we are adding value, we are making a difference.'"


Jen said she will remember that day for as long as she lives.


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Robert B. Tucker is the President of The Innovation Resource Consulting Group. He is a speaker, seminar leader and an expert in the management of innovation and assisting companies in accelerating ideas to market.

Innovation - Have the Last Laugh

Book Review and Innovation Summary - "The Levity Effect" by Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher

Innovation is hard, dirty, contentious work full of creative tension and disagreements and barriers to be overcome. All the more reason why it is important for innovation managers to not take themselves too seriously, and to know how to loosen up and allow as much fun into the process as possible. As I've said before, innovation and business success are the result of the quality of your insights and the quality of your execution.

You have to have find a way to have some fun on the bumpy road to innovation, or you will definitely fall into a pothole and stay there.

"The Levity Effect" by Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher is all about why it pays to lighten up in business. It is no accident that many of the best places to work are also some of the best performing businesses. Here are a couple of quotes from the book that capture its essence:


"An increasing body of research demonstrates that when leaders lighten up and create a un workplace, there is a significant increase in the level of employee trust, creativity, and communication..."

"...fun in great companies is natural, organic... The relationship comes before the fun, which makes the fun real and acceptable."


I'd like to focus one particular quote from the book from Amy Lyman, co-founder of the Great Place to Work Institute - "Fun benefits from high trust and vice versa. Since people are trusting, they aren't afraid to make fools of themselves and take more risks. And in turn trust is reinforced and benefits from the fun experiences people have." - The reason you should think slowly and deeply about this quote is that, when it comes to innovation, risk-averse cultures find it the most difficult to innovate. So, if people in your organization don't find it safe to take risks in small ways, what makes you think they will feel safe taking the big risks that innovation often requires?

When it comes to Continuous Innovation, if it wasn't clear before, let me say that I believe that building a culture conducive and supportive of innovation is the real key to success (and the hardest thing to do). If you've already created a culture of respect and trust in your organization, then fun is the next step, and you should consider this book for your reading list.

You'll have to read the book to really understand the full importance of levity, but just to be clear, that when it comes to levity, they're not saying that as a manager that you have to be a comedian, but you do need allow yourself to be human, to connect with people, and to have a sense of humor. Ultimately, people are less creative and innovative when they are stressed, so if you as a manager can help people feel more relaxed and make the atmosphere a little less tense, and show people a little respect, then who knows what creativity might spring forth.


"Levity is the link between trust, respect, and the engagement of a workforce. It is human alchemy."


Want to hear something truly disturbing from the book that will really make you re-evaluate your life? A study referenced in the book found that preschool children laugh up to 400 times a day, while adults only manage 15. Fifteen! "No wonder kids think adults are about as fun as a box of hair."

• So, how much fun are you?
  
• How much fun is your workplace?
  
• Is your workplace conducive to innovation?

Please leave a comment and let us know. :-)


As a special bonus, here are Scott Christopher and Adrian Gostick talking on The Today Show about the book:





My interview with "The Levity Effect" author Scott Christopher can be found here.


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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Share the Love

by Holly G. Green


Three Strategies for Creatively Recognizing Employees

Valentine's Day is for lovers. Usually we stay away from the topic of 'love' at work but we're talking about positive recognition here, not the stuff that gets you in a sexual harassment lawsuit!

Smart leaders and managers know that it's a good time to show your employees some love as well. In other words, let them know how much you appreciate their hard work toward achieving your organization's goals. (You did set the goals in January, right?)

Recognition doesn't have to be big, time-consuming, or expensive. In fact, the most meaningful recognition often comes simply from saying "thank you" for a job well done. But there are times when the situation calls for more than just a simple verbal acknowledgment. There are a lot of things that get in the way, but you do need to do it.

Here are three strategies for letting your employees know how much you care.

1. Start small.

Start by saying "thank you" on a regular basis. Over time, change what you say and how you say it so that it doesn't become routine. Be specific. Instead of, "Nice job," say, "Nice job on the quarterly audit. I know you worked incredibly hard to get it in on time."

Recognize individual accomplishments with a short e-mail note or comment in a team meeting. Send the employee a handwritten note of appreciation, and send a copy to your boss. How many of us have those handwritten notes saved away because they are so rare and really do mean something? Leave a sticky note with a snack thanking the person for his or her efforts. Leave a message on their desk that the employee will receive first thing in the morning.

Give small gifts such as cards, desk toys, picture frames, gift cards, or chocolate. To make sure your gift will truly be appreciated, check out the employee's work area to see what types of things they display. Or find out where they go for coffee in the morning or lunch at noon. A gift card to a favorite coffee shop or restaurant shows that you are observant and thoughtful.

2. Get Personal.

For performance that requires more than your basic pat on the back, orchestrate a thank-you letter or e-mail from senior leadership. Have the company leader call the employee with personal thanks. Make sure the employee is recognized publicly perhaps in a company e-newsletter, on the intranet, or at an all hands meeting. Send flowers or a gift basket on behalf of the company to the employee's home.

Offer the employee an assignment or project that will stretch their current skill set. Give them an increase or change in responsibility and authority. Offer them an opportunity to shadow someone in a job they want to have next. Increase flexibility of work hours and/or occasional comp time (hint: employees really like this one).

Give employees a relevant book inscribed with a message from leadership recognizing their accomplishment. Allow them to observe a team or project that would represent a big promotion (and thus a learning opportunity to observe). Arrange for your manager or a senior leader to take your group out to lunch or dinner to celebrate a team accomplishment.

3. Use Peer Recognition

It is just as important for employees and teams to recognize each other as it is for leaders and managers to acknowledge good work. One good way to recognize a team, department, or organization is to establish a "Caring Credits" program.

At the beginning of the month, give everyone three cards. Employees write notes acknowledging their colleagues for going above and beyond their job requirements, and submit the cards to a designated individual (someone in HR, the team leader, etc.). At the end of the month, the person with the most cards written about them earns some sort of recognition. Distribute all the cards collected to employees acknowledged so people can see the praise they received from co-workers. That way, everyone gets recognized, not just the winner.

Another good strategy involves setting aside some wall space for public recognition. Pick a Friday afternoon to engage employees in creating their own (and your own) "What's Great?" wall boards.

Employees use the boards to write a brief note about something great that occurred during the week. Notes can include professional or personal achievements or events. Encourage people to contribute to each other's boards as well as their own, and watch how easily they begin to add to the boards without weekly prompting. The different handwritings and colored markers will brighten up the workspace. And others will stop by just to see what's new on the boards.

So take a few moments this Valentine's Day to show your employees some love - the legally appropriate kind! Then look for simple and effective ways to do it throughout the year. A little bit of recognition goes a long way toward maintaining a happy, motivated, and innovative workforce. Remember, recognition doesn't have to be big, time-consuming, or expensive. It's not brain surgery... sometimes it's harder!


Enjoy this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group!

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Holly is the CEO of THE HUMAN FACTOR, Inc. (www.TheHumanFactor.biz) and is a highly sought after and acclaimed speaker, business consultant, and author. Her unique approach to creating strategic agility, helping others go slow to go fast, will change your thinking.

Good Acting can be Bad for the Business

by Holly G. Green

When Shakespeare said that all the world's a stage, he probably didn't have employee performance evaluations in mind. But for anyone who has ever endured a less-than-candid performance appraisal, his words definitely ring true.

Giving and receiving feedback is a complex process made infinitely more complicated by our human emotions and reactions. In particular, our fears, uncertainties and doubts about the feedback process can make us very uncomfortable. So when we give or receive feedback, we often appear as though we are on stage, performing a role.

Performance evaluations often feature two primary roles: lead actors (the person providing the feedback) and supporting actors (the individual receiving the feedback). Do you recognize any of the following performers in your company?

"...and the Oscar goes to..."

Leading Actors (providing feedback):

• The Magician disguises her feedback so that the employee can only guess about the real message. "You did great & here's one thing to work on, but you did great..." In order to minimize conflict and keep the employee guessing, she only slips in negative comments when the employee isn't looking. The magician typically appears when a manager is afraid of hurting the employee's feelings or worried about not being liked. The receiver walks away wondering what the show was all about.


• The Corporate Enforcer's main goal is to protect his "good guy" status. His impersonal "I'm just doing my job and delivering the message; it's not like I wanted to or that I even believe it is necessary" approach gets him off the hook for having any negative thoughts of his own or opinions about the employee.


• The Hero plays the part of protector while delivering the feedback as if he is there only to help. "Don't worry, I'll do it." He may pretend not to agree with the feedback while backpedaling out of the discussion, and will frequently step in and offer to resolve any issues for the employee.


• The Interrogator asks a series of tough questions, trying to get the employees to figure out what they might not have done well. "Do you think it went well? What do you think others thought? Do you think that was the best approach?" She remains in control by never providing the answer and by not offering any specifics on the behavior(s) in question.


• The Game Show Host prefers a guessing game in which the employee doesn't really know what the manager is thinking but is expected to play the game anyway. "Guess what I think is your strength? What do you think I want you to focus on?" As with the magician, the employee leaves the meeting wondering what it was all about.

Supporting Actors (receiving feedback):

• The Victim is so hard on himself that any feedback is taken way out of context. "It's always my fault. I knew I would fail at this." He often perceives the feedback as a personal condemnation and overreacts.


• The Sheepherder believes there is safety in numbers. "Everyone does it that way." She finds or at least identifies other employees who engage in the same behavior. This is a perfect way to avoid responsibility & accountability for personal performance & it can be intimidating to a feedback giver since it feels like the whole organization is suddenly against you.


• The Con Man (or woman) creates tangents and diversions by bringing up other projects, issues or behaviors. "Did you hear about what is going on in X department?" The goal is to get the manager off track and avoid the real issues at hand.
  
• Ex-Spouses blame the other person for anything less than perfection. "It's your fault. No it's your fault!" In this scene, the lead and supporting actors both become defensive and stop listening altogether.

Do any of these casts of characters remind you of anyone? All of these lead and supporting roles require sophisticated acting skills. Yet, most people are not consciously aware of when they are performing. So when any of these actors appear on stage, it's time to yell "Cut!" and re-shoot the scene.

Start by recognizing that the role being played is nothing more than a way of avoiding fears. If you're the one doing the acting, take a look at the behavior getting in the way of your valuable feedback and try to develop a better understanding of why you do it. If the employee is the one on stage, show some empathy for their fears and then gently redirect the conversation back to the issue at hand.

In Hollywood, a best actor award will definitely advance your career. When it comes to being a great leader or manager and assessing your employees, not so much. Keep the acting to a minimum on both sides and you and your employees will enjoy more honest and productive performance evaluations.

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Holly is the CEO of THE HUMAN FACTOR, Inc. (www.TheHumanFactor.biz) and is a highly sought after and acclaimed speaker, business consultant, and author. Her unique approach to creating strategic agility, helping others go slow to go fast, will change your thinking.

Video Interview - Dan Pink - Author of "Drive"

by Braden Kelley

I had the opportunity to interview Dan Pink, author of the new book "Drive" at a biznik event last night. If you're not familiar with biznik, it is an online community for entreprenurs and the independently employed. Instead of just stopping there, Biznik organizes several in-person events and an annual conference called Seattle BizJam (which I spoke at in 2007), and allows members to organize their own free or fee-supported events. I think Biznik is great and they are headquartered here in Seattle.





Dan Pink was interviewed on stage during the event by Warren Etheredge and some of the highlights from my tweets last night included:

• "A good book is a basket of ideas that is refined and spread through conversation."


• People are more likely to donate blood for altruistic reasons than for cash. Offering people money moves things from the social realm to the economic realm and behaviors and expectations change. Same is true when you begin imposing a fine on parents picking their kids up late from day care instead of people feeling obligated to be there on time.


• There is great absurdity in how open source developed if you look at it in terms of economic motivation, but the mastery drive is so strong that people participated (even without an economic incentive).


• Even though biznik has an even male-female split, more women turn up for the in-person events than men.


• People who sculpt their jobs to broaden them beyond narrow responsibilities, find more autonomy and job satisfaction.


• "Annual performance reviews are dumb. People need more frequent feedback. Imagine professional athletes only getting feedback on their performance only once a year."


• The carrot-stick approach is the wrong approach when it comes to creative, thoughtful work - non-algorithmic work.


• Using the carrot-stick approach with teachers or students is wrong. Dan Pink's solution for the education problem would be to raise teacher base pay and make it easier to get rid of bad ones.

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.