Developing 'The Greatest Virtue'

Anatole France, the French a French poet, journalist, and novelist, is attributed with the quote that "the greatest virtue of man is perhaps curiosity" and this was a theme revisited recently by Julie Winkle Giulioni on the SmartBlog on Leadership Innovation and Creativity site

Research indicates that on average. curiosity increases beginning at about 12 years old and continues until college age. But by age 30, curiosity drops off.

Yet, research (also) suggests that keeping curiosity close throughout one’s life can yield tremendous benefits including greater health (Swan and Carmelli), enhanced meaning and purpose in life (Kashdan et al), stronger social relationships (Brdar and Kashdan), and greater levels of happiness (Rodrigue, Olsen and Markley).

Curiosity also contributes to business success. Today’s landscape is complex, volatile and unpredictable. Surviving and thriving demands approaching each day and each opportunity with fresh eyes and an inquisitive spirit. Critical business imperatives such as creativity, innovation and continuous improvement require the prerequisite of curiosity. In fact, every workplace skill, including coaching and change management, is enhanced when it’s performed in the presence of curiosity.

That’s why curiosity is the new black. It literally goes with everything in business, providing a complement that doesn’t pull focus but rather amplifies and expands whatever ensemble it’s brought into.

Developing this characteristic of curiosity is a common theme throughout FranklinCovey's curricula and within each area we provide practical insights into the how people can develop it for themselves - for example 

• at a personal level, using 4 human endowments to consider alternatives to a given situation or problem
• at a team level, valuing and seeking out diversity of perspective to enable synergistic outcomes
• at a leadership level, tapping into the resourcefulness and initiative of team members rather than feeling 'I' need to know all of the answers
• at a client level, avoiding the instinct to 'tell' or 'accept' and instead developing the instinct and the skills to 'mutually explore' 

Being Your Best Self

David Novak is the chairman and chief executive officer of Yum! Brands, which is the world's largest restaurant group, and in his book, Taking People With You, he shares this insight about leadership authenticity and being your best self

People know and follow the real deal when they see it — those who walk through life on their own terms, who stay true to their beliefs, and who don't back down. We can all name people like this, and there's often a pretty broad consensus that such diverse figures as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Oprah Winfrey, Muhammad Ali and Winston Churchill are (or were) all real deals, which goes to show that authenticity can be demonstrated in many different styles.

I call this having "extraordinary authenticity," which means having the ability to be yourself even in the toughest situations. This requires living with a paradox: To inspire as a leader, you need to know your stuff, but you also need to be able to admit when you don't know stuff. You need to be both confident and vulnerable at the same time. Allowing yourself to be vulnerable can be hard enough for most of us, but in the business world, the idea of being yourself is further complicated by the fact that it's also important to get along with all sorts of people while staying true to yourself. You obviously can't just say to colleagues or customers, "This is me being myself, take it or leave it." Not if you want to get ahead. Instead, you have to figure out how to be you in a way that broadens your appeal and impact versus turning people off or unnecessarily clashing with company culture.

For many of the leaders FranklinCovey works with there are 3 stages to becoming your best self - the first is an awareness of this as being an important leadership characteristic (as advocated by David Novak, and others), the second is gaining clarity on what they value and what their values are and the third is then living and making decisions in congruence with these values. 

Having become aware of the importance of this as a characteristic, FranklinCovey's input helps leaders to structure their thinking on the different roles they play and what 'matters most' / what contribution they can make within each. For many, this can be quite a profound and challenging experience. Once completed, the challenge becomes turning this aspiration into reality and FranklinCovey's support is targeted at the choices leaders must make on a daily basis to make time for 'that which is important, rather than merely urgent'. We also recognise the issue that demonstrating integrity to these values is easy until a decision needs to be made that carries a cost or consequence to it, and we support leaders in the thought process of dealing with these situations.  

Making Trust Tangible

Lina M. Echeverría's book, Idea Agent, published at the end of last year, looks to provide insight on how to 'liberate creativity and accelerate innovation', and from this comes a sense that Trust is a (if not the) key component for leaders and organisations in making this happen

An impassioned culture of innovation thrives when guided by leaders who can resonate with team members — leaders capable of managing with passion and creating energised organisations while staying true to themselves and making their own work meaningful. Innovation thrives under a leader who internalises and lives by the belief that to excel you must start with a group; to excel you must create a culture; and to excel you must manage one by one — one person at a time, one situation at a time, one project at a time, one group at a time — by staying in the present, undistracted.

Trust is that fragile and vital value that must underlie every activity but that cannot be tangibly created. Trust is also essential to high performance. Expressions of trust are recognised by everyone's willingness for open, honest communication, dialogue and “feedback. They are at the core of the courage of taking intelligent risk and they underlie a sentiment of mutual respect. The utmost expression of trust is the willingness to place our future in somebody else's hands, to follow his or her guidance into unknown territory, to pursue a trail that we had not charted or even envisioned ourselves

This analysis reflects FranklinCovey's experience that Trust can be a key ingredient / catalyst / accelerator for innovation and creativity, but where our perspective differs is on the comment that trust 'cannot be tangibly created'. 

We do recognise that, while many people have a sense of when Trust is present or absent, not many people are able to define what Trust is, and in the absence of this definition it is then difficult to measure, assess, develop and reward for Trust. In contrast, FranklinCovey's approach starts by providing a definition of what Trust is (and the commercial benefits it can bring) and then builds on this by identifying 5 levels (or waves) of Trust which can be codified and developed at a personal, team, organisational, market and societal level. Given the focus that exists on increasing levels of Trust in many organisations and industries at the moment, it is this very practical approach to tangibly increasing Trust levels which many find attractive about the FranklinCovey approach.

Increasing Sales Without Selling

The key idea within Daniel Pink's new book, To Sell is Human, is that sales isn't what it used to be, that 'traditional' approaches (including the ABC of 'always be closing') are no longer viable options, and that success in any kind of persuasion or influence now depends on being more human. A recent review by Soundview Executive Book Summaries reflected this nicely

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, author Daniel Pink notes in his new book To Sell Is Human, 1 out of every 10 Americans works in sales. Is that less than before? Certainly. But have the Internet and online shopping brought the sales function to the precipice of extinction, as so many have predicted? Not quite, Pink writes. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics data (replicated by corresponding statistics in other developed countries) vastly understates the amount of "selling" going on when we consider what selling, according to Pink, really entails: "persuading, influencing and convincing others."

This is what he calls "non-sales selling." Most people, Pink explains, are involved in non- sales selling, no matter what their profession. Examples cited by Pink include physicians who sell patients on a remedy, lawyers who sell juries on a verdict, teachers who sell students on the value of paying attention in class, entrepreneurs selling to funders, writers selling to producers and coaches cajoling players to play their best. In fact, it's no longer completely accurate to see producing and consuming as the two most important economic activities, Pink writes. Today, much of what we do also seems to involve moving," he explains. "That is, we're moving other people to part with resources — whether something tangible like cash or intangible like effort or attention — so that we both get what we want.When selling is mostly "moving" people, the old rules of selling no longer apply.

This idea of 'moving people to part with resources so that we both get what we want' is completely congruous with the approach FranklinCovey has taken to support those with sales responsibilities for the past 10 year, and to enable this we have also seen that the old rules of selling (which often result in dysfunctional relationships between buyer and seller) no longer apply. 

In essence, the end in mind we focus on is helping a buyer to make a decision in their own best interest. To understand the beliefs they need to hold to inform this decision, we develop skills to mutually explore the key issues, impact, constraints and commercial expectations from their perspective. We also recognise that for a buyer to be open about these elements they need to believe that our intent is to help them succeed (as opposed to selling them our goods or services) and it is in connecting with this idea of intent and conveying this effectively in our dealing with others that FranklinCovey's approach enables the 'humanity' that Dan Pink talks about.        

Executing On Change to Create Competitive Advantage

EHS Today recently reported on the opening address Peter Sheahan, founder and CEO of ChangeLabs, gave at the American Society of Safety Engineers 2013 conference in which he shared four steps to effectively address change and turn it into a competitive advantage.

Throughout his work implementing platforms for change all over the world, Sheahan said he has witnessed only three responses to change: curling up in the fetal position and simply hoping it all goes away; acknowledging that change exists but being unwilling to do anything about it; and recognising not only that change is happening, but that the organisation must do something about it. It is this final, most constructive approach to change that Sheahan focused on.

“It turns out that just being open to change and acknowledging it and being willing to do something about it is not enough,” he said. Instead, organisations and leaders must take additional steps to ensure they can turn change into an opportunity and create a competitive advantage.

• Step One: Question your assumptions . “When you start moving forward from what’s changing to how to address it, the very first place you must start is to question the assumptions you’re making,” Sheahan said.
• Step Two: Create clarity and alignment . “Let’s say you have a vision for something – the next step is to very clearly articulate what success would look like if you do it well. Align everything in the organisation toward that vision,” he said. “Large-scale, fundamental change is never about intent. Your desire to create change is not enough. Execution always comes down to alignment.”
• Step Three: Actively reposition new vision for safety in the business . Do not assume your stakeholders, staff and partner will automatically understand this new reality. “You have to actively go and reposition the new reality,” Sheahan said. 
• Step Four: Collaborate . “Collaboration is the fastest way to drive engagement,” Sheahan said. “Don’t create it in a room and give it to people; create it with them,” Sheahan said. “Once they create it, it’s theirs. They own it.”

Focusing on a constructive attitude to executing change is also the approach that FranklinCovey takes and, what's interesting in reading the 4 steps outlined above is how they align with the Disciplines of Execution approach we have refined over 10 years of organisational application. For example, to help business unit leaders to question their assumptions we start by providing them with new 'lenses' to look at the issue of organisational execution through, so that they can refine and define their key areas of priority effectively. 
 

We then focus on the repositioning step by helping a business unit leader ratify this new direction with their team, and getting them to define what contribution their group can make so that 'the sum of the parts comes to equal the whole'. Following this is creating clarity and alignment down through the levels of an organisation so that there is a clear line of sight between executive goals and front line goals and so that people feel involved and engaged at every level in what they are being asked to contribute to. Finally, for FranklinCovey, the process of collaboration is about front line leaders engaging team members to get their input on how they can achieve whats most important and then playing a role of support and accountability in following this through.
 

The typical response when we describe this approach is that it helps people make sense of what can appear to be a 'big, uncertain thing' and so ensures that a business unit can approach the process of executing on change and creating competitive advantage with high energy and an expectation of success. 

Leading Culture Change

A few months ago Strategy + Business magazine featured an article by Jon Katzenback and DeAnne Aquirre entitled 'Culture and the Chief Executive' in which the authors considered how CEOs are stepping up to a new role as leaders of their company's thinking and behaviour

It is striking to see how many chief executives see their most important responsibility as being the leader of the company’s culture. According to Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, “Culture is your company’s number one asset.” Her counterpart at Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, has said, “Everything I do is a reinforcement or not of what we want to have happen culturally.” In another typical remark from the C-suite, Starbucks Corporation CEO Howard Schultz has written that “so much of what Starbucks achieved was because of [its employees] and the culture they fostered.”

Researchers such as former Harvard Business School professors John Kotter and James Heskett have also found consistent correlation between robust, engaged cultures and high-performance business results (as described in their book, Corporate Culture and Performance [Free Press, 1992]). But most business leaders don’t need that evidence; they’ve seen plenty of correlation in their own workplace every day.

To help people capitalise on the best aspects of your culture, you have to focus attention on the critical few behaviors that you believe matter most. These are a few positive sources of energy, pride, and interactions that, when nurtured and spread to scale, will improve company performance significantly. As simple as it sounds, this approach will not only accelerate the behaviour change that matters most, but also evolve and align your culture more effectively than forcing a major and potentially disruptive culture change effort on a broadly diverse global organisation.

This focus on impacting the mindsets and behaviour of employees throughout an organisation to enable culture change is one FranklinCovey also recognises as it is often something which we are asked to support with. What's striking, though, is the comment that 'as simple as it sounds' (to focus attention on the critical few behaviours) as in our experience, when Chief Executives try to do this (with 100, 1000, 10000 people) they typically find it anything but simple for these key behaviour changes to reach and sustain themselves at the front line. As a result, many revert to 'stroke of the pen' activities to enable change ie the signing off of new systems, processes or the resourcing of new initiatives, which they can point to as playing their part.

To change the thinking and behaviours of 100s or 1000s of people within an organisation takes significant energy and focus and is anything but simple. It requires an understanding of how messages get communicated down through the levels of a business, how to overcome embedded behaviours, how to distinguish between giving people clear guidance on 'what' is important for them to achieve and leaving scope for them to define (with support) the 'how' for themselves and for how to help people achieve this change in the midst of the day job they are still being asked to focus on. Yet, for those Chief Executives who recognise the power of successfully achieving this change right down to the front line, the impact for their business can be transformational and the energy and focus they invest can be paid back many times over.