Treat Every Job as an Adventure
Leaders personally seize the initiative, encourage others to do the same, and actively look everywhere for great ideas, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t make extraordinary things happen if they’re leading a project that’s been assigned to them. They don’t have to wait to start their own business to change the business-as-usual environment. When we asked people to tell us who initiated the projects that they selected as their personal bests, we assumed that the majority of people would name themselves. Surprisingly, that’s not what we found. Someone other than the leader—usually the person’s immediate manager—initiated more than half the cases. If leaders seize the initiative, then how can we call people leaders when they’re assigned the jobs and tasks they undertake? Doesn’t this finding fly in the face of all that we’ve said about how leaders behave? No, it doesn’t.
The fact that over half the cases were not self-initiated should come as a relief to anyone who thought he or she had to initiate all the change, and it should encourage everyone in the organization to accept responsibility for innovation and improvement. If the only times people reported doing their best were when they got to choose the projects themselves or when they were the CEO, the majority of leadership opportunities would evaporate—as would most social and organizational changes. The reality is that much of what people do is assigned; few get to start everything from scratch. That’s just a fact of organizational life.
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important whether you find the challenges or they find you. What is important are the choices you make. What’s important is the purpose you find for challenging the way things are. The question is this: When opportunity knocks, are you prepared to answer the door? Similarly, are you ready to open the door, go outside, and find an opportunity?
Even if you’ve been in your job for years, treat today as if it were your first day. Ask yourself, “If I were just starting this job, what would I do?” Begin doing those things now. Constantly stay alert to ways to improve your organization. Identify those projects that you’ve always wanted to undertake but never have. Ask your team members to do the same.
Be an adventurer, an explorer. Where in your organization have you not been? Where in the communities that you serve have you not been? Make a plan to explore those places. Take a field trip to a factory, a warehouse, a distribution center, or a retail store. If you’re in an educational system, go sit in on the class that was once your favorite subject. How’s it different today? If you’re in city govern- ment, go to a department that really intrigues you. If you’re in a professional services organization, go on a site visit with someone in a different practice.
Consider what happened when the chief executives of many large corporations got out of their offices and looked around their organizations from the ground floor, as profiled on the TV show Undercover Boss.25 On the show, executives (in disguise) work the frontline jobs of their organization to see firsthand how their corpo- rate mandates play out in the real world. Waste Management’s Larry O’Donnell revealed, “In my role as COO [chief operating officer], there are many policies I create that you all have to live with. Now that I’ve made a connection with the people who do the hard jobs
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at this company, I’m going to be a better manager. I have a whole new appreciation of the impact my decisions have.”26
You don’t have to be at the top of the organization to learn about what’s going on around you. Be on the lookout for new ideas, wher- ever you are. If you’re serious about promoting innovation and getting others to listen to people outside the unit, make gathering new ideas a personal priority. Encourage others to open their eyes and ears to the world outside the boundaries of the organization. Collect ideas through focus groups, advisory boards, suggestion boxes, breakfast meetings, brainstorming sessions, customer evalua- tion forms, mystery shoppers, mystery guests, visits to competitors, and the like. Online chat rooms are great venues for swapping ideas with those outside your field.
Make idea gathering part of your daily, weekly, and monthly schedule. Call three customers or clients who haven’t used your services in a while or who have made recent purchases, and ask them why. Sure, there’s email, but the human voice is better for this sort of thing. Work the counter and ask people what they like and don’t like about your organization. Shop at a competitor’s store or, better yet, anonymously shop for your own product and see what the salespeople in the store say about it. Call your organization and see how the phones are answered and how questions are handled. Make sure that you devote at least 25 percent of every weekly staff meeting to listening to outside ideas for improving processes and technologies and developing new products and ser- vices. Don’t let staff meetings consist merely of status reports on routine, daily, inside stuff. Invite customers, suppliers, people from other departments, and other outsiders to your meetings to offer their suggestions on how your unit can improve. Keep your anten- nae up, no matter where you are. You can never tell where or when you might find new ideas.
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