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0.5 Conclusion

When you build trust and spark together, amazing things happen.

You attract and retain the most talented employees. You innovate constantly. You surprise and delight your customers. You out-perform your peers. When trust and spark work together, it doesn’t ensure calm quiet. Because people feel free, they feel free to engage in asking questions and airing conflicting opinions. The culture shifts to one in which people focus on the performance of the entire organization. When you’re operating at light speed, everyone “runs it like they own it.”

To build trust and spark, you need to make ten quantum leaps in how you think, act, and orient yourself as a leader. Each of the following sections focuses on one of these quantum leaps. Here’s a preview:

Quantum Leap #1: Align the Core Values

The first quantum leap for leaders to make is to recognize the importance of aligning everyone around a single set of core values — the organization’s core values — defined as the behaviors and activities essential to the organization’s success. This is a significant departure from the traditional ways of thinking about core values. It is the leader’s job to discover these core values and make them apparent to all. By doing so, you begin to instill deep feelings of trust, ownership and mutual accountability. When leaders engage in a deep exploration of the organization’s core values, the consequences can be dramatic. Underlying conflicts are forced to the surface. Tough discussions take place. The entire character of the company is changed as it shifts from being personality-driven to values-driven.

Quantum Leap #2: Sharpen the Focus

It is not enough to communicate your purpose and core values. People want to know the specific vision: What is the company actually going to do in the future to improve how it delivers value? People want to know how to measure your success in getting there. Defining a focused direction is not easy. It requires difficult, sometimes painful choices. But a sharp strategic focus will build trust and generate spark. and research has shown that the more focused the vision is, the more people will dedicate themselves to achieving it.

Quantum Leap #3: Lead Through Others

To maximize your impact, you have to lead through others. For the leader, this means it is critical to recruit and hire the right players, delegate responsibility to them, and provide them with the tools and systems to succeed. It also means getting rid of players who fail to adapt successfully. In a light speed world, each player on the court needs to elevate the others. Understanding the habits of highly effective teams is critical. As a leader, you have to watch the dynamics carefully, bench the players who are not advancing, and give those who are ready to play a chance at a starting role.

Quantum Leap #4: Manage Decisions Well

Decisions are the day-to-day inputs and outputs of an organization. To operate at light speed, leaders must build systems that result in good decisions being made throughout the organization. They need to teach people how to manage decisions within the confines of the core values and vision. They need to reframe how difficult decisions are communicated and made. Delegations must be clear. Otherwise, the sludge of bureaucracy creeps in and paralyzes the organization. Most importantly, people must shift their orientation from making decisions to managing them.

Quantum Leap #5: Accelerate the Pace of Decisions

In a time of accelerating change, leaders need to enable people to adapt quickly by introducing “learning loops” throughout the organization. Successful learning loops have three qualities: they are based on clear metrics and targets; they are monitored on a regular basis by groups empowered to make change; and the communication is immediate. Effective leaders not only arm people with the skills and tools to continuously learn, adapt and navigate change effectively. They also weed out hidden “ignorance loops” that impede the organization from learning.

Quantum Leap #6: Stimulate the Creative Flow

Many organizations are ruled by hidden forces of fear — fear of failure, fear of personal embarrassment, fear of loss of status. Leaders must continually counter this tendency by rewarding people for taking chances and being different. They need to tap into and release people’s creative flow. They need to weed out “group think.” When people feel supported to take creative risks, they’ll discover and tap hidden wells of talent and energy. They’ll apply creative thinking to problem solving and achieve significant breakthroughs in remarkably short periods of time. When you enable people to stretch beyond their safety zones, you can inspire them to feel differently and to think differently. This builds high levels of trust and spark — and leads to high levels of innovation.

Quantum Leap #7: Spread Systems Thinking

To succeed in a light speed world, leaders need to spread the power of systems thinking throughout the organization. It’s not sufficient if just a few people understand systems thinking. Everyone needs to know how to view problems from a systems perspective. People need to become data-driven in their thinking. They need to visualize the organization from multiple frames of reference. People need to continually challenge the status quo and adjust business processes based on customers’ expectations, not internal assumptions or traditions. By spreading the power of systems thinking, leaders can instill deeper levels of trust, innovation and performance throughout the organization.

Quantum Leap #8: Communicate in 12-D

In a light speed world, people need to communicate at increasing speeds (and at increasing distances) in order to build trust. Internally, this means a focus from the top on building systems of communication. It also means focusing on external communication. In a light speed world, people on the outside scrutinize and analyze every action that the company takes. There is constant pressure from the media. new websites, blogs, and watchdog groups crop up every day, fueling more feedback and “e-chatter.” Since there is no “under the radar” anymore, leaders need to invent new ways to communicate and shape the rules of the game.

Quantum Leap #9: Start With Yourself

Leaders need to develop certain personal qualities in order to succeed. They need to be honorable, have a passion for what they do, display a well-rounded sense of humor, and stay humble and curious to learn. In addition, they need to become master communicators and adept at dealing with four paradoxes of leadership. All of these qualities can be learned. When blended together, these are the personal qualities that distinguish great leaders.

Quantum Leap #10: Help People Assume Responsibility

Leaders must master this last quantum shift in order to help themselves — and other people — assume responsibility for change. Change invariably means making a personal choice. Given that fact, leaders must rethink how they communicate: Rather than direct people, they must learn to ask powerful questions. “What is the change you need to make?” “How will you know you’ve achieved it?” “How will you approach it?” “What are the ways you’ll measure your success?” By asking powerful questions, leaders can harness the power of self-reflection and help people assume full responsibility to implement these practices and make the jump to light speed.

In Conclusion…

To lead at light speed you need to make ten quantum leaps in how you think, act, and orient yourself as a leader. These quantum leaps are vitally important. They will raise the leadership capacity of everyone around you – including yourself. They will create systems of communication and thinking that are not intuitively obvious. Paradoxically, it means slowing down while you implement these practices. But once you do, you will be maximizing your impact as a leader. The organization will start moving faster and with more productive energy than ever before. If you take the time to apply them, you will find yourself harnessing the full power of leading at light speed.

The Six Rings Model is a strategic planning template designed to align the core values in a coherent framework to communicate what the organization is all about and where it is going.

Here is what the Six Rings Model looks like:[ Members Only Content - please sign up to view it... ]

The Six Rings Model looks the same whether you are JC Penney or the White House. The beauty of this strategic planning template is that you start in the first ring and work your way outward. Each ring provides a different perspective – or lens- with which to define your company. When one ring is done you move on to the next. It’s an iterative process: the work on one ring informs the work on the others. Each successively narrows the aperture and defines the specific ways in which the organization creates value for its owners and its customers.

Strategic Planning Template – The Strategic Focus

The first three rings together form what I call the “strategic focus,” a nexus around which all activities are coordinated and organized. [ Members Only Content - please sign up to view it... ]

Learn More About This Strategic Planning Template

To learn more about this strategic planning template, contact the consultants at Leading Resources. LRI facilitates the development of effective strategic plans for public, private, and non-profit organizations.

0.4 Organizational Culture That Sparks Innovation

To create a high-performing organizational culture, trust is key, but it’s not the whole picture. Spark is also critical to creating a light speed organizational culture.

Spark means people are having fun, being creative, and giving their best selves to the work. It is what makes coming to work a joy, not a burden. Spark occurs when you tap people’s creative energies. It means providing people the freedom to explore new ideas without fear. Innovation happens when there’s a big vision, clearly communicated, and the entire team is focused on achieving that vision. It exists when there are clear performance measures tied to the things that matter, and performance is evaluated fairly and consistently.

In light speed organizations, trust and spark feed off one another. One catalyzes the other. By creating trust, you enable people to be open to change. By energizing spark, you unleash the innovation that makes an organizational culture vibrate with new ideas and real purpose.

Organizational Culture Examples

3M is a good example of a company that focuses on trust and spark. Its “15 percent rule” enables employees to spend 15 percent of their work time exploring and conducting experiments. Technical employees can apply for internal corporate grants to fund innovative projects they want to pursue. It’s this careful nurturing of innovation that has resulted in products like ScotchGard™ and Thinsulate™.

Fred Smith, the founder and CEO of Federal Express, has a similar strategy for his company: “We hammer home that not to change is to be in the process of dying, of not meeting the market as it is. We applaud people who instigate change. We don’t hang people who try something new that doesn’t work out, because that’s the easiest way to ossify an organization – to crucify the people who are trying to innovate.”

By now, nearly everyone is familiar with the story of how two young men named Steve – Wozniak and Jobs – pretty much created the personal computer industry. Today Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple Computer, still puts a premium on fun, creativity, learning, and exploring new ideas: “Learning about new technologies and markets is what makes this fun for me,” Jobs says. “You just gotta go learn this stuff. If you’re smart, you’ll figure it out.”

The Innovative Organizational Culture at Disney

Spark thrives in an environment of freedom, where the unexpected is invited, embraced, and encouraged to evolve into value. Walt Disney understood it. Long before Mickey Mouse came along, he injected creativity into his team of animators. He wasn’t content to have silent cartoons: he wanted to produce the first cartoons with sound. He wasn’t content with black and white: he wanted color. The people who worked with Disney often remarked on the freedom he gave them to try new things – and they drew on the culture he built to come up with their own dazzling creations.

I admire Walt Disney’s creativity, so bear with me while I recount a story. In 1932, while making his masterpiece of animation Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney became dissatisfied with the limitations of two-dimensional backgrounds. He wanted to convey depth realistically, yet all he had to work with was animation cells on photographic plates. So Disney challenged his team to find a better way.

The result was the invention of the multi-plane camera, an elaborate, one-story-tall device with a dozen moving glass panels on which his animators could superimpose different backdrops. By subtly shifting the positions of the glass panels with each shot, Disney’s animators successfully conveyed the illusion of three dimensions in Snow White.

Through his constant quest for creative quality, Disney sparked his teams of animators and producers to think freely and create great things. Walt Disney Studios innovated, learned from its mistakes, and blossomed into one of the most successful companies in the world.

Spark isn’t limited to the private sector. Ted Gaebler, co-author of “Reinventing Government,” sees innovation as one of government’s most important missions: “We need to start engaging public employees’ whole brains,” he says, “not just the expenditure control half. We need to engage the entrepreneurial brain as well.”

It’s easy to spot an organizational culture that has high levels of spark:

• People feel free to challenge the status quo.
• People go way beyond what you would normally expect.
• People feel their work is fun.
• People feel unconstrained by rank or hierarchy to suggest improvements.
• People share their ideas openly about how to improve things.

One of the best examples of spark is Google. Here’s a company that ten years ago barely registered a ripple. Today, its innovations influence everything from advertising and media to geo-science, disease control, and climate prediction.

In the next several years, I predict that Google’s innovations will enable your refrigerator to communicate your shopping list directly to the grocery store; guide your car as it navigates down the highway; and convert your home into a mini-generating plant. Google has created a new kind of company, one that blends the best of a non-profit with the best of a for-profit. By operating at light speed, it has rearranged and reshaped much of what we do.

When you build trust and spark together, amazing things happen. You attract and retain the most talented employees. You innovate constantly. You surprise and delight your customers. You out-perform your peers. When trust and spark work together, it doesn’t ensure calm quiet. Because people feel free, they feel free to engage in asking questions and airing conflicting opinions. The organizational culture shifts to one in which people focus on the performance of the entire organization. When you’re operating at light speed, everyone “runs it like they own it.”

0.3 Organizational Development – Building Trust

Building trust is a key aspect of organizational development, but how do you accelerate the level of trust in your organization? The short answer: with lots of reciprocity.

People feel trust because they are rewarded in many different forms of currency: customers with excellent service and follow-up communication, employees with recognition for a job well done and interesting opportunities, to name a few. But those aren’t the whole picture.

The most important currency of trust in a light speed world is access to information.

As a leader, you need to let people know what’s going on. Employees and contractors need access to key information. W. L. Gore, the maker of Gore-Tex fabric, provides regular updates to employees on how the company is doing in meeting its goals. Among midsized companies, it’s consistently ranked number one in Fortune Magazine’s survey of best companies to work for. It’s also one of the most profitable.

Access to information also builds trust quickly with customers.

Transparent pricing is one example. Some of the best automobile dealers build trust with their customers by being open about their pricing and profits. The internet giant eBay builds trust by providing tips on how to place the winning bid. Open source software builds trust by enabling developers open access to the code base. (Open source software is the fastest growing segment of software development. Why? It is capable of adapting at light speed.)

What does trust mean?

Trust means that every employee, starting at the top, knows the organization’s core values, its vision, and the plans for getting there. Trust means that roles and responsibilities are clear, and that the rules for dealing with conflicts are well understood. Trust means holding people accountable for what they do and don’t do. In short, building trust through open communication is the quickest way to build bonds with employees, customers, and shareholders – and to accelerate your organizational development success.

• Do you reward customers with excellent customer service and follow-up communication?
• Do you reward employees with recognition for a job well done and interesting opportunities?
• Do you provide access to information?
• Does every employee know the organization’s core values, vision, and plans for getting there?
• Are roles and responsibilities clear? Are the rules for dealing with conflicts clear?
• Are people held accountable for what they do and don’t do?
• Is there an open culture of communication?

0.2 Organizational Behavior – How Trust Works

Understanding organizational behavior starts with understanding how we work as individuals.

In his book How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker shows exactly how our brains are wired to respond to actions that either build trust or corrode it. He shows how trust gives rise to every one of our emotions – from love and devotion, to jealousy and betrayal. Why do we feel love? Because we trust someone and feel trusted in return. Why do we get angry? Because we feel a lack of trust. Why do we feel betrayed? Because we perceive someone isn’t keeping up his or her end of the bargain.

Trust is based on the principle of reciprocity. It’s an evolutionary strategy, hard-wired into our genes. If you give me a hand, I’ll return the favor – especially if I think there’s a strong likelihood of repeated transactions with you in the future. Pinker shows that our brains are hard-wired to detect whether reciprocity and trust exist – or whether there are gaps between what we expect to receive and what we actually receive. This “cheater meter” is working in every conscious moment. If I think that you’ve treated me fairly, then my cheater meter is in the green. If not, it swings into the red.

Organizational Behavior & The Cheater Meter

People are remarkably attuned to their cheater meters. You know exactly how much you trust your boss, your peers, and anyone else you know. Think about someone you trust. Fundamentally, if you feel trust, you trust him or her to look after your interests, right? That’s reciprocity at work. Adding another layer of nuance to this trust business, each of us sets our cheater meter differently. This is particularly evident at the start of a relationship. Look at the following table and see if you can tell where your cheater meter is set.

Organizational Behavior & Trust Orientations

If you said “trust until,” you join roughly 45 percent of the population who feel that way. Another 45 percent say they “distrust until.” The remaining 10 percent occupy the two extremes, again in roughly even percentages. Building trust begins with knowing how it works, and that people have different trust orientations.

Another dimension of trust has to do with expectations. Some people have very high expectations and thus are easily disappointed. Others have low expectations, and don’t feel particularly bothered when their expectations aren’t met. The chart below shows how these two dimensions work together.

People respond very differently when they feel trust. Customers will stay loyal to your company. Suppliers will provide you the best products. Employees will make decisions more quickly, put aside conflicts more easily, and accept compromises more swiftly. If you want to operate at light speed, you need to have your hand on the trust throttle 24/7.

Organizational Behavior: Trust vs. Expectations

• Are there trust issues in your organization?
• What would your employees would rate your trustworthiness, on a scale of 1-10?
• Do you build trust through reciprocity?
• What are your trust expectations?

0.1 Effective Leadership Rests on Two Behaviors

Let’s start at the beginning, at the underpinnings of effective leadership.

When you look at a tall building, what you see are the visible spaces above the ground. The foundation upon which it rests is largely invisible. But the foundation has to be strong, otherwise the entire building will fall. Similarly, the foundation of effective leadership is largely invisible. But it rests on two behaviors. One is building trust. The other is generating what I call “spark.”

Let’s start with the foundation of trust.

Creating trust may seem like an obvious part of a leader’s job. What’s not so obvious, perhaps, is how fundamental it truly is. Scientists have shown that our brains are hard-wired to respond favorably to those we trust. All of our emotions spring from trust – or the lack of it. That’s been true for thousands of years. What has changed is how quickly our feelings of trust can shift. Thanks to the Internet and 24-hour news coverage, we are constantly mining new information to determine whom we can trust.

Now let’s talk about spark.

By spark, I mean inspiring people to innovate and create. As with trust, spark feeds an essential need. We respond positively to people who inspire our creativity, and negatively to those who don’t. Spark is crucial if you’re going to succeed in a world where change is constantly accelerating. But spark without trust can be damaging, leading to useless innovations and even destructive ones. Leaders must know how to inspire trust while at the same time sparking new products, new processes, and new practices. Southwest Airlines, FedEx, and Google are three examples of highly successful companies that have built high-performing organizations based on trust and spark.

In short, trust and spark tap into who we are as human beings. They are the keys to our fulfillment and happiness. They animate us, giving us the courage to do extraordinary things. All the rules and practices of leading at light speed and effective leadership can be boiled down to building trust and generating spark.

• Are you doing all you can to build trust?
• Are you doing all you can to spark innovation?
• Write your thoughts in the notes section below.

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0.0 What is Leadership in a Light Speed World?

When you tackle a topic like what is leadership, it’s important to understand the context and the history.

In the course of writing Leading at Light Speed, I’ve conducted hundreds of interviews, read dozens of articles and books, and learned from the experiences of our clients. Interestingly, the word “leader” comes from an Old English root word, leith, that means “to be out in front.” The same root word also means “to die.” I believe some of our old ideas of leadership are dying. A new model of leadership is rising to take its place. My hope is that this leadership course can help lead the way.

On September 29, 2008, the American economy suffered its greatest shock since the Great Depression. In a matter of hours, the Dow fell 777 points. Even more remarkable than the depth of the plunge was the speed with which the reverberations spread. The panic of 2008 raced through global markets, toppling banks in America, Europe and Asia in a matter of days. By contrast, the crash of 1929 took three years to unfold. That’s how much our world has changed. Today, we are linked by information and communication systems that are breathtaking in their complexity and speed. That system allows events, like the financial collapse of 2008–2009, to unfold at light speed.

In his seminal book Future Shock, Alvin Toffler predicted this future. In Toffler’s vision, the world would grow so complex that people would be incapable of managing or leading it. The crash of 2008–2009 is all the evidence we need to understand that Toffler was right. The defining characteristic of this new, interdependent age is that so many things – from commerce to correspondence to influenza – move at a pace that few of us can manage if we are unprepared.

What is Effective Leadership?

In my work with leaders throughout the world, people tell me that they need a new set of principles to guide them in this new world. So in writing this book, I set out to meet the needs of people like these:

• The CEO of a hospital: “I was trained first and foremost as a doctor. Now I manage 5,000 people. Things are happening so fast. I don’t know if I’m thinking the right way or doing the right things.”

• The head of a bank in New York City: “How do I balance my time? How do I leverage myself as a leader? Do I focus on front-line staff? On meeting with customers? On managers? What’s the right balance?”

• The manager of a large retail chain: “All I do is respond to questions and put out fires all day. Did business school teach me how to lead in this kind of environment? Well, we attended a three-day leadership seminar. But the short answer is ‘no’!”

What is Leadership in a Light Speed World?

I see signs everywhere that we need a new way of thinking about what is effective leadership in this light speed world. One only has to think of Detroit’s automakers and imagine what might have been had their leaders developed the capacity to think and act differently in this new era. I have spent the better part of a decade reading these signs and developing an understanding of what leaders need to do differently. Working with leaders all around the country, I have had the opportunity to dissect what it takes to build dynamic, resilient, high-performing organizations. These leaders include the head of a global bank in London, who has created new ways to manage decisions across 24 time zones. Or the leader of a huge state health care system who has transformed the delivery of medical services in her state. Or the executive of a non-profit in Los Angeles who has created a sustainable system to educate more than 300,000 inner city youth. Or companies like Google that have learned to innovate quickly and thrive amid accelerating change.

That’s the backdrop for this book. What is leadership? Over time, I’ve identified ten quantum leaps in behavior and approach that can help people lead in a light speed world. Underlying these ten leaps are two foundational principles that will show you how to navigate complex change and deal with hyper-turbulent times. Above all, this book will equip you to think and act and lead effectively in the 21st century.

• Are you prepared to lead in a light speed world?
• Does your organization train leaders how to lead in times of accelerating change?
• How does the pace of change affect your market/industry?
• Does technology play a role? Global competition? Increased communication?
• Write your thoughts in the notes section below.