The 10 Norms for a Compassionate and Innovative Leadership Mindset (Part 1)
This week I'm back, sharing my insights on innovation and leadership. I've been asked a lot lately about how I generate my ideas and content, and how I manage to stay so innovative at work. Honestly? I didn't have a good answer at first. So I'm going to try to share some of the personal practices that really fuel my approach to innovation and leadership.
These 10 norms for a compassionate and innovative leadership mindset came to me in 2021 while reading Tim Harford's book "The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics." As I read Tim's rules, it hit me - they're incredibly relevant to leadership! So, here are my first five norms for a compassionate and innovative leadership mindset, inspired by Tim Harford's work.
Search your feelings/personal experience: The absolute most important thing you can do to become a better, more impactful leader is to grow your self-awareness. Self-awareness helps us truly understand how our feelings, behaviours, and interactions affect those around us.
A few years ago, I wouldn't have said I was someone who spent much time "searching my feelings." I tended to move on from negative emotions pretty quickly. But life throws curveballs, and I've had to deal with anxiety and all the messy emotions that come with it. One strategy that's been incredibly helpful for me is digging deeper into my emotional state and personal experiences. The ability to reflect, and then turn these reflections into action is a key to my ability to innovate. This exploration has not only made me healthier, but it's also made me a more compassionate and innovative leader.
Increased self-awareness has been transformative. It's made me more understanding of the challenges others might be facing. Searching your feelings and personal experiences raises your self-awareness, allowing you to connect with others in a more authentic and transparent way. This empowers everyone to contribute to leadership, opening up a world of possibilities for innovation.
Avoid premature insights/actions: We live in a world that's hyper-connected and quick to judge. This goes against everything compassion and innovation stand for - they're all about small connections and slow building. Leaders need to delay their judgement and responses to create the space and time for deeper understanding and relationships to form.
People who've worked with and for me see me as a quick problem-solver. But those quick responses come from countless hours spent reflecting and contemplating, building strong relationships with people, and asking questions. If you want to be a stronger leader, find ways to slow down your reactions and judgements. One great way to do this is to simply ask yourself a few questions when you realize you've made a quick judgement: Why did I form that opinion? Is there another possible cause for my reaction? What am I feeling? The best part is, you don't even need to have the answers to these questions to slow down your quick responses. By asking yourself and reflecting upon "I" centred questions, you can open yourself up to other people and possibilities. Compassionate and innovative leadership requires space and time; slowing down your judgements brings people and opportunity to you.
Get the back story: I love personal stories. I tell them (maybe too much!) and I love hearing them. Throughout my career, someone's story has often been the spark that ignited innovation. Stories have made me question my beliefs and perspectives. But I've also realized that the positive impacts of stories on my compassionate and innovative leadership style only come from people I have a strong relationship with. I tended to not seek out or to ignore the stories of people I was not close to.
When this clicked for me, I understood that my growth, development, and success depended on building relationships in order to uncover someone's story. Getting the back story of a person, a situation, or an experience allows for rapport building, mutual and situational understanding, and perspective-taking, all of which lead to deeper relationships and unexpected opportunities. Getting a back story also slows down your judgments and better prepares you for a unknown future.
Leadership is about contributing to and building upon a group of people's skills and abilities to transform the present into a better future. The back story of people, places, and circumstances are the foundations upon which a more positive future can be built.
Who is missing? What is invisible?: Leadership is about moving forward, transformation with people at the centre. A common issue with innovation and change is that our actions can create negative, unintended consequences. They may be unintended, but they're often outcomes that could have been expected if we'd taken the time and effort to gather perspectives from people or groups of people whose views are missing from the start. Gathering these perspectives allows leaders to potentially uncover the invisible, and at the very least, allows groups and teams to prepare for possible alternative outcomes to their decision-making.
Exploring alternative views also creates opportunities to raise the skills, diversity, and capabilities of a team. Asking yourself and your team about what's missing slows down judgment and leads to better leadership outcomes.
Open the door and then open it wider: Good leadership is open to others, open to disagreement, and open to experiences. A challenge with openness isn't simply a lack of desire to try something new. It's that after we try something and form a negative opinion, we're extremely unwilling to try that experience again, or anything related to it.
Openness is more than trying something new; it's demonstrating the grit to repeatedly try to build and/or repair difficult relationships. It's facing difficult experiences and emotions because it creates success for others. And it's the ability to give and receive feedback often. Good leaders open the door for themselves and others, and then work even harder to open the door wider, even when adversity makes closing the door the easiest path forward. Compassionate and innovative leadership requires that we be open and that we create the conditions for our teams to be open, even when that openness has the potential for discomfort.
Improving your leadership takes work, practice, knowledge, and inspiration. Over the last 20+ years, I've spent a lot of time and energy improving my leadership abilities. As I continue to refine these skills and support others in developing theirs, I've found that having norms to guide my leadership behaviour has only made me a more compassionate and innovative leader.
