The Crazy Ones: How to be a Leader that Inspires Creativity and Innovation

Photo by paul bica

 

“My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.” - Steve Jobs, Apple, Inc.

 

Many companies are striving to achieve Apple's level of creativity and innovation, but they don't have the type of culture and leadership to support this goal.

 

Stephen Gates, VP and Creative Director, Global Brand Design, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, presented "The Crazy Ones: How to be a Leader that Inspires Creativity and Innovation" at the Total Customer Experience Leaders (TCEL) Summit in Miami, Florida. Here are the seven characteristics of leaders vs. managers he shared:

 

• Execution vs. leadership: Managers think that anyone can lead a team. Leadership isn't telling people what to do. Leaders empower them to find their own solutions and embrace their own process.

 

• Status quo vs. beliefs: Managers believe in the status quo of doing things the way they've always been done. Leaders know that having beliefs gives your team something to rally around and it creates an identity.

 

• Best practices vs. real insights: Managers think they will find innovation in studies, conferences, and consumer research, but they keep you at the same level as your competition. Leaders know you have to look beyond shared knowledge and have your team spend time finding unique perspectives.

 

• Execution vs. ideas: Managers have deadlines. Leaders have ideas. Deadline-driven groups are a commodity. Idea-driven groups are a critical asset.

 

 

• Words vs. actions: Managers are all talk with little to no follow through. Leaders value actions over words.

 

• Emotional deafness vs. self-awareness: A lot of leadership has nothing to do with your team and everything to do with you. Leaders take time to understand how their teams work. People need to feel inspired, invested and protected to do their best work.

• Good vs. great: Managers do good work. Good work is a compromise. Leaders understand that good work is the single greatest threat to great work. Great work is born out of passion, investment and attention to detail and creates a culture of dedication beyond reason.

Stay tuned for more customer experience insights shared at this week's TCEL. Stay connected at:

• twitter.com/TotalCustomer #TCEL14
• linkedin.com/Total Customer Experience Leaders
• facebook.com/TotalCustomer

Peggy L. Bieniek, ABC is an Accredited Business Communicator specializing in corporate communication best practices. Connect with Peggy on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and on her website at www.starrybluebrilliance.com.

NACCM 2009: Going for Gold: Living Up to Olympic Size Expectations

Going for Gold: Living Up to Olympic Size Expectations
Rick Burton, CMO, United States Olympic Committee 2008, David Falk Professor of Sport Management, Syracuse University and Co-founder of Sportgiving

Most of the attendees know more about service customers than Mr. Burton. But he will share a few stories that challenge our thoughts and return the messages back to our businesses.
Burton has had many roles in his careers, including beer, football, college kids, the Olympics and college kids. He’s willing to challenge authority and challenge the rules.

He once worked with the NFL. The NFL gave the fans what they wanted. More scoring, this includes bringing in the uprights for limiting field goals. The NFL was listening to the customers and brought in more touchdown.

Customers need to come first. Burton has always been inspired by sports. How can the Nike video below inspire your company? Nike gives athletes the chance to keep on going, challenge their borders and go farther than they’re able to. The company started by athletes for athletes. They want to give them better products and a better chance to thrill them.

He was able to be the Chief Marketing Officer going into the 2008 Olympic Games. His companies involved were Coca Cola, Budweiser, Bank of America, and Kellogg’s. These business are the best at what they do, but no one person can take credit for the greatness of the Olympics. He was a part of the team, and they needed the ability to sell their products and make sure their customers were satisfied, whether if it was Corn Flakers or a bank account. AT&T put on a program where each night a song was featured. When users downloaded the song, the proceeds went back to the athletes. The ratings were very, very high, and it was also available across many platforms.

The thing about the Olympics, do your employees see themselves as champions? Athletes have to become champions by going on step at a time. In great leadership, you must be able to bring more out of the people around you.

You must trust: vision, staff, peers, product, organization, faith, view of the world, and yourself.
Are you sacrificing your creativity by not taking enough time for vacation and letting yourself relax? “Change or die” is crucial for how you live and interact with the world around you.
Children’s books and movies can be a source of inspiration.

What are three things your customers need? What are three things that your customers want and you’re not giving them? How often do you dream ahead 6 months in your business, in your career and in your customers. What would you like to see? If you don’t see anything, what does this mean for your creativity? Are you searching for excellence or settling for mediocrity?
Wow. What’s your definition? What’s your new outlook for your business?

All Fired Up

This is posted on behalf of JoAnna Brandi. It is co-posted on the Customers 1^st Blog and JoAnna Brandi blogs.

Over the last year I’ve done some things that have some of my friends wondering about me. Maybe it’s that I’m getting better with age. Maybe it’s being afraid to age. Maybe it’s all these happiness coaches I hang out with and study with.

One of the things we learn in happiness training is that positive psychologists have proven that the more time you spend using your strengths the happier you are. That makes sense. When you are doing something you are good at you feel good, and you usually get better at it. When you spend a lot of time doing something you are not good at you usually don’t feel as good.

I can relate.

So it turns out that the psychologists have found – and have evidence to support this – that if you identify your top strengths and spend time each week deliberately working to improve them, you will be happier over time. Certainly happier than if you identify your weaknesses and spend time each week trying to improve them. (Which is basically what I HAD been doing.)

All righty then. Let’s get going.

And so I went to www.viastrengths.com to identify my top strengths. (Warning: don’t go there without a food or at least a beverage – the instrument they use to determine your strengths is long and a tad redundant, you’ll need at least a cup of tea or equivalent to get through it.)

My first strength is creativity – that was fun. I knew that, so it’s always fun to find ways to be more creative. My second strength it turns out is bravery and courage.

What? Me? That was a bit of a shock. And so it was that I began challenging myself in ways I never thought I would. It all began with ziplining last year in Costa Rica.

http://www.monteverdeinfo.com/canopy/tour.htm It looked something like this.

Soaring some 120 feet above the ground scared the devil out of me, but in the end, I was thrilled and excited that I had done it – and done it with a good attitude. I chose excitement over fear. I told everyone that would listen about my “SuperCheeka” experience and reveled in the admiration. Me, a perennial scaredy cat, doing something brave and courageous - how cool was that?

So I figured I’d done my brave deed and that would be that.

Until I got that email from Connie and Karen. They are friends of mine from South Florida. They do workshops too. We met about five or six years ago and have a lot in common. Except that when you take one of their empowerment workshops you break things, bend things and end the evening walking on fire.

I swear, I never, never had the desire to walk on fire.

They’d been kind about inviting me to come and see their work, but I’d declined each time, until one day I got an email that said they were filming a corporate video and we asking friends to participate since there would be cameras starting and stopping and bright lights in the night. They invited friends that would be patient and would work with the awkward situation.

It’s tough enough to do the activities in that workshop – and with a cameraman in your face – well!

Well 53 friends showed up! From early afternoon until late in the night we broke boards, bricks and arrows. We bent rebar, walked on glass and then at the end of the night topped it all off with a little walk on fire. Everybody chose to walk (they say that never happens.) Even the cameramen walked (on walked while pointing the camera down on his feet.

Everyone did the firewalk – about 1250 degrees at its hottest – and no one burned their feet. When you walk on fire things change. You learn that your mind is powerful. You get to see your patterns. You think differently about beliefs. There was no hypnosis involved. All choice.

I’m the second one you’ll see on the video – busting through the brick. And now I’m all fired up, because I have this belief that when I put my mind to something (and keep it there) that I can make it happen.

By the way – want a firepower seminar? Call me, I’ll fix you up. We now proudly tell our clients that board breaking and even firewalking are optional add-ons to any of our workshops. Empowered? You bet! Whooooooooooowahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! http://firepowerseminars.com

Also, check out JoAnna's first customer service message for Customer Service Week here:
http://www.customercarecoach.com/csw2008/CSW_day1.asp

If you’d like to see more of Joanna Brandi’s blogs, visit JoAnna Brandi’s Blogs. You can also find out more by visiting her Customer Care Coach website. Joanna Brandi will be a keynote speaker at this year’s North American Conference on Customer Management, and has already been profiled on our Customer 1^st blog. Stay tuned for her posts on the Customers 1^st blog!

A Gold Medal for FUN

This is posted on behalf of JoAnna Brandi. It is co-posted on the Customers 1^st Blog and JoAnna Brandi blogs.

It all started as a crazy idea. From an intern nonetheless. While the “real” Olympics were taking place in China the folks over at the Midwest ISO were having an Olympics all their own.

The intern - Brooke Rodda - thought it would be great fun to come up with some challenges for interdepartmental games, and it was easy to think how that might just be good for morale.

Deb Lang, Director of Training, liked the idea and built on it. Deb’s big on teamwork and fun so the idea instantly appealed to her. As fate would have it, the Friday before a box of “BeanBoozled” had landed on her desk and she saw immediate application. (For the uninformed like me - it’s a box of BeanBoozled jelly beans - 10 colors of beans and 20 flavors - every color has one tasty flavor, and a disgusting flavor - the idea is that you never know whether you are about to get a good one or a bad one. This, apparently, makes it ideal for party games.)

This instantly started Brooke’s mind going in the direction of whacky games – one having to do with blindfold bowling another with condiment painting (held in the cafeteria at lunchtime of course.) Before long she and her team of equally creative thinkers had planned the games and word rapidly spread throughout the company grapevine and more people came on board. “We want to be involved too,” was the most common sentiment heard. Energy and excitement were building.

By the time the day for the Olympics arrived representatives from several divisions withing the company were on board, with more joining in to coach from the sidelines as word continued to spread.

The Olympics occurred mostly in 15 minute increments so not to take too much away from the work days. These short burst of activity really energized people throughout the five day competition.

I just happen to call on the last day and got a “blow by blow” on the final minutes of the events. I sat laughing in my parked car while a thunderstorm threatened right behind me. I had to make sure my car was not moving because I laughing much too hard to be driving.

Since I wanted to find out the results, I called back the next week and got the scoop. “So what did you get out of it?” I asked.“Besides fun? Team participation, increased communication between departments, memorable common experiences, innovation, engagement.”

“I gather then, this is only the first of your Olympics,” I asked.

“Yep, the first Annual.”

A tradition is born. All because a company was open enough to listen to a suggestion of a young intern – a crazy suggestion at that.

Gary Hamel, oft called the world’s greatest strategist, says that we need to find ways in companies to create thousands of crazy ideas, and out of the thousands we’ll distill them down to hundreds of not-so-crazy ideas, and out of them perhaps 10 or so viable ideas and out of the one or two really really great ideas that will fundamentally change the nature of our business and give us a competitive edge. Congratulations Midwest ISO, you’ve got a great start.

If you’d like to see more of Joanna Brandi’s blogs, visit JoAnna Brandi’s Blogs. You can also find out more by visiting her Customer Care Coach website. Joanna Brandi will be a keynote speaker at this year’s North American Conference on Customer Management, and has already been profiled on our Customer 1^st blog. Stay tuned for her posts on the Customers 1^st blog!

Doing More With Less

This is posted on behalf of JoAnna Brandi. It is co-posted on the Customers 1^st Blog and JoAnna Brandi blogs.

I’m an “expert” columnist for Customer Advantage Newsletter and ever few weeks or months they send me questions which I answer. I almost always forget to publish those Q & A’s and so today with my new eyes on potential blog posts I answered one of their questions and then before filing it away said “Yippee! A blog post!” So here we go.

The question: Customer demand is rising, but we can’t add more people to Service. So we have to do more with less. What’s a good way to approach this situation?

The way you frame the situation is important. You must come at it believing that every one on your team is smart, creative, talented and has something to contribute.

In order to bring out the brilliance in everyone in your organization, you must believe this (or ‘act as if’ you do until you realize it’s true). In holding open the possibility that people will shine they usually do. People live up (or down) to our expectations of them. If we expect and empower them to be competent, creative, innovative problem solvers who create exquisite experiences for customers, they’re more likely to do so.

Once you hold this as true it’s time you give people the chance to help. In a meeting, start with the truth.

“I know we would all like it if we had more resources, but we don’t and in the short term, won’t. We can’t do anything about that but what we CAN do is start getting really creative around here and find ways to work around the reality we’re faced with. I believe this team has the talent and ingenuity it takes to come up with solutions to even our toughest challenges. Let’s brainstorm some ideas together and get started.”

Set aside real time for brainstorming (no judgments, no idea-killer phrases, set amount of time where anything goes.) Get people limbered up with some silly challenges “52 ways you can use a teabag” and when they are loose and laughing introduce your real challenges.

Try using analogy “If this were a zoo (a garden, a circus etc.) how would we look at it?”

Convince yourself and your team that you have the creative potential to discover solutions for any problems and you will. A hint – little rewards, like mini candy bars, stress toys and kazoos always make creative sessions more fun. Once people are in the habit of being more solutions focused you reinforce it when ever you see it. “Jill, I am always so amazed by the way you come up with out of the box solutions that make our customers happy. Great work.”

You might even want to have a once a month celebration for the most workable solutions. Even in the most severe of situations there’s always enough for movie tickets and popcorn rewards.

My answer: The first thing you need to know is that you are not alone. Companies everywhere are asking people to do more with less. The second thing you need to know is that times like this give us the opportunity to show how good we really are. I believe that most of us have the ability to do a little better every day.

If you’d like to see more of Joanna Brandi’s blogs, visit JoAnna Brandi’s Blogs. You can also find out more by visiting her Customer Care Coach website. Joanna Brandi will be a keynote speaker at this year’s North American Conference on Customer Management, and has already been profiled on our Customer 1^st blog. Stay tuned for her posts on the Customers 1^st blog!

Customer Service Innovation: How to get there

In a recent blog post at Creativity At Work, they highlight ten ways to stay in the game when it comes to service innovation and keeping your customers at the center of the customer service strategy.

The ten reasons listed were:

1. Approach Service as if you were the customer -- See what part of your business customers are having the most trouble relating to, or the most difficult part of the shopping process you put them through. Fix those parts of the process.

2. Create a process map and identify service bottle necks – What are the steps, processes and people that a customer comes to your business? If you see the whole process, and identify the troubled points, the whole company can see what they can adjust to make the service better.

3. Work backwards from the ideal state to a solution. Find where you want to be, and work from that solution down to fix the service in your company. If you start a beginning point, it’s very easy to get off track and not end at that solution.

4. Benchmark to establish standards and reference points. See what other companies are doing to measure and make their service better throughout the company. Strive to be like those best companies.

5. Copy the innovations of industry leaders: Customers look for consistency when shopping with companies. See how other companies are finding and keeping customers through the consistency with their services.

6. Measure and monitor current levels of service: Survey the customers to find their levels of satisfaction, and this will also show where the company is not pulling their weight in certain categories of service.

7. Solicit ideas from employees: Brainstorm with your employees to find out what they know the customers to want. They’re in constant contact with the customers and could have a potential solution to that one thing you’re having trouble with.

8. Solicit ideas from your customers: It’s your customers you’re trying to please, so find out what you could do to make them happy through market research, customer surveys and other means.

9. Seek an outside perspective: Look to other who have no idea of the situations your dealing with. Their clear view could help you find the solution.

10. Employ performance tools like a Balanced Score Card: Find a way to link your service measurement to your company strategy. This process needs to be measured in order to know if you’re making progress.