Tag Archive for: harvard

2020 Resources – What Makes a Good Life?

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Recommended TED talk: Lessons from the Longest Study on Human Happiness by Robert Waldinger

Robert Waldinger, a professor at Harvard Medical School is the Director of a study that has been tracking two groups of men (and now their partners and children) for 75 years. One group is comprised of Harvard graduates and the other from the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods and families of Boston at the time the study began. Throughout this period of time, researchers have interviewed the participants every one or 2 years, collected medical records, undertaken brain scans and tracked their life journey and stories.

This study has informed our understanding of what makes people happy and healthy through their lives. In this easy-to-listen-to 12-minute TED talk, Waldinger shares three factors that make a difference – all connected to a sense of belonging and having meaningful relationships. “The people who fared the best had leaned into relationships with family, friends, community” even when messy and complicated.

While this talk is not about leadership per se, it is still relevant to our work in a number of ways. Our personal well-being influences how we show up as leaders, so how are we tending to the relationships we have with family, friends, and community? How might we foster positive relationships in our teams and organizations to create a sense of belonging and connection amongst the people we work with? Given the vital importance of strong attachments and relationships to long-term physical, mental and emotional health, in what ways do we design, deliver and lead services to foster healthy connections for children, youth, and families?

We know this stuff, but a little reminder doesn’t hurt!

Positive Teams are More Productive

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Positive Teams are More Productive, by Emma Seppala
(Harvard Business Review, March 2015)

One of the first things to note about this very short article is that is written by the Science Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. Think about the fact that an institution like Stanford values compassion and altruism such that it has established a center dedicated to researching the phenomenon. I don’t think this would have happened a decade ago. I think that it reflects a growing body of research evidence and understanding that attending to the well-being of ourselves and others – in our families, friend groups, organizations and communities – is not just nice to do if we can find the time, but essential to support thriving families, workplaces and communities.

The author draws on research from a number of different sources and suggests that the traditional approaches to increasing productivity – setting plans and goals, streamlining procedures, setting targets, measuring performance or offering incentives and perks – might have their place. However, so does paying attention to the context and culture for the team’s work and how this contributes or detracts from well-being. Citing a study from University of Michigan, she notes that workplaces “characterized by positive and virtuous practices excel in a number of domains.” They increase positive emotions (which helps to build resilience and amplify creativity to solve difficult issues), buffer against negative events and enhance personal and collective resilience, and they attract and bolster employees, including enhancing loyalty and staff commitment to offer their best.

These positive and virtuous practices include:

  • Caring for, being interested in, and maintaining responsibility for colleagues.
  • Providing support for one another, including offering kindness and compassion when others are struggling.
  • Avoiding blame and forgive mistakes.
  • Inspiring one another at work.
  • Emphasizing the meaningfulness of the work.
  • Treating one another with respect, gratitude, trust & integrity.”

So what creates a climate or culture that is virtuous? The author suggests that leadership is critical. In particular, modelling caring and supportive behaviour in an authentic way. Small steps also make a difference – there doesn’t need to be a grand strategic plan and dedicated resources to encourage a more positive workplace.

Another article that offers some insights here is by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, in which they distil their research into the relationship between authenticity and effective leadership. They found six principles or virtues at work in dream workplaces, in which people are happy and engaged:

  • Individual differences are nurtured
  • Information is not suppressed or spun
  • The organization adds value to staff (through support, supervision, learning and growth opportunities, training, mentorship, etc.)
  • The organization stands for something meaningful
  • The work is intrinsically rewarding
  • There are no stupid rules

The authors note that: “several of the attributes run counter to traditional practices and ingrained habits. Others are, frankly, complicated and can be costly to implement. Some conflict with one another. Almost all require leaders to carefully balance competing interests and to rethink how they allocate their time and attention.” Nonetheless, they issue an invitation to leaders to consider how they might enact some of these virtues in their spheres of influence.

How might your team context and culture stack up against the principles noted above? What small steps might you take as a leader (either by position or influence) to contribute to a greater sense of well-being (and thus productivity, effectiveness, and creativity) in your team?

In Praise of the Incomplete Leader

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In Praise of the Incomplete Leader
By Deborah Ancona, Thomas Malone, Wanda Orlikowski & Peter Senge
Harvard Business Review, February 2007. Can be downloaded at HBR.

The authors of this exceptional article (all teachers and researchers at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Leadership) have decades of experience working in diverse organizational contexts and declare, “It’s time to end the myth of the complete leader: the person at the top who’s got it all figured out.” They go on to say, “Most leaders experience a profound dichotomy every day, and it’s a heavy burden.”

They are referring to that awareness we carry that we actually don’t know what to do or what is right – that is in tension with the belief that we should know what to do. In these times of increasing complexity many of us continue to hang on to the myth that we must figure things out and know what to do – but this is neither possible nor sustainable. They note that, “incomplete leaders differ from incompetent leaders in that they understand what they are good at and what they’re not and have good judgment about how they can work with others to build on their strengths and offset their limitations.”

What I appreciate about this article is that it doesn’t just urge us to let go of the myth (how easy is that anyway!) but provides us with a framework that we can apply as an antidote to the myth. Their model of ‘distributed leadership’ integrates their research with many contemporary thinkers in the field and reveals four capabilities that effective leaders are attuned to. Leaders do not need to personally embody all four (this is extremely rare) but do benefit from nurturing the capabilities within their team and network:

  • Sensemaking = Entails ‘mapping out’ and making sense of the contexts and complexities within which we are operating, including sensing from different perspectives or vantage points and uncovering patterns.
  • Relating = Here the authors borrow ideas from Chris Argyris and Don Schon (who encouraged reflective practice work and learning through doing that many of you will know about). They suggest that it is vital to establish strong relating capacities within an organization or team, through inquiring, advocating and connecting. Inquiring is about suspending judgment and listening openly to genuinely understand the perspective of the other. Advocating entails being able to convey one’s own perspective clearly. While relating is about holding the 2 in balance – being able to listen to deeply understand as well as convey one’s own values, vision, etc.
  • Visioning = While the above two capabilities set the conditions for understanding what is called for and how to motivate and connect, visioning and inventing are more creative and action oriented. They “produce the focus and energy needed to make change happen.” Visioning is about “creating compelling images of the future…and produces a map of what could be.” It is not a static vision but one that unfolds in a “dynamic and collaborative” way with others in the team or organization.
  • Inventing = This is about finding new ways of doing things together to achieve the desired vision or state. They note that creating doesn’t have to be about large scale change: it can be about how tasks are distributed, or how meetings are conducted, or how information is shared. You might ask, ‘What are the creative ways in which the work can get done that is in service of our shared vision?’

“These capabilities span the intellectual and personal, the rational and intuitive, and the conceptual and creative capacities required in today’s environment.” In the article, the authors offer 4-5 concrete ideas for bringing to life each capability, as well as a framework to enable you to assess where you are with each. This could be used by a team to check in on the collective capacity of the group to support each other in working with the complexity and burdens of the work.

Strategies for Learning from Failure

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11/26/2015 – I am taking a course on entrepreneurial behaviour and practices and one of our key seminars has been entirely focussed on failure – imagine 8 days to explore all facets of and relationships to failure, with people from diverse backgrounds, organizations and cultures from throughout the world! I have loved it as it has helped me uncover and explore my own definitions and fears about failure (lots) and exposed me to new ways of thinking about and embracing failure as part of strong and innovative practice. One of the articles we reviewed is by Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, entitled, Strategies for Learning From Failure (April 2011). I thought it was particularly beneficial and relevant to our sector. She noted that, despite being told that ‘innovation and failure is good’ many of us have been conditioned since childhood to avoid making a mistake and failing at all costs. This sets up a dynamic tension between what we are told is necessary in the workplace (e.g., think outside the box, innovate, test out new ideas, fail, learn) and what we have been told for most of our lives (e.g., don’t mess up).

She offers a more nuanced understanding of failure, that lines up well with the 2020 teachings on the Cynefin framework. With problems that are simple or complicated – what she calls predictable or knowable problems – failure should be preventable and avoidable and when it does show up it could be due to deviant behaviour (someone doesn’t want to follow accepted practices) but more likely due to inattention, lack of ability or training, process inadequacy or a task challenge (e.g. the task is simply too much to expect someone or a group to complete with the available resources). Leaders and managers need to act to prevent these types of failures.

On the other hand, when we face complex challenges where there is a high degree of uncertainty and we have not encountered the situation before, failures are often unavoidable – “system failure is a perpetual risk”. Our response should be one of trying to prevent more significant or “consequential” failures by attending to small process failures: “To consider them bad is not just a misunderstanding of how complex systems work; it is counterproductive. Avoiding consequential failures means rapidly identifying and correcting small failures.” She strongly encourages leaders to create an environment in which people can comfortably raise concerns and identify the small errors that can be addressed before the whole system is compromised

Edmondson also describes a third type of failure that occurs within the complex domain: “intelligent failures at the frontier”. I love this idea of intelligent failures – where experimentation is necessary and the “answers aren’t knowable in advance because this exact situation hasn’t been encountered before”. Here she suggests small-scale tests to see what might work and continual iteration and improvement – NOT large scale pilot projects! Failure here is “praiseworthy” as it serves learning and development.

Her description of “the blame game” was particularly relevant to our sector where, due to the high risks associated with some failures there is often intense media and public scrutiny aimed at placing blame on individuals or organizations. She would suggest that this generates a widespread lack of “psychological safety” that shuts down innovation and experimentation due to fear of failure – even when the risks are minimal or the benefits of new approaches could be significant. The five elements that Edmondson suggests leaders should cultivate in order to contribute to a psychologically safe environment that can prevent failure where appropriate, and be intelligent and learn from failures in the complex domain, include:

  • Frame the work accurately – what kinds of failures can be expected and how they will be worked through helps to ‘detoxify’ failure;
  • Embrace messengers of bad news, questions, concerns or mistakes;
  • Acknowledge limits – “be open about what you don’t know. Mistakes you have made, and what you can’t get done alone will encourage others to do the same”;
  • Invite participation – “ask for observations and ideas and create opportunities for people to detect and analyze failures and promote intelligent experiments. Inviting participation helps to defuse resistance and defensiveness”;
  • Set boundaries and hold people accountable.

You can gain access to the full article here: https://hbr.org/2011/04/strategies-for-learning-from-failure and signing into the Harvard Business Review. You can view online or get up to five free articles to download. The 12-minute interview with Amy is also available at this site and offers a good summary.

You may want to consider the following questions about ‘failure’:

  • What is your attitude or approach towards failure?
  • Are all failures equally ‘good’ or ‘bad’?
  • Where is a greater openness to failure and the consequent learning, needed in your own practice?