Are You Casting A Shadow?
When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied:
“Only stand out of my light.” Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light.
~ John W. Gardner
Birthing Creativity
I was having a conversation with Matt Homann the other evening on innovation and creativity. Or to be more specific, how to build activities that birth and harness creativity for business purposes. Matt is working on doing exactly that by developing what he calls a "Creativity Camp". I would encourage you to ask him about it.
The following day while consulting with a client I kept hearing a common refrain from the staff that "we WANT to be creative/innovative but don't feel empowered to do so!".
Empower Me!
I confess that while this is certainly true in some cases, my typical gut response to this kind of statement is that it's an excuse. Call it tough love, call it being a bit of a hardass if you like, but I've always felt that if you're going to wait around for someone to empower you then you have a long wait in front of you indeed.
However, the combination of these two conversations got me to thinking. Perhaps the real benefit of having management engage in creative workshops and learn to value the less definable aspects of business culture is not so that THEY can be more creative. Instead, this new open appreciation for the value of creativity gives implicit license to those around them to be creative. Those who previously felt they were stuck in the shadow of an unbelieving leadership might now feel empowered, or even better, encouraged.
Tell The Story You Want To Be
My comment to Matt Homann the other night was about how the best tool to change a business culture was in teaching leadership to find and tell the right stories. Storytelling is a sorely lacking skill in business these days, and a session on learning the art of it in a business context would be invaluable. These stories become the examples of what is valued in the organization, and in turn others adapt and adopt their message into their own activities and behaviors. Thus, a culture shift is born.
Having leadership engage in these types of creative workshops and openly bring their learnings back to the workplace is one way of telling a non-verbal story, a means of management moving aside and allowing light to flow where once they cast a shadow.
Are you casting a shadow on those around you or are you empowering a culture that supports both your employees desires and your companies productivity? Are you telling the right stories? I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Cheers,
Matt Ridings - @techguerilla
11 Comments
What I find is that leadership often shortchanges the value of creative exercises because they've never experienced or seen the impact of them themselves. And no business leader wants to compromise their own credibility by doing something that could be perceived to be fluffy, silly, or too Tony Robbins-esque.
I love the idea of tacit endorsement of creativity by bringing in these kinds of activities. But I think we need to teach not just the art of storytelling to leaders, but the practice and purpose of it. We can't teach well what we don't ourselves inherently value. And that transition can be a tricky one indeed.
Cheers,
-Matt
Better question maybe: can the value and purpose of innovation be baked in from the bottom, up? Does it have to be leadership driven to spark the culture shift? Can you teach those that are saying they aren't empowered the value in risking their own boundaries to shake up the system?
Perhaps that's a different post altogether. But I'm also often confronted with that excuse (and I do think it's an excuse) and am always looking for new ways to tackle that argument.
I think bottom up innovation can certainly be encouraged. When formalized, it becomes a very engaging process and one that is fully embraced by the employees (at least in my experience).
By ID'ing the lack of participation as merely an excuse, I think you're ignoring (potentially) the significant issues associated with putting your ideas out there only to have the slapped back or dismissed entirely by the management structure and the business.
One of my issues while serving as a front line employee related to just this issue. Being an idea guy got to be painful over time. I didn't mind that the ideas were not embraced or driven forward, what I minded was the utter lack of an explanation as to why they were not considered. It got to be so bad, we had a code phrase among my close group of colleagues - "don't treat me like a first grader". A little explanation goes a long way.... Tell me why my idea doesn't fit within our strategy, or how the timing was off because we didn't request budget for this year. Don't do all lights out on me and then wonder why I'm no longer offering ideas.
I'm not so much ignoring the issues around it as I am telling those in the room to remove that as a 'reason' off the table. As I said, it's perfectly true in some cases, and there are times when you have to simply suck it up and deal because there are no other available options for you at that moment. But in the *long* run we all have options, including leaving for another job that we feel is more empowering to our personalities.
That said, I've been on both ends of this stick. I've certainly had my share of frustrations over the years. But I've also been the manager of the person who couldn't rise above their limited view of the companies needs and constantly offered up ideas that had no chance of being implemented. That is its own challenge and frustration as well. Self-awareness of what you do, and don't, know is pretty critical to the contributions one can make and their likelihood of them being adopted. But hey, if this was easy we'd all be doing it perfectly right? :)
The sentiment that waiting for someone else to empower you is a long and probably fruitless wait, I agree with. But perhaps what those employees were desiring was not so much direct empowerment as a general permissiveness to innovation.
One company that does, so I've heard, directly empower its employees (I'm sure you've heard of this before) is Google, where engineers are told to spend 20% of their work time on anything they want - go out and create. And some of Google's most successful products came out of such 20% time. How would those employees who asked for empowerment fare in such an environment, I wonder? Would they actually have ideas that they can work on productively - not in a bottom-line sense but in results (positive or negative). I'm willing to bet a great proportion would spend the time surfing, twittering or playing (ie being non-productive in every sense of the word).
Now, I don't pretend to know anything about Google's hiring criteria I bet one of the reasons Google has been able to profit from the 20% time is that they literally hand-picked engineers who had the right skills and cultural fit: people who were not only smart but were full of ideas they would love to have a chance to try, if only they had the resources.
This may be a very pessimistic view on my part but I believe when most people look for a job they are looking more for something to occupy their time and a pay check than an outlet for their creative juices. There are numerous exceptions, of course, and thank God for them.
I guess my point, with respect to your post, is that it's not just a matter of changing the company culture to permit innovation and creativity. It is just as essential to find the employees who can thrive in that culture. It's a partnership where one enables and empowers the other.
FWIW
At the time I thought the answers mostly self-serving excuses, so my initial response was more or less hardass as Matt puts it. However, as I've thought about it over time it seems to me, much like Amber's thinking above, that throwing that creative idea out, much like a rock in water, can't produce many ripples in a walled in pond. Empowerment is more than individual initiative, as colinwu58 suggests.
"When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied:
“Only stand out of my light.” "
Diogenes is famous for absurdly living in a barrel. The collective picture is of a philosopher who was sunk in a barrel renouncing the world, and the greatest leader/conqueror in the civilized world leaning over him, blocking his light. Perhaps it makes the analogy a bit more complex, but indeed, specialists are often doing so much more than you can tell.
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