Tag Archive for: Adaptation

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How to Fail Successfully

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I think you will agree with me that when we come together in these social constructs called companies we tend not to be as innovative, adaptable or inspirational as any one of the human beings in those organisations.  Why is that?

These companies tend to perpetuate this fear of failure.  As a result, we only innovate around tiny, incremental ideas that we’re almost one hundred percent certain are going to succeed because it’s a reputational hazard if we do otherwise.  As a result, companies usually don’t invest in big, supernova ideas that are going to leapfrog the competition and achieve exponential returns.  It is contingent on the leadership community in organisations to rethink their attitude toward failure and how they communicate failure as a learning opportunity.

Of course you have to control the risk when you are innovating, but you have to consider your innovation pipeline as a portfolio with a collective return rather than as individual opportunities that represent lots of chances for embarrassing failures.  If you have one supernova idea out of a hundred that you try over the course of a year, it doesn’t matter if the other ninety-nine were unsuccessful.  And I’ll go even further!  You never could have had that one supernova idea unless you also tried the hundred ideas.

How many of us in our companies try a hundred new things in a given year?  Very few!  U.S. Poet Laureate Maya Angelou once reflected, ‘People will forget what you said…but people will never forget how you made them feel.’  As leaders, therefore, let’s think about how we make our people feel about failure.  Change that attitude and we may find that our organisations are much more innovative than they ever could have been in the past.

Adam Kingl is the author of Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins) and is a keynote speaker, educator and adviser.  www.adamkingl.com

      Photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash

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How our brains hinder creativity

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Written by
Adam Kingl, author, keynote speaker and advisor

Published
22 Mar 2021

Our brains have learnt to sabotage our creative thinking efforts. Adam Kingl explains why taking the time for creativity can help address this issue.
Too many schools minimise or ignore creativity, too many parents discourage it, and too many companies devalue it. Our firms sometimes abrogate responsibility for innovation to a select fraction of the employee population, often someone with a lofty title like Chief Creative Officer, which of course communicates to the rest of the company that they should ‘leave creativity to the experts’.

If we observe how our leaders spend their time, and by extension how we should spend ours, too many are tacitly telling us that creativity is relegated to possibly a few minutes a week and ideally in one’s free time, not when we’re on the clock. In my advisory work to global corporations, I usually find this last condition, lack of time, to be the most common and pernicious.

Why we should make creative thinking a priority
The problem is that if we budget very little time in our lives to innovating or adapting to try new ideas, we typically incur a double deficit in our creative capacity.

First, we never make the time because creativity is always at the bottom of our priority list. Inevitably, we can never plan on all the firefighting and pop-up meetings that will occur in the week, so our real week is much more full of dealing with the day to day than our diaries suggested on Monday morning.

Allowing time for creativity is the only way to yield results
Second, if we do keep and honour a tiny fraction of our week or month to creative thinking, brainstorming and the like, we find our attention span is constantly distracted. We never seem to produce anything worthwhile as a result, and so we face each new window of opportunity for innovation with an ever growing, soul-sucking impression of dread or, at the least, resignation.

What we’re learning now is that we’re unfortunately training our brains to deliver this depressing result. Recent neuroscientific research has revealed how we repress and invigorate creativity. These hurried, captured moments of precious time for innovation yield paltry results. Our brains can’t turn on the magic for such short, unsustainable periods of time.

The five brain states explained
There are several brain states from deep sleep to deep focus and peak performance. The higher the performing brain, the greater the frequency of brain waves, hence Hertz is the degree of measurement:

Delta – deep sleep: 1-3 Hz
Theta – deep meditation, light sleep: 4-8 Hz
Alpha – relaxed, calm consciousness: 9-12 Hz
Beta – normal, alert consciousness: 13-30 Hz
Gamma – super-focused mind, increased brain power, peak state of consciousness and performance: 31-70 Hz.
Which of these do you think is our typical brain state during a normal work day?

I imagine many of you are thinking Theta! Sad but true – light sleep can be our normal work state. That’s rather depressing if that’s your normal. But Beta is probably our usual state, right? This is what we require of our brains to accomplish our normal tasks of answering emails, solving our workaday problems…and possibly Theta state when we’re in committee meetings.

Typical business routines encourage us to work in a state where the Beta waves (business as usual) in our brains are dominant, though we now know that maximum innovation and insight occurs when we are in Gamma state.

How to remain in Gamma state for longer
Neuroscientific research has also revealed that our brains can stay in Beta for a long time, and in fact are conditioned to stay there. As a result, if we crank the mental engine to get up to Gamma, the brain through habit easily and proactively often drags us back to Beta.

Therefore, if we need our brains to be in Gamma in order to be truly creative, genuinely adding previously unheard-of insight and exponentially big ideas, our brains would struggle to do that in, say, a one-hour meeting once a week. Beta state is like a constant and familiar noise, the ever-present static of our work lives that can block Gamma state. I liken this to how I find it hard to think when I’m eating an apple because I have this magnified, crunching noise in the echo chamber of my skull.

Mundane and creative – why getting the balance right is important
We can’t easily shut off this Beta activity, the laundry list of actions and decisions we have to make, even if we’re completely confident in our ability to make them. Beta is our habit, our rhythm, our tyranny.

Because we don’t have balance between the mundane and the creative, we can’t achieve creativity even if we give ourselves those fleeting thirty minutes a week to do so. We must change our routines so that we give our brains more time to marinate in Gamma and increase the frequency of those marinades. Like any muscle, the creative function in our brains requires exercise in order to improve, but as importantly, to be receptive to create in the first place.

The point is not that we denude all traditional routine from our organisations. We need some of that. But most of companies that I’ve experienced usually operate at a ratio of about 99% business as usual to 1% creative time…on a good week! So if you’re feeling uncomfortable that I’m suggesting something like a fifty-fifty balance, I’m not saying that. But the better ratio surely has to be closer to eighty-twenty at least? I’m merely entreating us to ask ourselves honestly, ‘Is the balance right?’

Adam Kingl is the author of Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins) and is a keynote speaker, educator and advisor. www.adamkingl.com

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What Should Senior Executives Focus On When Pursuing Innovation?

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A lot of executives say they want to enhance innovation in their organisations. I tell senior executives not to focus on products, services or processes because they have many colleagues who can focus on those. Senior executives should be focusing on strategic innovation, answering three fundamental questions: ‘Who, what, how?’ : Who is my customer? What am I offering that customer? How am I offering it?

This is also known as business model innovation, challenging the assumptions implicit in the answers to those three questions. If you can innovate around your strategy, you can develop an inimitable competitive advantage. To improve the quality of internal conversations in an organisation, leaders have to encourage that their assumptions be questioned. They should be asking their colleagues, including those more junior, ‘Based on what you’ve just heard me say, what assumptions do you think I’m making?’

Once those assumptions are surfaced, then ask, ‘OK, which of those assumptions may not be true or may no longer be true? Maybe some of the ways I look at the world were fit for purpose five or ten years ago, but they aren’t so today.’ That’s a really simple hack to make yourself automatically a more innovative executive. Of course, in a COVID and post-COVID world, the relevance of one’s perspective may be limited to months rather than years!

This approach to encourage questioning is rather antithetical to the old paradigms of the leader as the font of wisdom. Experience is sometimes an ally and sometimes a professional hazard. So do consider encouraging others to identify and then question your assumptions in order to progress on the road to enjoying an innovative environment in your team or company.

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The three things millennials want if they are going to work for you

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The three things millennials want if they are going to work for you

Leadership expert Adam Kingl believes a new way of thinking is needed to retain and attract Generation Y talent.

Chris Sloley
byPosted
City Wire Selector

Generation Y – or millennials – are likely to have between 15 or 16 employers during their career, as the dynamics of the working world changes rapidly.

But, how can employers make themselves attractive to this fast-growing cohort and, perhaps more importantly, how can they retain and develop new talent once they get it?

Speaking in the closing session of Citywire World of Boutiques Europe, Adam Kingl, a leadership expert and author, said there are three key components that any Gen Y candidate is looking for in a job.

‘I have asked them two important questions: what do you want from an employer, and what are the factors that would attract you? I gave them a bunch of options with a weighted ranking and there were tangible benefits and intangible benefits,’ he said.

Counting down his list, the third most attractive aspect, Kingl said, was development opportunities. He said many companies have complained about development being stymied by the lockdown, but Kingl refused to accept that excuse.

‘There is organic development in allowing people to join senior meetings, for example. I would also recommend coaching or mentoring – it doesn’t have to be any of your direct reports. Also consider reverse mentoring – if they are giving you something back.

‘When we come out of lockdown there are things like secondment, shadowing and international placements. Development can be anything as long as it involves constant growing.’

The second most important thing, he said, was that millennials want to know about the organisation’s culture. Kingl said they need to see what it takes and what it means to be successful within an organisation.

‘Allowing people to sit in on calls which show what success is. The best definition of culture is just two words “shared behaviours”, but you need to be involved to allow that to happen. When I asked people what one question they want to be asked, they said – I want to meet my team and see where my team would sit – so that isn’t macro, it is micro. It is culture.’

The leading demand, according to Kingl’s research, was work-life balance. He said this was a contentious issue, as Baby-boomers, those born between 1943 and 1960, tend to prioritise work against everything else and any demands to change this dynamic are viewed as selfish.

‘This was the most stunning finding I had, as there is semantic discord around this phrase, as different generations have different meanings when they talk about this statement.

‘Baby-boomers believe it refers to a “when statement” and it becomes something about the hours they put in. For Gen Ys it is a “where statement”, don’t chain me to my desk or only allow me to leave when the boss leaves, that’s face-time culture. This pandemic has shown we don’t need that.’

The fact many millennials change jobs multiple times does not mean that they may not return to an employer, Kingl said. ‘People think it is a closed door but it is not. If you can bring them back with more experience and more understanding, then surely that is a good thing?’

London Business School

How Best To Manage Millennials

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How best to manage Millennials

Gen Y is poised to transform the future of work, management and leadership. Enabling them to thrive and deliver value takes serious thought

AINE DORIS

For generations gone by, the only way to get on in work was to pay your dues. Promotion, reward, the steady ascent up the corporate ladder were all earned and paid for by commitment to the job, loyalty to the company and – perhaps more than anything else – by putting in the time. It took time – several years usually – to really learn the ropes and to demonstrate readiness for more responsibility.

Then Generation Y (aka Millennials) arrived in the workplace and turned much of this on its head. HR leaders and managers of Gen Y were shocked by a new wave of workers who are prone to leave their jobs with frightening rapidity. This is a generation that stays around for two to five years before moving onto the next opportunity; a cohort that cleaves more to purpose than to material reward, that demands to know why as much as what they are required to contribute or accomplish, and whose primary allegiance is not to the organisation but to the immediate team and the individuals who surround them.

Generation Y are, of course, the leaders of tomorrow. And they are starting to accede to positions of influence today. They are also causing friction with incumbent leaders who don’t know how to manage them.

So says Adam Kingl MBA2004 in his book, Next Generation Leadership: How to Ensure Young Talent Will Thrive With Your Organization. An educator, author, advisor, keynote speaker and alumnus of London Business School, Kingl had plenty of opportunity to observe Generation Y, as well as the organisations who hire them: ‘I directed, then supervised that is now titled the Leading Teams for Emerging Leaders programme at LBS for several years, working with young, high potential participants.  Since they were nominated by their organisations to attend, they are, more likely than a random selection of Gen Ys, the CEOs and leaders of the future. But their bosses just don’t know how to deal with them.’

The core issue, says Kingl, is a shift in priorities, expectations and values – a sea-change in the paradigms of work and leadership that set the upcoming generation apart from (and very often at odds with) the incumbents. And it’s not Gen Y’s fault.

“You have to remember that this is a generation that won’t have the security of retiring on a defined benefit (final salary) pension,” he says “The golden handcuffs and a job for life simply don’t exist for them. They’re also the first generation whose majority will experience the 100-year life, as explained by Professors Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott.

Longer life, shifted expectations

“Now, as we live longer, the expectation is that we’ll also have to work longer; the luxury of retiring at 65 will be replaced by the necessity in many cases of working into our 80s. Millennials will be spending probably 60 years of their life working, and that has shifted expectations and driven a feeling of optionality and greater flexibility in terms of where they work, who they work for and how long they choose to stay.”

Gen-Y workers are also demonstrably less materialistic than their forebears, argues Kingl. Salary, bonuses and promotions, while important, compete with concepts like purpose, development, culture and work-life balance. Capitalism, for Millennials, is a fungible concept, and as these emerging leaders assume influence, we are likely to see a swing in focus from outcomes to outputs: from bottom line and share prices to impact and value for customers, employees, communities and the world.

To manage this new generation more effectively, says Kingl, and to ensure that they thrive, organisations need to start thinking differently: “I believe there’s an onus on today’s leaders to recalibrate their own ideas and expectations when it comes to managing the leaders of tomorrow. There are things that the Boomer and X generations have to let go: the idea that young talent will stick around forever, that investment in things like development and training are tied to tenure, or that emerging leaders must be 100% dedicated to their job at the expense of all other interests or activities. We need to embrace their agility and recognise that the workforce can be a little more fluid without damaging our long-term prospects.”

But how do we enact this kind of shift in thinking?

Kingl’s work at LBS with emerging leaders and their companies has yielded key insights. For five years, he surveyed Generation Y participants, then interviewed them, their employers and other organisations across 44 countries, complementing the quantitative evidence with qualitative analysis across a sample that spans highly diverse industries and sectors.

His findings, which are shared in the book, point to a broad homogeneity in Millennial priorities – a generational “tightening” that stems from having much in common. They are the first truly global generation, the first to be digitally connected from the start, and a generation who will live – and work – longer than their predecessors by a considerable margin. Kingl believes that this consistency or homogeneity makes it possible to see Gen Y as a more coherent group, while recognising that to discuss generations does force one to generalise.  But he urges not to dismiss the findings merely because one can find an exception: “If we can better understand patterns and trends that are more true than not, then this can only benefit our ability to manage and empathise with our youngest colleagues.”

And this, in turn, makes it possible to distil insights about them into actionable ideas for their managers: practical frameworks, strategies and tools that he shares to ensure that young talent can thrive within today’s organisations.

Six ways to manage Millennials

The following are six tips from Kingl’s book to help manage Millennials.

#1: Articulate and live your purpose

Be proactive in terms of articulating your purpose and help your people connect their own purpose to that of your organisation. An impactful and cost-effective means of doing this may include putting together a workshop built around two central ideas: Why should talent work here versus anywhere else?  Why should customers come to us versus anyone else?

#2: Hold one another to account

Organisational culture is something that needs to be engineered versus emerging organically. Aim for transparency, responsibility and accountability as a rule, and be clear about the kinds of behaviour that model your organisation’s ethos.  Consider what behaviours, if shared among your bellwethers, should become new norms.

#3: Be fluid about development

Understand that development opportunities should not be tied to tenure. There are a host of cost-effective measures your organisation can take to weave training and development into everyday life, from shadowing to coaching to international placements to secondments. Aim to think more dynamically about this theme.

#4: Re-consider what work-life balance means

The number one thing that Gen Y asks for from their employers is work-life balance.  Too many organisations have resisted this request, but we all are now confronted with the necessity of remote working because of Covid.  Even when we exit the pandemic, our global, digitally connected workforce will inevitably have to get a lot better, and a lot more comfortable, with managing virtual teams.  We will not go back wholly to the way things were.

Before lockdown, the term “work-life balance” was often a contentious topic. Kingl discovered semantic discord between the generations when it came to having a common definition of work-life balance. For Baby Boomers and Generation X, asking for work-life balance sounds like a “when” request, concluding incorrectly that young people requesting work-life balance just want to work less than their seniors when they were paying their dues, leading to the common misconception that Gen Y must be lazy.

Work-life balance: when, not where

For Generation Y, work-life balance is a “where” request: they see the 9-to-5, chained to the desk, face-time model as archaic when technology makes it possible to have constant access to work. Emerging leaders want greater flexibility and a higher degree of agency or autonomy – some margin to choose where and how they work.  Be sure that you are all on the same page and that you aren’t talking about terms that mean different things to different people.  Our current world environment amidst self-isolation is a good time to practice working remotely yet effectively.

One insight that Kingl discovered after running an experiment with his London Business School programme cohorts is that some types of activities will yield better results if they are conducted virtually instead of face to face.  For example, brainstorming innovations or solutions to intractable challenges require as many insights as possible and reducing the noise of the usual voices who dominate the conversation.  An asynchronous virtual discussion board to solicit and respond to ideas can disintermediate a lot of the dysfunctions of dominating voices due to factors such as status, gender, culture or personality.

#5: See the value in side-hustles (activities that employees pursue outside work)

Talented young people often have interests that go beyond their role or the organisation. Whether those are charity work, personal websites or projects that leverage professional skills, try to reframe these activities as sources of dynamism and opportunities for intra- and entrepreneurial development. Encourage your employees to pursue opportunities to learn and to share that learning.

#5: Be flexible about people leaving

After all, they might well come back. Encourage a sense of fluidity that leaves the door open so that after your leavers build new skills and knowledge outside your company, they might bring that back to your organisation should they choose to return further down the line. Embrace this fluidity and find ways to make it work to your advantage. Many professional services firms are world-class at cultivating an alumni network of former colleagues, even hosting reunions!

As Generation Y accedes to leadership, Kingl believes the world of work is set to become ‘more human’.  The real challenge for today’s employers is to leverage this forward momentum to the advantage of the organisation – and the advantage of young people driving change.

“Research, polls and surveys repeatedly tell us that the majority of employees in today’s businesses are not engaged,” he says. “The management models that we have in place come from a time long past and are no longer truly fit for purpose. Generation Y feels this keenly, and this is the generation that feels the urgent need to fix it.  It’s our responsibility as leaders and managers to empower them as they prepare to rehumanise the world of work.”

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Making Adaptability A Habit

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Adam Kingl

As published on Changeboard.com, 11 September 2020

We are living in an age of unprecedented rates of change.  We’re well versed in narratives about shifts in landscape, industry, market needs, and redundant strategies.  However, familiarity with the challenge does not necessarily create a solution.  What do we have to do as leaders to navigate these waters?  What skills do we require to keep our organisations relevant and successful in the 21st century?  There are mindsets, tools and practices that you can use for yourself and in the development of others to make adaptability and agility a habit.

In my consulting and executive education practice, I consistently see three barriers to adaptability, no matter the size or industry of the company.  First, the organisational culture punishes failure, or at least attaches a strong stigma to failure.  As a result, the priority is for perfection and predictability.  Generally, new practices, processes, products or services that we create are but tiny, incremental adjustments or improvements to what already exists.  Such an enterprise rarely develops the sort of game changing, supernova innovations that create exponential rewards and disrupts its industry.  So the first area to work on is the organisation’s attitude toward adaptability.  After all, you can be error-free or your can be agile; you can’t be both. 

Second, a huge reason that companies struggle to adapt is that their people don’t have clarity about what the change is supposed to look like.  Too many of us are familiar with the scenario:

Boss: After the board meeting, we’ve all received a memo that we need to encourage agility and innovation.

Put-upon employee: OK.  What should I be doing?

Boss: What do you mean?

Put-upon employee: What do I need to do that’s different to what I’m doing now that would demonstrate that I’m being agile and innovative?

Boss: You’ll work it out.  You know – explore! 

Since routines and habits are so difficult to disrupt at the best of times, it is incumbent on leaders not only to set direction but to suggest, not dictate, a vision for what a new direction could resemble, how it might impact the team’s day-to-day, and what behaviours are encouraged. 

Third, I have found it immensely helpful to suggest lenses through which leaders and their teams can practice adaptability and innovation with a little more focus.  For example, perhaps a team could run a 24-hour hackathon where they create experiments and then prototypes of innovations that they wish to develop.  That activity automatically moves the organisational needle forward in terms of enhancing its creative capacity.  Or a department could conduct some interviews with customers, suppliers and partners about what emerging trends they’re seeing in the marketplace.  This exercise would by definition break that team out of its internal perspective.  How many times do we try to adapt to a new world, but we only discuss the potential responses amongst a small set of colleagues?  Yet at the same time, we decry that we keep coming up with the same solutions to any problem!  It’s probably because we’re drawing from a toolkit that rarely refreshes. 

Change usually feels like a difficult, drawn-out, top-down, military campaign instead of an organic, market-driven, exciting prospect.  It can be the latter, but we have to question some of our long-held management paradigms about leading change that have fostered some our collective disabilities. 

  • Adam Kingl, www.adamkingl.com, is the author of Next Generation Leadership (www.nextgenerationleadershipbook.com) and is a keynote speaker, educator and advisor.  Adam was previously the Regional Managing Director, Europe, for Duke Corporate Education – Duke University, and the Executive Director of Thought Leadership and Learning Solutions at London Business School.  He is a writer, keynote speaker, educator and advisor.    

*First published in Michael Page and Future Talent Group, Adapting is Thriving in a Post-Pandemic World, 2020, p.9

https://view.joomag.com/michael-page-ebook-adapting-is-thriving/0887990001597657398?short&

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Spare A Thought For Middle Managers

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Perspectives: Spare a thought for middle managers
Written by
Adam Kingl, author, keynote speaker and advisor

Published
04 Aug 2020

Though they are often highly adaptable, middle managers can be the most overlooked element of any company. For Adam Kingl, a little more empathy for the ‘squeezed’ middle wouldn’t go amiss.
My recent book, Next Generation Leadership, explores how to engage and better manage Generation Y, the most junior segment of the workforce. In researching generational theory for the book, my sympathy for my own generation, X, grew exponentially. Gen X is crammed between two huge generations, the Baby Boomers and Gen Y, unable to enjoy the privileges and prerogatives of the Boomers and at the same time managing the most difficult group that the workforce has seen in the Ys. Gen X is currently our sandwich generation and is a perfect metaphor for middle management – pushed from above and pulled from below, unthanked, unloved and overworked. Yet we all acknowledge that our middle managers make the gears turn, hold the culture and need to pivot and have to adapt faster than anyone else in the company.

If our organisations depend upon middle managers, what paradigms about this critical segment might we need to revise?

‘Uncrunch’ the middle layer
First, I firmly believe we must challenge the assumption that the executive suite decides on new or revised products or services, and middle managers are responsible for executing those decisions. One of the greatest difficulties implicit in a hierarchical organisational architecture is that the more we are promoted, the less we talk to actual customers! Yet in too many companies it is the enterprise leader who decides the customer offer, and that leader’s concept of what the market may want could be years or even decades out of date. Instead, perhaps the external-facing employees and their managers should be incentivised to develop new and adapted products and services and submit the evolved prototypes and business plans to executives for sign-off.

Second, we must offer development to the middle management layer for what they require now, and not only what skills they need at the next level. In my many years of working in executive education, I find that too often organisational learning is around the skills that one will need at the next level, yet I observe so many capabilities that the employee needs right now! If we consider the areas that will help to ‘uncrunch’ the squeezed middle layer, they would be themes that would free capacity for expanded exploration and empowerment. These include customer-centric innovation, trends we perceive in the market and the consequences of those trends; experimenting and prototyping in order for the organisation to enjoy a constant pipeline of adaptations and creative outputs; articulating one’s purpose in work and enabling one’s team to do the same – this last theme is perhaps the most critical in a world that is wracked with disappointment about the role of business in society.

In these manners, learning initiatives are directed toward including the customer voice, enhancing the agility of the organization, focusing intent, and engaging and retaining the largest segment of the workforce. A little dose of extra empathy for the squeezed middle manager wouldn’t go amiss either. Perhaps my favourite phrase that I’ve ever heard from a colleage is ‘How can I help?’

Adam Kingl, is the author of Next Generation Leadership and is a keynote speaker, educator and advisor. Adam was previously the Regional Managing Director, Europe, for Duke Corporate Education – Duke University, and the Executive Director of Thought Leadership and Learning Solutions at London Business School. He is a writer, keynote speaker, educator and advisor.

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You’ve got to fight for your right to innovate

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If reaching optimal brain function requires longer than an hour-long meeting, we must schedule time for innovation, argues Adam Kingl.

Written by
Adam Kingl, author, keynote speaker and advisor

Published
15 Jul 2020

In my many conversations with organisations about their quest to be more creative, the challenge that I hear more than any other is, ‘We just don’t have enough time.’ Yet these same organisations complain that their relevance is declining daily because they are not as innovative as they need to be, governed by the tyranny of the daily schedule, the hundred emails, the endless conference calls.

So I offer one hack for individuals and organisations to be more creative that has little to do with bringing in jugglers, sticky notes on the wall, or foosball tables – be disciplined about carving out time to dream, brainstorm, prototype and look outside your immediate silo. After advising companies whose very existence depends on their creative capacity, such as Disney and Pixar, I found one crystal clear distinction in their daily habits versus those in organisations from just about any other industry. Companies who depend on innovation prioritise it in their daily activities. I know – shocking idea, right?

But I’m not asking you to trust my own experience or instinct. Let’s look to the neuroscience as to why this advice may be mission critical. We cannot trust that only hurried, captured moments of precious time for creativity will yield anything but paltry results. Our brains can’t turn on the creative magic for such short, unsustained periods of time.

It’s a state of mind

There are several brain states from deep sleep to normal consciousness to deep focus and peak performance. The higher the performing brain, the higher the brain wave frequency, hence Hertz is the degree of measurement. Our typical brain state during a normal work day is beta (14-30 Hz). You might disagree and suggest it’s theta (4-8 Hz), which is light sleep, and I would neither agree or disagree with you until I experienced your employer! But beta is probably our normal state and theta when we’re in committee meetings, agreed? Beta is what we require of our brains to accomplish our normal tasks of answering emails and solving our workaday problems.

Neuroscientific research has revealed that our brains can stay in beta for a long time and in fact are conditioned to stay there. As a result, if we crank the mental engine to get up to gamma (30-70 Hz) for peak performance and creative thinking the brain through habit easily and proactively usually drags us back to beta. Therefore, if we need our brains to be in gamma in order to be truly innovative, genuinely adding previously unheard of insight and exponentially big ideas, our brains would struggle to do that in, say, a one-hour meeting once a week, no doubt in the creative committee meeting! Beta state is like a constant and familiar noise; it’s the ever-present static of our work lives that can block gamma state. I compare it to how it’s hard for me to think when I’m eating an apple because I have this magnified constant crunching noise in the echo chamber of my skull.

We can’t shut off the laundry list of actions and decisions we have to make, even if we’re completely confident in our ability to make them. Beta is our habit, our rhythm, our tyranny. Because we don’t have balance between the mundane and the creative, we can’t achieve innovation even if we give ourselves those fleeting thirty minutes a week to do so. We have to fight for our right to be innovators.


 

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Should We Focus On Our Strengths Or Our Weaknesses?

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Perspectives: Should we focus on our strengths or our weaknesses?
Written by
Adam Kingl, author, keynote speaker and advisor

Published
04 Nov 2019

Our willingness to focus on negatives has persisted since the post-war era, and this includes our approach to talent management. Shifting emphasis from weakness to strengths can help transform personal development, argues Adam Kingl.

The ways in which we consider and develop talent are still largely derived from military influence on leadership in the wake of the Second World War, as imported into the business world from generations entering the workforce upon their release from service, and the “delete all errors” foundations of scientific management.

Our talent experiences these foundations as a two-pronged pincer assault on their weaknesses. The implications are that they are never good enough, always wary of slipping up, and their fleeting moments of pride and job satisfaction are quickly subsumed by frequent reminders of their own inadequacies.

Assessing strengths vs weaknesses

Consider your own experience of talent-assessment reports in the organisations in which you have worked; 99% of you will probably recall an almost universal way in which these reports are organised: your strengths and your weaknesses.

Now remember how you read and reflected on this assessment. For most of us it went something like this:

Strengths: “Oh, I’m pleased that I have done well here. I know that I’m good at these things.”

Reader now dismisses and forgets this section entirely. Similarly, their manager opens a development conversation with these strengths for all of five minutes, then never mentions them again.

Weaknesses: “Oh no, I’m not good enough. I’m a terrible colleague and an embarrassment to my family. I’m wholly inadequate. And who was that traitor who gave me ones across the board in my 360?!”

Reader obsesses about this section for the next eight months, and their manager is similarly obsessed, beginning every conversation with a progress report and feedback on how well the weaknesses are being addressed.

The positive effect of building on strengths
This is a deficits-based approach to talent assessment. It implies that the best way for our people to develop is to focus on and improve those things at which they are terrible. There’s a massive and obvious problem with this philosophy. Allow me to explain with a personal story.

When I was about 12 years old, my parents took me on holiday to a ski resort. I was hopeless on skis; ragingly atrocious. I was holding onto a rope (my only job was to hang onto the rope quietly and do nothing else) that would drag me up the kiddy slope…and I fell over. Since no one behind me could ski either, and I couldn’t navigate out of the way, everyone fell on top of me – a novice skier puppy pile. My nose met my tonsils, as I was squashed into the bottom of a Black Forest Gateau of helmets, scarves and skis, a tartiflette of flattened bodies and egos.

Now, here’s the point: imagine I’d spent the rest of my life attempting to be a world-class professional skier. That was never going to happen, and I don’t regret it. I pursued hobbies that I enjoyed and academic topics about which I was either curious or had some natural aptitude.

I’m sure that for most people this is completely normal and ‘commonsensical’. Yet in most companies today, incredibly, we assess and spend our development resources as if we want to turn our ‘worst skiers’ into ‘average skiers’.

Developing world-class qualities

Wouldn’t our organisations be stronger and our people more fulfilled and successful if we identified their strongest skills and invested in turning those great attributes into absolutely world-class skills?

The shift we are just beginning to experience is from deficit-focused performance management (improving one’s weaknesses) to a focus on strengths. If we work on our weaknesses, most likely we can at best hope to improve those areas from ‘weak’ to ‘mediocre’ or ‘barely passable’ and only after an unconscionable amount of unfulfilling graft and attention.

If we work on our strengths, we have at least some chance, maybe even a reasonable one, of improving those qualities to ‘world class’, which will have a stronger impact on us individually and on the success of our organisations.

What do you want to tell your customers?

“Everyone in our company is world class at something, and we’ve worked hard on that.”

Or: “Everyone in our company is at least average in everything, and we’ve worked hard on that.”

Generational shifts
This shift from weakness-based assessment to strength-based assessment will only accelerate as generation Y (millennials) grow in numbers to become the majority of the global working population. As one typical way in which a generation develops its attitudes is its reaction to previous generation(s), gen Y is clearly embracing a healthier approach to self-regard, celebrating what colleagues can bring to the table.

Positive psychology is also a harbour from the ceaseless economic and socio-political breakers crashing into generation Y’s already justifiably shaky sense of security and confidence.

Adam Kingl is the author of Next Generation Leadership and a keynote speaker, educator and advisor. He was previously the regional managing director, Europe, for Duke Corporate Education (Duke University), and the executive director of Thought Leadership and Learning Solutions at London Business School.

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