ChiefLearningOfficer.com: To lead from the edge, leaders should focus on building trust

COMMENTARY & OPINION in ChiefLearningOfficer.com

To lead from the edge, leaders should focus on building trust

To become more adaptable and resilient, companies will have to assume increased levels of risk, which will require increased levels of trust throughout enterprises.

Noah G. Rabinowitz, Joe Plenzler April 20, 2021

We know from nature that it isn’t the strongest or the swiftest, but rather the most adaptable, that succeeds. And most contemporary CEOs agree that future relevance, viability and profitability will not come from maintaining the status quo; rather, they will be the result of future innovation.

At its core, innovation is the product of creative people learning to solve problems by recombining existing ideas and technologies in new ways. In today’s competitive business environment, organizational leaders are feeling increasing pressure to do more things differently at a faster pace to keep up with the rate of change — which has accelerated as more people and ideas have become connected globally through technology.

Conversely, increased connectedness and change is correlated with a significant decrease in the average lifespans of companies — shrinking more than 84 percent over the past eight decades. In fact, by 2027, the average company is expected to last only 12 years.

This tells us corporate leaders have a simple choice to make that can be very hard to execute: Adapt or die.

In so many ways, innovation is an adventure into uncharted waters. It demands corporations accept the risk of committing scarce resources without the assurance of outcomes or guaranteed promises of returns. Innovation also requires intrepid employees who are willing to take on reputational risk, explore the adjacent possible and challenge the status quo.

Despite shrinking corporate lifespans and increased complexity, the good news is there are many things leaders can do today to make their organizations more innovative.

To become more adaptable and resilient, companies will need to assume increased levels of risk, which will require increased levels of trust throughout enterprises. To set the environmental conditions for success, leaders must first focus on increasing the level of psychological safety — and therefore trust — within their organizational cultures.

Harvard’s Amy Edmonson defines psychological safety as a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.

Leaders should remember that in most instances, trust is an emotional rather than a rational state. It is a belief in the reliability, truth, ability or strength of others. Trust is the product of people’s willingness to be vulnerable with others and an estimation that others will act according to expectations.

So, to be trustworthy, leaders and team members need to be credible, reliable and vulnerable. Most important, they need to be selfless and demonstrate they will place the needs of the team before their own.

Second, leaders can increase psychological safety by changing how they describe business outcomes from “success or failure” to “success and learning,” and shifting the primary expectations for innovative efforts from a return-on-investment to a return-on-learning mindset.

We have found that this simple semantic change can have dramatic effects on team performance as members shift from an execution-focused to a growth mindset.

Leaders can also benefit from another simple semantic change: eliminating the phrase “no, but” from their lexicon and taking advantage of the lesson from the classic improv comedy game of “yes, and,” which builds empathy for others and fosters cooperation and collaboration.

Third, leaders should expand their concept of innovation from a change in the performance of products or the creation of new products and services to all aspects of their enterprise. In other words, leaders should establish expectations that all employees, not just the research and development teams, have the duty and responsibility to innovate.

A wide lane for innovation exists in businesses’ profit models, structure, relationships with stakeholders, communication channels and more. Leaders can embody this by first assuming no one person, regardless of rank or position, has the monopoly on good ideas.

Leaders should clearly communicate organizational mission and intent to all teammates and push decision-making authorities as far down the organizational structure as practical. This will reduce bureaucratic processes and increase speed and focus within the enterprise. This increased rapidity of action over time will increase organizational strategic agility and operational tempo, resulting in increased advantage over competitors.

Fourth, leaders should seek to create new pathways for ideas to interact within their organizations and within their business sectors.

The probability of innovation increases when more creative minds viewing contemporary challenges through diverse lenses are connecting and collaborating to solve problems.

Paradoxically, current intellectual property and trade-secret practices, driven by financial incentives, essentially wall off ideas and decrease innovative potential, both within and between organizations.

A polarity exists within the concepts of discovery and protection, which requires leaders to balance the sharing of information and creative potential with protecting profitability.

Between collaboration and protection, we believe confident, competent and agile organizations can favor collaboration and still outperform their competition. This is exactly how Boeing, in its heyday, went from blank page to a first-production 747 airplane in 16 months.

Trust unlocks creativity and speed.

Last, we are learning more and more from the field of neuroscience about the human brain’s cognitive capacities — especially around endurance and creativity.

In order for humans to unleash their innovative capacities, the brain requires unstructured time for free association and chaotic experimentation — otherwise known as sleep. Leaders should make sleep, diet and exercise a priority and encourage and model holistic wellness to their teams. We know humans are less creative as cognitive loads increase, so this dynamic needs to be managed effectively to ensure optimal team performance.

The old human adage of “change is constant” no longer applies.

In today’s world and the world of the future, we can expect change to be exponential and accelerating. In order to cope with this new reality, leaders at every level of organizations would be well-served to make increasing trust and psychological safety their No. 1 priority.

Noah G. Rabinowitz is the chief learning officer and vice president of human resources at Intel Corp. Joe Plenzler is the president and co-founder of Cassandra-Helenus Partners, a leadership and communications expert, and a 20-year combat veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. To comment, email editor@clomedia.com.