If you walk into a dark room, you’ll naturally slow down and proceed very cautiously. If at all. Our brains are wired for certainty, to look for patterns and assurance that our next step will land just as we want. When certainty is removed, obscuring the path ahead, our default response is to put on the brakes and seek safety until the fog clears. 

All well and good. Except that if you’re reading this website, you likely have a passion for leading change – in your business, organization, or the world at large. In which case, succumbing to fear and hyper-caution amid uncertainty is not an option. This isn’t promoting recklessness. Instead, it recognizes that while ‘playing it safe’ provides a short-term illusion of security, it can ultimately land you in a far more precarious position than decisive, forward-leaning action.  

Shakespeare said that ‘Fortune favors the bold.’ Never is this truer than when fear runs high, rendering many frozen in overwhelm, paralyzed by their own catastrophizing. It’s why a common rule of battle is that when under mortar fire, the direction one runs holds less risk than standing still waiting for the dust to settle.    

The first task of leadership is not to set a strategy or manage the process. It’s to manage one’s mindset. When the ground underneath is continually shifting, we must learn to be grounded in ourselves – in ‘self-certainty’ – anchored to our core values, of who we want to be as a leader. This does not imply immunity to fear. Instead, it means we don’t give it the power to highjack higher-order thinking. Left unchecked, it easily does, driving clever, creative people to focus on potential losses and discount the cost of cautious inaction. 

Leading through change requires rising above instinct, adopting an offensive’ play to win’ mindset over a defensive ‘play not to lose’ mindset. The latter stymies ingenuity, directing all resources solely into protecting the status quo. The former, however, unleashes the creative and bold thinking that fear closes down. Neuro-research has shown that working toward a compelling ‘invented future’ elevates our perspective to see opportunities others miss and expands our capacity – individually and collectively – to seize them. 

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is known for making commercial decisions based on 70% of available information. This near guarantees that his decisions will not be 100% right and will require ongoing iteration and sometimes 180-degree pivots. Yet by not waiting until he’s sure to land the ideal outcome, Amazon has disrupted old paradigms and forged new ground at a pace that leaves most in their wake. 

Summoning the courage to act decisively despite the ambiguity lies at the heart of real leadership. One way to tap this courage is to consult your’ future self’; to step into the shoes of you five years from now, looking back on this time. Ask your future-self:

Where are you being called to step up and make a change or take a chance?

What new ‘invented future’ would you pursue if you trusted yourself, not your doubts? What lays at stake if you don’t? 

Courage or cowardice? 

The desire for security and comfort will always be in a tug of war with the desire for growth and service. This is why real leaders must continually reconnect to their deepest values and highest intentions lest the self-protecting pull of lower-order intentions wins out, driving short-sighted decisions and over-cautious actions.  

Every significant crisis throughout history – depressions, wars, pandemics – has been followed by a rebound of the human spirit and an intellectual, social, and cultural blossoming. Yet reaping the opportunities that emerge from disruption does not go to organizations whose leaders are mired in indecision and unable to see beyond the immediate horizon. 

Addressing our biggest challenges will require leaders to embrace the discomfort of uncertainty, challenge their own best thinking, and take courageous action toward a future that lays beyond that horizon. Not just annually or quarterly, but daily. After all, our psychological immune systems can justify an excess of courage far easier than an excess of cowardice. 

Now is not the time to wait for certainty. It is, after all, an illusion. Instead, it’s the time to reframe uncertainty into possibility, to reimagine the future, and to recommit to transforming this crisis into a catalyst for good of the highest order – to do business better and harness the diversity among us to create a more equitable, sustainable and compassionate world. 

www.MargieWarrell.com / www.GlobalCourage.com

Is your life aligned with what matters most to you? Could you use last week’s schedule as evidence?

Leaders’ work lives have become a whirlwind of daily demands – packed schedules, urgent meetings, pressing deadlines, and grinding out as much productivity as possible. Notifications and other interruptions fracture their attention further, undermining their ability to advance their most vital efforts.

While obligations will always have a place, leaders can be more intentional about designing schedules that advance their most important work.

Here are seven practices grounded leaders use to shape their lives:

1.    Think bigger. To-do lists and urgent demands anchor your attention in less significant work. Establish a weekly ritual to reconnect with your larger aspirations. Leverage this broader perspective to not only separate your most meaningful efforts from the noise but to strengthen your ambition and resolve against forces undermining your most significant efforts.

2.    Unproductive patterns. Escaping unproductive patterns is no easy task. Review how you invested the prior week of your life. Where did you fulfill your intentions? Where were you blown off course (external forces)? Where did you wander (internal resistance)? Use this time to identify patterns that imprison you so they can inform your weekly design choices.

3.    Think smaller. Escaping ingrained patterns requires better choices. Don’t fall into the trap of making significant changes or too many changes at once. Commit to one behavioral change that will meaningfully impact your life. It’s easy to forget that little by little, these small changes create the momentum that leads to big, enduring changes.

4.    Leverage boundaries. You can expect to face 50-60 unplanned interruptions per day. Achieving anything of significance requires continuity of attention. Design your week to include protections that fence you off from people and devices. With protections from external forces in place, you can more readily preserve your attention on advancing your most meaningful priorities.

5.    Blank canvas. Each week offers an unlimited number of ways to invest your time. Taking back control involves consciously designing days that enliven you versus unconsciously reacting to the whirlwind of your life (an ongoing design challenge). Design time for health, fun, family, friends, not just work. As importantly, ensure you design space for recovery and doing nothing at all.

6.    Concentrated effort. Your most significant work is a function of uninterrupted time and the focus you bring. Arrive prepared to bring focused effort, or you will sabotage your protected time with less demanding, superficial work that you perceive as more pressing. Become skilled in escaping these urges.

7.    Daily escapes. The design you envisioned for your day will come under attack. Rather than succumbing to forces that could undermine your intentions, enact escape paths. It takes just one second to switch from a less effective choice to a better one. 

The power to manifest a life filled with greater meaning and impact comes down to the quality of your choices. Little by little, your weekly adjustments, stacked one atop the other, will create dramatic breakthroughs in the quality of your life.

In today’s fast-paced, highly competitive marketplace, we need our employees to excel at collaboration in pursuit of innovation. To connect with each other in meaningful ways. To disrupt the status quo, take risks within financial parameters, fail, learn, and get back up again. If your company is to hold its own in a super-competitive, innovation-fueled marketplace, leaders and employees at all levels must do all of this and more. 

But it’s no job for scared people. People need to feel comfortable trying new things, doing experiments, and understanding that unexpected results are surprises, not mistakes. That means fear must be eliminated.

Courage must be part of your organization’s culture. Here are nine indicators that courage is alive and well in your workplace… and six red flags that fear might be preventing your employees from doing their best work.

9 Signs of Courage

• People are willing to experiment because they know failure isn’t punished. (Leaders promote psychological safety by allowing people to try things and fail.)
• People freely admit when they are wrong. People are comfortable saying, “I don’t know the answer,” or, “Let’s go find out!”
• People are willing to navigate uncertainty and ambiguity. They never rush to the safety of making comfortable, speedy decisions.
• People volunteer for new projects. They regularly step into uncharted waters and try new things.
• Employees challenge the views of higher-ups. When they disagree, they speak up and explain why. In turn, the higher-ups thank people for having the courage to challenge their ideas. They keep an open mind and try to understand the other person’s views. They strive for an idea meritocracy.
• Leaders and employees alike ask for feedback. Even though it may be uncomfortable, everyone welcomes constructive criticism.
• People are transparent. They explain their thinking and reasoning behind their decisions.
• Leaders are willing to be vulnerable. Those who are highest-ranking are vulnerable first, sending a message that they trust others. They show that it is safe to ask for help or advice and to admit to uncertainty. This fosters psychological safety.
• Leaders freely say, “I don’t know,” “I was wrong,” “I apologize,” or, “I should not have interrupted you before you were finished making your point.” If they publicly embarrass someone, they publicly make amends. They transparently own their bad behaviors.

6 “Red Flags” That Show Courage Is in Short Supply

• People are hesitant or unwilling to take risks. They feel afraid to put their necks on the line even though change and trying new things is essential for innovation.
• “Learning mistakes” are punished. People may be scolded, shunned, or penalized in more overt ways.
• People are guarded and closed lipped. They do not trust that it’s safe to be vulnerable.
• Leaders avoid uncomfortable and difficult conversations. Poor performance goes unchecked, and the whole organization suffers.
• People at all levels avoid asking for feedback.
• Employees do not speak up to higher-ups. They do not feel free to challenge or disagree with their bosses.

Leaders, pay close attention to your people over the next few days. If you don’t see courage on full display, it’s time to take a hard look at your culture and, as importantly, a hard look at yourself and how you behave. Leaders operationalize culture by their behaviors. Culture is only as good as the most recent behaviors by leaders.

Covid-19 has affected not just our lives but our livelihoods, too. No industries, businesses or communities have been left untouched. And it’s exhausting. In this article I look at ‘action ready strategies’ to help manage and lead in times of imposed and, with Covid-19, unprecedented change.

There’s a big difference between managing and leading in times of change that we choose to adopt — new markets or products, mergers or acquisitions, growth and expansion — and change that happens to us. This pandemic happened to us all. What happens now is up to us.

How can leaders find the energy, the drive, and the motivation to inspire those around them? What can they do differently or more of?

Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, authors of the Leadership Challenge define leadership as “The art of mobilizing others to want to struggle to achieve shared aspirations.” Those four words “to want to struggle” is the challenge. In times of imposed and unwanted change we have to encourage a new spirit, an energy to want to take on that struggle.

Being Resilient

When unexpected change happens to us, our resilience is tested. We have to dig deep when we are, ourselves, already battle weary. In an excellent and very moving TEDX talk Dr. Lucy Hone (pictured above) identifies three factors to help our resilience. Firstly, she says that stuff happens and we need to accept it — that’s life. Secondly, choose where you focus your attention and thirdly, look at what you’re doing. Is how you’re responding to what happened helping or harming? if it’s harming, then stop.

Know Yourself

Leaders have to stand for something, and their people need to know what that ‘something’ is. In times of change, that’s even more important. Whether you call them your values, your beliefs, your purpose — they need to be defined, articulated, shared and talked about. What makes you, you? When you’ve had to make difficult decisions, what values guided your actions? When someone acted or behaved in a way that crossed one of your core beliefs (you’ll know because you were angry), why did that upset you? What inner factor did that highlight as important to you? Revisiting your values and being clear on what you stand for, what really matters to you, will energize you and give you clarity on where to focus your attention. And not just you — those around you. Talk about what matters to you, share and explain why. A good test is whether the people you manage and lead can say what you stand for and why.

Create a Culture of Problem Solving

Leaders push the boundaries, challenge the status quo and put problem solving at the top of their to do list. No one has the answers for leading the change in this pandemic but those who can create teams that are agile, that can quickly prototype ideas, fail fast and learn from that, will come out stronger. Leaders need to experiment, encourage risk taking, knowing that some things will work and some won’t. But their followers need something more if they are ‘to want to struggle’. They need to know that they can experiment in a relatively safe environment. Great leaders have to create a culture and context where failure is possible, where people know that mistakes are inevitable but that they give us opportunities to learn and grow stronger. When finances are stretched and markets are unstable, that’s hard to do.

When working with leadership teams in hospitals, they often tell me ‘We can’t take risks with peoples’ lives’ until I point out that they’re taking a risk every day, but with protocols in place to minimize those risks.

Focus on small changes, projects with run times of 30 or at most 60 days. When people solve a problem, it’s highly motivating. They feel good. They feel energized. And don’t forget to give the credit, too — celebrate and move onto the next challenge. Keep that momentum.

Look at creating ‘trailblazer’ or ‘pioneer’ teams, encourage people to look outside of their own sector and see what others are doing. A very senior procurement leader once told me “Always look at the packaging industry Izzy. That’s where you see innovation.” He sends his buyers out to look at other industries, at what they’re doing and then uses those ideas to challenge the process in his organization.

Skill People for Change

There’s a difference between knowledge and ability. I know how to play tennis (knowledge) — I’m just a bit rubbish at it (ability). If we’re asking our people to work differently, to change how they work, then invest in training and support to help them. Telling people what to do won’t crack it, they need to know how. And yet, during tough times that’s often the first thing to get cut.

Dan Pink (Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us) shows that mastery is a great motivator. When we get good at doing something, we feel better. If we equip our teams to levels of mastery, help them to get better at what they do through coaching and training, they’re motivated to go on and tackle more.

Maybe that’s not really surprising after all.

Winston Churchill famously said, “It’s always wise to look ahead… but difficult to look further than you can see.”

Difficult? Yes. But even in times of disruption, uncertainty, and challenge it is undeniably possible to see the future…or more accurately, the “futures.” I’m not talking about an apocryphal, crystal ball vision of the future, or even a linear prediction model, but rather the type of strategic foresight that gives a glimpse into what could be so that companies and their leaders are better prepared to respond to and/or shape the future.

This kind of foresight, gained through structured methodologies like scenario planning, requires a strategy mindset – a belief that optimism, integrated and holistic thinking, peripheral vision, outside-in analysis, and team alignment creates exponential opportunity – and thus, it’s worth the effort.

Why is a Strategy Mindset so Important?
Leaders with a strategy mindset believe they have agency over the future despite, or maybe even because of, all of the ambiguity they face. They see around corners. They see possibilities and choices where others see problems and constraints. They place smart bets when others are fighting, flighting, or stalling.

To manage the influx of disruption, seize opportunities, and even create the next unicorn, executives need to systematically expand the boundaries of their understanding, gather more insight, and ultimately synthesize faster so they can integrate risks and opportunities into courageous strategies. Of course, they need to do all of this while making smart short-term and operational choices.

A strategy mindset starts with asking the right questions:

• In what multiple ways could the future unfold?
• Which forces are in our control and which are not?
• What is the full range of choices our company faces?

Rather than driving immediate and actionable solutions, addressing these questions sparks depth, exploration, strategic dialogue, and transformative thinking. It demands that leaders flex a different set of muscles than they are used to.

That’s why strategy today is more than a skillset. Strategy is a mindset – a set of beliefs about how to find and execute on opportunities, supported by a way of being that enables expansiveness, accountability, and engagement.

The 5 Elements of a Strategy Mindset

Often when a leader achieves short-term results repeatedly, they balk against long-term planning. Why fix it if it isn’t broken? A strategy mindset doesn’t negate the need for both nimble thinking and focusing on this quarter’s results…it simply enhances your ability to approach all planning with a more strategic lens. Understanding the five key elements is the first step in being able to nurture and adopt a strategy mindset.

1. Taking the long view – While the past offers critical lessons and the present is where decisions get made, a long-term future orientation opens up choice and possibility because it is unimpeded by all of the limitations of the present reality. In making decisions, do you start from the unconstrained opportunities the future offers and work backward to determine your choices or begin with a more confined and “realistic” set of options?
2. Starting from the context – Outside-in thinkers look for opportunities and threats in the contextual environment (social, technological, political, economical, and increasingly epidemiological forces), before narrowing in on the decisions they do control. Do you systematically consider the impact of forces you don’t control or focus more directly on those forces you do control?
3. Challenging the conventional wisdom – Long-established, familiar ideas and routines breed predictability, certainty, and often times unrivaled rigidity. They are the enemy of innovation and disruption unless they are challenged by multiple competing plausible scenarios. Do you depend on an implicit understanding of your core business assumptions or do you explicitly surface and interrogate the assumptions to determine which ones are based on habits and which are well-grounded?
4. Making sense through synthesis – There’s generally more data, information, and insight to process than time available to interpret or act on it. This creates a need to separate the signal from the noise in order to rapidly infuse a broad range of information without ignoring key information. Do you rely on a small set of credible and dependable sources to inform your view or do you systematically scan, synthesize, and process information from a broad array of inputs?
5. Being purposefully optimistic – Positivity and an optimistic outlook transform challenges into opportunities and victims into responsible leaders. It is the foundation of a solution orientation, offering a wide range of viable and attractive choices. Are you generally focused on risks, concerns, and the threat of loss or opportunities, upside, and potential wins?

The idea of a strategy mindset is easily understood but learning how to cultivate one is the journey all great leaders must go on. Take this 2-minute quiz and instantly get feedback on what kind of mindset you currently have and how to nurture it for best results.

It’s no secret that many businesses are hurting in 2020.

Transportation, hospitality, and brick- and-mortar retail outlets selling nonessential goods and services have been hit the hardest. The last time we were in a similar situation was during the Great Recession of 2008. Although the causes were different, both situations flattened revenues so much that business, as usual, led many companies to fail.

How are leaders supposed to navigate such tough challenges? One way is with humility.

Why does humility matter?

Leadership requires working together. A leader’s biggest challenge is to inspire others to fully engage with a shared goal, improve financial performance, increase safety, launch a new product, or undertake a significant change. Leader humility is an extraordinarily powerful way of influencing those around you to volunteer their full support to achieving shared goals. I define leader humility as a tendency to feel and display deep regard for others’ dignity. Because leadership requires working together, this is a game-changer. You can still be strong and have high standards but demonstrate respect for others’ sense of self-worth.

How Humility Fuels a Turnaround

As a great example of this, consider one of the toughest cases of performance management in business history: the rescue and turnaround of Ford Motor Company from near bankruptcy to a soaring success following the Great Recession.

The leader behind this success story is Alan Mulally, former president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, who took over as CEO of Ford in its decline. Mulally applied a management approach he developed and used at Boeing, which he calls the “Working Together Management System™,” or WTMS™ for short.

Mulally transformed an organization that was failing — losing $17 billion the year he arrived — into a dynamic enterprise by creating full employee and union engagement with his “One Ford” plan. Under this plan, Ford became the only major U.S. automobile manufacturer to survive the threat of bankruptcy without federal bailout money.

Alan earned the trust of jaded employees because he delivered and accepted nothing less than behaviors based on humility from everyone on his team. In a short period, Mulally galvanized a company of more than 300,000 employees, moved from failure to profitability, and was ranked number three on Fortune’s World’s 50 Greatest Leaders of 2014.

When you study how Mulally leads, you see that WTMS™ rests on four prime principles:

1. Embracing the leader’s most important responsibility
2. Identifying a roadmap for creating value
3. Establishing behavioral norms for working together
4. Creating a structure and process for how you oversee the work to ensure implementation

1. Embracing a leader’s most important responsibility

Mulally states that a leader’s most important contribution is to hold himself or herself responsible and accountable — collectively with the team — for defining a compelling vision, comprehensive strategy, and relentless implementation. Leaders create the container for how the work gets done: the direction, structure, and processes that determine how to work together and what the results are. Mulally sees this as the “leader’s unique service.”

2. Identifying a roadmap for creating value 

Every organization exists to add value. Leaders need to guide the organization in identifying the best path to create value for all of the organization’s stakeholders. This should result in a compelling vision, comprehensive strategy, and performance goals and measures. From there, leaders and team members can create an appropriate workstream for implementing the vision and agree on performance goals and measures for achieving the desired results. Importantly, measures need to address the interests of all stakeholders.

3. Establishing behavioral norms for working together

WTMS™ is explicit about what Mulally calls “expected behaviors.” Among these, Mulally emphasizes:

• People first. Love them up.
• Everyone is included.
• Respect, listen, help, and appreciate one another.
• Have emotional resilience — and trust the process.
• Propose a plan and have a positive, find-a-way attitude.
• Have fun. Enjoy the journey and each other.

These behaviors reflect leader humility because they show deep regard for the dignity of others. Mulally also allows no jokes at others’ expense, noting that they’re never funny!

When a leader models these behaviors, and when others are expected to demonstrate these same behaviors, the organization becomes open, trusting, and thriving.

4. Creating a structure and process for ensuring implementation

Other expected behaviors Mulally stresses are practices for managing the work or overseeing implementation. WTMS™ emphasizes having “One Plan” that everyone is working together on. As Mulally says, “Everyone should know the plan, the status, and the areas that need attention.”

WTMS™ also uses facts and data to assess progress and move away from personalities and politics. Data can be quantitative or qualitative, as long as the data are tied to key indicators that ensure a successful implementation. Leaders need a strong plan for how they and the team will use data to monitor progress frequently. Mulally’s approach, a weekly business plan review, works well for most organizations. However, small or nimble organizations may monitor progress with less structure while still keeping everyone informed.

A Rigorous System that Works

The challenges we face today are no less daunting than what Mulally faced when he stepped into Ford. Having used this system at both Boeing and Ford, we know it works. It combines structure and high standards with the humility required for working together well. There’s nothing touchy-feely about this approach; it’s rigorous and demanding. But the demands come from clarity, standards, and collaboration built on trust and transparency across the team.

The only way to create an environment like this is by fully respecting the dignity of everyone. And that requires a leader who shows genuine humility — and holds everyone else accountable for showing it, too.

Attitudes are changing fast. By 2020, half of global employees will be millennials, according to PwC (1), with Gen Z waiting in the wings.

As digital natives, millennials communicate, gather information, and purchase much more in the virtual world than previous generations. Better-educated, highly ambitious, and purpose-driven, they are more likely to switch employers in search of career progression, development experiences, and the advancement of a social cause. And as the first generation that will face the full realities of climate change, they are passionate champions of sustainability. 

Financially, millennials are often stressed by the burden of student loans and the rising cost of urban living. They tend to be value-conscious purchasers, although 75% are likely to spend on items like clothing, cars, and phones that help them stand out and compete with friends (2). However, the millennials’ fortunes are likely to change over the next three decades as they become the beneficiaries of a $30 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer (3)—the largest in history. The impact of this windfall will reverberate in the corporate boardroom, as millennials increasingly insist that companies receiving their investments meet higher environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards. The sustainable investment movement already influences a quarter of all assets under management in the US (4) and is poised to grow rapidly.

For all these reasons, it’s increasingly important for senior executives in today’s fast-moving organizations to stay in touch with younger generations’ changing attitudes—as employees, consumers, and investors. Meanwhile, millennials must feel more engaged in shaping their company’s strategic direction and that their voice has a channel to be heard.  

One very effective tool for bridging this generational divide is “two-way” mentorship. The origins of this form of learning can be traced back to GE’s reverse mentoring programs under Jack Welch, which were adopted by many other leading organizations such as HP, Target, Cisco, BlackRock, and Ogilvy and Mather. Traditionally, reverse mentoring was more of a one-way street for senior leaders to learn about modern technologies from younger tech-savvy employees in a safe, open environment. 

But companies soon realized that reverse mentoring could be applied to bridge other disconnects between diverse segments of workers. For example, in one P&G division, senior male managers were matched with young female staff to address the problem of high female turnover in middle management roles. The program helped male leaders build greater empathy for the challenges faced by their younger female mentors. In contrast, the female managers gained anchoring relationships with senior executives, which helped increase female retention.

In recent years, it seems that reverse mentoring is evolving again. This time, it is becoming an effective process for two-way engagement on a broad range of strategic issues ranging from the organization’s social purpose and sustainability to product design and customer engagement. For example, Michael Jacobs, General Manager of Microsoft Norway, explains how his millennial mentor “is mentoring me on what his generation is interested in, …, how we can make ourselves attractive for young talent, …, and how we can stay relevant to them both as a potential employer and as an important customer segment.” (5).

Two-way mentoring can also help to navigate some of the hierarchical barriers that impede innovation. In the world of fashion, CEO of Estee Lauder Fabrizio Freda was so impressed with how a team of young employees helped him understand how millennials “fall in love with brands,” he formalized a reverse mentoring program for 300 of the company’s senior executives and set up “millennial advisory boards” to advise executive teams. So far, the efforts have led to a new range, Estée Edit, targeting millennial women and promoted primarily on social media by celebrities like Kendall Jenner (6).

In my experience of setting a broader scope of dialog in two-way mentoring, the benefits are coming through loud and clear. Executives view it as a strategic component of their lifelong learning, which helps them gain valuable perspectives on specific business issues. Millennials feel valued for their contributions to corporate direction and innovation. But in addition to boosting engagement and retention for both younger and older employees, two-way mentoring could be an important catalyst for the kind of broader stakeholder engagement in corporate affairs being advocated by voices such as JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Reference Articles:

1. Millennials at work: Reshaping the Workplace in Financial Services

2. How Millennial Spending Habits Compare to Other Generations

3. The “Greater” Wealth Transfer: Capitalizing on the Intergenerational Shift in Wealth

4. US SIF Trends Report

5. Reverse Mentoring: How Millennials are Becoming the New Mentors

6. Estée Lauder Applies Millennial Makeover

All billionaires think differently as part of their DNA. They think independently, challenge the status quo, and refuse to accept old truths. Billionaires look for their own truths outside the mainstream.

Norwegian property developer, Petter Stordalen (above), advises people to “be scared when everybody is satisfied, and there are only blue skies, and be brave when everybody’s scared. Because if you do what everybody is doing, you will never succeed. If you come up with a new toothpaste, it’s too late. You need to do something differently. But you can also change an old industry as I did with hotels.” Petter told me: “Don’t be afraid to be different. Sell yourself as best as you can and don’t listen to others.”

Billionaires view things from their own perspectives. They see things as they could be instead of seeing them precisely as they are. When Stordalen, known as the Hotel King, saw an old post office building in Gothenburg, he thought it was perfect for a hotel. The objections were powerful: “No, no, no, it’s the old post office. It’s over 100 years old. It’s been closed for 15 years.” Petter held his ground: “It’s a hotel.” No, Petter, it’s not, and it’s under strict rules. You can’t do anything to it; you can’t change anything.” Petter bought it anyway.

After eliminating all of the bureaucratic obstacles and remodeling the building and surrounding area, it became a huge success. In fact, the area has become the new center of town. The lesson? It’s unlikely you will reach billionaire level if you are a follower and go head-to-head against the harsh competition. Instead, find a hole in the system and exploit it. Also, don’t follow the seemingly obvious truths and steer clear of options that are “apparent.”

Sergey Galitskiy, founder of one of Russia’s largest retail chains, has a sober view: “You should not believe in obvious decisions that are important. You should not take faith in simple decisions. You always have to doubt everything, even the most obvious decisions, and this is the key to success.” Vladimir Gordeychuk, Sergey’s business partner, confirms that “Sergey never believes in anything. He always doubts everything. He has his own opinion about every single situation.”

Billionaires never let the opinion of others decide their actions or self-worth. As Brazilian entrepreneur, Lirio Parisotto, puts it: “Of course, everybody prefers applause instead of complaints. But in some way, I think for billionaires, it doesn’t matter whether they get applause or discouragement. They have their own inner standards, and they are their own judge. They are prepared for criticism. They know today you get applause, and it’s possible tomorrow that you are in trouble. If people complain today about you, tomorrow maybe they applaud. Billionaires have a personality that can bridge this divide. I don’t need anybody to tell me I do the wrong thing when I do it. I know I do the wrong thing. The greatest criticism comes from me.”

Personal independence also seems to be an essential component of billionaires’ lives. Not only do they insist on this for themselves, but they also look to pass their independent mindsets onto their children. They want them to become free-thinking persons in their own right. Contrary to what most parents say to their children, Stordalen repeatedly tells his own kids that school grades aren’t important. He stresses to them: “Be happy with all the things you do. Choose your way, not my way. Not the way your mother wants you to take. Choose your life. Live your life the way you want to live it. Do whatever you want as long as you are happy with what you do.”

Filipino businessman, Tony Tan Caktiong, has a similar philosophy with his children: “I think I want them to know how to enjoy their life and live their life based on their own needs and passion. You don’t live your life to follow somebody’s beliefs or society’s beliefs, so whatever your passion, you live toward that passion.”

“As states reopen, and we give the virus more fuel, all bets are off. I understand the reasons for reopening the economy, but I’ve said before, if you don’t solve the biology, the economy won’t recover.” – Dr. Erin Bromage, Infectious Disease Expert, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

A business leader was overheard saying, “I have this office building I’m paying for, and no one is in it. I need to fill it up to make it worth it. We can and must reopen now.” But wait, Facebook and Google just told their thousands of workers they can work from home… forever. They  certainly have lots of buildings that have been paid for. Workers, on the other hand, are afraid  of losing their jobs if they don’t go back to work. They have to calculate whether they want to risk losing their jobs, or risk potentially losing their lives. It’s an unholy choice, the  modern day version of “Your money or your life.” But it’s a calculated risk business leaders and workers alike must make as “re-opening” continues despite the millions of infections worldwide that continue climbing daily.

Much is due to a fundamental lack of leadership. A May 20th research report from Columbia University found that had the U.S. government locked down the country one week earlier, 36,000 people would still be with us today; 80,000 if two weeks earlier. Dr. Ashish Jha, Director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute, on June 8th, called this “blundering” Federal leadership. 

We’ve moved into a “your money or your life” phase in this country. Many business and political leaders are putting people directly in harm’s way by having them come back to work. The virus isn’t gone. In fact, the number of infections are increasing nationally and in those states that have opened up hastily. The Prime Minister of New Zealand has shown amazing leadership around the challenge we face. Jacinda Adern shut down New Zealand at the outset, recognizing that the economy would resume once the virus was gone. She succeeded, and now the  economy is opening back up without putting people’s lives at risk. 

Business leaders face the same fundamental moral choice: Shall I reopen my business and  possibly put my employees at risk? Or should I risk my business and keep them healthy and bring  them back once the coronavirus is crushed? Every business leader must wrestle with the ethics and  morality of this choice. Because the coronavirus is so deadly, it cannot be avoided, denied, or rationalized away. But let’s look at this decision from the vantage point of business logic:

• Work Gets Done Through People: You need the workforce to be healthy, safe, and trusting you. Without trust and safety, you may as well sell the business.
• It Only Takes One Infected Worker: One asymptomatic worker can infect many others. Of 61 people in a Washington State choir, 32 came down with coronavirus after rehearsal. If your people get infected and are home sick, what kind of business do you have? And you’ve lost their trust.
• The Building Has to be Paid For Regardless: With or without your people, the lease or mortgage still has to be paid. 
• An Infected Workplace Inevitably Shuts Down: Tyson tried to avoid this, yet it didn’t work. Half its workers got infected and they shut down the plant.
• The Moral Stain of Indifference: You have to live with yourself. Can you live with the risk of infecting your workers and their families? Leaders who demonstrate indifference toward their people’s health have far greater problems than making money.

At the end of the day, all we have is our integrity, our name and reputation. Buildings come and  go. But people’s lives must be cherished. It’s a moral choice. Solve the biology issues first and take care of your people — the economy will follow.

As a leader, you’ve most likely been given the mandate to create a culture of innovation. Or perhaps, you’ve been given the high-pressure responsibility to overcome today’s new challenges and unearth new opportunities. Of course, in times of massive upheaval like today, this comes with an urgent deadline and incredible pressure to perform.

Unfortunately, most leaders in this high-stakes situation incline to tap into a specific set of people that they already deem innovative. Maybe it’s someone named Helena, with her purple highlights and funky glasses, bestowed with the great gift of imagination and creativity. Her days are filled with “aha” moments and brilliant insights. Or perhaps it’s a cross-functional team of those that work in the more creative departments like marketing and R&D.

While there is a lot of good intention around plucking out the people that are perceived as being the innovators to leverage their talents, this inclination to silo innovation to the select few sabotages your innovation efforts and damages employee engagement.

Think of it this way: Why would your organizations only want to tap the power of six or 14 people when they could tap the power of all 300, 3,000, or 300,000 employees? You aren’t paying your team to keep their heads down. You are paying them to help you grow and thrive as a business. If you don’t have that expectation, you’re missing countless opportunities.

Furthermore, as we’ve learned time and time again in business case studies, innovation often comes from the most unlikely places. Innovating and adapting isn’t about implementing the latest and greatest process or initiative; it’s about people; all the people inside your organization.

In organizations, when teams or a select few are given special powers and responsibilities, the rest of the organization suffers a blow. The decision-makers tell the unanointed that they don’t have a voice in the organization’s growth or shifts. Nothing is more demotivating than feeling like your contributions aren’t needed or valued. It hurts on a personal level. It’s an unintended consequence of not focusing on human-centered innovation that leads to wasted opportunities, dollars, and productivity that can be felt across an organization. Those not part of the “innovation team” become disengaged, demotivated, and go silent.

Here are five tips for fostering a culture where innovation is everybody’s business so you can drive innovation, productivity, and profits.

1. Democratize Innovation

Take responsibility for innovation out of the hands of the select few and place it into everyone’s hands. Encourage them to innovate with the work they have right in front of them. Set a culture that fosters and develops innovation skills in all team members.

In my 25 years of work and research around developing the Innovation Quotient Edge (IQE) assessment, I discovered being innovative is universal. We are all capable of it. However, how we innovate is unique to each of us. After delving into the neuroscience and behavioral psychology, my research revealed that there are nine triggers or styles of innovation. Two of those styles are our power triggers for each of us – our wellspring of natural innovation strengths. We also have one dormant style – how we innovate the least. What matters most here is that everyone has the science and style of innovation in their brains – it’s hardwired into all of us. That means everyone can innovate if given permission and opportunity.

2. Make Leadership Enablers of Innovation, Not Doers

The question I often get from clients is, “if everyone is innovative, who is accountable for making sure it happens?” It’s a great question. It’s been my experience that every organization needs a leader or leadership team to ensure their people’s talent and development are happening. However, here’s the fundamental distinction. That leader or leadership team must see themselves and act as enablers of innovation, not doers of innovation. To successfully grow that skill across the organization, they must redefine their roles to support, guide, and provide resources. When leaders become enablers, the entire organization’s ability to innovate rises; when leaders try to control innovation, the organization’s ability to innovate falters.

3. Recognize the Diversity of Thinking Inside Your Four Walls

Several recent studies show that teams that have and leverage diverse thinking are smarter. Diversity in thought leads to more inquiry, challenging one another, and different perspectives. This leads to more wholly thought out work output. Interacting with people unlike you forces you out of your bubble, challenges your biases, and helps you fill the holes in your thinking. All you have to do is be open to it. This is why ideas that come from birds of a feather tend to die, but those that come from diverse thinking thrive.

Diversity in thinking can come from a partnership of two, a team, or across your organization. And it goes even deeper. Alison Reynolds from the UK’s Ashridge Business School and David Lewis, director of London Business School’s Senior Executive Program, ran a series of studies to understand better how diversity impacted a team’s performance, particularly their ability to be innovative and productive.

Their findings were fascinating. It turns out, while race, gender, and age are essential in creating diversity in a company, they did not impact the team’s ability to be innovative and productive. In discovering this, it begged the question of what did. Teams with cognitive diversity performed smarter and stronger. Cognitive diversity is defined as “differences in perspective or information processing styles. It is not predicted by factors such as gender, ethnicity, or age,” although one could argue that those factors lead to different thinking styles purely because those individuals come from other vantage points and experience. The point is to dig deeper, look beyond the surface, and tap into the cognitive differences that bring powerful diversity.

4. Provide Recognition and Resources

When it comes to innovation, this is especially true because we ask our people to take risks, try new things, think, and act differently. That comes with a healthy dose of fear. Fear of not succeeding, fear of being wrong, fear of looking stupid, etc. It’s essential that leaders first help everyone on their teams identify with their innovation styles and then provide the resources to unlock innovation daily. The reality is many of your people don’t identify themselves as innovative because somewhere along the way, they bought into the myth above that innovation is for the select few, or they don’t have the skills and tools needed to make innovation actionable. It’s important to remember that innovation, while an innate talent we all possess, still requires intentional practice.

5. Create a Complete Feedback Loop

Over the years, I’ve come to one crucial truth about humans. The truth is this: people don’t need to feel right; they need to feel valued and heard.

If you want to build a culture of innovation, driven by high engagement across your organization, it’s essential to build complete feedback loops that not only gather ideas but also communicate back what happened to those ideas. All too often, organizations put their efforts in gathering ideas for them to only go into the black hole. Leadership then decides direction without communicating appreciation or reasoning.

Your employees, the ones you asked to be thoughtful and spend time giving you solutions, feel unheard, and undervalued. That leads to massive frustration, lower engagement, and minimal desire to innovate moving forward. The fix, however, is quite simple. Spend just as much time communicating how and why on the back end as you do gathering on the front end. I have a client that tasked a team of people with filtering thorough ideas and going back to each person who submitted to share with them — first appreciation, and second a reason for why their vision did or didn’t get moved forward.

To summarize, building a culture of innovation isn’t about siloing responsibility, it’s about tapping into the talent all across your organization. When innovation is everybody’s business, the individual, the team, and the organization win.