Leading for Growth

Leading for Growth: How Umpqua Bank Got Cool and Created a Culture of Greatness by Raymond P. Davis and Alan Shrader

Here are my favourite excerpts...

Leading for Growth offers real-life lessons from my experiences in leading Umpqua on a journey of transformation that took it on a path of consistent growth year after year. This book is not intended to tell Umpqua's story. The strategies and methods I used had little to do with our particular financial services industry and

everything to do with understanding how to motivate people, create a competitive advantage, ensure flawless execution, and meet the other challenges every business leader faces.

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At Umpqua we start every day with a motivational moment-a brief group activity (five minutes or less) that promotes fun and teamwork and often teaches key lessons or provokes fresh ways to look at our business.

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And you cannot grow your business if all you are doing is worrying about your numbers-because then you are not honing a strategy to seize the future.

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Think of your own business and industry. What do you and your competitors do that is boring, stale, or bland? Is there something that is numbingly similar across every company, including yours? If so, you have a great opportunity.

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I also sent teams of people on road trips to different cities and asked them to look at companies that have a reputation for some sort of pizzazz, places like Restoration Hardware, the Gap, Nordstrom, even a luxury hotel. I told them, "I want you to observe.

Use all your senses, find out what things look, feel, smell like. And when you come back, I want you to step out of the day-to-day, forget about how banks are supposed to operate, and use your imagination to think about how this might apply to us."

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When you move to reorient your company around the business you are really in, you'll find it will lead to changes in almost everything you do. You'll need to rethink many of the key dimensions of your business:

When everyone in your industry is playing by one set of rules, you must decide to play by another.

• What success looks like

• How performance is measured

• Marketing objectives and strategies

• Hiring and other personnel issues

• Rewards and incentives

• Culture issues

• Customer relations

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I see my job as head of support. If I don't support the people under me, we fail. Simple as that. It starts with me. If I'm not the head cheerleader, shouting myself hoarse to encourage the team, forget it!

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As you think about this chapter and its themes of passion, optimism, and unreasonable expectations, I want to leave you with this bit from Alice in Wonderland:

"One can't believe impossible things," Alice tells the White Queen. "I daresay you haven't had much practice," the Queen replies. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

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What's in Your Briefcase?

Exercise: Distribute sheets with the briefcase drawing (below). Tell the group, "Identify three to five intangible things you will carry in your briefcase today to make it great! Draw or write each item in the briefcase drawing.

"When your briefcase is full, share with the rest of the group.

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Whether they like it or not, leaders have the power to scare the hell out of people. If you don't fully explain what you are up to, you leave people in the dark, and people in the dark have vivid imaginations. They might not imagine you're an axe murderer, but I can assure you, they will imagine something close. And when people are afraid, they shut down right away and don't hear what you have to say. So if you want your people to get excited about change, you sure shouldn't scare them. You've got to give people information, and lots of it, so they don't wonder what is really going on and start imagining all sorts of worst-case scenarios.

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The next time you are trying to persuade the people in your company to break away from conventional wisdom and take a risk on something new, try it. Say, "Give me the benefit of the doubt."

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Don't Manage Change-Lead It

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The point I'm trying to make is that you won't know what is going on behind your back if you don't make it safe for your people to tell you things, especially things they think you may not want to hear. It comes down to a simple question: Are you trustworthy? Can your people trust you not to fly off the handle when they tell you the truth?

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But when I'm talking to our people, I tell them to scratch out "President and CEO" on my business card and write in "Head of Support," which is my real title in their eyes.

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So I really do see my job as head of support, to provide our people with the tools and the training they need to do their jobs at the standards we've set within the company. Because things are moving so quickly, I can't assume that the tools and support that worked yesterday will be sufficient today. I'm out there all the time, asking, "What is it you need?" It's a constant. It's the only way we can keep up with our own growth.

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I am always out there asking these questions. What can I do for you? What is it you need? What type of decision-making authority do you need to provide the level of service that Umpqua is so well known for?

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You've got to demonstrate it daily: you expect people to make decisions. Never even hint that people have to ask permission first. You have to make it clear that people will not be punished for making decisions, and especially won't be punished for good-faith mistakes.

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Empowered employees do not hesitate to tell the truth, good or bad.

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Are people free to say what they think in your company?

When people are empowered, they get into a lot of debates, some very passionate.

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People who are empowered are not afraid of being punished for making decisions.

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At Umpqua, people are never punished for trying to do something unique-what I call coloring outside the lines. What I will punish people for is not doing their jobs. But I tell our executives that nobody in this company should ever be criticized for trying to serve the customer. We might, however, recommend another way of handling the problem next time. "Thanks for taking care of the customer. If that comes up again, let me give you another idea to try that might work even better." That's different from criticism.

And you certainly don't punish or criticize someone for handling a situation differently from how you would handle it. One of our customers came into the bank very upset. She had accrued $700 in overdraft charges, an incredible amount. The Universal Associate she met with went over the charges with her and found they were all valid. It was the customer's fault for writing so many checks. But even so, the associate decided on her own to reverse almost all the charges, about $500. When the store manager found out about this, she was quite concerned. She didn't criticize the associate, because as I said, we never criticize people for trying to take care of customers. But she did ask why the associate would forgive $500 of charges. The associate explained that the customer was basically broke, and the bank would never collect the $700 anyway. But she wanted to impress upon the customer that the charges were her responsibility, so she didn't wipe them all away.

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When people are empowered, they don't worry too much about the rules.

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A lot of people are just not going to color outside the lines if they don't feel completely safe. They want rules because the rules give them security.

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I like to tell my people not to be afraid to break rules.

Rules can't cover every eventuality. People shouldn't break rules just to break rules, but when it makes sense, they shouldn't let rules inhibit them from taking action. So I tell people, "Don't be afraid to break the rules, but be prepared to explain why you did so. If you've got good reasons, people are going to pat you on the back and say `way to go.' That's leadership, that's displaying initiative."

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Enforcing discipline while simultaneously encouraging initiative and empowerment is a tricky equation to manage and many companies struggle to get it right. My approach is to deal with it in terms of foul lines. As long as you keep the ball inside the foul lines, it's fair play. But once the ball goes outside the foul lines, you lose. You've got to set foul lines for your people: "Here is how far you can go, and if you do well with that, I might even let you go a little farther, but for now, here are the limits. Your job is to take care of the customer, and you can do it any way you want as long as you stay within these lines."

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Daily Survival Kit

Items Needed: Mint, candy Kiss, tea bag, eraser, rubber band, toothpick, gum, Band-Aid, pencil.

Exercise: Put all items in a self-sealing plastic sandwich bag. Make one package for each participant or pass one around the group. Ask each member to guess why the items in the bag can help you survive a day.

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If you as a leader can influence your people's state of mind effectively, you've taken a big step toward your goals. Changing job titles sounds like just changing words on paper, but at Umpqua it has changed the way people think about their jobs. It's taken the mind-set and moved it up a level.

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Leaders who don't make it a top priority to help people see the vision of the company are making a big mistake. Instead of talking about the vision and making it real, they focus on this month's numbers or next quarter's numbers. I know numbers are important and everybody at Umpqua knows it too-but they're important because they help us fulfill our vision. If we are financially healthy, then we have the wherewithal to advance our vision. But make no mistake, our quest is for the vision, not the numbers. If all you talk about is the numbers, people will lose sight of the vision.

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People in our industry say if you're big you can't be a community bank. That's not true. It has nothing to do with size: it's about the way you operate the business, the culture you maintain, the relationships you build, and the way you serve customers.

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Exercise: Purchase small Lego kits (space ship, monster, and so on-the more unusual the better) and keep them hidden until the participants have formed teams of three. Place two of the team members back to back, one with the pieces and the other with the instructions, while the third person observes. Direct the person with the pieces to build the item following oral instructions from the one with the directions. After several minutes, the observer and instructor can switch roles.

Conclusion: Assembling a kit in this fashion is a lot of fun and a very powerful demonstration of how important communication is to success as a team.

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If you have a sense of urgency, you can't manage by memos and e-mail. A sense of urgency gets bogged down by e-mail. If you want to slow things down, send e-mail. I've seen more hamster wheels spinning over e-mail than any other communications mode.

If you want to get something done, pick up the phone and talk it through. Instead of picking up a phone for a two-minute phone call that gets something done, people will spend ten minutes typing up e-mail, which has to be responded to, which then has to be responded to, and so on and on.

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Failure to act urgently on a customer's problem is a take-away from our culture and I'm not going to tolerate it. I mean business on this. I'm relentless, I won't let up.

If I get a letter or e-mail and a customer is having some sort of problem, I'll turn it over to the EVP of retail (if he's the appropriate guy) and ask him to take care of it right away. And I'll keep a copy of the original, so I can follow up. I tell him to let me know when he's taken care of it so I can take it off my to-do list. And if I see him later in the day, I'll ask if he's handled it. And if he hasn't yet, I'll say, "I want it done before you leave today." These people are waiting for a response. To us it may seem like small potatoes and we'll get around to it next week. Bull! To the customer it's a big problem.

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When people deal with a reputable company, they expect the large things to be done right. At a bank, you expect your checking accounts to be handled correctly and the interest on your savings account to be computed accurately. When you go to a tire store, you expect the tires to be mounted on your wheels and balanced properly. It's taken for granted. What you don't expect are the little things. And what you remember is not how well the tires were balanced but whether the guy behind the counter went out of his way to help you or was rude to you or whether the coffee tasted like it had been sitting there for days. It's the things that happen that you don't expect that either delight or irritate you. It's all in the details. Sweat the details.

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Leaders who think paying attention to execution at the finest level is too much work or who think they can delegate it to someone else are doomed to mediocrity. Listen to Larry Bossidy, who was chairman and CEO of AlliedSignal and then chairman of Honeywell International after it acquired AlliedSignal. He wrote a best-selling book titled Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done and later described his main points in Leader to Leader, a journal for and largely by top executives. He faults top leaders who see execution as tactics, seeing that side of business as something that can be delegated while the leadership focuses on so-called bigger issues. As he points out, "Getting things done isn't `tactics,' it's the heart and soul of a company. Execution is everything. It produces satisfied customers and repeat business, higher operating margins and earnings per share. Leaders who do not pay attention to how their companies get things done are running companies that don't do things well."

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The people who really help you grow are the people you can count on when you've fallen on your knees-who will bust their britches to get things back on course when something blows up in your face. These are people who are not in it just for the money. These are people who get fulfillment from their jobs and from doing something right, who take pride in accomplishing something, who believe in what the company is trying to do.

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What makes 100 percent? What does it mean to give 100 percent? What makes up 100 percent in life? Here's a mathematical formula that might answer these questions

A - T - T - I - T - U - D - E

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Our performance was measured simply. I did not want this to appear difficult to do at first. I needed buy-in from the troops; they needed to see this as clearly different but fun. So we measured our cross-sales (sales of new products to existing customers) and started the Return on Quality (ROQ) program. See Exhibit 14.1.

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Have you ever experienced poor service at a store or restaurant? Of course you have. And the first person to be blamed is usually the one serving you. But if you experience bad service, it's probably not the clerk's fault, or the server's fault: it's usually management's fault. Management has not communicated high quality standards, supported and trained people to achieve those standards, or held people accountable on a consistent basis. At Umpqua, we do. As a result, everybody at Umpqua is now a service critic. They live and breathe it, and they are very aware of bad service when they encounter it in their lives.

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Three vital strategies ensure Umpqua's focus as a local community bank. First, as much as possible, we make decisions locally. Second, as I discussed in Chapter Seven, every associate is empowered to make decisions that benefit customers, creating strong personal ties that bind each store to its community. Third, our Connect Volunteer Network, a hands-on donation of time and resources, further cements those ties. Through our Connect program, Umpqua associates are encouraged to spend forty paid hours per year volunteering in their communities. We make it explicit: alongside FICA and 401 (k) on each employee's pay stub, there is a line item for volunteer hours available and used.

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What Is Local?

You won't find it on a map. Local is not a place.

It's a decision we make every day.

It's treating everybody as if you've known them your whole life.

Local is not the opposite of global. It's the opposite of words like careless, indifferent, and business as usual.

Values are like vitamins: they are required for the growth and development ?f any company.

Local is what we've always been.

Local is what we'll always be.

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When you have a wider perspective it helps you to see the revolutions gathering that can sweep you away-or, if you harness them, carry you ahead of the pack. But you can also use some specific strategies to sense changes in the marketplace that might turn into revolutions:

• Leave the building.

• Look outside your industry.

• Partner up.

• Ask "dumb" questions.

• Take your blinders off.

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Ask your marketing director, for example, to sit down with the marketing director of a successful company in another industry. If you're selling hardware, for instance, sit down with somebody who is in the transportation business. You may not get ideas about selling your product, but you could get ideas about branding, strategy, or PR opportunities. You will get ideas from somebody who sees the world in a fundamentally different way. And that is always eyeopening. For me, hiring bank consultants for advice is not exciting, because they're just going to tell me about trends in banking and what other banks are doing. That's okay, but it doesn't go very far. I would be much more inclined to hire a retail consultant or a hospital consultant to come in and say, "Here's how you can use our ideas in your industry." When you talk to someone who sees the world differently, you're probably going to discover brand-new ideas for your business.

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Another partnering opportunity arose when Microsoft came to us, wanting to explore how their technology could help transform the banking experience of customers. Microsoft's vision included such concepts as enabling a customer's personal digital assistant (PDA) or cell phone to send an identifying signal to bank associates when the customer enters the store. In turn, an associate can immediately begin the process of accessing the customer's account to help reduce wait times. If using a bank kiosk, the customer could use the PDA to quickly transfer personal information to apply for a loan or other account services. Customers could also use the technology to transfer promotional information from instore digital marketing displays directly onto their PDAs. By partnering with Microsoft to test these concepts, we hope to ride the crest of the next technology revolution.

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So if you want to build your brand and grow your company, you've got to ask some questions-of yourself as a leader and of your company.

• Who are you?

• What gets you up in the morning?

• What's your character?

• What do you stand for?

• What's the spirit of your company-fun, dull, strict, loose, what?

• What inspires your people?

• What makes them proud?

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We always have something going on that makes people talk about us. Our Pearl district store started a "Friday Nite Flicks" program awhile back. We show free movies on Friday nights and everyone is welcome to come. We want every store to be part of the

community, so that people feel free to use their local store as a community center. Local stores have art shows, yoga classes, and book clubs, whatever people in the community ask for. Some stores even have weekly "stitch and bitch" sessions where knitters and needleworkers gather.

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So we decided to enact a formal program to help get people to stretch their rubber bands. What I was desperately trying to do was to give people the indication that real changes were happening. The program was simple enough: everyone in the store-tellers, new accounts reps, loan assistants-would have to take turns for a day standing by the front door and greeting customers as they walked in. Of course, many retailers do that, but in banking, it was unheard of. We had the designated greeter wear a flower corsage or boutonniere and welcome people to the store. When it was your day, that's what you did all day long. The program was little more than cosmetic, but it took people out of their comfort zones.

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"Yes, that's it. They basically spend almost all their time with customers. They aren't in the backroom doing chores. They're out on the floor."

So I said, "Okay, gang, that's what we're going to do. If we are really serious about customer service, we can't have people focus on it only part of the time and expect full-time results. We've got to take the paperwork and reports away from the tellers so they can focus on customers. And we've got to train everyone so they can help customers with all their usual banking needs."

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In sum, what I thought at first would be a simple step of paying more attention to our customers required redesigning jobs, restructuring operations, and implementing a new culture where the focus was on customer service. At most banks and most companies, the culture focuses on efficiency, process, and controls, which almost makes customers an afterthought. Since we decided that while we were a bank, we were really in the retail service industry, I wanted the Umpqua culture to be focused first and foremost on serving customers, which was a significant change.

Making Ideas Happen

Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky

On the idea / execution scale I definitely lean towards the idea side and enjoyed this book. Here are my favourite parts:

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We learned that these teams and individuals did not arrive at success through a mysterious spark of creative genius. Rather, the people who consistently make ideas happen utilize many of the same best practices. Specifically, we discovered that the most productive creative individuals and teams have a lot in common when it comes to (1) organization and relentless execution, (2) engaging peers and leveraging communal forces, and (3) strategies for leading creative pursuits. While many of us spend too much energy searching for the next great idea, my research shows that we would be better served by developing the capacity to make ideas happen—a capacity that endures over time.

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As psychologist Keith Sawyer, a protégé of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of the renowned creativity book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience), writes in his 2007 book Group Genius, “All great inventions emerge from a long sequence of small sparks; the first idea often isn’t all that good, but thanks to collaboration it later sparks another idea, or it’s reinterpreted in an unexpected way. Collaboration brings small sparks together to generate breakthrough innovation.”

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Across the hundreds of interviews conducted during the research for this book, no individual or team I met was without frustration. Anything new inherently works against the grain. And working against the grain is uncomfortable.

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Rather than ask you to emulate a static process that works for others, I will instead present you with a set of core elements to strengthen your existing process.

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We have found that even within large bureaucratic companies with elaborate, formal project management systems, the most productive people run their own parallel processes to accomplish projects more flexibly. These homegrown systems share a common set of principles:

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A relentless bias toward action pushes ideas forward.

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For each idea, you must capture and highlight your “Action Steps.”

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Stuff that is actionable must be made personal.

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When tasks are written in your own handwriting, in your own idiom, they remain familiar and are more likely to be executed.

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Taking and organizing extensive notes aren’t worth the effort.

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If you simply capture and then tend to the actions required for a project, you are already way ahead of the game.

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Use design-centric systems to stay organized.

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Organize in the context of projects, not location.

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Every project in life can be reduced into these three primary components. Action Steps are the specific, concrete tasks that inch you forward: redraft and send the memo, post the blog entry, pay the electricity bill, etc. References are any project-related handouts, sketches, notes, meeting minutes, manuals, Web sites, or ongoing discussions that you may want to refer back to. It is important to note that References are not actionable—they are simply there for reference when focusing on any particular project. Finally, there are Backburner Items—things that are not actionable now but may be someday. Perhaps it is an idea for a client for which there is no budget yet. Or maybe it is something you intend to do in a particular project at an unforeseen time in the future.

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Whether in a meeting, brainstorming session, chance conversation, article, dream, or eureka moment in the shower, you are generating Action Steps, References, and Backburner Items at a fast clip. Everything is associated with a project. Sadly, much of this output will be lost unless you capture it and assign it properly.

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Action Steps are specific things you must do to move an idea forward. The more clear and concrete an Action Step is, the less friction you will encounter trying to do it. If an Action Step is vague or complicated, you will probably skip over it to others on your list that are more straightforward. To avoid this, start each Action Step with a verb: Call programmer to discuss . . .

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The second type is “Ensure Action Steps.” Sometimes you will want to create an Action Step to ensure that something is completed properly in the future. Rather than being a nag to your team, you can create an Action Step that starts with the word “Ensure.” For example, “Ensure that Dave updated the article with the new title.”

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The last type of managerial Action Step is the “Awaiting Action Step”. When you leave a voicemail for someone, send a message to a potential customer, or respond to an e-mail and clear it from your in-box, you’re liable to forget to follow-up if the person fails to respond. By creating an Action Step that starts with “Awaiting,” you can keep track of every ball that is out of your court.

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some teams take a few minutes at the end of every meeting to go around the table and allow each person to recite the Action Steps that he or she captured. Doing so will almost always reveal a missed Action Step or a duplication on two people’s lists. This simple practice can save time and prevent situations in which, weeks later, people are wondering who was doing what or how something got lost in the shuffle.

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Postrel explains, “The difference lay not in ‘information processing’ but in ‘affect,’ in how full-color monitors made people feel about their work.” In other words, the aesthetics of the tools you use to make ideas happen matter.

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Create a Backburner ritual. Of course, putting stuff in your Backburner is not enough. You need to periodically revisit and curate the Backburner as time goes on. Make it a habit. One agency creative director I interviewed keeps his Backburner as a running Microsoft Word document on his computer. On the last Sunday of every month, he prints out this ten- or fifteen-page document and, pen in one hand and beer in the other, spends half an hour editing the list. As he reviews each entry, he either cuts it, keeps it, or—in some cases—turns the Backburner Item into a series of Action Steps. Consider making a recurring monthly “Backburner Review” appointment in your calendar.

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Set up your Backburner. Functionally, the Backburner is easy to employ. Set aside an area at the bottom or side of your notes—or perhaps a separate page—to capture Backburner Items that come up.

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If you were to place projects along the spectrum, the extremely important projects would be placed on the “Extreme” end of the spectrum and the others would be placed accordingly farther down toward “Idle.” Keep in mind that you are not placing your projects along the spectrum based on how much time you are spending on them. Rather, you are placing your projects according to how much energy they should receive based on their importance.

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Viewing your projects along an Energy Line prompts certain questions: How much of your time are you spending on what? Are you focused on the right things?

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An article by personal development specialist Keith Trickey describes how, when developing feature-length films, Disney implemented a staged process using three different rooms to foster ideas and then rigorously assess them:

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Room One. In this room, rampant idea generation was allowed without any restraints. The true essence of brainstorming— unrestrained thinking and throwing around ideas without limits—was supported without any doubts expressed.

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Room Two. The crazy ideas from Room One were aggregated and organized in Room Two, ultimately resulting in a storyboard chronicling events and general sketches of characters.

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Room Three. Known as the “sweat box,” Room Three was where the entire creative team would critically review the project without restraint. Given the fact that the ideas from individuals had already been combined in Room Two, the criticism in Room Three was never directed at one person—just at elements of the project.

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Rothstein’s gift is his ability to navigate corporate bureaucracies, multiple time zones, and various rungs of the corporate ladder to find information and serve his clients. He has no MBA, no souped-up technological solutions, and no magical powers. What Rothstein has is perseverance and a simple conviction that he adheres to with an almost religious fervor: he follows up like crazy. “I’m starting to believe that life is just about following up,” Rothstein confided to me on a hot August evening at a Thai restaurant in New York City. “There’s this one guy that I was paired up with to lead a recruiting project. It wasn’t his real job, and it isn’t mine, but it’s something you do in a company to help out. It’s corporate citizenship. The problem was that this guy didn’t really care. I would send e-mails and a week would pass before a response. I would send drafts of a calendar for him to review and get no response. He obviously didn’t care much, but the project had to get done. At one point, more than a week passed without any feedback or collaboration. So, I forwarded the original e-mail again. Then, two days later, I reforwarded the forwarded e-mail. Then three days later I printed the e-mail out and I sent it FedEx overnight, with my quick notation at the top: ‘Just wanted to follow up.—Jesse.’ He finally got back to me, and he did quite a bit of the work himself.”

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The inspiration to generate ideas comes easy, but the inspiration to take action is more rare. Especially amidst heavy, burdensome projects with hundreds of Action Steps and milestones, it is emotionally invigorating to surround yourself with progress. Why throw away the evidence of your achievements when you can create an inspiring monument to getting stuff done? Some teams, including the Behance team, have created “Done Walls” covered with old Action Steps.

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YOUR COMMUNITY IS all around you—your team, mentors, clients or customers, collaborators, and of course your family and friends. Your community will seldom understand your idea in the beginning, but it will help make it real in the end. Every idea has constituents—members of your community who hold a stake. It is your job to engage and make use of your idea’s constituents.

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For every project, Bennett finds himself a partner. Partnerships are so important to him that he doesn’t pursue an idea until he identifies the right partner.

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Steffen encourages leaders to send an e-mail to each person on their team—as well as to key clients—requesting a few feedback points for each participant under the headings START, STOP, and CONTINUE. Each recipient is asked to share a few things that each of their colleagues and clients should START, STOP, and CONTINUE doing. People then return their lists to the team’s leader (except for the feedback about the leader, which is redirected to someone else on the team). The points under each heading are aggregated to identify the larger trends: what are most people suggesting that Scott START doing, STOP doing, and CONTINUE doing? Isolated points mentioned by only one person are discarded and the common themes are then shared in a personal meeting with each member of the team.

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The combination of an influential audience and updates on the progress of past wishes creates a very powerful yet unspoken sense of accountability for the new recipients. Every TED Prize recipient knows that, one year later, they will be showing their progress to the TED audience and the broader world.

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To understand how systems for accountability can be incorporated into a flexible work flow that suits idea generation, we should examine the emerging movement known as “coworking.” The notion of coworking is very simple. Professionals across industries—whether freelance or full-time telecommuters—gather in a neutral space to work together. It can be a coffee shop or an open office space that rents out desks. While the professionals may never collaborate, they share a work environment that fosters focus and professionalism. In some ways, coworking provides the benefits of an office environment without the costs. There is no boss on site, no face time, and no office politics. But everyone feels a slight pressure to stay focused. In addition, the exchange of best practices and the impromptu collaborations that are supposed to happen in the classic work environment flourish even more so among disparate coworkers.

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In his book The Medici Effect, Frans Johansson makes the case that an explosion of insight happens “at the intersection of different fields, cultures, and industries.”

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“At its best, marketing is building relationships—and learning.” When you go to lunch with people, when you ask for feedback and develop a relationship based on mutual exchange of information, it is optimized marketing. It is optimal because the intentions are multidimensional. You’re valuing the process of getting to know someone, learning something new, and, in the process, familiarizing them with your capabilities. Self-marketing, it seems, is akin to cross-pollination. You have the opportunity to communicate your objectives by seeking to understand those of others.

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You must take the task of marketing your strengths into your own hands. Once you accept responsibility for marketing yourself, you can start to mine for opportunities. Often, the opportunity to showcase your greatest strengths arises as a side project or extracurricular activity outside the scope of your official duties. Little problems pop up all the time that are, in fact, opportunities to which you can add a unique value. Fight the desire to wait for instructions, and learn to showcase your skills and expertise without an invitation.

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As Brier reflected on the interconnectedness of it all, he shared what he sees as a big problem in the media world. “People don’t understand that ‘monetization’ doesn’t happen directly,” he explained. “But if you get people to visit you, and they find that they like the experience, other opportunities will arise.” Brier wholeheartedly believes that people can visit you—and come to respect you—only if you put yourself out there in an authentic way.

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Identify your differentiating attributes. Self-marketing should start with identifying the strengths that differentiate you from others. Are you a designer who has a unique background in computer science or some other unrelated field? Did you spend time in other countries or develop certain skills while working with a well-known client? Are you particularly young—or old—relative to your peers? Make a list of your most differentiating attributes without judging how they might be perceived. Remember that unique features can be regarded as strengths or weaknesses depending on how they are communicated.

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For Noah Brier, this involved a continuing series of breakfasts and a few quick side projects that shared his perspective and talent with the world. For others, it may involve setting up a dynamic portfolio site, doing pro bono work for a nonprofit, or writing freelance articles for local newspapers.

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Brilliant creative minds become a single spot on the spectrum—102.3 or 98.5—and unless you’re right there with them, you’re unlikely to connect. Our frequency determines the other people to whom we are most receptive and connected to. As we stretch to connect with people at other frequencies, we must adjust how we communicate, present our ideas, and engage others.

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One of the best things you can do for your ideas is develop the capacity to tune in to the perspectives of others—and to help others tune in to yours. Interaction, whether it is with an individual or an audience, can be maximized by understanding who you are talking to. What excites them? What are they worried about? Just synthesizing this information will help you further engage those around you.

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Leaders of any creative endeavor should focus first on the things that only they can do—things that simply couldn’t be delegated to others.

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Another common problem faced by once-solo leaders is the desire to have your team just get the job done rather than learn how to do the job better. Remember, however, that the people who work for you are likely interested in more than money; they want to become experts. Besides being the leader, you need to be a teacher. You will want to find opportunities to engage your team members in whatever interests them, even if it is beyond the scope of their jobs.

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Leadership development is experiential. Through trial and error, good times and bad, we gradually become better leaders—but only if we are self-aware enough to notice when and why we falter. In this section of the book, I present best practices of great creative leaders as points of reference for your own personal journey. While leadership capacity is only enhanced through raw experience, we must always question our assumptions and compare various methods and convictions to our own.

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And finally, after much discussion on how we lead others, we will turn our focus inward. After all, some of the greatest obstacles we face in leadership lurk within us. The fortitude to learn from our experiences and take risks is a result of a very personal sense of self-awareness. As we seek to effectively lead others, we must become more effective leaders of ourselves.

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Unplug from the traditional rewards system.

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Stay engaged by setting up a system of incremental rewards.

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If you cannot completely overcome your obsession with short-term rewards, you must use it to your advantage by establishing a regimented series of near-term rewards—the psychological equivalent of grades, paychecks, and affirmations. Whether it means prizing the value of lessons learned, building games into your creative process, or getting gifts upon certain milestones of achievement, self-derived rewards make a big difference. One entrepreneur I interviewed cited the growing number of results from a Google search for his company’s name as a daily reward that his company sought for short-term encouragement. You must be creative in developing a set of incremental rewards that represent progress in long-term pursuits. You cannot ignore or completely escape the deeply ingrained short-term reward system within you. But you can become aware of what really motivates you and then tweak your incentives to sustain your long-term pursuits. We’ll examine some ways to mine alternative forms of compensation in the next few sections.

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With the WTC logos endeavor, the project became an ongoing game as Lee attempted to find at least one old NYC skyline logo every day. “Games,” Lee explains, “keep things simple and keep people engaged.”

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One game he plays with his students and colleagues throughout the day involves an ongoing e-mail exchange of links—little findings that stretch the mind in some way. The game is the hot pursuit of the most clever and engaging or surprising link. The process is both playful and deliberate. “It’s really fun, but at the same time it’s very important, because I think it breaks the routine of their work flow and brings their brains to something totally different,” Lee explains. “That’s how creativity usually works.”

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“Living at either end of the spectrum—spending your energy exclusively on all personal projects or all professional projects—will make you either poor or jaded,” he explains.

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The innate human desire for amusement is a powerful force that you should use to foster commitment and progress.

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As you assemble teams around creative projects, probe candidates for their true interests—whatever they may be—and then measure the extent to which the candidate has pursued those interests. Ask for specific examples and seek to understand the lapses of time between interest and action. When you stumble across an Initiator—someone who has passion, generates ideas, and tends to take action—recognize your good fortune. Nothing will assist your ideas more than a team of people who possess real initiative.

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As you cultivate your team’s immune system, you will want to differentiate between skeptics and cynics. Cynics cling to their doubts and are often unwilling to move away from their convictions. By contrast, skeptics are willing to embrace something new—they are just wary and critical at first. Though they are often undervalued, skeptics are an essential component of a healthy team, and leaders should cultivate their respect and influence.

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One approach is to have a bias toward considering ideas during brainstorming sessions and killing ideas when they come up randomly during execution.

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Fighting is uncomfortable, but consider the benefits of opposing perspectives duking it out. Imagine that the answer to a problem lies somewhere on a spectrum between A and B. The more arguing that takes place about both ends of the spectrum, the more likely it is that the complete terrain of possibilities will be adequately explored. By contrast, if the advocates for A just give up, then B becomes the default answer without any better solution being discovered in between.

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As the leader of a creative team, try to foster healthy debate between people with different levels of influence and experience. One helpful practice is to get everyone to share proposed solutions or ideas first, prior to having people react. Junior people go first, followed by alternative proposals from the more experienced members of the team. Then, as people share their reactions, be sure that all members of the team stay engaged throughout the exchange. When you notice shortness or impatience, confront it with a question about process—something along the lines of “How can we keep all options on the table?” or “Since we’re all trying to find the best solution, why are we getting impatient with each other?”

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These teams recognize that the purpose of disagreement is to more fully explore the options.

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When working with an extended team of stakeholders, Hennes believes that his job is to listen to the stories, gather knowledge about all of the viewpoints, and then identify what he calls the “extremes” that will differentiate the project. Of all the ideas that his team comes up with, Hennes tries to find the few critical extremes that he wants to hold on to, and then commits to compromising on much of the rest. Hennes explained to me that the extremes are the ideas that he feels will most distinguish the end result. As he endures the inevitable battery of critiques and requests for alterations to his plans for a project, he holds these extremes sacred.

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In many creative teams, especially in the creative agency world, I observed an “input by many, decisions by few” strategy. Leaders would engage opinions broadly, then make final decisions in small groups.

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“When I have ideas within the magazine, I don’t say, ‘You, you, and you, act on this idea,’” he explains. “What I do is I say, ‘Here’s an idea. Who’s interested?’ And, you know, I articulate it to the best of my ability and I evangelize and I get people all enthusiastic and do as good a selling job as I can, and very quickly people might say, ‘Man, that’s exactly what I was thinking about!’ . . . Or they’re like ‘meh’ and in those cases I drop it. I don’t push it through.”

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Trusting someone’s judgment does not mean that everything is being done the way you would do it. Different people will make different decisions. The question, as Rojas points out, is: Did their alternate approach make a material difference? As long as the desired outcome is achieved, controlling how it is achieved shouldn’t be that important to you.

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I was grateful for the positive response from the group, but I was eager (and somewhat anxious) for constructive feedback. I wanted to know what went wrong. Then I remembered that the workshop operated with a very nontraditional approach to sharing feedback. Specifically, constructive feedback was not allowed. Rather than bracing myself for the onslaught of critical comments, I would have to refine my story by listening to the group’s “appreciations.” Appreciations is a technique that O’Callahan and other storytellers use to improve students’ skills without any demoralizing consequences. It’s a unique form of feedback that helps creative professionals focus on developing their strengths. Here’s the concept behind appreciations: having just shared a story (or, in other contexts, a presentation or idea), you go around and ask people to comment on the elements they most appreciated.

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And I noticed that a natural recalibration happens when you commend someone’s strengths: their weaknesses are lessened as their strengths are emphasized. As my storytelling compatriots recounted their stories a second and third time, the points of weakness withered away naturally as the most beautiful parts became stronger.

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Of course, the contrarian’s view to this approach is that more direct feedback and criticism might help one cut to the chase. O’Callahan would argue that appreciation-based feedback helps us access a deeper creativity: People need to relax to be able to discover. Our unconscious won’t come forward and help us see things when we are too logical and focused on criticism. Sometimes someone will say, “I just want to know how to improve, not what is good.” People think that pointing out faults is the only way to improve. Appreciations are not about being polite. They are about pointing out what is alive. The recipient must take it in, incorporate it.

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Humankind is critical by nature. It is easier to hear an off note in a symphony than to identify the perfectly played note that makes all the difference. As O’Callahan explains, “Everyone thinks they can tell you what is good. But, no, it takes years to be able to say, ‘That phrase is fresh, that was a lovely image, sheets on the bed like snow-covered mountains, lovely.’ It is hard to get people to pay attention to that skill.”

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At one design firm I visited, a piece of work is placed on the table in a conference room, and everyone is asked to share three things they like about it. The artist takes away the feedback—all positive—and makes another version for the team to review. Almost always, the piece is dramatically improved. And the concerns that some members of the team had—but didn’t share—are often minimized naturally.

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Hot spots are easy to identify if you ask the right people and look in the right places. Don’t look for who gets the most credit or who is the most well-known. Instead, ask people where they go to get help. Seek out the people in your company or industry who are known for their reliability and uncanny ability to always know (or find) the answer. And then, when you identify the hot spots, listen to them and empower them. Give them more influence and responsibility. As you try to lead change through your creative endeavors, you should depend less on formal power plays and top-down transformations. Instead, you should seek out and engage the hot spots to ensure a lasting impact.

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A common occurrence in any organization is what I have come to call “momentary injustice.” One of the most extraordinary leaders I worked with while at Goldman Sachs was then vice chairman Rob Kaplan. “Justice prevails over time in any good organization,” he would say. “But justice does not prevail at any given point in time.” A good leader, Kaplan believed, was able to overlook missed credit or an unfair project assignment by having faith in the course of an organization’s growth.

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The best practice here is to develop a tolerance for momentary injustice and periods of ambiguity. Stay strong and stay calm as a situation settles itself over time and the clouds around any period of change start to dissipate.

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As British author A. A. Milne once said, “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience—well, that comes from poor judgment.”

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Aspire to better practices, not the best. Rather than default to the way things have already been done, recognize that anything can be done better. While it is certainly worthy to find and follow time-tested methods as we pursue projects, it is dangerous to passively accept advice. All conventional wisdom and “best practices” should be taken with a grain of salt and built upon as we aspire to “better practices.” (This applies just as much to the advice in this book!)

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“When our [start-up team] first came together,” Weinreich recalled, “I told them that their biggest risk was joining the team—and that the rest of the experience would just be filling the holes in the boat. If we sat still, the boat would sink. The faster we moved, the more slowly the water would creep in, and we’d simply plug all of the holes over time.”

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In Anne Lamott’s international best seller Bird by Bird, about the art of writing, she cites a quote by the award-winning American author E. L. Doctorow on what it is like to write a novel. “It’s like driving a car at night,” Doctorow proclaims. “You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

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My Horizontal Life

My Horizontal Life by Chelsea Handler

This was recommended to me as a fun summer read and it was exactly that. Lots of funny, laugh out loud parts that would make this blog blush if I posted them here. Perfect for my summer vacation.

Rocket Boys

Rocket Boys (The Coalwood Series #1) by Homer Hickam

I enjoyed this book and was surprised that I had only flagged one excerpt (not a reflection of the story's quality!):

"My usually less supply mind was trying to figure out how high our rockets were flying. I delved into Jake's book. Quentin, delighted to have it, did the same. Sitting together in the Big Creek auditorium at lunch, we taught ourselves trigonometry. I had discovered that learning something, no matter how complex, wasn't hard when I had a reason to want to know it. With trig under our belt, all we would need to do was build some instruments to measure angles and we would be able to calculate how high our rockets flew."