5 Innovation Lessons I Learned on the Dance Floor

The greatest leadership lessons I’ve learned have occurred on the dance floor. Dancing is an experiential form of being, learning, and doing. Moving your muscles helps you understand things in totally new ways.

I’ve danced my whole life. I’m a Bollywood dancer, but I'm also a globally recognized leadership expert, and I use movement in all my work. Through movement, I believe we can inspire creativity, deep listening, and cross-generational learning.

Why movement? Our minds and bodies are intrinsically linked; movement acts as a messenger between the two. When we can understand our own and others’ movements, our capacity to collaborate and harness our intuition skyrockets. And growing research in many disciplines–from neuroscience to sports medicine, from psychology to anthropology–supports these ideas.

Here’s what I’ve learned from all those years of hip shaking and shimmying:

1. Partnership

Dance teaches us about the push and pull of partnership, intellectually, viscerally, and kinetically. Dance partners learn how to work together, move together, listen to each other, and to move past missteps. Dance teaches trust. As innovators, we do the same. Our collaboration in teams and groups allows us to open up new ways of working with others, sometimes taking the lead and sometimes following. Regardless of who’s leading, we’re always in partnership with a larger movement or organization.

2. Adaptability

Harvard leadership expert Ron Heifetz uses the metaphor of dance throughout his renowned book on The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. When we adapt as innovators or move as dancers, we test new variations of working. This adaptability brings together the physical, emotional, and intellectual that all feeds our work as innovators. Learning new steps and combination in a dance is a challenge in a controlled setting and freedom within safety. Just learning a new dance move helps develop neuro-pathways and makes us more adept at solving problems in any area of our life. By giving yourself challenges in movement, you rewire your brain and have greater capability in your work.

3. Variation

In dance and in innovation, we often focus on a "final event." Learning variation allows innovators to practice the process of discovery in their work lives. Twyla Tharp, choreographer and author of The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life, asked her dancers to reverse their moves as if they were a mirror of themselves. This small variation created a whole new dance form called inverse variation. Similarly, an innovative leader can quickly test new variations of working and then decide which works best rather than talking on and on ad nauseum.

4. Inquiry

The questions we ask ourselves as dancers are questions we should ask ourselves as innovators. Think of your work as a piece of art you create. What is the rehearsal process? What does hardship look like? How is it structured? What’s holding the piece together? What judgments are you coming up with? How do you sustain yourself?

5. Audience

Building an audience as an innovator or dancer is about who you can connect with. Most people attend a performance because they’ve been encouraged to or they see that it relates to their interests. Ask yourself: What conditions do I want to build for success? Much of it is about sharing your ideas early on with others and embracing them, like you would in a first dance performance. Additionally, as in dance, the most important part of business innovation is the process of surfacing the knowledge in the room to use it in a different way. Innovators are given permission to see, comment, or fix. However, so much of innovating is observing and noticing and getting more voices in the room.

This post first appeared at Fast Company.

5 Best Companies for Employee Engagement

Business leaders in America have been programmed to view Capitalism as an "anything goes" system, where competition is king. For example, as long as business leaders are playing by the rules, it's apparently okay for wages to be distributed unevenly throughout the organization. For example, the top executives are being paid more than 100x that of the average worker. After all, only the CEO works really hard right?

Wrong. A new era of leadership is beginning to catch fire and the days of profits, profits, profits are slowly coming to an end. Stakeholders want more from their companies. Companies that are getting on board with stakeholder demand for doing what is good and just for their employees are the ones who are winning.

Billy Joel, it’s time to rethink your tune.  It is not enough to simply conduct business to make money in today’s environment.  Companies must go the extra mile to do what is right for their people and invest in them what they want to get out of them. 

Take a look at how Five Companies are thriving in today’s environment of increased employee engagement:

1.     GOOGLE:  Google offers its employees a workplace that combines work and play. Complete with scooter parking stalls, free late afternoon espresso shots, healthy snack bowls, and a full service gym, Google is working to provide a workspace that people appreciate and ultimately work harder for. Sure it is an investment for Google to offer these perks to over 50,000 employees all year. However, the investment is clearly worth it with Google stock selling at $889 per share and consistent reports of year over year increases in growth rate. 

2.     SAS:  SAS employees, and their families, have free access to a massive gym featuring a weight room and a heated pool. They also have an on-site health care clinic, staffed by physicians, nutritionists, physical therapists, and psychologists–all for free! Deeply discounted child care is available and additional no-cost work-life counseling is offered to employees. They’ve had 37 consecutive years of record earnings coming in at $2.8 billion in 2012.

3.     WEGMAN’S FOOD MARKETS:  Employees of this grocery food chain are encouraged to reward one another with store paid gift cards for good service. Many workers like it there so much that one in five employees are related to each other, as so many referrals take place.  Wegmans has also been known to offer chartered jets to fly all new full-timers to Rochester to be welcomed by CEO Danny Wegman.  With turnover rates far below that of other retailers, Wegman’s future is promising.

4.     DREAMWORKS ANIMATION:  At this movie studio, fresh-juice trucks visit the headquarters location to distribute free smoothies, and employees are given stipends to personalize workstations.  Parties are frequently held after large projects are completed where company artists are encouraged to share their personal work.  Revenues for this company were over $706 million in 2011.

5.     ZAPPOS.COM:  Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is relocating headquarters to Las Vegas where he is spending $350 million to develop the entire neighborhood, dubbed the Downtown Project, so employees will have access to great places to live and socialize too.  The company employees a full time life coach, and last year Zappos.com reported 0% voluntary turnover.

Guest Post by April Anderson. April is a researcher at Erica Dhawan Group and currently a MBA candidate at Baruch College in Organizational Psychology with a passion for women & leadership, social enterprise, and management development theory.  Find April here.

 

MONDAY INSPIRATION – Eric Butterworth

Alexstar | Dreamstime Stock Photos | Stock Free Images

Alexstar | Dreamstime Stock Photos | Stock Free Images

"Don’t go through life, grow through life."

  Eric Butterworth (Click to Tweet!)

 

Are you finding yourself growing through life? If NOT, what's that one action you want to take today to turn that around? 

 

 

Don’t Go it Alone: Collaborate

Being a leader in today's world is about collaborating, giving the work back to a group, and experimenting with new solutions. Most importantly, leadership is always about working with others: we cannot go it alone and live in solitude– our greatest challenge is about trusting, testing and letting others in to our most important work.

Oftentimes, we don’t share those hours we work, the sweat we build up, and the tears we give. It’s easy to hide and not share your challenges. It may be for many reasons, you don’t feel ready to talk to people about it, you’ll think they’ll say negative things, or you just don't want to share it.  The truth is feedback is all opinion and all positive. We just have to be in the right place to engage with others.

Here are four key ways to make sure you don't go it alone and collaborate:

1) Improve your capacity to ask for help: We all have to learn to ask for help. We need to work with confidants and allies. You can't lead alone. You need people to debrief with everyday.

2) Get comfortable and confident with yourself:  Connect with your inner spirit that gives you energy. Connecting to our hearts give us an internal force that helps us grow–it's that little inkling of, I know myself and I can do it.

3) Create structures to stop feeling alone: Find an accountability partner, a buddy who is on your side and helping you grow in the same way you are helping them grow. Choose someone who knows your strengths and can help you move forward.

4) Build a board of quotes: Inspirational messages or some type of mantra / affirmation are excellent ways to reframe your mind, keep you motivated and energized for your next challenge.

Davos: Where are the women, again?

As CEOs, celebrities, and champagne covers the snowy streets of Davos this week for the 2013 World Economic Forum, the media is enjoying its own spin on the world’s most exclusive event. While the mix of people at the event is slowly changing with the rise of World Economic Young Leaders, Global Shapers and technology entrepreneurs, there is one population that remains quite the same—the overwhelmingly low ratio of women to men at the event and the whispers of the quota system in the air.

With women still only making up only 17 percent of Davos, we are moving closer but we are not moving fast enough. There is still a long way to go.

This week in Huffington Post I share some facts about quotas as "controlled experiments" and what it might look like in the future. Read the full article here.

How are you tackling quotas in your workplace? Do you have strategies to recruit a pool of diverse talent—diversity of backgrounds, experience and ideas? We might not be able to change Davos, but we can change our own teams and companies to generate better ideas, leaders, products and services.

Get motivated to work

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a lot of conversation about whether work motivation comes from extrinsic or intrinsic rewards. Most research has shown that extrinsic rewards (i.e, pay for performance) distorts results, whereas intrinsic rewards enhance performance.

I believe it goes back to how your work itself is organized. When work is designed well, you get more motivation and much higher quality because individuals care about work, and it generates commitment. There are certain conditions that must be met to create these conditions: Work must have meaning; avoid the classic assembly line problem, you are not just a cog in the wheel. One must experience responsibility: the choices you make have something to do with the outcome. There must be a clear bigger picture: you have some knowledge of how it all relates to a larger change in the world.

When designing work, there are five key ways to design motivational work (thanks to Harvard researcher Richard Hackman)

Task identity: when work is completed, it’s clear what your contribution was. Nothing is worse than working all day and thinking “What did I even accomplish?!”

Skill variety: It’s not same old, same old repetitive work. Engaging lots of different skills = fantastic.

Task significance: the work makes a difference in some way. You see the connection between what you’re doing and the difference you’re making.

Autonomy: This doesn’t mean that you always get to do what you want. It means you get a domain of choice about how you’re doing your work.

Feedback: This helps you SEE the difference that your work is making.

So here’s an exercise for you: rank how you currently design a work project from 1-5 in each of these categories. Where do you need improvement? What’s blocking you from doing your best work? Find out and address it. And share with us what your greatest work design challenge is in the comments here and I’ll help you refine it.

Stop Comparing

It’s not worth your time. Yes, you know what I mean. Ever sit and feel like you are not as good as [fill in the blank]? Ever feel like you ‘should’ do more? Here’s some news: We live in a world of leaders, stop comparing yourself.

Each person has their gifts, and their gifts shine in different ways and at different times.  When you compare yourself to others, you don’t win, you hurt your own brightness and stop focusing on developing your strengths.

This rings especially true in today’s world of experts and entrepreneurs. “The truth is that we don’t help each other and move our industry forward,” says Brendon Burchard in The Millionaire Messenger. If you are an expert, well, can others be experts as well? And how do you compare yourselves to them? Our system isn’t set up to help people share their own voices, rather it is set up to fear one another and hold our information so close because it could be ‘copied.’

There is room for everyone and comparison just drains our creative potential. We should not worry because as long as our focus remains on our talents, we will be able to successfully make them our own.  While life may seem like a treadmill where we always want more, just relax and own yourself, and I promise you’ll be a happier and satisfied leader.

So instead of comparing, give. Give to the world in new ways. Give more help to a friend. Give to a social cause or your business. Give lots more to the world and you’ll SHINE. Because that’s what we really need AND it will end up serving you.

My Dialogue Walk with Peter Senge

“Never waste your time convincing anyone of anything.  Get them to realize that they are struggling. A community organizer helps groups realize they have deep common interests even though they don’t yet know how to work together.”  -Peter Senge

On Monday, I attended a Social Initiatives meeting led by Arthur Zajonc, author of Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry and professor at Amherst college. Arthur had convened a group of 30 men and women, across generations, countries, and sectors co-facilitated by my greatest teacher Otto Scharmer. My biggest takeaway from this meeting was the power of personal development to enable social change.

Midway through the session, Peter Senge, leading management guru and author of Fifth Discipline, spoke to the group for ten minutes about his own current social initiatives.

Peter discussed the next generation of leaders: “5-15 year olds are the leadership needed to transform our societies. We simply in our present culture do not know how to see the future. We care about kids as customers more than as human beings.”

This sparked a group conversation, and within ten minutes, I noticed a peculiar thing: only the older generation in the group was still talking. My body started trembling and my inner voice said, were they talking about or with the younger generation right now?

Soon after, Arthur made an intervention. He asked the ten younger participants to form a smaller circle in the middle of the larger circle. For the next ten minutes, the younger generation spoke about our own needs, challenges and opportunities we saw in our future, and the older generation just listened.

I then took a 45 minute dialogue walk with Peter Senge to investigate this discussion further. We spoke as human beings, about how for him working and listening to youth made him come alive and about my own challenges speaking in a group around those with so much more experience. We talked about our meditation practices, even how failure has come up for us. What I appreciated most was that we were in real cross-generational dialogue listening to one another, not in a classroom setting where academia created authority boundaries. We embodied the work of community organizers, learning and working with each other in new ways given our common values and interests for the world.

My biggest awakening from the dialogue walk was to just remember that each human being, even Peter Senge (!!), has their own inner revolution which enables their outer revolution. When we all pay attention to our personal leadership work, social change can really happen.

On innovation….

Taken at Maya Design office in Pittsburgh, PA

What would I do if I weren’t afraid?

I’m currently reading the “War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle” where Steven Pressfield describes how I have two lives, the life I live and the unlived life, where resistance is in the way.

Resistance prevents me from doing my work, from being free, from being solo. It’s the different between the artist and fundamentalist.

So, ask yourself: what would I do in a life without resistance, without fear?