My article titled To Succeed in Business, Act Like a Child got published on The Washington Post – On Small Business Blog today. In the article I describe how if we want to encourage innovation in business we should follow the examples set by our children with their creativity, ambition, and fearlessness. As we get older we lose our tolerance for risk-taking and failure. We become conditioned to mitigate risks to preserve our wealth and egos. But there are ways that business leaders can promote risk-taking and failure: 1) intentionally hiring risk-takers, 2) creating policies that retain innovators, 3) purposely addressing risk-taking and failure, and 4) demonstrating transparency.
Below is a link to the original article with a copy of the article to follow. I would love to hear your thoughts on how to best maintain our courage for risk-taking?
Article: To Succeed in Business, Act Like a Child
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During a rainy vacation day last summer, I watched my six-year-old son playing a game on my iPad.
He was stuck on the first level for what seemed like an eternity. Hoping to help, I tried to offer some suggestions, but he immediately turned me down. I eventually realized that he didn’t care how many times he failed that level. He was going to try everything he could until he succeeded.
For him, it was a puzzle — not a problem. In business, we could learn a few things from that type of determination to succeed.
Children are creative, ambitious and fearless — which sounds like the makings of a perfect entrepreneur, right? So, if we want to encourage innovation in business, we need to follow that example. There are several qualities kids have that many adults have lost along the way.
1. They don’t worry about failure
When a child takes on a challenge, the thought of failure doesn’t even cross her mind. It’s not that she thinks she’ll succeed immediately; it’s that she knows she has to try different things to succeed. She also isn’t afraid of what other people might think. Kids have more self-confidence than self-consciousness.
We all understand the importance of trial and error in moving our ideas, businesses and lives forward, but as we transition into adulthood, we lose our willingness to experiment. We lose our tolerance for failure. We become conditioned to mitigate risks to preserve our wealth and egos, particularly when our financial futures are dependent upon the success of our self-run businesses and ventures.
The older we get, the more comfortable we become with our lives. It becomes more and more difficult for us to manage our own risk-versus-reward equation.
2. They appreciate the process
Kids don’t expect to know everything. Their minds are open, and they want to learn – failure is simply another method through which they gather information.
3. They recover quickly
If you watch a child lose a sport or game, you will likely see a small volcanic eruption. There’s no burst of frustration quite like that of a child, but kids also move quickly to the next challenge. As adults, we’ve learned to control ourselves better, which is good, but we often lose the ability to move on. It’s understandable that after months or years of working on a product or service, a person would be emotionally invested and would struggle to see past that one goal.
But without seeing through a wider lens, failures hold us back — often yielding more failures.
So, foster an environment that accepts failure
There’s a lot of buzz in business publications suggesting that innovation is dead. I believe it’s far from dead, but our fear of failure is paralyzing us. In order to foster innovation, we need to be able to experiment. There are many ways small business owners can promote a tolerance of risk-taking and failure.
1. Hire risk-takers: During interviews, ask qualified candidates to share their experiences with professional failure. What did they accomplish? What did they learn? What would they do differently? This is a great way to quickly assess an individual’s comfort level with failure and establish it as part of your organization’s culture.
2. Retention policies: In one organization I worked with, employees whose projects had failed were given 60 days to find a new position within the organization, rather than being immediately cut loose. Another option is transitioning employees to positions where they can jump into new innovation projects. Policies like these take away a major fear that comes with risk-taking, and they encourage employees to be more adventurous.
3. Address risk-taking and failure: Ensure that employees and managers are communicating about risks and failures. One CEO I worked with added a section to his company’s annual review process in which employees captured their failures and discussed them with their managers. This is a great way to lead employees beyond their failures and on to more successes. You can also see if employees have escaped failure, which often means they’re being too cautious.
4. Demonstrate transparency: No organization is flawless, and sharing the mistakes a company makes with its workforce establishes the expectation that all employees, from the top down, share failures. Not only does this communicate that failure is valued as part of a learning process, but it also offsets the cost of failure by sharing lessons learned.
No matter how much we try to avoid failure, it will happen one way or another. You can make the most of it and use it to your advantage, or you can let it block progress.
My son finally did solve that level of the game – and many more after it. If your company and employees can learn to fail like children, who knows what level you will reach.
Matt Hunt is the founder of Stanford and Griggs, LLC in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota. Hunt is also an author, speaker and consultant.
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A couple of nights ago I was catching up on The Daily Show episodes and was watching Jon Stewart’s interview with Sheryl Sandberg (Part 1 and Part 2). If the name doesn’t ring a bell, Sandberg is the COO of Facebook and the author of the new book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. During the interview Sandberg was suggesting that women need to not be afraid and lean in and to break the stereotypes by being more assertive. Let me begin by stating that I have not read the book yet and although I plan to read it, the book hasn’t made its way to the top of the stack yet. Overall I think that Sandberg raises some great points and I agreed with her on 99% of her argument but I think she missed one giant piece of the puzzle.
Sandberg cited that women are held back by sexism, discrimination, and terrible public policy – all of which I have personally witnessed in my career and agree with. She went on to suggest that women are also held back by negative stereotypes where little girls are called bossy but little boys are expected to be assertive. On this one I am not so certain- sometimes that may be true but I have also seen plenty of little girls referred to as bossy just as little boys get called annoying when they overreach that boundary where they are dictating versus co-creating play.
Where I would suggest that we need to zoom out to better understand the problem is when women choose not to seek those ambitious goals at the top of an organization because they don’t like what they see. In my experience they often times will see individuals in those roles, mostly men, who are married to their job, who lack a balance between work and family, and who frequently have become a$$holes. You’ll have to pardon my vulgarity but I really can’t find an easier way to explain it. I have known many women, and many men, who have intentionally chosen not to go that route because it does not fit with who they are or who they want to become.
When we rank new up-and-coming executives by how many hours they put in, by how unbalanced their lives are towards work, or by how big of an a$$hole they can become we are bound to lose more women than men in the process.
I hope that this is where Sandberg takes the discussion in her book! While I agree that we need to encourage girls to lead and applaud women for reaching ambitious goals I also think we need to hold our executives accountable for creating a better work environment where more women and men “want” to strive for leadership roles.
My other suggestion would be to examine the companies that are conducting the “Individual Assessment” or “Leadership Assessment” for candidates that are rising through the ranks of an organization. These are the companies that are used to assess and qualify internal and external candidates for leadership positions. There are only a few of these companies that service most of the Fortune 500 firms but they all follow the same methodology. They are using historical executive performance criteria to evaluate which candidates will make the best future leaders and in the process they create a cookie cutter model where all leaders are held to a similar standard. This process makes it difficult to select candidates who don’t fit the mold. I had a colleague who was an extremely qualified candidate for a position but she was told that she wasn’t assertive enough.
This methodology reminds me of one of my favorite quotes: “If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got.” – Peter Francisco
Food For Thought:
Let me start by saying that I am a huge fan of Steve Blank‘s (@sgblank) work (I have linked to some of his recent articles below) and I did appreciate the distinction that he had drawn between teachers, mentors, and coaches in his article for LinkedIn. But as I read the article I found myself upset with his response to a question from an audience member. I felt that he had shown indifference to the audience member based on his response. The question was “How do I get you, or someone like you to become my mentor?” The individual was clearly asking for a suggestion on how to find a mentor. Steve’s response was “At least for me, becoming someone’s mentor means a two-way relationship. A mentorship is a back and forth dialog – it’s as much about giving as it is about getting. It’s a much higher-level conversation than just teaching. Think about what can we learn together? How much are you going to bring to the relationship?” Steve finished the article with this advice regarding mentorships “But never ask. Offer to give.” To me that advice sounds to close to, “I’m too busy, don’t bother me with your question.”
While I agree that a mentorship relationship should absolutely be reciprocal I wonder if his advice is how he approached his mentors, with an “Offer to give?” Or instead was the “give and take” established after they had first met? My hunch is that Steve’s answer left this person exactly where they started… with no mentor.
I wanted to suggest a different approach to this question. Ask the person to write down 1) who they are and what is their story, 2) what they seek in a mentor and 3) what they can give to a mentor relationship? Steve could then tweet a link to that request out to his 58k Twitter followers asking if any of them are willing to mentor this person. Let the mentee then select their mentor from the individuals who responded. This would take almost zero effort from Steve but it would give the mentee a list of possible mentors. Better yet, it would pay forward the great mentor relationships that Steve was lucky enough to have found when he needed them.
Food for thought:
Great Articles/Posts from Steve Blank:
[This post is edited from my reply to Steve’s post on LinkedIn from April 4, 2013]
This morning there was a great article from MPR reporter Tom Robertson that touched on how the elimination of shop class in high schools is seen as a contributor to decline in skilled manufacturing candidate across the state. “Worker skills shortage starts in high school” parallels a book that I had read a few months back from Matthew Crawford titled Shop Class as Soul Craft. In his book Crawford asks us to examine the intent and outcomes of our fervent battle cry for all kids to go to college and to become part of the information economy rather than becoming makers, builders, and fixers.
Like so many things in life education is just another example of a system (systems thinking). Apply pressure on one side of the system and watch the other side atrophy. Tell everyone that we MUST move to an information economy and naturally we will adjust resources to support that goal. A great example of this from Crawford’s book is how many high schools in the United States have pulled out their shop classes to make way for computer labs. Yet we wonder why we don’t have enough qualified candidates to run manufacturing equipment in this country (Forbes Article)? The bigger question is does everyone really want to (or need to) go to college? The same rational and resourcing happens in higher education when we swing our attention in one direction and we ignore or neglect other things. Recently the importance and measurement of graduation rates has caught the public’s attention.
What I struggle with is how we have selected the graduation rate as one of our primary goals for higher education. In my retail experience we would say that our goal is to strive to have happy customers who love to buy “things” from us. To measure happy customers we would suggest that we want to survey our customers to determine if they are happy. The standard measurement tool for customer happiness is the Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI). The challenge with this is that most retailer quickly find that it is very time consuming and expensive to continually measure our customers’ satisfaction. So instead we look for something that is easier to capture and calculate, like sales revenue, units per transaction, basket revenue, etc. The problem is that there may be a correlation with these numbers and customer satisfaction but it can be far from perfect. In fact, the reality can be that we are just selling the customer more stuff that is also more expensive but that they don’t really want or need.
I think we run the same risk when we try to measure the performance of higher education through graduation rates rather than student satisfaction. It might be the case that some kids who would have thrived in community college end up at the university and hate it. They drop out and we chalk it up as a “failure” instead of solving their problem and getting them into the right education environment. Here is where my passion for better understanding failure comes in. We need to get over our fear and the negative stigma associated with trying something and failing at it. We should all try to fail at something periodically because it helps us define those things that we “can do” and then map them to the things that we like to do. My personal example is that I failed at calculus in my freshman year of college. But that failure forced me to determine what I really wanted to do and it required me to adjust the path that I was going to take to get there. Some might have failed and decided that college wasn’t what they wanted to do, and that needs to be acceptable too.
Or maybe it wasn’t failure but opportunity that pushes a student to drop out. Bill Gates had dropped out of college because he saw a better opportunity in leaving school at that time. If we ask these students who chose to drop out to become entrepreneurs how satisfied they were they might have been reasonably satisfied but it simply wasn’t right for them at the time. Perhaps we should instead be encouraging these individuals to pursue their ideas and explain to them how they can return to school when (or if) they decide to? How different might the world be if Steve Jobs hadn’t decided to drop our of Reed College?
In no uncertain terms measuring “student satisfaction” would absolutely be more difficult and more costly than measuring graduation rate but it gets us a lot closer to our true goal of preparing students for the their next stage in life – whether that is blue collar, white collar, or as an entrepreneur. One positive outcome of measuring satisfaction would be that it would draw our attention more quickly to difficulties students are having within the system. If higher education administrators were measured on student satisfaction there would be a much stronger incentive to address the concerns of properly qualifying incoming students, continually rising tuition rates, and limited class availability.
When I hear legislators talk about increasing graduation rates or time to graduation I hear the same failings of the No Child Left Behind Program. I suggest that we ask ourselves what are we really trying to measure? If it is student satisfaction, I think of one of my fraternity brothers who ended up taking eight years to graduate while he worked his way through college. Had they asked him at the time, I am certain he was one of the most “satisfied” students on campus.
Earlier this month there was a great and refreshingly candid interview from the Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) with former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley that captured his thoughts on what companies get wrong (Link Here). The interview hit on so many of the topics that I have tried to capture over the last few months that I thought I would try to highlight a few:
Food for thought:
Over the last year I have done several posts on the importance of mentorship and I am continually surprised by the feedback of how few organizations are investing in a formal mentorship program. In my work driving innovation and new business development I have always found mentorship to be a critical element for success. Today, I published a piece in the entrepreneur and small business publication Under30CEO on the importance of mentorship in driving innovation work. The article focuses on how mentorship can help drive better innovation results, build stronger innovation leaders, and retain the institutional knowledge gained while driving innovation. I conclude the article with 6 elements that I have found to be vital for a successful innovation mentorship program.
I would love to heard your comments or feedback on the article!
Here’s the link to the full article: http://under30ceo.com/mentorship-is-vital-to-driving-innovation/
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Mentorship is Vital to Driving Innovation
If you had the choice between exploring a cave alone with no flashlight and exploring a cave with an experienced guide who carried a torch, which would you choose? Alone in the dark, you might still be able to use sound and touch to make it through the cave, but you would be doing a lot of guesswork. Clearly, it would be an easier (and more enjoyable!) journey with a guide.
The same goes for navigating an organization. Innovation-oriented leaders need to be paired with mentors who have traveled the organization’s winding path and can offer a greater understanding of its unique politics and methods.
How Does Mentorship Help?
How does a good mentorship program benefit newbies and the “been there, done that” crowd? It:
Drives Better Results
The most significant effect of a solid mentorship program is better results, and we all want those! The guidance and advice given throughout the process make innovation leaders more efficient and effective in their work. They are able to avoid a lot of skinned knees when they have a guide lighting the path.
Builds the Individual
Like the Silicon Valley entrepreneur, the innovation leader should be growing and learning with each new initiative. Startup investors would never hand over their cash without knowing that the entrepreneur has the right coaches to help her succeed, so why wouldn’t companies make that same investment in their leaders? Innovation must be viewed as a system or process that can always be improved, rather than a bunch of individual projects.
Sustains the Organization
Just as mentors can help support the success of the individual, they can also promote the organization’s success by capturing and retaining the institutional knowledge gained through its series of successes and failures.
The innovation leaders who are drawn to this work oftentimes have very similar attributes to that of the entrepreneur. They are action-oriented individuals willing to take risks, and they have a low tolerance for bureaucracy and wasted time. These individuals have high turnover rates due to their personalities, an organization’s lack of planning or clarity regarding future opportunities, or both. As these risk takers move in and out of organizations, it can be the role of the mentor to capture the lessons learned and prepare the next generation of innovation leaders.
Vital Components of a Successful Mentorship Program
What sets a good program apart? It:
Mandates Participation
Being a mentor or mentee should not be optional. Before investors put money into a company, they ensure that the leader has the right board in place to help him succeed on his journey. A mature organization should not skip this step and assume that it will figure things out along the way.
Guarantees Swift Communication
In my personal experience and research, I have yet to see innovation leaders with an abundance of time for decision-making. Usually, the scene is described more like the triage area in a hospital, with brief reprieves among chaos. The fast pace of decision-making requires quick information exchanges and feedback loops.
The mentor and mentee should spend a few minutes discussing their preferred communication vehicles and their expectations for each. For example, what is the expected response time to an email, call, or text message?
An innovation leader I know began using a blog as a way to quickly keep his stakeholders up to speed on progress, as well as to address any issues with the initiative. The posts were intentionally brief, but frequent. This blog also served the team well when conducting a postmortem on a failed initiative.
Relates Personal Experience
The ideal mentor candidate is someone who has previously been an innovation leader and is more senior in the organization. An established leader knows the realities and emotions that come along with driving innovative work forward. If this kind of work is new to the organization, bring in an outsider with experience. The closer he can relate to the current setting, the better.
A more senior mentor helps the innovation leader as a forward lookout. The mentor sees potential structural changes and political landmines within the organization. With so many other variables at play during an initiative, the role of the senior mentor becomes imperative to successfully navigating the organization.
Starts from Day One of a Project
As soon as an initiative is green-lighted, there should be mentors identified to help the innovation leader. If organizations would spend even a fraction of the time they spend on financial analysis identifying the best mentors to help guide the initiative, they would see a much stronger showing from their innovation leaders.
Instills Accountability
There is never as much time or as many resources available as we want, so we prune which areas will get our time and attention. Mentorship programs frequently get pushed to the back burner. Innovation mentors need to be the exception to this rule to have a fighting chance to succeed; the leader’s role is to set expectations and follow through with them.
Shares Good Examples
If leaders want to drive sustainable innovation within their organizations, they need to communicate the importance of this work and engage everyone in supporting it from their respective disciplines. One of the most effective ways to do this is to show them what “good” looks like. Share the story of a successful innovation project, and demonstrate the importance of the mentors who helped guide the team along the way.
Whatever you do, don’t neglect the importance of mentorship for innovation leaders if you want better innovation. While you can always stumble your way to success, it’s much easier to find it with a light illuminating the way forward.
Last week I did a story about Dun & Bradstreet CEO Jeff Stibel (@Stibel) on how he had created a Failure Wall at his company in an attempt to build a tolerance for risk-taking and failure within the organization’s culture (Post Here). I was just able to watch a similar interview that the Huffington Post had done a week prior with Jeff and three other guests. I found the discussion with the other guests absolutely bizarre but worth addressing. On one hand they were all praising Jeff for his ability to create a culture that has learned to tolerate failure without being fired. But on the other hand they all expressed deep concern over what would happen if someone took a picture of someone’s failure from the wall and shared it on social media. This is exactly the fear bordering on paranoia that Jeff is trying to address with his Failure Wall.
I think that their comments are very indicative of the same feedback that I have received from talking about the importance of failure over the years. Here is a summary of the lessons that we can learn from their discussion:
Alyona Minkovski (@AlyonaMink) was the host of the event for the Huffington Post (Video Link) and the other guests were Shenan Reed (@Shenan) CMO of Morpheus Media, Dawn Rasmussen (@dawnrasmussen) the author of “Forget Job Security, Build Your Marketability,” and Jocelyn Greenky (@jocelyngreenky) the author of “A Girl’s Guide to Office Politics.”
Shenan had remarked that “a lot of clients come to our office that I am pretty positive that we wouldn’t want to showcase our failures for… we want them to think that we are perfect all the time and as far as they are concerned, we are. We are perfect all the time.” But my question is how much risk are you taking with your clients? If the answer is between zero and a little then you’re right in that you should be near perfect. But most marketing firms that I have worked with don’t play it that safe. They take risks and sometimes those risks payoff but sometimes they don’t. If that is closer to reality then your client certainly knows that fact too. They are the one’s paying you to take risk and there is an assumption that some of those initiatives might fail. How might your next conversation with the client go if you shared the risks involved in each of your proposals? This one is safe but will get you a modest return and this one is a little more risky but it could have a huge payoff. Then share with them that even if the initiative fails we could do x, y, and z. I can tell you that from the client side there is nothing worse than big expectations for a new marketing campaign that eventually bombs. Few things can kill the relationship faster. But maybe things could be different?
A little later Shenan gets to the root of what is causing her anxiousness when she states that “I think that the thing that I get caught up on… is truly the word fail … It doesn’t give me that positive I want to come to work in the morning and read that board.”
Dawn had picked up on a concern that Jocelyn had made about possibly making yourself vulnerable by sharing your failures. She had made this comment based on the idea of a coworker taking a picture of your failure and posting it to social media, “… how would this be construed outside of the current environment? If someone took a picture would that damage your career brand at all because that was taken out of context.” Sure this could be an issue but it sounds like a worst case scenario. We all have enough failures to choose from in our lives. If one is a little too personal or a little too significant then just pick another. Or perhaps they could just sign their first name or first initial? At the end of the day, if a hiring manager passed over a candidate because the candidate had recognized one of their failures, learned from it, and was courageous enough to share it with their colleagues then I have to question the strength of the hiring organization.
Jocelyn later made the comment “the positive things that we have also accomplished [are] really important to celebrate as well.” My take on this comment is that the Failure Wall isn’t meant to be the be-all end-all for employee recognition in the organization. It is meant to provide reinforcement that leaders want employees to take calculated risks and if those risks fail the employee won’t be punished or fired. Jeff goes on to mention how every other wall in the office is available to be devoted to success but this one is for sharing failures. When we only recognize successes and ignore our failures we are subtly reinforcing that failure is something we don’t want. This would be like a parent who compliments the child only on their “perfect” spelling quizzes and ignores the rest while not understanding why the child thinks that they need to have perfect scores every time.
Food for Thought:
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