Summer Edition #1: Growing up
It's summer break here, so for the next few weeks, a compilation of the most popular 5MSM segments from the past year.
Wake-up call
Picture this: It's early morning on Wednesday, and instead of checking emails, I'm Googling heart attack symptoms. Why? Because I woke up feeling like an elephant was sitting on my chest.
Dizzy? Tick. Tingling extremities? You bet. Every website I looked at said, "Get to a hospital." So, I Uber'd my way to ED faster than you can say "ambulance."
Good news: Not a heart attack. Bad news: Atrial fibrillation, or AF. My cardiologist's witty diagnosis? "It's more an electrical problem than a plumbing issue."
It was an experience that, for me, was terrifying until my heart ‘reverted’ mid-afternoon, but by the evening had become salutary. As you know, my brain is wired to think about strategy, so lying in my hard hospital bed, I started thinking: “What are the incalculable contributors to risks in a business?”
Take the lifestyle contributors to AF for instance. They include dehydration (sometimes due to too much caffeine and alcohol!), not enough sleep, and too much stress. Tick, tick and tick. But I never imagined my heart would give up its normal functioning — at least, not yet — provided I lived a healthy life with good diet and regular exercise. Tick and tick.
How is that similar to your protective mechanisms in your business? Do you think you’re ‘playing it safe’ — until you realise you’re not?
Question: What do you take for granted — until you don’t have it?
Fellow adults
Talking of sleeplessness, what about the yawn-fest known as corporate values? You know the ones I’m talking about: respect, integrity, professionalism. A few others.
“What’s wrong with those!?” I hear you exclaim.
To be blunt, they're not values—they're a bare minimum. It's like a restaurant bragging about not poisoning customers. Or the confectioner down the street when I was growing up advertising, “Delicious Cakes” on their window. “What other types are there?” I wondered as a ten year old.
So, these are not something you should advertise; they’re something you should assume.
I’d rather have values that predict the success of my organisation.
Look at Amazon’s leadership principles of ‘customer obsession’, ‘invent and simplify’ and ‘bias for action’. Or Netflix’s principles of ‘people over process’ and ‘uncomfortably exciting’.
But here's a bolder, even more minimal, approach from a CEO client of mine. Their one and only value? "Adults work here."
Think about what that involves.
No infantilising timesheets. No mind-numbing codes of conduct. Just grown-ups treating each other like . . . well, grown-ups.
Their problem-solving strategy? "What would an adult do?" Simple, effective, and refreshingly BS-free.
Question: How could “adults work here” translate to your organisation?
The 60 Second Culture Test
I’ve long said that I can detect how good your organisation’s culture is in less than half an hour - at no cost.
Here's the process. Ask 10-20 of your people this one simple question: "When you last had a good idea to do something differently around here, what happened?"
The responses? They'll fall into three buckets:
The Pragmatic Innovators: "Oh, when I wanted to shake things up with X, I pitched it to my team. We hashed out the pros and cons..."
The Constrained Improvers: "Ideas? Sure, I've got 'em. But there's no real pipeline for that stuff here."
The Stagnant Survivors: "Uh... I dunno."
If you're hearing a lot of 2s and 3s, it's time for some serious soul-searching on how you can convert them to 1s. Gather your leadership team and get them to answer these questions: "What do you want that you don't have now? And what are you going to do about it?"
If they're open to a discussion on this, then there's hope.
Not a question, but a challenge: Don’t assume how your people will respond -- actually try this out by asking 10 people around you.
There’s a lot to be gained from just clicking the heart, so please do. It releases cyber-karma, which is what powers newsletters like these, and all others, in fact.
Go through your week looking for the non-obvious risks, the signs that ‘adults work here’, and growth cultures.
And, I’ll see you next Friday.
Andrew
Great to re-read this one, Andrew - and it seems you’ve been hale n hearty since the AF episode. What struck me this time was how complex adaptive systems need simple rules. “Adults work here” certainly sounds like a compelling example of a simple rule… yet adults also work in criminal gangs and terrorist organisations where presumably we would not condone the behaviour (and of course adults can also behave abominably in bonafide organisations). That causes me think that we need to make explicit what “adults work here” looks like behaviorally then make every decision regarding people, even the tough ones, from entry to exit, based on these. That’s where values stop being empty motherhood statements and start to matter. Then we won’t yawn.