*Fast Company online to learn more!

Making personal connections is a cornerstone of the hospitality industry. Connecting with guests, team members, colleagues, and hotel owners is part of what we do every day. A few years ago at Hampton, many of our 1,850-plus General Managers were feeling isolated, without avenues to connect with other hotels. As a brand, we collected various best practices, but collaboration across the lines was limited. General Managers wanted the ability to electronically share best practices, ask questions, and learn from the experiences of their peers. Being a franchise organization, however, it was a challenge to connect people who work for hundreds of different employers in hotels spread across 49 states and 10 countries.

Our solution – called Sharecast – was two years in the making, but well worth the effort. It has quickly become an invaluable resource for our General Managers and Team Members, and a great success story for Hampton. Sharecast is an example of the power of leveraging technology and innovation to celebrate the best in people, scale ideas, and enhance performance and engagement. One of our General Managers predicted it early when he said, “I personally think that Sharecast has the potential of being the #1 tool for all hotels. We become the encyclopedia of knowledge between us and our combined skills of 1,850 teams!”

While Sharecast is a fresh and exciting tool for our hotel managers and teams, it’s not the technology alone that makes it truly innovative for our brand; it is the development process and user-centric approach we used in creating the site. We employed an eight-step approach – that we now apply to everything we develop – that centers around the user perspective. Every detail of the site, every feature we included, came directly from our users.

Our first step, and the foundation of this process, is listening. Working with Root, we listened to our owners, operators, and General Managers and talked to them about the need to leverage the great things that were happening in their hotels. We asked them what they would want to share with the rest of the Hampton community and what information they would like that they couldn’t currently access. We also spent time listening to key stakeholders within the brand to get their input and buy-in from the very beginning of the process.

The next two steps in our process, ideating and generating, were done carefully and intentionally around our design philosophy. An innovation in its own right, our design philosophy was a set of guidelines that we used to manage the Sharecast project to solve the business problems identified through insights from users. Basically, we laid out the tenets and principles that we would stick to until the site was successfully up and running. This sounds easy, but it wasn’t. We created a really robust document that we came back to again and again as we developed the site.

The next four steps in our development process, generate, test, evaluate, and refine, were done over the span of a few months. We developed a prototype site and did three rounds of testing, gradually building out the features that our users said they wanted. This rolling development was a differentiator because it gained us buy-in from all of our stakeholders, and, equally important, it began filling the site with content. We knew that Sharecast, just like any website, would only be successful if it had content, so it was critical that there be plenty to look at and browse through when the site was launched. To start collecting content, and establish the “culture” of Sharecast (what’s appropriate to post and what’ not), we invited our top- performing hotels to be part of the testing. By the end of testing, Sharecast was well on its way with 216 users and over 200 posts!

We officially launched Sharecast at our General Managers’ Conference in October 2011 to over 2,500 people – General Managers, Brand Team Members and franchise partners. We partnered with Root to do media, an e-mail teaser, and a “commercial” at the conference.

As of press time, Sharecast has over 3,000 users, and there have been close to 30,000 visits since its launch. The site has even taken on a life of its own beyond General Managers; Team Members in every position have found the site valuable. What makes Sharecast work so well is that first right step: focusing on the user. We didn’t impose a new set of behaviors on our teams – we gave them an easy way to do what they already wanted to be doing.

Six months later, Sharecast is driving performance and engagement by scaling best practices and creating a community across our 1,850 hotels. Team Members who wouldn’t have been connected to each other now have a place to meet 24 hours a day – and they are! It’s created a world of peer-to-peer learning that has united our community and sparked connections that wouldn’t have been possible before. One front desk agent captured it perfectly in a note she sent to a General Manager she had never met, in a Hampton five states away: “I’ve been following your posts on Sharecast and I just wanted to say thank you. My goal is to be a GM of a Hampton Inn one day and I love your enthusiasm and the ideas you have shared with us. I’ve written many of your ideas in my journal so I can one day implement them on my own at my own property.”

For the brand, Sharecast continuously delivers insights. We are constantly looking at the analytics, tracking traffic to the site, demographics of users, what pages they are viewing, the average amount of time spent on the site, and much more. The last of our eight steps, measurement, tells us how successful we are, and where to begin looking for enhancements and improvements to make.

We’re experimenting with opening Sharecast to strategic dialogue with the senior leadership from the Hampton Brand as well. Not long ago, Phil Cordell Global Head, Focused Service Brands and Hampton Hotels, asked in our weekly newsletter that people help him with an issue through Sharecast posts. A guest had sent a letter claiming that a General Manager had given him bad service. Phil asked the community, “What do you do when you’re under pressure and still have to give great customer service?” Because of that request, that post, Sharecast got more than 915 visitors the following day! To give perspective, our average at that time was about 130 visits a day. That week alone, more than 400 new users registered. The unprecedented response to Phil’s post has us brainstorming other strategic conversations to open with the Sharecast audience.

Ultimately, Sharecast has succeeded in making our entire network of General Managers and Team Members into curators, experts, and anthropologists in hotel operations. By staying true to our process and putting the user at the center of every decision we made, we have used the best of technology to ignite our community and create connections beyond what we could have imagined!

These days, a lot of organizations and their leaders talk about “sustainability,” but internally, most of them don’t walk the talk, especially in relation to food. I have a goal: To “teach people to fish” in a way that helps them understand the importance of eating well and the results we can expect when we do. I started with my own family, and then realized what might happen if entire communities knew this – parents who needed to feed their kids well and raise them to be responsible for their own lives. My aim is to radically change how we feed and educate our children, parents, and everybody else – including the corporate world.

By creating nourishing, nurturing, and engaging environments, we set the stage for learning. The “triple bottom line” of “people, planet, profit” that sums up corporate social responsibility and sustainability can easily convert to “nourish, nurture, and engage” when it comes to feeding people’s creativity.

In my experience helping organizations understand how they can impact the health of their employees, create a foundation for a culture of innovation, and ultimately improve their bottom line, I learned some steps about introducing this new approach to food.

1. Find the flaws in the current thinking.

   You don’t need innovation if things are fine as they are. But if they’re not, you need to pinpoint exactly what is wrong. To change the culture of any community, you need to change how they think about food. You can have wellness “events,” but very few community endeavors address the question, “How are we changing the way people relate to food?” If people are nourished with healthy food, nurtured by a caring environment, and engaged mentally and physically, our population becomes more productive. It all works together.

   To understand just how people think about food, use the concept of “beginner’s mind” and just notice what’s happening around you. That’s how innovative thinking starts. For example, if you want to learn the mindset of a company about healthy eating, start by looking at the vending machine. Ask if they regularly buy pizza or cookies as “rewards” for employees. If there’s a cafeteria on site, ask what kind of food is served, and ask the chef where the food comes from. Ask people if they actually know what they’re eating.

   In the same way, to introduce any kind of innovation at companies – to change the environment – you need buy-in from management to help educate people. When you eat better, you feel better. When you feel better, you do better. It’s as simple as that. (There’s more to this. See the box.)

2. Start at the top, with the people who have the clout to get the innovation started.

   So how do you get organizational leadership to buy into this? Start with progressive-minded bosses who see the relevance of food to business results. If the boss can see that there are employees who are a health risk from an insurance perspective, that’s a plus. These people are costing money – and aren’t giving their best even on the days when they aren’t sick. When you point out a dollar value, you get attention for innovation.

3. Demonstrate how the innovation will affect the bottom line.

   Of course, business leaders can have plenty of objections. Most of these have to do with time, money, and extra work. One of the biggest problems is that they don’t immediately see the connection between innovation, eating well, and the bottom line. Point out that insurance companies incentivize businesses that help their people stay well. That impacts the bottom line. People who feel well do more and better work. That impacts the bottom line. And what about all those employees who are practically comatose by 3 pm? Are companies getting the best from people who ate unhealthy food at lunch and are now starved for nutrients? Probably not. That’s more money down the drain. So feeding our people’s bodies, feeding their creativity, has a tangible return on investment. And so it is with any innovation. Show people in charge of money how the new thinking will improve that bottom line.

4. Research benchmarks to find best practices and inspire more innovation.

   It helps to measure progress against others who have succeeded. Find companies who are doing what you want to do and research how they do it. For healthy eating, Revolution Foods and Jamie Oliver’s website are great places for inspiration (rev.foods.com, jamieoliver.com/us/foundation/jamies-food-revolution).
   Find best practices to model. At Google’s headquarters, for example, there are vending machines, but they make it easy to eat well because items are priced by nutritional value. If you want an organic snack bar, it costs about 15 cents. If you want a Twinkie, you can get one – but it will set you back about $4. This makes you stop and think before you push the button. Talk about best practices with immediate impact!

5. Take small steps to change the culture and make the innovation a habit that brings results.

   We’re more likely to make change happen in small increments. This isn’t about getting someone to go straight from Cheetos and Coke to a strict vegan diet. But if we could help him move one notch, make one little upgrade, it makes an impact. Potentially, it could change his life, his children’s lives, and his entire community – just with one little step.

Innovation needs to be supported by companies, from the top down to its family of employees. When leaders just do that one thing to change how their businesses operate, they move along that continuum.

If you start with a passion to help people re-establish a connection with what they’re consuming that leads them to care, that’s the first step in the “eat better, feel better, do better” chain that brings results. For your company, get people to care about your innovation. And then watch for the results.

Molly Reams Thompson is the founder of Feeding Creativity LLC, and is committed to changing how we feed and educate our communities by creating nourishing, nurturing, and engaging environments. A book she co-wrote, I Am Diva: Every Woman’s Guide to Outrageous Living (Warner), guides women through the art of living passionately and was her catalyst to discover and tap into her own passion for food advocacy.

As strategy execution consultants, we constantly see mandates to innovate and strategies built around innovation. More than ever, it seems that organic growth through innovation is a critical component of almost every company’s strategy.

We’ve gained a few insights from working with companies who are trying to encourage their people to be more innovative. Change of any kind is hard, and good leaders will steer their people through the changes needed to both create innovation and deploy it. Here are some of the human factors that need to be managed to ensure that you reach your destination of innovation.

Get Them Motivated and Keep Them Motivated

Innovation requires people to be as motivated to innovate as you are. To feel that motivation, they need to understand the strategic logic for innovation and the intent behind that logic. This is especially true in companies that have experienced incremental success without a focus on innovation. Many people can’t understand why innovation, with all of its perceived messiness, is important enough to outweigh the pain. If people are asking why you want them to innovate, try these techniques.

• Give them an emotional connection by helping them “feel what the future will feel like” when it has been achieved. Help them see what you see. Telling stories, showing films, playing games – these are all powerful ways to help everyone emotionally experience the benefits of innovation and focus on the excitement rather than the difficulty. Whether it’s an orientation or a reminder of what it feels like to create something new, find ways for your people to feel the euphoria of innovation!
• Help them see the business results of innovation by using data, group problem-solving, and simulations to show how innovation will help you achieve your goal and performance targets.
• Show them a personal benefit by connecting the dots between business success and personal success. Focus on the emotional rewards of being creative and developing something new that someone else values.
• Make it clear that management supports innovative thinking. If managers don’t create a safe place to experiment, it may be hard to build momentum for innovation! We often witness middle management’s actions actually working against innovation. This may show up as reinforcement of the status quo, punishing failures rather than celebrating early wins, criticizing new ideas, and failing to recognize when a new idea is suggested. We need to place failure and innovation right next to each other. We can’t innovate if we don’t fail, and people need to make this connection when we prepare them for innovation.

Show Them the Results

Next, make it clear how innovation supports the strategy and what innovation means for each role. Innovation is often misconstrued as the goal. Innovation is actually the things you do to achieve your goals. Innovative cultures, habits, behaviors, and routines are the human factors that enable you to innovate to achieve your goals. Being clear about how innovation helps you achieve your goals and then shoring up the human factors that enable innovation will set you up for success. That’s the hard part for leaders: getting clear on the parts of the business that will drive innovation, and what parts of the business will be affected by innovation. It’s critical to help align your organization on those things. You may want your R&D department to lead innovation, but not your legal department. To get everyone on board, you need to know who’s in charge of innovation and how it affects everyone else. People will need to know a role-by-role definition of what’s expected, and each role will need to redefine its focus based on this new mandate.

Getting Them Started

Creating an atmosphere of innovation requires change. Think about your own company. Hundreds, even thousands of people are giving their time, talents, and energy to push the company toward your goals. They’re tired, and they don’t want more work. Leaders must overcome the inertia by instilling new behaviors, routines, and habits.

To innovate, you have to begin by navigating through some fog. People are afraid of the unknown. This shows up as fear of reprisal, fear of embarrassment, and fear of inefficiency. There will almost certainly be some hard, time-consuming thinking required to get through the fog, so create an environment where this is accepted and understood.

One of the best ways to spark a cultural movement in your organization is to create a subculture of innovators, and then spread their behaviors, routines, and habits throughout the company. You won’t be able to create this subculture if your most innovative people are scattered across your organization. Give the innovators opportunities to spend time together so they can build momentum and generate visible examples of the culture of innovation that you want to create. Allow them to work on small projects that illustrate in a tangible way what you want to encourage. Then, tell their stories and connect them to results so people across the organization can say, “Now I know what the desired innovation looks like,” and “I can do that too!”

With all the upcoming leadership events and keynotes that I have on my schedule, I’m on a pretty constant stream of planning conference calls.

As I dig into the culture and attitude of a client through interviews with the CEO and other team members, I’m always mystified to find that some organizations just seem to do everything they can to shut down new ideas. Here are some points to consider to find out if your company is on the way to killing innovation.

There are a few key mistakes that organizations make when it comes to innovation. Do these sound familiar?

1. Form a Committee. An absolute surefire way of shutting down ideas! The herd mentality takes over, and activity sclerosis soon sets in.
2. Defer Decisions. It’s easier to wait than to make any bold, aggressive moves. Uncertainty is a virtue; indecision is an asset.
3. Hide Failure. If anyone tries something new and doesn’t succeed, make sure that no one else sees it. You don’t want to set a message that it is important to take risks.
4. Let Innovators Work in Secret. You want to make sure that the concept of innovation remains some deep, mysterious process that not everyone can participate in. That will help to ensure that most of your team doesn’t pursue any type of fresh new thinking. They’ll just keep doing what they’ve always done.
5. Banish Fear. Make sure that everyone thinks that everything is going to be all right. You don’t have to deal with potential business market disruption, new competitors, significant industry transformation, or the impact of globalization. Everything will look the same 10 years from now, so just keep everyone focused on doing the same old thing!
6. Accept the Status Quo. Things are running perfectly, you’ve got the perfect product mix, and all of your customers are thrilled with your brand and the levels of customer service. There’s no need to do anything new since it’s all going to work out just fine!
7. Be Cautious. Don’t make any bold, aggressive moves. Just take things slowly, one step at a time. If you move too fast, things are likely to go wrong. Let complacency settle in like a warm blanket.
8. Glorify Process. Make sure that everything is filled out in triplicate; be sure process slows down any radical ideas.  It’s more important to do things perfectly than to make mistakes.
9. Be Narrow. Keep a very tiny view of the future. You can’t succeed with any big wins, because there aren’t going to be any dramatic surprises in the future. Think small. Act accordingly.
10. Study Things to Death. Don’t let any uncertainty creep into your decision-making process. Make sure that if you are to do anything, that you’ve spent sufficient time and effort to understand all the variables. Your goal is ensuring that any decision is free of risk, unlikely to fail, and in retrospect will be carefully and fully documented.

And there are certainly more attitudes that help destroy innovative thinking. What do you think? What are the other attitudes and ways of thinking that manage to shut down organizational idea machines?

Are You in an Innovation Rut?

Find out! Take the list below to your next meeting. Score one point each time a phrase is used, plus bonus points as indicated. If your total is more than 5, you’ve got an organization that is innovation-averse. Score 10 or more, and you are innovation-dead. If you get 15 or more, you might as well close up shop.

• “We’ve always done it this way.” (3 bonus points)
• “It won’t work.”
• “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”
• “That’s not my problem.”
• “You can’t do that.”
• “I don’t know how.”
• “I don’t think I can.”
• “I didn’t know that.”
• “The boss won’t go for it.” (5 bonus points)
• “Why should I care?” (10 bonus points)

10 Signs that You’ve Got an Innovation Dysfunction

• People laugh at new ideas.
• Someone who identifies a problem is shunned.
• Innovation is the privileged practice of a special group.
• The phrase, “You can’t do that because we’ve always done it this way” is used for every new idea.
• No one can remember the last time anyone did anything really cool.
• People think innovation is about R&D.
• People have convinced themselves that competing on price is normal.
• The organization is focused more on process than success.
• There are lots of Baby Boomers around, and few people younger than 25.
• After any type of surprise — product, market, industry, or organizational change — everyone sits back and asks, “Wow, where did that come from?”

Innovative Companies Act Differently

So how do innovative organizations differ? In these organizations:

• Ideas flow freely throughout the organization.
• Subversion is a virtue.
• Success and failure are championed.
• There are many leaders who encourage innovative thinking – not just managers who run a bureaucracy.
• There are creative champions throughout the organization – people who thrive on thinking about how to do things differently.
• Ideas get approval and endorsement.
• Rather than stating, “It can’t be done,” people ask, “How could we do this?”
• People know that in addition to R&D, innovation is also about ideas for how to run the business better, grow the business, and transform the business.
• The word “innovation” is found in most job descriptions as a primary area of responsibility, and a percentage of annual remuneration is based on achievement of explicitly defined innovation goals.

The fact is that every organization should be able to develop innovation as a core virtue. If they aren’t doing that, they certainly won’t survive the rapid rate of change that envelops us today.

Jim Carroll is a leading international futurist, trends and innovation expert, with a client list that ranges from Northrop Grumman to the Walt Disney organization. For more information, go to www.jimcarroll.com.

]]> http://watercoolernewsletter.com/10-surefire-ways-to-destroy-innovative-thinking/feed/ 0 http://watercoolernewsletter.com/great-workplaces-great-innovators/ http://watercoolernewsletter.com/great-workplaces-great-innovators/#comments Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:14:04 +0000 admin http://watercoolernewsletter.com/?p=4652
Leslie Caccamese
Senior Strategic Marketing Manager,
Great Place to Work ^®



To many, it comes as no surprise that great workplaces often are also great innovators. When we consider the likes of Google, Microsoft, W.L. Gore, Intel, and the other 96 companies on our 100 Best Companies to Work For list, it seems like these companies are just better at everything.

At Great Place to Work®, we were interested in understanding if there is a real link between being a great workplace and a great innovator. Our research into the Best Companies to Work For revealed three distinct areas where great workplaces put extraordinary focus that helps sustain a culture where innovation can thrive: Communication, Coordination, and Collaboration.

Communication

One of the reasons so many great workplaces are also great innovators is that their employees are intimately connected to the company’s business objectives, mission, and goals, and regularly receive candid and detailed updates on where the business is and where it is headed. When people understand where the company is going, they can help get there. In an innovation culture, communication reflects these beliefs and behaviors:

• Belief in the value of transparency.

  Even good workplaces and great leaders struggle with establishing the right level of transparency in their internal communications. Closely guarding information about the state of the business diminishes trust, where honestly and authentically sharing information about the state of the company enhances employee trust in management and keeps employees connected with company goals.

• Keep business goals front-of-mind for all employees.

  While semi-annual town halls are great opportunities to hear about the state of the business from executive leaders, it may not be enough to keep people connected with business goals throughout their day-to-day operations. Regularly cascade business information through departments to line managers who should be accountable for keeping teams alerted to successes, threats, and new opportunities.

• Invite employees to help set goals and strategy.

  At Great Place to Work®, we see more and more companies inviting employees to participate in the goal- and strategy-setting process through surveys and committees. Not only does this increase engagement, but it accelerates buy-in of company goals and facilitates big-picture thinking among frontline employees.

Communication in innovation cultures invites employees to act and think like stakeholders. When employees can see beyond their job roles and departmental functions, they can begin to contemplate where and how their ideas can contribute to the company’s overall goals.

Coordination

Great workplaces do not just hire great talent and sit back to wait for the innovation to occur. Rather, they enable innovation by coordinating innovation efforts throughout the organization. For many companies, this means developing and maintaining specific programs and mechanisms that will facilitate innovative thinking by creating the time and space for that thinking to occur. These coordinated efforts may take these forms:

• Time to innovate.

  Many companies offer the designers, developers, and engineers behind their products designated time to work on approved projects – of the employees’ own creation – that don’t serve current product or profit goals. This sanctioned freedom to experiment engages employees and also creates a pipeline of fresh ideas that ultimately will lead to new products, projects, or enhancements.

• An innovation platform.

  Innovation has gone social at many companies, with online forums that ask employees to contribute fresh ideas and invite colleagues to vote and comment on the ideas they are most enthusiastic about. When ideas hit a critical mass, they are lobbed to a cross-functional innovation committee that vets the ideas for implementation.

In an innovation culture, great ideas aren’t seen as random or fortuitous developments, but rather as opportunities that are consciously encouraged and vetted. With an innovative approach to innovation, organizations can develop the innovation capabilities of all employees.

Collaboration

Cultures of innovation recognize the inherent (if at times latent) abilities of all employees to contribute to the ideas, disruptions, and enhancements that will drive the business forward. A culture of innovation fundamentally differs in approach – innovation is believed to be the result of inclusivity, engagement, and collaboration, and not the purview of a select few. When every employee is thought of and treated as a potential innovator, organizations structure ways for employees to collaborate.

• Create an “innovation team.”

  Great workplaces take a team approach to innovation, whether it is through an inherently collaborative work environment or a specifically developed initiative such as an innovation team. Ideas take on new life and more rapidly transition to the point of implementation when a diversity and breadth of thinking are brought to the table.

• Coaching.

  To ensure that people continue to contribute to innovation efforts, it’s important that a discarded idea is always accompanied by a “why.” Companies with particularly evolved innovation cultures place a lot of emphasis on this area. Doing so validates the employee contribution, invites them to continue their contributions, and cultivates a better eye for developing an idea that better feeds business objectives.

The belief that every employee is valuable and that every idea gets better when a diversity of opinions is expressed resides at the core of innovation cultures. If innovation is an area of opportunity for your company, let the three Cs guide you toward a more inclusive, collaborative approach to idea generation.
Leslie drives key conversations with leaders interested in building or sustaining great workplaces and believes Great Place to Work® is the best place for her.

Since 2006 she has served as Events Manager, Marketing Manager, and Communications Director. She thirsts for knowledge (and wine) and loves reading about workplace dynamics, attributes of leaders, the power of intention, and Native cultures of the American Southwest. With an MA and BA in history from Brown and Vassar respectively, she’s grateful to have a “real” job. For more information on Leslie and Great Place to Work®, go to: http://www.greatplacetowork.com.

]]> http://watercoolernewsletter.com/great-workplaces-great-innovators/feed/ 0 http://watercoolernewsletter.com/making-successful-business-changes-the-quiet-way/ http://watercoolernewsletter.com/making-successful-business-changes-the-quiet-way/#comments Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:24:38 +0000 admin http://watercoolernewsletter.com/?p=4321
Ed and Deb Shapiro

Meditation. An odd word to associate with business? Maybe not. Through our work, we’ve met with many companies that want to integrate it into their workplace, while others are already offering meditation classes, such as Yahoo!, Google, Morgan Stanley, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

But how does something as seemingly benign as sitting in silence help a business to operate more efficiently and creatively, or to make the changes necessitated by new trends?

Changing World, Perennial Needs

Let’s consider the things that make all business changes difficult:

The Need to Be Real
When we work with corporations and coach CEOs, we often see how a gap between our professional and personal selves can grow due to stress. But if our inner needs are not expressed, this can lead to the development of masks, a lack of fulfillment, relationship failure, and isolation. The corporate climate needs to reflect our internal climate, as a lack of authenticity limits the inner resources we bring to our job.

The Need to Make Smart Decisions
In any business environment, there is an ingrained push to succeed – quickly! Many problems are due to the speed at which decisions are made or actions are taken. We’re required to think of a million things simultaneously. As a result, we tend to have an overworked “monkey mind,” when our thoughts are all over the place, not alighting anywhere long enough to make an impact. No wonder so many poor decisions are made when the monkey is in charge!

The Need to Think Together
When we’re not mindful and present in the moment, we are unlikely to realize how much we need to work together – that we are interdependent. It’s important to remember that we are all human, and humans make mistakes. It’s okay to be who we are. At the same time, we each have something very unique to offer.

Weird and Wacky? Maybe Not
Meditation helps us to fill these needs, and a lot more. Yes, many businesspeople think of meditation as being a bit “out there,” and even the word “mindfulness” may be confusing. But being mindful simply means paying attention – to our relationships, communication, and presence. While working with corporations, we find that their unfamiliarity with meditation demands a new approach, so we created the term “silent space.” This is instantly understandable and makes the experience far more accessible.

This is a far cry from being weird and wacky! Rather, it speaks of greater lucidity, efficacy, and adaptability. Many workplace issues can cause stress, yet all of us have the ability to grow and change. We just need to be relaxed and at ease within ourselves to access that ability.

A New Way to Measure Success
Bringing meditation, relaxation, and visualization into the workplace decreases stress and clears the mind. It increases focus and concentration, develops skillful ways of dealing with issues, and inspires ways to solve problems. With just a few minutes of silence, you can gain:
• Clarity of thinking
• Increased efficiency
• Greater perspective
• Better listening skills
• Improved health through greater relaxation
• A stronger sense of self and purpose
• Awareness of our interconnectedness, leading to kindness, compassion, and altruism

Using “Silent Space” at Work
Picture the first few minutes of most of the meetings that take place at your company. Usually, people rush in checking phone messages, setting up laptops, or continuing conversations from the hallway. It’s pretty chaotic. How can we expect people to stop, concentrate, and bring their whole selves to a meeting when it begins like that?

We recommend starting your meetings with two or three minutes of silence. No one has to do anything odd – just breathe naturally and be quiet. In this way, when they start focusing on the meeting, they are more relaxed and ready to do their best work.

In essence, meditation is just calming our mind while being fully in the moment. Entering into silence with ourselves invites us to be truly present with who we are. It helps us relax, yes, but it also creates a space where creativity, solutions to difficulties, and awareness of the bigger picture naturally emerge. It also gives rise to greater joyfulness and a personal happiness that affects both ourselves and those around us. When people are in the present, then magic happens – even in the business world!

Ed and Deb are corporate consultants and personal coaches working with CEOs and senior and middle management. Their award-winning book, Be the Change: How Meditation Can Transform You and the World, includes a foreword by the Dalai Lama. They are regular featured bloggers for Oprah.com and HuffingtonPost.com. They host their own acclaimed radio show, “Going Out of Your Mind.” www.edanddebshapiro.com.

]]> http://watercoolernewsletter.com/making-successful-business-changes-the-quiet-way/feed/ 2 http://watercoolernewsletter.com/an-interview-with-farmer-lee-jones-of-chefs-garden/ http://watercoolernewsletter.com/an-interview-with-farmer-lee-jones-of-chefs-garden/#comments Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:24:38 +0000 admin http://watercoolernewsletter.com/?p=4309
Farmer Lee Jones

As a leader of a family farm that grows, packages, and ships the highest-quality, safest, and most flavorful specialty vegetables and herbs directly to the best chefs in the world, Farmer Lee Jones is by nature a keen observer of changes in the environment – that relate directly to changes in business.

As you look back at 2011, what are your insights for changing an environment?

Farmer Lee Jones:
In many cases, we’re focused on looking forward – like all businesses – but it pays to look back too. Many of the beliefs and practices from 100 years ago were extremely effective and remain valuable today. In my field, that was pre-chemical, pre-synthetic, pre-genetically modified organisms. Farmers employed true crop rotations with cover crops to reinvigorate the soil rather than applying chemical fertilizers to supplement soil devoid of nutrients because it never had a chance to rest.

A huge dichotomy has arisen in agriculture over the past century. Most farmers are sustained by producing cheap crops. Now, these farmers aren’t bad people – they’re just fulfilling the current demand, and they do it very well. As it relates to our income, we produce food cheaper than any other country.

Food is not measured by brix (sugar content), nutritive value, or other qualitative measures as much as quantitative measures like yield and tons per acre.  Billions of dollars have been invested in marketing the cheapest product, leading many consumers today to make decisions based on price, so re-education is the key.

The reality is you can pay now or later for fueling your engine with inferior quality foods. Doctors’ offices are packed, and pharmaceutical companies are making billions as a result of the way we currently eat. Yet the majority of consumers still don’t recognize the difference between buying cheap food and quality food. It’s a hard sell to increase a family’s food budget in a tough economy with high employment rates, yet we’ll pay more for entertainment than food and then wonder why diabetes is rising at such a staggering rate.

Luckily, the news isn’t all bad. We see farmers’ markets also on the rise. Families are beginning to view trips to these markets more like social outings than grocery shopping. They’re cooking with their kids to cultivate their interest, and teaching them to make fresher and healthier choices. Kids are more likely to eat something if they helped pick the ingredients at the market or helped select the crops to grow in the home garden. Getting them involved reinforces the value of the food we eat and gives them a sense of ownership over their decisions that will carry into adulthood.

How can businesses change to be more sustainable in 2012? And what are the benefits of moving to a sustainable environment?

Farmer Lee Jones:
Any sustainable business must be environmentally friendly and socially responsible. But there’s a third part that is harder for people to wrap their heads around – it has to be economically viable. Our businesses can’t sustain if we can’t pay our team members a fair wage. It’s extremely important to keep quality employees. Yet it’s also difficult when we’re competing with companies in third-world countries where the average wage for farm workers is $1.55 per day.

As in other businesses, we have to compete based on things that will differentiate us – like our sustainable growing methods, diversity of products, food safety, and use of technology. One of the most exciting adventures we embarked on this past year was to find a way to generate energy through a renewable source. We’ve installed a boiler that burns corncobs to generate heat for our greenhouses. The cobs are a waste product from one of our neighbors, and it provides a cheap and renewable alternative to fossil fuels. However, wars in the future will not be fought over fossil fuels; they will be fought over water, so companies should be looking toward water conservation methods, which is another area of focus for us.

How can you create hope professionally and personally?

Farmer Lee Jones:
How do you eat an ear of corn? One bite at a time. Over the years, I’ve seen that we can make a difference, but it doesn’t happen overnight. In lieu of a perfect plan, the combined mass of small bites can and will make a difference.

I am extremely hopeful for the future of agriculture. I recently read that more seeds were sold in the U.S. in 2011 than at any time in our history. There are more gardens today than during the Victory Garden days of World War II. That’s exciting to me, but even more exciting is that people are realizing that gardening can be an educational tool as well as entertainment, and on top of that it will produce healthy foods for their household or community.

Farmer Lee Jones and the farm have been featured in Bon Appetit, Cooking Light, Gourmet, Food & Wine, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, The Washington Post, and Food Arts. See www.chefs-garden.com.

]]> http://watercoolernewsletter.com/an-interview-with-farmer-lee-jones-of-chefs-garden/feed/ 0 http://watercoolernewsletter.com/leading-means-leading-change/ http://watercoolernewsletter.com/leading-means-leading-change/#comments Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:24:38 +0000 admin http://watercoolernewsletter.com/?p=4303


Jan Rutherford

It’s that time of year when everybody talks about making changes. All business leaders are facing the usual challenges – transforming cultures, creating better processes, setting shorter sales cycles. All change has one thing in common – whoever is leading it needs to gain acceptance and commitment from the team.

Leadership is nothing if not change. As leaders, we know that creating positive change starts within. I learned much of what I know about leading change while I was in the U.S. Army, from ages 17 to 26. I saw people who held impressive ranks, but that didn’t always correlate with effectively leading and managing change.

People in business may think leading in the military is simple – just give an order and people follow! But that really only happens in combat – just a small percentage of a soldier’s time. In business, people often follow repeatable policies and procedures that can be trained in a course. In the military, assignments are short, so you’re always doing something for the first time. In some ways, there is more change in the military than in the business world.

Becoming a leader who inspires change isn’t easy. Even in the military, leaders have to work hard to gain commitment and acceptance. A friend who is a retired two-star general says, “If I had to give an order, I knew I had already failed.” In other words, if a soldier did something because “I said so,” the leader hadn’t gained acceptance or commitment along the way.

Change Is Cultural

Early in my business career, I thought I could train and coach teams through challenges and problems. But I soon realized that behavior in organizations comes from everything that makes up the environment – that’s the key determinant of success or mediocrity. And that’s why we spend so much time figuring out how to create the right environment, the right culture, so we can foster innovation, facilitate change, and provide fulfillment to the team members. When we can do that as an art, we can instigate change from the heart. But culture has to start at the top, with the vision, mission, and values. If your leaders aren’t walking the talk according to the values, you’ll never create the culture change you desire.

In the military, every unit has a unique culture they take pride in. For example, field artillery units wear red socks. The culture creates bonds of trust, and within that trust, people have open conversations and rules for creating the norms. When that kind of culture exists, leaders can guide change. They don’t have to sell people on the details. Continuous change just becomes “the way we do business.”

Change Requires Sacrifice

To inspire people to change, leaders need to be willing to change their own way of doing things. What does long-term change mean for you? Chances are you’re comfortable. Change requires some degree of discomfort, but great achievements require great sacrifices.

Successful leaders have a passion, and they’re willing to sacrifice the status quo to fulfill it. Think hard about what “sacrifice” means.  Now think about what sacrifice requires. It means giving something up so you can focus on something else. Leaders give their teams more and more to do, but they don’t tell people what to stop. Then they can’t figure out why so many change efforts fail. You yourself have to say “no” to some things, and that may be the hardest step of all.

A famous motivator, Charlie “Tremendous” Jones, once said, “You are the same today as you’ll be in five years except for two things – the books you read and the people you meet.”  I’d add “and the sacrifices you make.” It would be pretty amazing if we all made a New Year’s resolution to sacrifice something so we could change something else – and inspire the will to change in others.

---

These are the Ten Self-Reliant Leadership Essentials that effect change –
in yourself and in others.

1. Passion: What am I driven to change?
2. Vision: Do I know where I want to go?
3. Consideration: Am I assessing past events that may be holding me back from changing?
4. Intention: What happens if I don’t change? What will the future be like?
5. Planning: Have I given myself milestones for change, with due dates?
6. Commitment: Is my passion powerful? Do I have the courage to act?
7. Sacrifice: What will I need to stop doing? Am I willing to leave my comfort zone?
8. Discipline: Can I stick with the change and not procrastinate?
9. Action: Am I working my plan and measuring success?
10. Habit: Has the new behavior become a habit, so it no longer feels like a sacrifice?

The last marker of personal change is not so much an action, but a result of a disciplined approach to these ten steps: Character. Has the habit become so ingrained as to become part of who I am? What will be my legacy with the people I lead? What can I do to augment my personal growth?

Which step is your strength? Which step most needs your focus to adapt the way you think, approach others, and truly effect change?

---

For the past 20 years, Jan Rutherford’s business roles have been in marketing, business development, sales management, corporate training, product management, and government affairs. Half the proceeds of his book, The Littlest Green Beret: On Self-Reliant Leadership, go to the Special Operations Warrior and Green Beret Foundations. He is also a blogger on leadership and change; to learn more, go to http://janrutherford.com.

]]> http://watercoolernewsletter.com/leading-means-leading-change/feed/ 2 http://watercoolernewsletter.com/14-trends-to-watch-in-2012/ http://watercoolernewsletter.com/14-trends-to-watch-in-2012/#comments Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:24:38 +0000 admin http://watercoolernewsletter.com/?p=4294
Josh Bersin
CEO and President,
Bersin & Associates

Leading-edge human resources teams will drive competitive advantage for their organizations by building a borderless, agile workplace with new and changed talent and learning strategies in 2012. These strategies include the heavy adoption of social networking for recruiting, employment branding, learning, and collaboration. They also address a focus on diversity and “Girl Power” to build leadership competencies for the future. In addition, they recommend continual coaching and goal review to drive agile performance management.

Our research shows these strategies are among the 14 biggest trends we see shaping the world of corporate leadership, talent management, training, and recruiting in the coming year. They are included in our report, Strategic HR and Talent Management Predictions for 2012: Driving Organizational Performance Amidst a Global Talent Imbalance. For leaders of people in 2012, the opportunities have never been greater! Here’s a closer look at the top strategic human resources, learning, and talent trends we identified.

1. The imbalanced global workforce will place the focus on talent acquisition. With high unemployment in the U.S. and Europe and the growth of emerging economies, businesses will need to hire staff and develop products at a frantic rate. Also, there is a large gap between skills needed and skills available. Young people are less prepared for work than ever, forcing employers to adopt more forms of on-the-job training to build skills. And as jobs are becoming much more specialized, “internal expertise-matching” is taking hold – matching jobs with current employees who have the expertise and are most willing to do them. There is an explosion of interest in assessment tools and pre-hire simulations, as every hire counts in 2012.

2. HR and talent teams will need a global mindset. In multi-national companies, foreign operations usually have local leaders and ways of doing business. In 2012, most of these companies will build “globally federated” models. This will mean sharing global best practices and customizing tools to deploy locally, keeping in mind that not all talent acquisition teams use the same style of sourcing and staffing. And as local geographies have leadership styles that may be decades behind North America, leaders must now be moved around the world to create a “global talent structure.”

3. Talent acquisition and talent management teams will be integrated. Traditionally siloed, these two functions need to be integrated to avoid disconnected decision making, ineffective response to employee demands, and intensive administrative work. In 2012, companies will form new functions that may be called “talent acquisition, development, and mobility” to combine training, leadership readiness, and succession management. When labor markets and economy are tight, recruiting should first focus on internal talent. Integrating various talent processes allows a company to solve problems more powerfully.

4. Talent acquisition will “go social.” With the more “imbalanced” talent markets, tools like LinkedIn and Facebook are becoming more valuable for recruiting. In 2012, organizations will realize that their entire employment brand has a dramatic impact on the ability to hire. To be a magnet for talent, companies need to clearly showcase their strategy, the types of people they hire, and goodwill from people in the marketplace. It’s important to build a team of people who know who you are and what you stand for, and who want to join your team.

5. Employee engagement will be more important than ever. A 2011 report by Mercer found that 32% of employees were “planning on leaving” their employers – up from 19% just two years ago. People seem to be holding on only until the economy recovers. In 2012, engagement may be more critical as people find easier ways to take their new skills elsewhere. By 2013, 47% of the workforce will be born after 1977, so engagement needs to include an appeal to people under 30. Today’s employees are looking for career development, a modern rewards structure, and companies with a strong mission.

6. Corporate training will continue to transform. Even though the concepts of informal learning and expertise-sharing are becoming more common, most companies are still stuck with “old-fashioned” learning management systems. This is more than using social networking – it’s a total change in “what learning and development teams actually do.” The modern approach will mean about 20% formal training, with the remainder divided among on-demand, informal, and embedded disciplines, supported by new tools and a culture of learning.

7. Performance management will go agile. According to our 2011 research, companies that revise and update their goals quarterly generate 30% greater impact from their performance management process. This means that performance management needs to go agile and “real-time.” The “agile” concept means that annual reviews need to give way to a more continuous, dynamic, and transparent model of feedback. As labor markets tighten, it’s even more important to coach people to perform better and potentially move them into better roles.

8. Talent mobility strategies will go mainstream. There is a desperate need for a dynamic process for internal movement. This benefits people’s careers, enhances employee engagement, saves money on recruiting – and allows companies to hold on to highly trained employees. This requires defining what “talent mobility” means, implementing a strategy for it, and (the hardest part) managing it. High-impact companies will not just tolerate internal movement – they will embrace it and force it. Ultimately, mobility is the most advanced form of succession.

9. Organizations will focus on career development. We envision a system where people can go onto their company’s online portal and look at “similar careers” and see not only what learning is needed for that job, but what other high-performers have done to succeed in that area. Career development will explode in 2012 because young employees are more motivated by career interests than salary or promotions. Companies with transparent career management and mobility programs are already outperforming their peers.

10. Social tools and solutions will abound. Current social tools in HR have similar elements: employees are all peers, anything you post is visible to anyone, employees have rich profiles so they become “real” online, people can share many forms of content, people can comment on and rate each other’s posts, and information is linked through systems like Facebook and LinkedIn. Some HR people are afraid of this transparency, but new tools will dramatically change how companies deal with rewards, learning, performance appraisals, recruiting, and career management.

11. New models, diversity and “Girl Power” will drive leadership strategies. Companies will have to build new leaders – and the nature of leadership has changed. The “new” key competencies are innovation, agility, global acumen, emotional intelligence, and the ability to manage diverse workforces. One diversity issue facing companies is the lack of women in leadership (only 14% of top executive positions are held by women). Diversity creates debate, new ideas, and innovation. In 2012, organizations that value diversity will outperform those who do not.

12. Growth and disruption in software. Some major trends in 2012 in the talent management software market are continued growth (as much as 15%), growing interest in single-vendor solutions, and bigger vendors getting bigger. Also, talent management software is expanding into tools for social recruiting, career management, advanced analytics tools, and mobile solutions. As most buyers rate their software solutions as 3.3 out of 5 in total satisfaction, vendors have a lot of work to do.

13. “Big Data” will differentiate top companies. In 2012, terms like “Big Data” and “Data Science” will impact HR. With the explosion of data, there is a need to know how to analyze it. However, only 6% of HR teams rate themselves as “excellent” in data analysis – and 56% rate themselves “poor.” It’s easier to find talent-related data, but you have to know what you’re looking for. In 2012, we see a major emphasis on building strong “Data Science” teams.

14. Top businesses will “reskill” HR teams. The U.S. Department of Labor says that HR careers will be one of the fastest-growing in the next six years. HR generalists and staff provide huge leverage in the ability to impact change, but interestingly, our research says that fewer than 15% of HR organizations have training for their own people.

Josh Bersin has worked with hundreds of companies to deliver high-impact employee learning, leadership development, and talent management. Bersin & Associates offers product and market data, insight on trends and expert advice on enterprise learning and talent management. Bersin has been quoted in BusinessWeek, Harvard Business Review, and National Public Radio. He is the author of The Training Measurement Book: Best Practices, Proven Methodologies, and Practical Approaches and The Blended Learning Book: Best Practices, Proven Methodologies, and Lessons Learned. See the entire report at marketing.bersincom/2012Predictions.html.

]]> http://watercoolernewsletter.com/14-trends-to-watch-in-2012/feed/ 0