Are You a Grumbler? Keep It Up—It Is an Advantage!
M&M culture: Are you also getting tired of always having to wear the “yes hat”? The good news is that you don’t have to wear that hat any longer. Have you experienced people asking you to be a yes-man or yes-woman? You have probably tried working with yes processes, where you must be positive and are not allowed to scrutinize or reject an idea when it is presented. Often, the rule is that you are not permitted to say “no” and “but.” In other words, you are forced to be positive and obliging. It is a sympathetic idea, but does it work in the real world? The people who came up with the idea probably thought that more ideas would lead to more opportunities, and because nobody can say no, the employees would not be afraid to present their ideas, hence making them more creative. I have experienced this at brainstorming sessions and in business development projects. Many companies have adopted various brainstorming tools that are used to generate (many) ideas in a short time frame or as a tool to support an innovation process. It is often a requirement for the participants to be very positive in these processes.
Joy dictatorship Last week, I visited Norway, where I bumped into Eva Grinde, who works as a journalist for a business newspaper. She has written about how we should do away with the “yes hysteria.” She mentions that we are subject to a “joy dictatorship.” I found her very inspiring, and I would like to share her thoughts with you. Among other things, Eva states that this “joy dictatorship” can quickly become as oppressive as “management by fear,” where the boss often is an authoritarian, an almost militaristic and psychopathic person who manages the employees using threats and fear. Roughly speaking, you have three options:
You can decide that everybody must say “yes” and accept all ideas. You can decide to stick with your “we always find at least five errors” culture. You can ask everybody to be dedicated and sincere.
Innovation doesn’t come from positive environments
A couple of days ago, I attended a conference at the Danish mortgage credit company Nykredit. The financial crisis and the time following the crisis were on the agenda. I spoke with one of the industry’s leading financial experts. He told me that when economists work together in creative processes, then their contribution is distributed with 5 percent passion and 95 percent errorfinding attitude. It is quite interesting to conduct innovation projects in a culture like that. Some people will claim that innovation is impossible in such environments. I disagree. The focus should be on the fact that most companies need creativity to come up with ideas, and they can be stimulated to do this. Their innovation ability is defined as their combined ability to implement their creative ideas. The first part is vital for businesses in most industries, but being innovative is far from enough to secure the actual realization of an idea. Several researchers have stated that joy, humor, and self-management form the glue that makes innovation possible (in other words, joy dictatorship). Again, I have to disagree. Throughout my career working for several big companies it is my experience that employees do not become more creative because they are allowed to work in a false positive environment. In other words, your employees don’t need the boss acting as a coach, walls painted in spectacular colors, fruit baskets, or free massages to be creative and innovative. It is forbidden to be positive In my experience, the people’s creativity, ideas, resourcefulness, and dedication are the qualities that make them innovative. Their ability to be innovative is also due to you and your management style. Can you make your employees feel that their work is meaningful? If you cannot, the consequence is that you might get the job done, but you don’t get the extrainnovative involvement from your employees. You must create meaning or get out! For example, I have told my new assistant not to be positive. Don’t get me wrong—she is a happy and smiling person, and she is actually quite positive. However, we have agreed that she is not allowed to praise my work. She may not tell me if anything I say, write, or do is good. If she wants to praise me, she can do so to her friends or whomever she talks with about me. I don’t need her praise. I really don’t need it! Praise doesn’t make our company better. I need my assistant to be constructive and critical. She is very talented, and I prefer to hear her suggestions for improvement rather than praise. The M&M trap You do have a big coresponsibility for your overall innovativeness. Examples of this responsibility might be your ability to find financing or to change a business process. What kills innovation is what I call M&M: meeting and manager.
Hour-long meetings and the many bad and poorly educated midlevel managers do more harm than good. Don’t you agree?
Give me a list of your last eight meetings and tell me how you benefited from having them. Ask your employees about how they perceive the value of their immediate superior as well as his/her creativity and innovativeness. ;-) Welcome conflicts and disagreements It is my experience that if you let people disagree or leave room for misunderstandings, mistakes, and temperament, then you will create more innovativeness than if you demand that everybody must be positive and praise each other all the time. Say goodbye to the “feedback burger” and bid the grumblers welcome Danish managers like the so-called feedback burger where you start out saying something positive whenever you want to criticize, and when you receive feedback on your criticism, you will again have to wrap your opinion in positivity. Forget about this method. Just call them as you see them! You will stimulate a culture where people say things the way they really are. Do your best to make sure that the grumblers remain authentic and committed. The people who grumble and offer you honest feedback are important to you. Some might say that they are more important than the people who are always positive—are they positive because they are afraid of losing their job or because they really are that positive? My best innovation advice Make sure that your competent employees are open, honest, and not afraid to go all the way to make sure that you still have a business in one to three or ten years. Liberate yourself and your company from joy dictatorship. It’s okay to not be positive all the time—as long as it can be converted into real innovation.