On the surface, embedding innovation within an organization appears to be a relatively straightforward process: Hire some creative people, give them an office and budget, and prepare for breakthroughs. Unfortunately, as the saying goes, if it were that easy, everyone would be doing it.

Integrating an significant, new way of thinking and working into an organization is a complex process of addressing reporting relationship, accountabilities, turf battles, salary disputes, and office locations. Integrating innovation is even more complex in that successfully embedding innovation into people’s everyday ways of working requires fundamental contradictions to the already-always nature and make-u of enterprises. Institutionalizing innovation is not about implementation; it is about transformation.
Ideas Are Not Enough

Leading innovation means creating a context in which idea emerge from all corner and are potently monetized to create new value for customers and the organization. WE worked with a subsidiary of a Fortune 100 company that had successfully grown to dominant market share worldwide but stagnated with little room for further growth. The executive team set an ambitious goal for innovation: $150 million in revenue from new products that did not yet exist within 5 years. Six months later, they had generated many great ideas—but had made zero progress on execution.
Barriers to Innovation Execution

What happened? Great ideas, even great prototypes, are not enough for profitable innovation in large companies. Kodak famously invented and saw no value in the digital photography. Xerox invented and saw no value in the GUI, Ethernet, or Laser Printer. Control Data saw the PC revolution as a passing hobby. Procter & Gamble acquired the technology for its billion-dollar Swiffer from another company. Bill Gates bought DOS from Seattle Computer Products for $50,000.

How a new innovation occurs to people within a company corresponds to the actions that they do and do not take It is easy to wonder how Microsoft missed mobile, how Blockbuster could not anticipate Redbox and Netflix, or why VRBO or Marriot didn’t create Airbnb? Closer to home, why didn’t Bally, William Hill or Caesars create Poker Stars of DraftKings?

Over our 30 years working with executives in large, complex organization, we have identified three forces that inhibit innovation in these types of corporations:
Three Forces that Inhibit Innovation

• Corporate Gravity: like a force field that keeps people from venturing too far beyond the core business model, pulling for the predictability of what is, rather than what could be.
• Corporate Myopia: shortsightedness in which today’s business model supersedes the importance of future business opportunities.
• Corporate Immune System: organizational antibodies that thwart any deviation from what already is.

An Ecosystem for Innovation Execution

The role of leadership for innovation, then, is not to come up with great ideas. The role of leadership for innovation is to create a context and structure for fulfillment of ideas that emerge throughout the organization to ensure these ideas are invested in, fostered, nurtured, developed, tested, iterated, and monetized to fulfill strategy.

Back to that Johnson & Johnson subsidiary: Working together on a new context for the organization, the employees, management, and executive and executive leadership created a new context for the organization and took a stand. They expanded the scope of their business, something they previously assumed that corporate would not allow.

The leadership enrolled corporate and their own people in the new context for the company in a powerful way that touched, moved, and inspired people to take extraordinary action. Within six months, the subsidiary launched three new business units targeting three adjacent market segments. One of the three businesses fueled double-digit growth for the subsidiary for the next decade. Five years after the launch, the subsidiary had blown past its ambitious $150 million target with new products accounting for $500 million in annual revenue. Within a decade, revenue from the new business surpassed $1 billion.
Implement The Four Pillars of Enterprise Innovation

Good management creates predictability and eliminates variation. Good leadership accomplishes results outside of what is predictable and beyond business-as-usual. Both are required for innovation that continuously produces new streams of profitable revenue.

In their book Strategy Innovation, my colleagues Robert Johnston and Douglas Bate distinguish the four pillars necessary for innovation in large, complex organization:

1. Management Mandate

The senior leadership commitment to innovation, which could include tangible structure changes, clear accountability for those involved , and an impassioned appeal.

2. Dedicated Infrastructure

The establishment of an infrastructure specifically for innovation so that it has a home, resources with which to operate, and metrics to asses its performance.

3. Supportive Corporate Culture

The establishment of rules, norms, and recognition in support of innovation will ultimately create a culture that is supportive of innovation.

4. Proprietary Innovation Process

The development of a specific process for identifying and evaluating new business opportunities, e.g., the Discovery Process, unique to the company’s business and culture.

Each pillar is intended to simultaneously stand on its own and be correlated to and supported by the other three pillars. As a whole, the four pillars provide a pathway for where to take potent action to create a culture of innovation within a company. Together, the pillars protect against and inoculate the organization from the three forces that inhibit innovation They form the condition for an ecosystem in which innovation can be effectively managed to sustainably produce new profit streams.

Let’s dive deeper on one of the pillars: Supportive Corporate Culture.

Supportive Corporate Culture for Innovation

What do we mean when we talk about corporate culture? The simplest construct for corporate culture is:

“Whatever is reinforced and rewarded within a corporation”

Corporate culture could be thought of as the set of unarticulated rules for success inside the enterprise. If you think about it from a particular view, an organization’s current culture, processes, structures, and systems are artifacts of past successes and failures. To be successful in embedding innovation, the culture processes, structures, and systems need to be redesigned so that they pull for success in the future.

While many know theoretically that Peter Drucker was right when he said “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” few give as much thought to designing and changing their culture as they do their strategy. When customer preferences change and the market shifts, the first step often is to reevaluate the strategy not corporate culture. Culture seems like something amorphous and difficult to change. In fact, it is possible to transform corporate culture: to end one culture and create an entirely new culture that serves as a competitive advantage.
Culture: Past Successes Can Inhibit Future Success

When the competitive market changes faster than the organization, the old culture impedes success in the marketplace. Internally, however, the existent patterns of perceptions and corresponding patterns of action are validated and reinforced, and the old culture persists. What were proven processes, are improved. What were effective systems are refined and rebuilt. What were solid structures are re-balanced. All the while, corporate performance stagnates or then deteriorates.

“What do successful companies fail?” That was the question that inspired Clayton Christensen’s dissertation research—research that would eventually lead him to the theory of disruptive innovation. As an entrepreneur and consultant, Christensen had observed that many of the best performing companies were a few years later among the worse performing, often with the same CEO and executive team.

Lipstick on the Old Culture

No Matter how successful a company has been in the past, it cannot develop and implement powerful strategies and effective plans if it is operating with strategies, culture, processes, systems, and structures that no longer fir the demands of the marketplace. In order to regain competitive advantage, the company must transform itself by generating a new future for the enterprise that is founded in and has competitive advantages in the marketplace of the future. Commensurately the corporate culture must be a harmonic of the marketplace of the future, a corporate culture that is the source of competitive advantage, empowering and enabling people to invent new ways of competing and to change the rules of the game of the marketplace and the enterprise.

Unless the existing culture is revealed, accepted, and owned, any attempt at culture change will comply be lipstick on the old culture. The supposedly new culture will unwittingly inherit aspects of the old one that can undermine the effectiveness of the change effort.
Culture Transformation for Competitive Advantage

Once management has identified the existing culture, executives must then be willing to relate to it as merely the current paradigm for doing business in the company—”a way of working” rather than “the way the business works”—and then take responsibility for how they, and everyone else in the organization, participate in and reinforce that same culture. Only then is it possible to begin to design a corporate culture from the future to which senior management is committed, a culture that can be a source of competitive advantage, as opposed to being an attempt to fix, change, or improve on the past.

In a designed culture, people naturally innovate to fulfill the vision. In other words a designed culture pulls for the realization of the vision, strategy and intended results. This gives access to the extraordinary accomplishments and to producing measurable results that are beyond the predictable.

Where do you start? At a high level:

• Speculate on multiple scenarios for what the market will be like in the future (customer preferences, technologies available , social, economic, and political conditions, etc.) and upon what assumptions your scenarios rest.
• What kind of company would be successful in such a future?
• What kind of corporate culture would such a company have?
• What strategies would that company pursue?

A healthcare EVP recently told me about designing their culture, which they say is the reason that they have gone from an average to one of the top 10% health systems nationally over the last six years.

“We had a subgroup work on those values and bring them back to the leadership coalition. Time Rice then our CEO, was part of one of those subgroups and he espoused a certain set of values that stood up and was very strongly articulating why he believed the certain set of values that his group has come up with should be the values for our organization. One brave leader stood up and said, ‘I think those are totally boring and do not reflect who we aspire to as an organization.’ And that was transformational for us as a n organization: that na individual three levels below the CEO in a group of senior executives, physicians, and line staff could say, ‘Time, that’s not going to work for who we aspire to be and for the future of our organization.

We held our collective breaths, and then he said ‘You know what? You’re right. Let’s talk collectively about what the future of our organization is going to be about.’ And so again because our past had been so bureaucratic and top down—that we could say that, a leader in our organization, could say that our CEO and him be on board with it and accept that kind of pushback, that was a pivotal moment for us in our transformation.”

Innovation for the Rise-Averse: 70-20-10

Assuming that you have the four pillars and are generating ideas, how do you decide which ideas to invest in, whether that is internal or external? When most people think of innovation, they think of products, but research from Bansi Nagji and Geoff Tuff found that only 10% of the bottom-line returns from innovation came from product and service innovation within the core of the business.

In high-performing firms, strategy innovation takes place across three strategic horizons:

Three Horizons of Strategy Innovation

1. Core innovation of existing products and services
2. Adjacent innovation into similar markets using company’s core competencies.
3. Transformational innovation uses new business models o reinvent the rules of the market or invent entirely new markets.

On average, Nagji and Tuff found that 70% of the earnings return from innovation came from transformational innovation while only 20% from adjacent opportunities. Coincidentally, on average, they found that high-performing firms allocated 70% of innovation resources to core innovations, 20% to adjacent opportunities, and 10% to transformational initiatives. The authors note that the 70-20-10 is not a strict rule, but an average (“Managing Your Innovation Portfolio,” Harvard Business Review, May 2012).
Wynn Paradise Park: A Transformational Innovation On the Horizon?

What does transformational innovation look like in gaming and hospitality? Transformational innovation requires new business models. For example, Wynn Resorts recently announced that they are pursuing a two-tier business model of admission fees and ancillary F&B revenue. As Steve Wynn said in his announcement:

“I don’t give a damn if they put a nickel in a slot machine. I want them to pay my admission, I want them to stay in my rooms—I want them to drink my booze and eat our food.”

Whether the new model works or not is left to be seen, but new gaming resort models in the past have produced remarkable earnings growth: e.g., national data-driven loyalty program for Harrah’s/Caesars, convention mega-resorts for Venetian/Las Vegas Sands, and baccarat-driven super-luxury at Wynn.

Some might say it is the title, the paycheck, and the larger office (or at least corner spot in the open floor plan) that makes an executive. Though these are all typical trappings of being an executive, we have all encountered high-paid, corner office goobers who couldn’t scrape together a business plan if they were producing Shark Tank.

Perhaps our inquiry is aided by the soulful words of country music singer Chris Stapleton who writes, “I’m lonely because I drink and I drink because I’m lonely.” The being of an executive, possibly, is just that: a being. Though there are things an executive does (ex., gives direction, sets context, thanks people) and that an executive might have (ex., broader accountabilities, signing authority, a dedicated admin), these aren’t what makes an executive who they are.

Good News, Bad News

This notion of being an executive is interesting. Once when a long-time coaching client was promoted from senior director to vice president in a large company, he and I celebrated over a glass of champagne. During that conversation I said to him, “You know there’s bad news don’t you?” He asked what I meant.

I said, “There’s three parts of bad news, actually. First, you have just entered a completely new ballgame: the world of executive level politics. Second, almost certainly none of your new colleagues are going to tell you outright how to succeed at it. Third, the game starts now and you’re the worst player.”

Knowing that he was not going to be able to gain 20+ years experience of being an executive any time soon, it became clear to him that he was going to need a new plan. As we talked, I suggested to him that he might not need a new plan, it might be that he might need a new access to this world of the executive.

The new access we talked about was the being of an executive. It’s not about what an executive does or what they have or how they act, it’s about their way of being. Consider what constitutes such a way of being … we’ll pick this up in the next blog on this topic.

What is it about the boss? They’re always prepared. They got to the heart of my presentation in moments, though it took me hours to create. They just asked a question I should have seen coming. The question was neither pedantic nor tedious, simply illuminating, straight-forward and blunt. I care a lot about this business and success, but he seems to care about it at a higher level—it’s different.

What’s different about executives? We’re all dressed the same, but I realize we’re not. No matter what, his slacks and shirt are crisp and seem brand new; his shoes are always shined. Their suits seem tailor-made for fit, and they seem to always be a match for the situation. They’re perfectly comfortable and perfectly professional at the same time. Do they ever have a bad hair day?

What is the ‘it’?

It’s a simple question: what makes an executive an executive? They don’t become someone else when they get the title – they seem like they’ve always had ‘it,’ whatever it is. Executives have this it factor, but intuition tells me it is more than a matter of just what they do.

Executives have a way of being. Every executive is different, of course, simply as each is their own person. Yet, watch the executive in their native habitat. Observe how they deal with problems, opportunities, politics, and colleagues. Pay attention to on what they have their attention. Notice their stature, their presence, how they carry themselves and how they interact with others.

Executives are different. They aren’t like everyone else. We’ll continue exploring what makes an executive an executive in our next blog.

I have come to realize that a leader is a pathfinder. Leaders find the path; they are readers of the signs and the clues—they see and show the way.”

Transformational leadership starts with a deep exploration into the heart of the evolution of our true, authentic leadership and embracing the necessary changes important to our lives and in our leadership in order for us to grow and expand our horizons. 

With respect to Transformational leadership, changing the way you look at things, is really changing from the inside out. This takes self-awareness, courage, strength, mindfulness, and focus. Consider that managing change well is a new muscle in leadership. Take all the opportunities in front of you to practice exercising that muscle.

Once we recognize and embrace the changes necessary, then we can look newly at our core values, which are the fundamental beliefs of a person or organization. Core values are the guiding principles that dictate behavior and action. Core values can help us to know what is right from wrong; they can help companies to determine if they are on the right path and fulfilling their business goals; and they create an unwavering and unchanging guide.

In this final piece to this series here are some tools to help you utilize your Core Values and develop a purpose and clear vision for your future, which is an essential component of Transformational Leadership.

Imagine yourself and your organization 5 years into the future. What do you see? What does it look like? Be as specific as you possibly can. Write it down, perhaps you can create vision board, using pictures of what you imagine is possible and design a visual display.

Create and articulate a clear purpose and vision for this new future. This will give you and your organization direction, inspiration and intention. Fulfilling on a purpose and mission much bigger than yourself is at the heart of the matter of being fully alive.

Leaders invent the future, a future that wasn’t going to happen but for their saying so.  A
leader speaks for the future, dwells in the future and brings forth the future.  Leadership is fundamentally concerned with bringing forth a powerful VISION and FUTURE.

Leaders hear the “call,” and take daring and inspired action to design a structure for the fulfillment of that future. Then, they go on a campaign to share that future and enroll everyone around them into that possibility. They utilize innovative and creative ways for others to step into that future and be fully self-expressed to bring that new future into existence.

I wish you joy and success on your journey of Transformational Leadership.

In most organizations, most of the time, people focus on securing what they need from those they report to. I recently worked with a project team that committed to a bold increase in manufacturing production. Like project teams everywhere, they struggled to negotiate the demands placed on them by their leadership on one hand, and the on-ground realities and issues they faced on the other. The team met most requests from leadership with ‘yes,’ which naturally led them to over-commit and under-deliver on several metrics.

In a moment of clarity, they saw that they needed to have a new kind of conversation with their leadership; one that made it clear to everyone the consequences of continuing the dynamic they worked inside of. One team member characterized the need to say: “If we don’t have X, then we can’t do Y.”

The need to have this kind of conversation with those we report to is obvious; it opens communication channels, and has both parties relate to the facts as people on the ground see it. But, here’s the problem: we spend much more time thinking about what we need to say to others as opposed to thinking about what others need to say to us.

Ask people for what you need:

What do we need to be more effective in our roles?

• The ability to share the candid truth about the challenges we face
• Opportunities to pause the daily rush and plan strategically
• To renegotiate accountabilities we have

The truth is that we are not the only ones that have these kinds of needs. Your colleagues and the people that report to you do as well.

The moment the project team saw the need to address the constraints they faced with their leadership, they had a realization: the hourly factory work force, they themselves lead, likely had the same issues, and they had not spent time listening for those issues.

Proactively enabling the people you work with to address these issues makes them more effective; just as it would make you more effective were you able to address the critical issues you deal with in your work.

Guess what happens when you make the people around you more effective? It makes you a better leader.

How does one become a leader? Although human being have been studying leadership for millennia, the academic teaching of leadership to business people has only begun recently. Until the late 1970s, zero business schools and only three under-graduate schools in the U.S. taught leadership as a discipline: the United States Military Academy, the United States Naval Academy, and the United States Air Force Academy. The first doctoral program in leadership was not established until 1979. Paradoxically, leadership is an ancient discipline and at the same time, a new discipline.

15 Years Ago: Enron, Good to Great, and G&L

On Gaming & Leisure’s 15th Anniversary, we take a look at how our thinking on leadership has changed since 2001. That was also the year Enron collapsed, an event that started a conversation within the business community and business schools about how leadership is taught. In 2001, the latest work on leadership was Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and John Kotter’s Leading Change. It was the year that Jim Collins published Good to Great, and wrote “Level 5 Leaders.”

One of the great things about leadership is its enduring value: many old ideas (the Ancient Greek’s authentic leadership, Marcus Aurelius, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Burns’ X Theory and Y Theory, Bass’ Transactional and Transformational Leadership, etc.) are rediscovered. To honor Gaming & Leisure reaching this milestone, this article will focus solely on new scholarship published in the last 15 years to see how humanity today sees leadership differently than on the day when the publication was founded.

Since Gaming & Leisure was first published, there have been two major movements in the field of leadership:

A. Crucibles of Leadership—Warren Bennis and Robert J. Thomas (Harvard Business Review, 2002).

Harvard and USC professor Warren Bennis, a pioneer in the academic discipline of leadership, and consultant Peter J. Thomas interviewed 40 top leaders in business and the public sector and found something that surprised them: “All of them—young and old— were able to point to intense, often traumatic, always unplanned experienced that had transformed them and had become the sources of their distinctive leadership abilities.”: They called these experiences crucibles of leadership.

While many are defeated by crucible experiences, Bennis and Thomas distilled four essential skills for emerging from crucibles as a stronger leader:

Engage others in shared meaning
A distinctive and compelling voice
A sense of integrity (including a strong set of values)
The most critical skill: “adaptive capacity”

Adaptive capacity, they said, had two qualities: the ability to grasp context, and hardiness.

Grasping context is an essential skill that includes a spectrum of talents, from understanding how different people would interpret a gesture to being able to put a situation in perspective. Leaders who do not grasp context do not realize how their actions will be perceived, or fail to understand the biggest pictures in which circumstances happen.

Hardiness is an inner strength, which people draw upon to make it through challenging ordeals without losing hope. Hardiness, they said, came not only from an ability to put circumstances in context, but also from an ability to create a sense of belonging, hope, and optimism about change beyond themselves.

Using these skills, people emerge from the crucible stronger, more engaged and more committed than ever.

B. Creating Leaders: An Ontological/Phenomological Model— Michael C. Jensen and Werner Erhard, Handbook for Teaching Leadership: Knowing, Doing, and Being ed. Nitin Nohira, Rakesh Khurana, and Scott Snook (2011)

Bennis and Thomas’ surprising finding left a problem for educators: if all leaders must go through a crucible experience, what should one do to become a leader? Wait for a crucible to come along? We will return to that question in a moment, but first we have to return to the year G&L began publication.

As mentioned, 2001 was a turning point in the field of leadership. That is the year that Enron collapsed in scandal. What worried the academic community was that many of the executives at Enron and its auditor, Arthur Andersen, were graduates of the best business schools. In subsequent years, similar scandals at Tyco, WorldCom, HealthSouth, and Freddie Mac convinced many that something needed to change in business leadership education.

The Economist said in 2005, “The real problem arises when students, or their new employers, believe that an MBA is, somehow, a qualification for business leadership. It is not…” In a Harvard Business Review article the same year, professor Warren Bennis and James O. Toole pointed to what they and many other said was the source of the problem:

“Business schools are on the wrong track… The actual cause of today’s crisis in management education is far broader in scope and can be traced to a dramatic shift in the culture of business schools… This scientific model, as we call it, is predicated on the faulty assumption that business is an academic discipline like chemistry or geology. In fact, business is a professional, akin to medicine and the law, and business schools are professional school—or should be.”

The intent of the scientific model, its philosophical traditional, is knowing. For example, university students learn what is known about chemistry until they know chemistry themselves. Similarly, the preferred method of leadership research and teaching in the 20th century was knowing: observe or interview successful leaders, identify what qualities or skills they have in common, and teach those qualities and skills to students until they knew those qualities and skills. However, as anyone who has tried to lose weight or improve their fitness has experienced, knowing does not always equate with doing. Learning about leadership or knowing about leadership does not make one a leader.

This article also appears on Insigniam’s Enterpise Transformation blog.

Harvard Business School professor emeritus Michael C. Jensen and Werner Erhard began teaching a one-semester course in business schools, medical schools, and military academies with one objective: “Leave students who complete the course actually being leaders and exercising leadership effectively as their natural self-expression.” They put aside what they knew about teaching leadership and used the courses and laboratories in which to experiment, test, and iterate on theories about what it takes to leave people being leaders and exercising leadership effectively as their natural self-expression. They even considered the radical notion that such a course might never mention the words “leader” or “leadership.” Early in their work, they distinguished two theories of leadership and experimented with both:

1. “From the Stands” Third-Person Theory of Leadership: being and action are observed and commented on by someone, and then described, interpreted and explained.
2. “On the Court” First-Person Theory of Leadership: being and action are really experienced as lived in real time.

Bennis and O’Toole said that all leaders go through a crucible. Jensen and Erhard sought to design a semester-long crucible experience that would intentionally leave students being leaders by the end. Eight years later, Jensen and Erhard along with Kari ranger from the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Center for Character and Leadership Development published the underlying theory for their course in the Handbook for Teaching Leadership edited by Harvard’s Nohira, Khurana, and Snook. The underlying theory of course had three parts:

• Foundational Context that Users You: integrity, authenticity, being committed to something bigger than oneself, and being cause in the matter as a context that uses you.
• Contextual Framework for Leader and Leadership: leader and leadership each exist as linguistic abstractions, phenomena, concepts, and terms.
• Removing Ontological Perceptual and Functional Constraints: Having mastered the context that leaves one being a leader and exercising leadership effectively as one’s natural self-expression, what remains is to remove what interferes with or limits one’s natural self-expression: ontological perceptual constraints (unexamined assumptions) and functional constraints (knee-jerk reactions).

Using in-class and out-of-class exercises and assignments, students in the course experience for themselves the various elements of the context for leader and leadership, mastering the context by making it their own and having whatever personal transformation that they need to have to leave the course being a leader. Early results are promising: in course evaluations, 88% to 93% of students report that the course delivered on its promise. Texas A&M is currently conducting a longitudinal study to see if those results last.
Conclusion: The Next 15 Years

Over the last 15 years, the focus of leadership research has shifted from the qualities and skills of leaders to what it takes to be a leader. While militaries have been turning young people into leaders for millennia and many of us personally know good business and community leaders, we still know surprisingly little about what it takes to become a leader ourselves or teach others to be leaders. With early signs of a reliable methodology for creating leaders, perhaps by Gaming & Leisure’s 30th anniversary, we will finally be able to answer the age-old question: how does one become a leader?

Nate Rosenberg, Jr. is a consultant with Insigniam, an management consulting firm with offices in Asian, North America, and Europe. He recently worked with a hospitality REIT to increase operating profit at its properties by $17 million using strategy innovation. For over 30 years executives around the world have used Insigniam consultants to generate and execute new growth opportunities, install powerful corporate cultures, develop transformational leaders and produce breakthrough results.

Well, simply, there is none.

Since the 1960’s, personality assessment tools have been used in corporations large and small to help individuals better understand themselves, their work, and their colleagues. Starting with Myers-Briggs in the 60’s, and now including Lumina Spark and dozens of others, these personality assessment tools inspire breakthrough performance by changing the way people relate to their work, and with whom they work.

In the tumultuous contemporary business climate, I would argue it is critical to understand how you are perceived and gain better insight into your perceptions of others. Perhaps most importantly, discovering how to communicate so that you are speaking to the way everyone is listening, instead of just a few, will be more likely to yield breakthrough performance and results. As a leader of a team or organization, it is simply insufficient to say or tolerate the stance of, “this is how I am, take it or leave it!” We must explore how leadership styles, as perceived by others, is central to motivating and leading others towards a greater end.

Perception is Reality…or is it?

How many times have you thought about your style of leadership? Or how it is perceived by others? Or, before a meeting with your team, have you wondered if your commitment to Breakthrough Performance will be truly heard as such, and not as a complaint or criticism?
Or if you’re speaking to a large audience, how do you reach everyone, and not just those who “speak your language” or style?

Are you an Introvert or Extrovert, and does it impact your effectiveness as a leader?

Contrary to previous schools of thought, being a leader does not require one to be extroverted, or results-driven. Despite this conventional sentiment, that is simply not the predominant portrait of leadership in the corporate world today. More and more attention is being given to “embracing the paradox” of seemingly opposite “types” or styles. Bringing empathy and a focus of valuing people is rising in importance. The corporate world of today is complex and constantly changing. To achieve Breakthrough Performance, one must be aware of and adapt to this complexity. There is no “right” style of leadership. Good leaders are inclusive of all styles.

Since the currency we use in business is language, or communication, let’s start with how we as leaders can best communicate to achieve Breakthrough Performance.

Five Easy Steps to Communicate to All Styles

First, write your entire message, talk, or presentation.

1. Re-read it, and briefly Bullet key points, removing all excess and superfluous words. (Less is more – I typically reduce my emails by 1/3 or more.)
2. Make sure you leave people in Action, and be very clear about what you’re requesting, mandating, or suggesting. If nothing else, ask them to identify one thing they’ll start doing or stop doing as a result of your communication.
3. Start and close with something with a personal touch – welcoming people at the beginning by focusing on being INTERESTED (not INTERESTING), and closing with authentically acknowledging and appreciating them for their time, participation, intellectual effort, etc.
4. Be Inspired yourself, and you’ll be Inspiring to others. Create your WHY or purpose for the communication, beyond the obvious.
5. Include supporting Data and Details as an attachment, rather than including it in the body of the message.

In essence, be inclusive and speak to all styles and you will reach people and inspire them on to Breakthrough Performance.

Where breakthroughs start

At their heart a breakthrough is about one thing: honoring commitments. Breakthroughs start with the commitment to deliver a breakthrough. Instead of a ‘nice-to-have’ or setting a goal with someone else, try creating an explicit, public promise to deliver a breakthrough. This is essential, especially in those circumstances in which what it will take to deliver that breakthrough is unknown. This is because what is absent is very powerful and a shared commitment to have a breakthrough is the only thing that can compel a group of people to act in ways that truly marks a departure from how things are usually done.

What it looks like to deliver a breakthrough

Promising to deliver a breakthrough is not sufficient to delivering a breakthrough. Consider the prospects of a team that has committed to an unprecedented result for their organization, but fails to fulfill the promises to each other needed to make that breakthrough happen along the way. The prospects are dim; they will fail. There is no hope for organizations that fail to do what they said they were going to do when it comes to delivering a breakthrough.

Doing what one says they are going to do is the foundation of breakthrough results. Making promises that directly forward the breakthrough result and rigorously accounting for the promises is what it looks like to do the work needed to deliver a breakthrough.

Things to consider
• What will it take for me, and the people around me to commit and promise a breakthrough?
• What are the specific, discrete actions that need to take place such that a breakthrough is realized?
• How can we promise and rigorously account for those promises as our work unfolds?