Introduction: How can a company improve its thinking skills? How can it make shrewd sense out of what it perceives? How can it exercise imagination and creativity, and enrich what it does by expanding its options?
How can it make effective decisions that optimize its efforts by thinking both quickly and well? Here we will consider your people and roles they need to play as we challenge them to think well as a team.
They have to know what to do to develop the mindset of deliberate thinkers. They need to have the wherewithal to observe themselves in action and to critique their own performance.
This critique has to be applied to individual contributions, as well as to the group’s contributions. People must recognize the difference between constructive, contrary thinking and destructive obstructionism.
They need to have the confidence to critique people in all positions and at all levels based on objective, performance based criteria, not personality.
You can’t leave it to chance. You can’t just expect it to happen (although expecting it is critical). You have to attend to it in a deliberately way that builds the skills. The more you help everyone to become better trained thinkers, the savvier your company will be, and the better your organization will think as a group.
CEO As A Thought Leader
The CEO: The CEO ultimately sets the levels of tolerance within the organization. The CEO tolerates something, or doesn’t. The CEO not only models the level of rigor that’s acceptable, but s/he has the power of position to demand more, or better, from others.
Standards develop not only by what is said, but also by what is deemed to be sufficient---what is tolerated. Expectations are established by not taking action, as much as by taking action; any behavior you accept validates that behavior. Consider the role of the CEO as the thought leader of the organization.
If not the CEO, then who? (See section 8, thought partnerships and the Leadership Profile).
What does it mean to be a thought leader in this context? How do you lead the company’s thinking? How do you provoke the conversations that lead to the learning you want to be a part of your culture day in and day out?
How do you fire up the imagination of your collective human resources? As the steward of the company’s assets, how do you measure the ROI on its brainpower?
Action Steps To Encourage Rigorous Thinking
There are a number of things that you can do if you see thought leadership as part of your leadership role. You can produce improved thinking skills by starting the following practices: (many of these issues are discussed in the chapter on smart organizations.)
- Make agendas available well before meetings are convened to discuss and decide issues. Expect preparation. Don’t allow off-the-cuff conversation to suffice. Don’t allow opinions and intuitions to dominate your deliberations.
- Broaden any discussion by appointing a person to perform in the role of “contrary.” In this context, a contrary is a person assigned to think about the issue from a non-traditional perspective, or a viewpoint opposite to the establishment’s point of view. This person thinks as the outsider or the competitor.
S/he deliberately thinks from a different viewpoint. This is NOT an assignment to be difficult or obstructionist. Anyone can mindlessly criticize or find fault. This role requires a thoughtful, considered advocacy of a separate point of view, designed to ensure thorough discussion and deliberation. It is easier to play this role if you’ve been invited to play it.
It is easier to play this role if it is shared by others, including the CEO, across a variety of issues deliberated over time. (See Devil’s Advocate)
- Continue to talk about the business idea with passion and creativity. This idea has the power to excite others. People want to be excited about what they’re doing, about how they spend themselves in their work.
By encouraging people to continue to imagine new ways to play out the business idea, which is illustrated in a number of the stories and profiles presented throughout this text, you’ll be stretching your company’s imagination.
- Imagining the company in various future scenarios can be thought of as rehearsing for the future. It is difficult for anyone, or any organization, to cope with an event they have never imagined. Leading the organization to consider reasonable possibilities stretches the organization’s ability to think about itself. (See scenario planning.)
- Instituting ongoing conversations about the work involving multi-level, cross-functional groups fosters awareness within the company of how the company is thinking.
- Attacking select problems through a red team/blue team format is another vehicle for building a company’s thinking skills.
- Establishing a robust system of after action reviews generates a good deal of value.
Action Steps For Stretching The Executive/Leadership Team As Thinkers
The Executive/Leadership Team: I’ve been in many companies where the executive team (they might be the lead thinkers and decision-makers, even if they aren’t officially “executives”) is comprised of people in competition with each other for the company’s resources.
They operate from the perspective of serving their individual missions rather than maximizing the outcomes sought by the enterprise. I have also seen executive team members approach each and any problem from within their own typical intellectual posture.
If this is a description of your leadership team, change their focus. This group can and should become a think tank for the company. You must channel their intellectual capabilities, orchestrating them the way a conductor handles a symphony orchestra. They won’t automatically act that way if they aren’t expected to do so.
Create cross-functional problem solving teams rather than keeping all responsibility for functional programs within one function. Help internal suppliers and customers collaborate for innovation.
By implementing and supporting effective leadership techniques, demand that these people, your best thinkers, continue to evolve their thinking skills. Your staff meetings have to become a “No Coasting” zone.
Action Steps For Stretching High-Performance Teams As Thinkers
High-Performance Teams: Being on a truly high-performance team can be a profound experience. Many people say that they’ve been on such teams, but that is because they have a weak understanding of what a high-performance team really is.
A high-performance team should be defined as a team (people with a shared responsibility for creating a common outcome) that is motivated by a truly compelling purpose. It cannot be framed as a team that deals with mundane or pesky problems.
It has to strike people as a mission worthy of sacrifice. In short, people are willing to take a hit for this team’s success because the goal is so worthy.
If the goal is that important, people have to be free to focus on it with all of their attention. If you want to create a high-performance team to achieve an extraordinary result, the members have to be free to focus. It won’t work if they are on six high-performance teams simultaneously.
It won’t happen if the folks are constantly distracted by day-to-day functional problems. (As an aside, the existence of a high-performance team culture makes it less threatening for managers or executives to have people trained to fill in for them if they are on temporary high-performance team duty.)
High-performance teams are collaborative and flexible. They engage in social innovation, that is, they are comfortable in doing what works rather than staying within old, rigid roles, relationships and/or processes.
People on these teams learn as they scramble to address difficult problems in new ways. Without these conditions, performance may be good, but it isn’t likely to be extraordinary.