Making Ideas Happen (24 page)

As I finished, O’Cal ahan clapped as his body rocked back and forth with laughter.

“Wonderful, wel done,” he said. His enthusiasm and support, coupled with that of the group, was invigorating. For a moment, I thought that I had cracked the code of storytel ing. Then I remembered that I was an amateur, and I became eager to hear feedback. Had I spoken clearly enough? Was the plot at al confusing? Perhaps there was a portion of the story that could have been cut?

I was grateful for the positive response from the group, but I was eager (and somewhat anxious) for constructive feedback. I wanted to know what went wrong. Then I remembered that the workshop operated with a very nontraditional approach to sharing feedback. Specifical y, constructive feedback was not al owed. Rather than bracing myself for the onslaught of critical comments, I would have to refine my story by listening to the group’s “appreciations.”

Appreciations
is a technique that O’Cal ahan and other storytel ers use to improve students’ skil s without any demoralizing consequences. It’s a unique form of feedback that helps creative professionals focus on developing their strengths. Here’s the concept behind appreciations: having just shared a story (or, in other contexts, a presentation or idea), you go around and ask people to comment on the elements they most appreciated.

In my case, many people appreciated the pace at which I told the story. I also received a lot of unexpected comments about the character descriptions I had provided. After hearing the aspects of the story that people appreciated most, I got a sense for what strengths I should emphasize even more in future stories.

The exchange of appreciations is meant to help you build upon your strengths, with the underlying assumption that a creative craft is made extraordinary through developing your strengths rather than obsessing over your weaknesses. And I noticed that a natural recalibration happens when you commend someone’s strengths: their weaknesses are lessened as their strengths are emphasized. As my storytel ing compatriots recounted their stories a second and third time, the points of weakness withered away natural y as the most beautiful parts became stronger.

“It is strange that, in our culture, we are trained to look for weaknesses,” O’Cal ahan explained to me. “When I work with people, they are often surprised when I point out the wonderful crucial details—the parts that are alive.” O’Cal ahan went on to suggest that “if our eyes are always looking for weakness, we begin to lose the intuition to notice the beauty.”

Of course, the contrarian’s view to this approach is that more direct feedback and criticism might help one cut to the chase. O’Cal ahan would argue that appreciation-based feedback helps us access a deeper creativity: People need to relax to be able to discover. Our unconscious won’t come forward and help us see things when we are too logical and focused on criticism. Sometimes someone wil say, “I just want to know how to improve, not what is good.” People think that pointing out faults is the only way to improve. Appreciations are not about being polite. They are about pointing out what is alive. The recipient must take it in, incorporate it.

The ability to recognize and share appreciations may, in fact, be more difficult than offering constructive criticism. Humankind is critical by nature. It is easier to hear an off note in a symphony than to identify the perfectly played note that makes al the difference.

As O’Cal ahan explains, “Everyone thinks they can tel you what is good. But, no, it takes years to be able to say, ‘That phrase is fresh, that was a lovely image, sheets on the bed like snow-covered mountains, lovely.’ It is hard to get people to pay attention to that skil .”

Of course, O’Cal ahan’s approach to developing creative talent through appreciations applies to more than storytel ing. Some creative teams incorporate elements of appreciation-based exchange in their review process. At one design firm I visited, a piece of work is placed on the table in a conference room, and everyone is asked to share three things they like about it. The artist takes away the feedback—al positive —and makes another version for the team to review. Almost always, the piece is dramatical y improved. And the concerns that some members of the team had—but didn’t share—are often minimized natural y. The team’s morale and the general chemistry benefit from the exchange of positive encouragement, and the artist further develops his or her strengths.

Institute a round of appreciation-based refinement with your team prior to your formal process of critique. Your projects—and the skil s of your col eagues—wil be refined more organical y by doing so. This change in the process of feedback exchange wil not only improve output but also enrich the team’s chemistry.

Seek the Hot Spots

Most companies place a great deal of emphasis on hierarchy, on who is in charge of whom. While the pecking order may affect salaries and titles on business cards, it is less relevant than you might expect when it comes to making ideas happen.

A study done in one large Fortune 500 company asked employees to complete a survey about who they go to for help. Whether it was a computer question, a finance inquiry, or something about the history of the business, employees were asked to provide the names of their “go-to” people.

Once the data points were col ected, researchers mapped it out to graphical y il ustrate the flows of information. It quickly became clear that there were various particularly active “nodes” of information. Scattered throughout the organization, a handful of people functioned as the dominant go-to people who everyone else relied upon. Surprisingly, there was no correlation between the nodes and those with the most seniority or experience within the company.

One executive who looked at the data reportedly remarked on how scary it was to think that in a periodic round of layoffs the company could so easily lose critical nodes of information that it had never ful y valued or formal y accounted for.

The most successful leaders of change in organizations focus less on hierarchy and more on who has the best information. Ultimately, quality information leads to quality decisions. If you are able to identify the nodes of information in your organization, you wil be able to lead with great understanding. We should al stop looking up and start looking around us for the people who seem to always know the answers.

Years ago, I had the opportunity to spend some time with Malcolm Gladwel as he spoke to a few groups of clients we had assembled at Goldman Sachs. He made a strong case that change doesn’t always have to take time—that it can happen instantly —and that the catalyst behind instant change comes from what he cal ed “social power.”

Gladwel explained that social power is different than economic or political power. It is not correlated with status or demographics. Rather, people with social power have the special ability to connect to others en masse. They tend to always be in the know, and they are respected, although not necessarily in a hierarchical way.

My friend Erin Brannan, now a nonprofit executive, spent a few years in the Peace Corps stationed on the smal island of St. Vincent, off the coast of Barbados. When I visited her there, I was struck by the unique impact she was having on the community.

She explained to me that helping to develop schools or improve health care was nice, but lasting impact would come only from identifying and training those individuals who would perpetuate the good work for years to come. Over the course of our discussion, we coined the term “hot spots.”

Whether on the island of St. Vincent or within a large organization, the hot spots are the people with social power. They are respected within the community without bearing the scrutiny that isolates and ultimately limits the potential of official leaders at the top of the hierarchy.

Hot spots are easy to identify if you ask the right people and look in the right places.

Don’t look for who gets the most credit or who is the most wel -known. Instead, ask people where they go to get help. Seek out the people in your company or industry who are known for their reliability and uncanny ability to always know (or find) the answer. And then, when you identify the hot spots, listen to them and empower them. Give them more influence and responsibility. As you try to lead change through your creative endeavors, you should depend less on formal power plays and top-down transformations. Instead, you should seek out and engage the hot spots to ensure a lasting impact.

SELF-LEADERSHIP

THE MOST CHALLENGING
one to manage is you.

“Self-leadership” isn’t a concept that most of us think about al that often. Yet leadership capability relates as much to how we lead ourselves as to how we lead others. Some of the greatest barriers we face along the path to pushing our ideas to fruition lie within us.

Most creative leaders can trace their greatest obstacles to something personal—a fear, insecurity, or self-imposed limitation. As we consider past battles that drained our energy—such as a partnership that fizzled or a team that gradual y disbanded under our watch—we must chal enge ourselves to acknowledge our role in the failure. Our flawed judgment is often the root cause.

As you lead others in creative pursuits, you are your greatest liability. Self-leadership is about awareness, tolerance, and not letting your own natural tendencies limit your potential.

Find a Path to Self-Awareness

A motif throughout my research—and this book—has been the battle against our natural tendencies. The forces of organization, community, and leadership capability often evade us because our tendencies—to constantly generate more ideas, to isolate ourselves, and so on—get in the way. Even with insights and best practices for how to better generate ideas, organize projects, leverage communal forces, and lead others, it is stil easy to regress.

Our best hope for staying on track is to notice when we stray and to figure out why—to be self-aware. Self-awareness is a critical skil in leadership, but it is deeply personal. It is not about our actions but about the emotions that trigger our actions.

Earlier we met Ji Lee, the überproductive visionary at the helm of the Google Creative Lab and a man with a long history of taking action on creative inspirations. When I spoke with Lee, he elaborated on the grander role of emotion in creative work. “Society teaches us to suppress emotions,” Lee explains. “But, to effectively lead, you must understand and hone them.”

Lee’s personal journey, like that of many other leaders in the creative world, has included a commitment to psychological growth. For Lee, this meant group therapy. He describes group therapy as “al about being in the moment and real y listening to others.”

In group therapy, members develop a contained set of relationships that play out much like the real world, but in a safe environment. The setting al ows for self-discovery of the emotions behind your actions.

If someone says something that bothers you, you are encouraged to express that feeling. Statements like “What you said makes me angry,” “You are annoying me,” or “I feel afraid” are not uncommon. Expressing these raw emotions in a safe environment serves as a catalyst for understanding what lies beneath them. The insights gained from group discussion are especial y empowering in the real world, where these emotions are almost always suppressed.

Lee and many other admired leaders in the creative world have made a personal investment—whether through group therapy, personal advisory boards, circles, or otherwise—to understand the emotional impetus for their actions. The construct of circles, discussed earlier, can serve as a source of self-awareness if members are wil ing to trust each other and feel vulnerable. Some other leaders I have met have assembled “personal advisory boards” for themselves—usual y a group of three or four people with whom they share their fears and solicit candid feedback. The mechanism you choose can vary, as long as you are being chal enged to be more introspective.

With increased self-awareness, we become better students of ourselves. When we make mistakes, we are able to identify what we could have done better more readily.

When we receive feedback from others, it becomes more actionable as we come to understand its correlation with our emotions. The path to self-awareness never ends, but we must traverse it nonetheless.

Emerging leaders in the creative world benefit from some sort of psychological development in their lives. An early commitment to developing self-awareness wil yield better judgment. In turn, sound judgment builds lasting relationships and great decisions —the kind that garner the respect and confidence you need to lead bold pursuits.

Develop a Tolerance for Ambiguity

With greater self-awareness comes a greater tolerance for uncertainty. Patience in the face of ambiguity helps us avoid brash decisions driven by our emotions instead of our intel ects. We must use time to our advantage and temper our tendency to act too quickly.

The leader of a large technology company shared with me the chal enges—and great bouts of anxiety—she faced when a large and wel -funded competitor entered her space. The new competitor was wil ful y misleading her company’s clients—claiming that her company’s customer service was subpar and that their pricing was inferior.

But rather than rushing to draft a defensive marketing strategy and cal customers, this leader stayed the course and introduced a new round of enhancements that trumped the competition. “I refused to let our momentary angst derail our wel -thought-out plan,” she explained to me. “As a leader, my job was to promote tolerance for a lot of crap in the meantime.”

The best leaders have a high tolerance for ambiguity. They don’t go nuts over the unknown, and they don’t lose patience when dealing with disappointments. They are able to work with what they know, identify what they don’t know, and make decisions accordingly. They also act with a faith in the law of averages. Over time, truth has a way of revealing itself.

A common occurrence in any organization is what I have come to cal “momentary injustice.” One of the most extraordinary leaders I worked with while at Goldman Sachs was then vice chairman Rob Kaplan. “Justice prevails over time in any good organization,” he would say. “But justice does not prevail at any given point in time.” A good leader, Kaplan believed, was able to overlook missed credit or an unfair project assignment by having faith in the course of an organization’s growth.