In this talk How High Performance Organizations Innovate At Scale I share my lessons learnt from working with many of the world’s leading organizations, their business leaders and teams as they seek to not fear the future, but invent it.
Use purpose to empower
The majority of management practices are still grounded in principles from the 19th century. Leaders need to focus on outcomes and find freedom from command-and-control. By creating purposeful organizations, and following the Principle of Mission, leaders can move decisions to where the information is richest and into the hands of the people with the most context and capability to make impactful decisions. But this requires leaders owning what is the outcome to achieve, and allowing their people the autonomy to discover how to get there.
Big change, start small
To change people’s mindset, we need to change how they behave and design for the behaviors to help our teams succeed. This requires thinking big but starting small -tiny in fact. BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model helps frame a systematic approach to adapting behavior over time. By introducing Tiny Habits into existing routines we can start to innovate our culture and ways of working. Small changes compound to create ripple effects across the entire organization. We just need to make it easy to do, and start.
Transform yourself, not others
Everyone thinks of transforming others. Few think of transforming themselves. Don’t focus on how others operate, look at what you do and how that can improve the organization. A simple change in becoming a better leader is to ask better questions rather than trying to come up with the correct answers all of the time. Try it. You will be surprised by the results.