How inspiring are you as a leader?

Straight up then: how inspiring are you as a leader?

Do you even know?

Television’s Dr Phil McGraw often asks guests getting some pop-psych on his Oprah offshoot program ‘Dr Phil’, 'How much fun are you to live with?'

It's a brilliant question that will put you in the shoes of your partner. But the same can apply to workplaces, organizations, teams, leaders and groups.

So how much fun are you to work for? Work with? Collaborate with? Communicate with? Do you even know? Do you need to have a chat to someone?

Think of it like a bellows that fuels a fire with air. At the historic re-enactment tourism village in regional Victoria, Australia, about 90 minutes from Melbourne, there’s a place called Sovereign Hill.

Here you can buy boiled sweets, watch people wear clothes of the pioneer days or get your name printed on a bushranger ‘WANTED’ poster. On a school-day visit in years gone by, I remember seeing the impact of the bellows at the town blacksmith. The Smithy would be operating the bellows using a foot-pump to stoke, feed and ‘air’ the fire and then he’d be tapping, belting and chinking out horseshoes and other historic items of metal blacksmithing in between whooshes of air.

When you look at bellows, you see they have two actions:

• first they draw air IN ...
• before they can blow it OUT.

Do you give or take?

Are you the sucking-air-in kind of person… squeezing the life out of; the one who brightens a room just by leaving it? Do you leave people deflated and flat, beaten and feeling hopeless? Do you even know? Oh how depressing! No no!

Rather… be the one who gives with (good) air and energy and possibility and hope. Make the environment, space, team, project and business feel fired up with air and energy because of you. Whooosh – blow fresh air and energy into the environment. Be inspiring! 

Be filled with possibility

When you’re leading change in a team or organisation, you have to fill the air and the environment with possibility and hope and ‘yes we can do this.’ This is not ‘yee-ha’ but rather a great feeling of capability, high likelihood and a sense of ‘we’re gonna do this because….’ and ‘we can do this because…’

If I followed you around for a week (not in a creepy way), what would I see? How inspiring are you as a leader? 

Think. Build. Ship. Tweak.

Forget the days of heading to the CD shop to buy a CD – just stream what you want to listen to via an online service like Spotify.

So how does a business like Spotify get their sh*t together and take on a market, and an industry and revel in the opportunity to disrupt?
 
Henrik Kniberg shined a light on some of the leadership and management insights of Spotify at a conference recently - he's been working as a lean and agile coach.  

Go anti-silo and have squads and tribes
Henrik reckons a minimum viable bureaurcracy is the way to go…to group people into tribes; to have squads of people who collaborate with each other to find the best solution. These groups cut across the organisation. It’s somewhat of an anti silo strategy.

Healthy culture heals broken processes
Don’t try and scale your product or service – rather, descale the organisation. A healthy culture is what will heal broken processes. We’ve all felt the pain of a broken process when we’ve interacted with a business or organisation and things just didn't go well :-(
 
It seems that control is dying but not yet buried. In fact it’s trust that flourishes; it’s more powerful than control. Having autonomy across the organisation means you can move fast. Be agile.

What agility looks like
In Henrik's words, agility looks like this:

• Think it
• Build it
• Ship it
• Tweak it

Don’t you love it?
 
And it's alignment that enables the autonomy. Without people being aligned to the vision, plan and purpose, you’ll create fear, silos, yawn culture, and a host of flow on problems.

Fail fast ... and recover from it
You’ve got to let people make mistakes. To fail fast. But then recover from the failure.

I think too many leaders think they're encouraging failure yet secretly fear failure because it takes so damn long to recover from it – “hmmm, best to not go there at all,” they think.
 
Rather, go there. Fail it fast. But Henrik says limit your ‘blast radiance’ – limit the effect of the fail and how far it impacts around the organisation.

Are we learning anything people?

Leverage the learning from the fail. And further, you’ve got to then share the learning from the fail. Trust and support people.

Contemporary leaders of today have to let go and let their teams make sense of what needs to be done and how to do it. Community is what matters.
 
Move fast, fail fast, limit the blast.
Think. Build. Ship. Tweak.

Getting Back to Joy

How do you Build a Workplace People Love?

It's a time of year when 'joy to the world' and 'peace and goodwill to others' is seen on baubles and banners and heard in songs, hymns and cards. 

Many teams wind up 2014, with an eye on 2015 and breathe a sigh of relief at the year's end.

We often see more human interaction at this time of year; more support, more engagement, more concern - particularly amid tragic events or fearful challenges.

We are, above all, human. This message was loud and clear at the Above All Human innovation conference in Melbourne last week. No matter the work we do, whatever the field or sector, it still involves people, is for people and has to do with people. Can we bring more of this engagement, support, concern.... joy.... to the workplace?

Richard Sheridan of Menlo Innovations, thinks we can. We can build workplaces people love... if we just add joy. Richard says we do important work. So joy matters. And the company he's a part of welcomes dogs, babies, conversations, (no cubicles or pods by the way), but there's plenty of book sharing (without having to 'sign out' which book you've taken) and so many other sweet tools that make work human and joyous. 

If you can get back to the joy you felt when you were a little kid, you would be:

• doing the work you love, with people you like, the way you want (a key element of Thought Leaders)
• experimenting
• trusting the team
• flexible
• embracing learning.

To build a workplace people love, keep out of chaos. That's the land of not getting anything done!

Bureaucracy isn't much fun either. Too much red tape.

Between chaos and bureaucracy is ... structure. This structure is based on human relationships. 
It's about building an open and collaborative culture and then you can create the environment that will fit that culture.

Allow support, empathy, and encourage creativity; let in some joy and you and your team will do great work... and love the people and the place and the fact we are all... human.

Can you really change the culture of an organisation?

School Principal Jihad Dib spoke at TEDxSydney recently - and shared his story of how a school can go from barbed wire … to belonging. 

Imagine a school community where people had given up.

But this education and community leader said 'where there's a heartbeat, there's life'. He believes the trajectory and culture of any organisation can be changed. 

You can see Jihad Dib's TEDxSydney 2014 talkhere...

and my visual notes below: