Great to speak at the Texoma HR Management Association today on maximizing employee engagement, building high performing teams and increasing teamwork, communication and innovation.
We played Cards Against Mundanity (small group team building/performance question-and-answer) to show how quickly you can skyrocket trust.
It’s built off a famous research study where in 45 minutes people built the closest relationships in their lives.
Trust is everything. It’s THE business performance accelerator.
90% companies who create value statements for employees to follow are completely wasting their time. Brene Brown (In her new book), Gartner Group & other research show that employees aren’t living out those values in their behavior. BUT they can be powerful if you have a structured process to create company values.
Here’s a test to see if you know your company values and if they make an impact:
“Can you tell a story about something that happens in your company that would not happen anywhere else? What company values does the story line up with?”
Not many people can answer that.
Here is a process you can use to create game-changing values.
1) Create a short list of guiding principles for your company. I’d keep it to three.
2) For each value write out the behaviors an employee needs to exhibits in order to embody it.
3) Each month, take one of those principles and focus on it. Market it, educate and show examples of it.
4) Reward employees for exhibiting that one principle.
5) Include it in performance check-in reviews, bonuses, etc.
6) For hiring, use values to focus on cultural contribution rather than cultural fit so you hire diverse people rather just people who think alike.
I’ll be speaking at Social Media Dallas event on Thurs, April 18 at 6:30pm on building the highest performing & most engaged teams (and on maximizing employee engagement). We will addressing how this specifically affects social media teams, public relations agencies, marketing and advertising professionals and many others.
We will be playing my game Cards Against Mundanity (group question-and-answer game) that skyrockets trust in minutes. It’s based on a research study where participants created the closest relationship in their lives in 45 mins. 1,000 employees have played it in companies such as Amazon, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Gillette, Oklahoma City Thunder, Google & many others.
Many business leaders, managers, and owners want to come up with business breakthroughs that will propel them to new career heights and/or help them their business. I want to discuss today how the greatest people of our time use creativity to create more breakthroughs.
The secret of creativity is that it is combinatorial – made up of a combination of things. Nothing is entirely original. Everything builds on what came before.
We create by taking existing pieces of inspiration, knowledge, skill, and insight that we gather over the course of our lives and recombining them into incredible new creations.
Let me explain with this story about Picasso.
Picasso is sitting in the park working on several paintings. A woman walks by, recognizes him, and begs with him to draw her portrait. He’s in a good mood, so he agrees. A few minutes later, he gives her a portrait. The lady is elated, she cries out about how this masterpiece captures the very essence of her soul and character. She is enamored with its beauty. She asks how much she owes him, “$5,000.” said Picasso. The woman is taken aback, shocked, upset and asks how that’s even possible given it only took him 5 minutes. Picasso looks up and, without missing a beat, says: “No, madam, it took me my whole life.”
“The idea that in order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces to build” new solutions, processes and more.
Think about it like legos. “The more of these building blocks we have, and the more diverse their shapes and colors, the more interesting our castles will become. Because if we only have one color and one shape, it greatly limits how much we can create, even within our one area of expertise.”
Your success, failures, fulfillment and more is based on what you do every day and the diversity of your experiences (people, education, ideas, etc.). It’s not a linear process like school. It’s piecing together a lifetime of concepts, ideas, experiences, beliefs, values, and relationships and creating something new. h
Truth & beliefs are two separate things. Leaders & managers OFTEN get them mixed up and it’s crushes their career because they argue them because they need to be right (or they are closed off from other possibilities). Here is why your beliefs aren’t truth (and goes to epidemic level of poor self awareness).
Truth is 1+1=2. That’s a fact. Belief is true to you, but a belief isn’t necessarily true to me. It’s an opinion (& emotional not logical) even though is may feel or seem to be the truth (such as a particular strategy, process or way of thinking).
If you and I are sitting at a table eating dinner we can both point to the table and say, “Yeah, that’s a table.” How do I know that? Because you’re experiencing it and I’m experiencing it. That’s the truth. We look up at the sky that’s the truth. But you telling me that best TV show is Game of Thrones, that’s not true. That’s just your belief.
I challenge people constantly on what’s true and what’s not true. And then are you willing to give up your old beliefs and accept new ones.
If not, you’ll get stuck (& limit your growth), alienate people, underperform, and find yourself in some very difficult situations that you could have avoided.
