Creativity and the unconscious are not magic. Almost all thinking operates in the unconscious — including taking out the garbage, tying our shoestrings, or driving our car. You can’t do any of this if you are unconscious, but your subconscious mind can control these actions.

Creativity is sometimes misunderstood and placed low on a company agenda. But sometimes, the cheapest place to get better (more profitable) ideas is to stimulate creativity and innovation inside your organization.

01 Creative Leaders Have Modest Intelligence

In summarizing the personal characteristics of creative thinkers, renowned Italian psychiatrist, Silvano Arieti, concluded that they must be intelligent. The paradox is that they generally are not too intelligent. Excessive intelligence cripples creativity by imposing an examination of self and ideas that is too strict, too “logical.”

02 Creative Leaders See Opportunity In Mistakes

A rat uses its errors to help find its way through a maze. In a similar but more sophisticated way, creative thinkers must be assisted by their leaders and colleagues to recognize and use their thinking errors as they grope with the creative solution to a problem. In scientific and technical arenas of thought, mistakes can be quite useful in posing issues in a new way and in inviting unique approaches to a problem.

03 Creative Leaders Ask (The Right) Questions

A question calls forth an answer; a problem, its solution. The trick is not only to ask questions but to ask questions or pose problems in the most effective ways. A question can easily limit creative thinking if it restricts the space of potential answers. It’s therefore essential to raise questions in open-ended ways, and ways that do not make too many assumptions about an acceptable answer. A significant part of the creativity task is the proper formulation of the problem itself.

04 Creative Leaders Are Prepared to be Creative

What this means is that creative people have a mindset that enables creativity to happen, as if by chance. We have all heard the famous axiom: “Chance favors the prepared mind.” But the complete explanation is: “Accident arises out of purpose. The essence of invention isn’t process, but purpose.” In other words, creative people, desire to be creative, believe that there is a creative solution, and expect that they will be the ones to find it.

05 Creative Leaders Are Original Thinkers

Original thinking is not the same as creativity but is a prerequisite for creative thought. Originality requires an active search for the different. This may involve deliberate attempts to conjure contrasts, opposites, bizarre associations, and symbolic thinking. Original thinking is sometimes no more than merely recognizing that what is accepted by everybody else has flaws, is not adequate, or needs to be done differently. Creative leaders tend to search longer for original thoughts that can improve upon or even replace emerging ideas.

06 Creative Leaders Keep People From Getting Too Specialized

Overspecialization gets in the way of creative thought. A research team with people of diverse backgrounds creates a stimulating intellectual environment that can promote the evaluation of problems from a broader perspective and lead to new ways of seeing problems and solutions. Many projects require a diversity of technical skills, which is provided in a diversely structured team.

07 Creative Leaders Tolerate Mavericks — Even Value Them

By definition, creative people are more likely to be non-conformist, not only in their thinking but sometimes in their attitudes and behavior. If such people are valued in an organization for what their ideas can do for the group, then a certain amount of tolerance for unconventional behavior is the price that has to be paid. Sometimes creative, innovative people are uncomfortably aggressive. They may be driven by ambition and are not very tolerant of obstacles, be they material or managerial. “Best workers gripe the most” was the conclusion drawn by one analyst of a survey of industrial productivity.

Born with a rare form of dwarfism, Michele Sullivan has spent her life looking up. As the first female president of the Caterpillar Foundation, she uses her unique point of view to impact countless lives around the world. Here, she recounts her early strategies and how the responsibility of finding millions of dollars to give to worthy causes has given her valuable life lessons.

One of my first orders of business at the foundation was reframing the way we operated. I knew it would cause quite a stir, but now that the role was mine, I was going to make some changes. The foundation board, my team, and I, set an aspirational goal to impact the lives of 50 million people living in poverty within eight years. That meant different things to different people. To me, it meant life change, seeing families no longer living in the poverty that had plagued them for generations. It meant seeing children in school and graduating into a job that allowed them to provide for their families. It meant building wells in desperate areas, and also ensuring that the girls who spent each day gathering water became educated, too. It meant that communities who used the wells became healthier and that children no longer died from waterborne disease.

I needed a way to track this impact. My math brain went full scale. I spent the first few months observing how things operated. I wanted to understand the elements that worked and uncover areas where we could improve. More than anything, I wanted to know where I could best serve the foundation’s mission to impact the lives of those in poverty. It’s easy to assume a company like Caterpillar has unlimited resources. While the company has a lot to give from a financial standpoint, the two critical resources money can’t buy are the right vision and the right partnerships. I needed individuals with viewpoints that compelled them to work with us and to carry out the work that needed to be done.

My primary role as president was determining the strategy for investing millions in grant money every year to create sustainable change in individual lives. I took maximizing every single dollar very seriously. In 2012, I rolled out a new operational strategy for the foundation that fundamentally changed how we measured ROI. Typically, foundations and their grantees measure returns by output — for example, how many schools were built or how many microloans were issued. While this certainly measures the productivity of a foundation and isn’t irrelevant, I don’t believe it measures actual, long-term impact. I wanted our foundation to always have a sense of what grants had the most significant impact and how many lives were truly elevated by our investments. This entailed creating a metric to track details such as how many recipients of microloans broke their family’s cycle of poverty. Knowing that sort of data would tell us how much impact we were having. 

This new strategy meant new grantee reporting rules around the measurement of outcome, instead of output. It was a stark change for many of them. Dozens of calls, letters, and emails came in from nonprofits which were not accustomed to the change. Our team worked with these organizations to help them create the right metrics. Eventually, their perspectives changed when their ability to prove that impact was happening opened up additional funding from sources that required this data.

Essentially, I wanted to know if we were defeating poverty and, if not, what needed to change? What more did we need to see or understand? Through hands-on research, asking lots of questions, and spending time with both our grantees and the individuals they were helping, it became clear that as the woman goes, so goes the family. If women are documented from birth, educated, given support for their businesses, and married after becoming an adult, their chances of success are exponentially higher, and their family follows suit. With this knowledge, we created a proprietary collaborative platform known as Together. Stronger. 

Its name reveals the core initiative: ToGetHer Stronger. The objective became a pillar of our investments and emphasized monetary accountability — dollar-to-impact behavior — and strategic alliances across public, private, and nonprofit sectors. I knew we couldn’t see and help 50 million people alone. Our partners make the impact.

One year after I took over, we contributed a grant to Water.org to expand its microfinance program, WaterCredit, which allows families in poverty to borrow money to purchase toilets or get clean water piped to their homes. The initial effect was that the number of people who gained access to clean water jumped to 3.2 million. We didn’t stop there. We connected Water.org with Opportunity International, one of our other partners, to increase capital to provide more WaterCredit loans.

The vision to bring water to all these desperate people wasn’t mine. It was the vision of actor Matt Damon and Gary White. It wasn’t my vision to provide microloans to help people start farms and businesses and meet basic needs. That was the vision of Al Whittaker, former president of Bristol-Myers International Corporation, and Australian entrepreneur David Bussau. It wasn’t even my vision to build the world’s largest construction equipment manufacturer. I just work there. But I knew how to look up to people. Together with a few others who also knew how, we were able to bring about exponential change well beyond the number of people our individual visions could reach. 

Today, Water.org has helped 17 million people access clean water. Opportunity International has provided financial products to nearly 15 million people in 20 countries. For our vision to have its most significant impact, we have to trade credit and recognition for collaboration. Looking up to others is, after all, about others. It’s not about us.

The change in approach was never about bureaucracy or introducing more red tape into the process. It certainly wasn’t about control. It was about the need to stop generalizing our approach to how we help people. It was also about introducing accountability into our efforts, so that seeing people in bad circumstances doesn’t end with just feeling empathy. It was ultimately about stewardship of vision — making the best use of the insight we’d been given into multiple lives — male or female, a retired white American attorney, or a single African-American mother. Many people have modeled this conviction around stewardship for me over the years, but my mom is at the top of the list. She continues to see me and step in to see with me. I don’t think she’s ever considered how much her insight into my life became one of the dominoes from which my future progress has flowed — since I was a little girl born with dwarfism and big dreams.

This is an excerpt from Michele L. Sullivan’s new book, Looking Up: How a Different Perspective Turns Obstacles Into Advantages.

A trip to Tibet in 2009 changed the life of Shiyin Cai forever. The YPO member and current CEO of her family’s portfolio of Chinese art museums and boutique hotels, Cai grew up in an entrepreneurial family, attended the best schools in China and the United States, and was climbing the corporate ladder at GE — and then her eyes were opened.

“I was brought up in a very traditional way in China,” says Shiyin Cai. “I did what was expected. But, I was always wondering what my real value is, if I was making a difference in the world.” On that trip to Tibet, she visited a school for the blind and was struck by the fact that despite being blind and surviving on very little income, the children were full of joy.

“I was surrounded by children who were, by far, the happiest children I’d ever met, even though they had about 70 cents per day for their living expenses,” muses Cai. She says it was then she realized her values were not about how much money she could earn or how high she could climb in society and her career, but what she really valued was how much difference she could make in other people’s lives.

She abruptly ended her travels and went to work as a volunteer at a vocational school for the blind. “That was the start of my whole journey; that’s when I started devoting myself to blind children,” explains Cai. “The biggest challenge for blind people is not the physical disability; they can overcome that. What they cannot overcome is society’s stereotypes about what they can do.”

The problem haunted her, she says, until she found a solution after attending a special exhibit, Dialogue in the Dark, when visiting a friend in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Dialogue in the Dark is an international organization offering sighted people the opportunity to experience blindness, introducing them to how they can use their other senses as they go about their usual routine.

As part of the exhibit, Cai spent 75 minutes in total darkness. The experience helped her see the solution is not to change blind people, but to change sighted people’s views of blind people’s abilities.

Cai was particularly drawn to Dialogue in the Dark’s business model as a social enterprise rather than an NGO. “I had been in the business world for almost 12 years and was always looking for a sustainable way of doing good. Dialogue in the Dark is self-sustainable. I figured I could use all my business knowledge and experience to maximize my impact.”

She went to work for Dialogue in the Dark’s corporate office in Hamburg, Germany, serving as its COO, before returning to her homeland, bringing the franchise to Shanghai in 2011, followed by Chengdu, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Nanjing. One of the services she offers through Dialogue in the Dark China is leadership training. Groups of leaders enter a pitch-dark room with blind guides, are organized into teams, and given tasks to complete.
“What makes this very different from the other training is we don’t tell you what you should do,” Cai says. “You look inward instead of outward. Most of us, when we make mistakes, we blame external factors, but the dark experience forces you to look at yourself. You realize maybe that person didn’t understand, not because he is not smart, but because you didn’t explain it in a way he can understand. It drives empathy, communication skills, listening skills.”

Dialogue in the Dark China has trained more than 500 companies. “My biggest accomplishment is to witness people change in half a day. It is difficult for leaders to be aware of their own problems and to be willing to change. So, this is exciting,” Cai reveals.

She adds that diversity makes a company stronger and a leader better. “When you are a leader, you want a team of people with different opinions from you. If everybody has the same opinion, then why do you need a team? Most of the time, we are blind, even when we can see. Our visually impaired employees show us things we don’t see. This is why we always say that we need to let blind people teach us how to see.”

There are five key relationships that require your attention if you want to thrive as a leader: time, money, the self, friendships, and the unknown. How you manage these relationships dictates your well-being. Leaders make decisions that impact the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of other people. That’s a huge responsibility.

Learning to manage these five key relationships from a place of trust instead of fear will decrease your stress and anxiety, improve your well-being, and enable you to make the best decisions for yourself and your team.

No matter where you are on the leadership spectrum, you can wake up to a new way of leading. Mindfulness is not reserved for the chosen few. It’s a skill you can learn and practice daily. Doing so will transform the way you relate to your thoughts, emotions, coworkers, and the difficulties of life. When you stay present, you can see what’s happening, talk to yourself about how you’re relating, and bring yourself back to the facts.

You have the power to choose how you respond. You can manage your relationships with time, money, the self, friendships, and the unknown from a place of trust. As a result, you will lead more effectively and with less suffering for yourself and others.

1. Time

We go after the short-term solution rather than what is most beneficial in the long run. Author and educator Stephen Covey talks about this idea and how we spend time on things that seem urgent (e.g., answering the phone when we’re in the middle of a conversation, responding to a text while we are driving with our kids in the car), but are mostly unimportant. Instead, he suggests that we focus on what is most important: building relationships, exercising, and getting plenty of sleep. When we are constricted around the idea of time, everything seems important and urgent. The first step is to take responsibility for your relationship with time. This is a choice. Moment by moment, you need to pay attention to how you’re relating to time.

2. Money

Valuing our time in relation to money is tricky. It’s easier to measure the value of $10,000 than an extra 30 or 60 minutes. However, when we realize that how we use our time impacts our well-being, we can more easily see the value of paying for a service that will free time for stargazing or mountain climbing or whatever gives us joy and positive emotion.

Many leaders come to me bewildered by the stark reality that they have worked many years to earn a lot of money only to find themselves no happier, and, oftentimes, less happy than they have ever been. Gratefulness is one of the keys to unhooking yourself from a fear-based relationship to money. Be grateful for the resources you have right now because right now is all there is. Focus on what you have available in the present, not what you’re missing or what you think you won’t have in the future. When we’re not grateful, it seems like nothing will meet our needs. Everything is a black hole, so we keep striving for more.

3. The Self

We all see ourselves a certain way and are reluctant to change, even when that way creates a lot of suffering for ourselves and others. It takes great courage, an ability to pay attention, and a willingness to let go to begin to choose something different. This is the moment of waking up. 

Gaining a flexible sense of self starts with paying attention. First, we need to notice when we slip into thinking the self is permanent. Notice when you start focusing on my project, my team, and my money. Notice when you start to justify yourself or feel judged by others. Both are evidence of trying to prop up or defend something you believe is inherently, constantly, permanently you.

Second, we need to pay attention to where we get
caught in the world of shoulds: life should be different, this shouldn’t be happening to me, and so on. One way to show generosity is by using our strengths to support others. 

Strengths can be seen
as the gifts we’ve been given, like a sense of humor or the ability to edit grammar and writing. Choose to be generous with these gifts and use them
to benefit others.

4. Friendships

We sometimes view people as being a glass we can see through. We think we know everything about them. There’s nothing new for us to know about their personality or capabilities. In other words, we view them as static, unchanging things. We tell ourselves that “Tim is like that” or “Stacey is like this.” We don’t see how they are always changing right in front of us. If we view people as static objects, we won’t be curious to know more.

A key part of friendship is curiosity, and curiosity is linked to appreciation and caring. It drives us to see the uniqueness and nuance in the most mundane things. If you’ve worked with someone for a while, you might think you’ve reached the end of what you can know about her. Not true. You’ve simply stopped being curious and appreciative.

5. The Unknown

Sometimes, it’s good to think about the future. We need to plan, use a calendar, set goals, and so on. However, in thinking about the future, we tend to think we can control all the causes and conditions that make an outcome possible. Thinking this way brings a false sense of security and more anxiety. We cannot control all of the causes and conditions that make our lives function well. 

We cannot control the future. Finding pleasure in the unknown is an adventure that makes us human. It’s enjoying the mystery that is life rather than trying to solve the mysteries of life. The key idea is not getting caught up in the past, beating yourself up, ruminating, and so on. Let the past inform the present and the future so that you can act more skillfully.

This is an abridged script from Dr. Daphne Scott’s new book Waking Up a Leader: Five Relationships of Success.

Great philosophers have said throughout the ages that change is inevitable, and that certainly seems true in the moment we’re living through. How can we lead our teams through this time of disruption? It turns out that change is hard for humans, especially when our health, jobs, or the survival of our businesses depend on it.

Why is change so challenging for people, even when we know it is necessary or useful for us? It may have to do with how our brains are wired. According to integrative neuroscientist Dr. Evian Gordon, Ph.D., MD, maintaining safety is the core driver of brain function — what he calls the “safety 1st principle.” Our nonconscious brain can see even beneficial change as a threat. Change often requires that we learn new skills and build new habits, which challenge the certainty of our current actions and can make us feel we’re losing control.

Disruptive events create a perception of threat that can put management and executives tasked with leading change directly in conflict with their own brains’ core needs for safety and stability. At the moment when they need to be open, flexible, and adaptive, they may fall into the trap of being defensive, protective, and closed, undermining their own best efforts. Even the best technical and management solutions can’t overcome this evolutionary hardwiring of our brains. Leaders can explain the need to change all day, yet such rational, objective reasoning does little to make change successful.

So, how can we cultivate new patterns of thinking and ways of working together that allow us to embrace uncertain times?

Integrating rituals to practice openness, whether consciously designed or not, teams practice rituals that send their members messages, or cues, about what is safe, acceptable, and predictable. These rituals create and reinforce social norms. Rituals can be generative and can reward innovation and ingenuity, or they can send messages that cause team members to remain closed and protectionist — to shut people down — as we often see in siloed organizations. The regularity of rituals reinforces ways of thinking and behaving, so they become second nature to us. We can build in intentional rituals that allow people to practice remaining open and curious, creating new brain patterns that become stable over time, and that can persist even during times of change and uncertainty. The familiarity of rituals can give us a sense of certainty and stability, even as they are nudging us toward evolving and changing.

Peter Cooper, the legendary investor, founder, and CIO of Australian investment firm Cooper Investors, uses regular rituals based on neuroscience and universal human values of humility, curiosity, and being in the present moment. CI’s approach to rituals is not common in the financial industry, shiny object management trends, nor are they found in formulaic management techniques often taught in MBA programs. The rituals that CI regularly practices prime their employees to deal with uncertainty in the market and protect them from overcompensating in the face of threat. A ritual around humility, for example, can include regularly acknowledging that many investment decisions are based on incomplete information; it can be modeled by admitting mistakes and not doubling down on faulty thinking to save face.

Creating norms and rituals around being present can include explicitly calling out the typical biases and heuristics (mental shortcuts) that prevent us from observing things as they are — for example, our bias toward confirming what we already believe. Rewarding curiosity can cultivate learning mindsets, which are vital to being open to change and finding new possibilities. At CI, for instance, investors and executive leadership understand how rational thinking is only part of the problem-solving process, and they are allowed space to give both rational and intuitive explanations when thinking through complex problems.

As humans, change is never easy. We may be wired to resist it because of the “safety 1st” principle. Understanding and acknowledging that our nonconscious minds drive much of our conscious thoughts can help leaders and teams feel safe and stable, even during uncertainty. Building the right rituals can allow us to buffer against our automatic reflexes to threat and create social norms that reward the flexible, open thinking we need to keep up and thrive in uncertainty.

What have been your experiences been with overcoming the threat of change and forming new habits to adapt to challenges?

It’s that uncomfortable pause. It’s the tidal wave of uncertainty. It’s an indescribable feeling that something uneasy is just around the corner. Many label this feeling “waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

It’s an artificial roadblock fueled by inference that stops our thinking, energy, and natural flow of business, ideation, and relationships. It is causing individuals to ask at an all too frequent pace – when is the next shoe going to drop, and how will it affect me?

Shoe after shoe has seemingly dropped on top of us. And we are still here. Frazzled. Battered. Confused. But, breathing, surviving, and living. Yet, the wait for what is ahead is characterized by a chronic state of unease that often includes a sense of fear. It forces us to ask questions about a future state that exists only in our minds. It habituates a constant state of unease and doubt, forcing the “thinker” in each of us out of our current place of being and into an undefined future state. How can we live somewhere that doesn’t yet exist?

This raises every doubt we have about ourselves and our abilities, and even more importantly, it is a slow form of giving up on the future. It isn’t about the kind of certainty that we see when there is a fourth-quarter loss or a reorganization that brings both promise and challenge. It is about that unknown that you don’t see coming but still dread. It is that thing that you are overlooking or that comes out of nowhere, much like the unimaginable virus that inexplicably emerges and disrupts every part of our lives, our work, and the global economy. We know why we feel what we feel – but the inescapable feelings and negative thoughts persist and continue to compound.

Of course, there is always the quick answer that it’s a sign of the times and where we are today. Before this recent pandemic, even the historically strong financial markets were making us feel agitated and compromised, knowing it couldn’t last – even though we have no known timetable for it. We still waited for the change – hoping it would not appear, but intuitively knowing it was imminent. But “the other shoe” is more personal. It has to do with not feeling up to whatever is going to be asked of you. It has to do with the weariness of always being on alert. And mostly, it has to do with the loss of that undeniable feeling of being in flow when things go your way. We miss that when it isn’t happening.

In clarity, there is alignment, and we have a profound experience understanding that all things are connected. “The other shoe” is an intruder, the trespasser that violates our safety zone. The unexpected complication that no one could have anticipated. It is the X in the thought that “we’ll be fine as long as X does or doesn’t happen.” Some people call “the other shoe” bad luck. In clarity, we call it life.

The extraordinary thing about this feeling is that it often nudges us to activate our innate leadership skills. You can step into leadership at any time, and all have the capacity to be one. Leadership is really about being the person who stands up and leads the way with clarity and precision – requiring the leader to strike a balance between knowledge, experience, and the natural tendency to infer. Leaders have great ideas about what to do next, but even more importantly, they inspire others to have great ideas. Unfortunately, we forget that leadership often starts with us, as individuals, first.

One aspect of leadership that we encourage as a counter to this trend is to actively work on getting out of your head and learning how to ask for input. Our research has found that when leaders actively seek advice or elicit conversation around an issue, it helps to solidify what is more or less likely to be real. We encourage leaders to create personal dream teams or an advisory council that can help see things from a different perspective and help to bolster confidence against unexpected happenings.

As we are experiencing today, we know that life is uncertain. We dread the other “shoe drop” because an ancient part of our brains favors safety over risk – until taking a risk is the only way that leads to safety. I encourage leaders to couple an original thought or idea with something that is tried and true. This already feels like a win to your brain because it knows what can bring reliable results, but with the new part that can make it feel more relevant and ready for deployment, if and when needed. Having contingency plans that can be routinely updated with new and appropriate adjustments, keeps dread of the unknown from creeping in.

Dread and uncertainty about any hidden tripwire can always be assuaged by what I call guts and grit. This is the term for the hard decision that you know needs to be made. It is taking an honest look at something you don’t want to see. Mostly it is about stepping into your leadership where you know where you stand and what you have to offer. You step up. You are the volunteer – not of someone else’s cause, but your cause. You eagerly embrace what is hard and take it on – with your dream team or on your own. The thought of the unexpected happening is calmed by knowing you can take on whatever comes your way.

Control is possible even in chaos and uncertainty. We may not control the environment or the factors that are driving it. In essence, we do control our minds and our ability to more effectively attack or respond to any future “falling shoe” by living in the present moment. This is at the heart of mindfulness (and meditation), and something research has proven to change the brain composition and positively impact our flight or fight response to the unexpected. When we live in the present moment and not in fear for what is next or next after next, we allow our brain to slow down and allow us the rest to be prepared to tackle whatever shoe does fall.

Finally, an infusion of energy is vital to our positivity and outlook. Dread and unease create an oppressive atmosphere. Change the energy – your energy. Whether it is identifying your energy circuit breakers, those things that limit the flow of your energy or published circuit breakers like fear, inference, physical depletion, labeling, boredom, stress, resources, you can restrict the doubt creep and control the inputs to your brain. Believe that fortune’s smile is just a plausible as misfortune’s lousy visit. Positive energy is way more than merely trying to be happy – it is about being mindful, optimistic, inspirational, grateful, and yes, happy too.

Positivity is the glue that binds us to what is most important. When we allow in doubt when faced with uncertainty, we are removing the control that we, as leaders of ourselves, own. We are enabling others in some fictitious future state to control our minds, our energy, and, sadly, our future. We are allowing unknown substances to erase the positivity glue that holds our dreams, hopes, and future together. Be clear; another shoe will eventually fall. By acknowledging that you can cope, adapt, and navigate, you will be claiming your power over uncertainty.

Legend has it a man was driving his relatively new Rolls Royce across the English countryside. The luxury vehicle unexpectedly coughed, sputtered, and stopped running. 

Realizing it was several miles back to the nearest small town, he called the dealership where he had purchased the car for their advice. The friendly service tech got his location and promised to have a response in less than a half-hour. The man was a bit surprised since his Rolls dealership was two hours away. 

Twenty minutes later, a helicopter landed on the roadside near his Rolls, and a repairman got out and began to do mechanical surgery under the bonnet (a.k.a., hood). After a few minutes, the car was running perfectly again, and the helicopter departed as quickly as it had arrived. The man was very impressed by this James Bond-like over-the-top response.  

A couple of months later, he realized he had not received a bill for the miraculous roadside service. He called his dealership; they reported no record of a roadside repair. “But, where did the helicopter and mechanic come from?” he asked. The service tech suggested someone at the corporate headquarters might know and transferred him to the Rolls headquarters in Derby. 

Again, a friendly service person could not find any record of a service call and suggested he worry no more. As he was about to hang up, she warmly added, “Besides sir, Rolls Royce cars do not break down! They are built for the utmost perfection.”

Through the lens of this story, examine what it would take to create a magical myth that your offering was perfect, astonishing, remarkable, or practically a miracle. It starts with great pride in product and service coupled with the zeal to guarantee always to match your customers’ hopes, not their expectations. It requires elevating standards to the pinnacle of superiority. As my friend Shep Hyken would say, it also takes leaders who inspire employees to “be amazing or go home.”

Add Magic to Your Service Vision

How do service leaders foster a vision laced with magic? It starts with having a vision that excites, challenges, and points to a noble aspiration. 

Author Seth Godin sometimes asks his audiences to “raise your hand as high as you can.” After the audience complies, he adds, “Now, raise your hand a little higher.” You can predict the outcome. Everyone held back a little instead of complying with his initial request. 

Focusing on magic-making stretches employees to reach as high as they can every time.

Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company’s mission (or credo) contains “magic in the mission.” It reads: “The Ritz-Carlton experience…fulfills even the unexpressed wishes and needs of our guests.” 

Armed with this vision, a waiter at the restaurant at the Crystal City, VA property had an associate go to the theater in the adjoining shopping mall to get a box of popcorn when a guest asked his son what he wanted for dessert. “Popcorn,” the young man said. And, moments later, a bowl of popcorn appeared. But here is the best part. When the guest returned to the same restaurant a year later, he was asked by a different waiter, “Would you want popcorn for dessert again, sir.”

Show Associates the Magic You Expect

A mid-seventies age customer of Umpqua Bank stopped by the nearest branch to request a stop payment on a check he had written to a firewood supplier. The supplier had promised to deliver a load of firewood and split it. The firewood was delivered, but the supplier claimed he didn’t have time to split it! “Go get an ax!” was the solution the supplier offered when the elderly man asked how he was to get the wood split. The bank retail service manager had to inform the customer that, unfortunately, his check to the supplier had already been deposited.

For most banks, that would have been the end of the story. But, that’s not how the “World’s Greatest Bank” does customer service! With two other associates, axes in hand, the retail service manager drove eighty miles to the customer’s home. They split and stacked the wood and swept the garage clean! You can imagine the emotional impact on the customer whose only source of heating was his fireplace. Will Rogers wrote: “People don’t learn from conversation; they learn from observation.” 

According to the official Rolls Royce history, when Henry Royce was designing the first Rolls Royce, a colleague suggested he “turn out a reliable car at a low price.” Royce had a vision of magic—“the best motor car in the world regardless of cost.” Henry Royce (and his partner Charles Rolls) led with such purpose and conviction that the dream became a modern-day reality, one not possible without inspiring the fledgling Roll-Royce team to dream big, raise their hands high, and work with a spirit of magic-making! 

Bruce Hughes moves back and forth, yet goes nowhere. His arms and legs are constantly at work, pulling and pushing with rhythmic force.

Yet when Hughes rowed on a stationary machine for six days straight, covering 1,460 kilometers, he went further than he thought he could to raise funds for South Africa’s most vulnerable children. 

“Not everybody has the home they deserve,” Hughes says. But at Ingane Yami Children’s Village, orphans are given a house complete with foster parents and siblings. When Hughes heard about the initiative in 2013, he immediately fell in love with the organization and wished to see it grow. “It’s a great start and a great foundation to creating future leaders for our country,” he says. Having just completed the Atacama Crossing, a 250-kilometer marathon in the Atacama Desert, Hughes realized he could use his passion for extreme sports to help these orphans. 

In 2019, Hughes and his friends, Stefan Terblanche and Mike Morris, alternated turns to stationary row, completing the equivalent distance from the children’s village to Robben Island. The motivation behind this feat kept them going. “I know these children face harder challenges every single day,” Hughes says. Their stunt raised enough funds to build two new buildings that house six children each, creating a new and loving family for those in need. “Everybody can give back and everybody can make a difference, even if it’s a very small way,” Hughes says.

Dear Conscious Leaders,

During turbulent times, our leadership faces the biggest litmus test. And with the recent turmoil from Coronavirus (and other factors), you might be feeling that.

As a conscious, unstoppable leader, tough times aren’t only a test, they’re also an opportunity. Instead of flying by the seat of your pants, you have the chance to consciously evaluate your leadership, and in the process, you can emerge as a stronger leader while uplifting your team. 

The secret sauce is developing your executive function and staying present. 

When we face intense stress, fear can take over. Fear has three strategies: flight, fight and freeze. When none of those tactics work, our sense of vulnerability kicks in. When it does it’s telling us to connect. And the best thing to connect to is the present moment. To stay focused and certain and confident. And to lead others to that place. 

This is why we must develop our executive function; our capacity to reason with ideas, take time to think before acting, meet unanticipated challenges, resist temptations, and stay focused. 

In moments when you are out of your comfort zone, when the information you need is not available but you still have to make good decisions, your ability to remain present and think rationally is critical.  Just like any other skill, it can be learned and transformed into a habit. Imagine that ability kicking in as your autopilot instead of fear.

Your brain will try to fill in information gaps. This is where your leadership begins: leading yourself in these moments by providing the direction. There is always the choice to breathe and focus on the present. Give your brain that information. When you adopt and develop this practice and philosophy, not only can you feel centered, you can become unstoppable and lead others to be the same. 

If you need a crash course in developing your executive function, contact me and I’ll personally take you through The StillPoint Experience — a science-based solution to develop your ability to stay calm and make smarter decisions when you are out of your comfort zone and in the most trying of times.