Bring Playfulness to Your Work

Playfulness can soften difficult decisions, conversations and actions that require courage. Having the ability to bring a level of lightheartedness to even the most difficult situations can take the edge of circumstances that might otherwise scare you. Playfulness has the incredible power to disarm even the darkest of circumstances.

It invites courage to play.

Play is a fundamental part of the human experience. We should never forget to bring it to our work. A playful attitude keeps your mind curious. It makes us better problem-solvers.

Play involves an enthusiastic and in-the-moment attitude. When we play, we detach from outside stressors and become completely absorbed in the activity. Play is the ultimate mindfulness.

Do not let play be the first thing that gets lost when stress overrides our lives.

Playfulness is a subtle art. It is bordered by silliness on one side and rudeness on the other side. Be careful to ensure you never are in either of those territories. Men, this is especially critical to us as our culture lets too many sexist, racist and homophobic attitudes slide as humor. Always remember that playfulness is not the same as being funny. I’m not a very funny person, I try to avoid making people laugh. what I strive to do is make people feel included in my curiosity and exploration.

Good playfulness should always connect, never divide.

Take your play seriously! But don’t take yourself too seriously. Point out your own flaws and imperfections in a humorous, confident way. Sincere self-deprecation can be powerful.

People will strive for your success when you show up with playful energy. Make the other person genuinely feel special and watch the magic happen. Playfulness is a gentle invitation for others to follow you if they want to.

Playfulness will reflect in your body language. This is very inviting, and a whole lot of what folks mean as charisma stems from this spark.

By practicing playfulness you will develop an attitude of irreverence where you are in touch with yourself and avoid negativity and drama.

So reflect and ask yourself these questions:

How can you approach life with more playfulness? What would happen if you were more playful in your daily life?
Where are you lacking playfulness?
Who is someone playful you admire? What makes them playful?
If you approached life in a more playful way, what brave decisions would you make?
How would you show up differently if you were to embrace playfulness?
How can you invite more play into your life?

Democratic Leadership Style

A building block of Quality culture is learning how to make decisions faster without impairing their quality. We do this by ensuring availability of the right knowledge so that the appropriate measures can be decided on and making the decision-making processes quicker.

Adopting a flexible but consistent approach to decision-making and giving people greater leeway creates the organizational framework for faster decision-making processes. In addition to creating the right framework, however, it is equally important for employees to have confidence in each other so that decisions are not only taken quickly but also implemented swiftly. Rather than merely seeing employees as resources, this requires management to value them as part of the community because of the competencies that they bring to the table. The underlying capability that makes this possible is a democratic leadership style.

Democratic leadership is a style where decision-making is decentralized and shared by all. This style of leadership proposes that decision-making should be shared by the leader and the group where criticisms and praises are objectively given and a feeling of responsibility is developed within the group. Leaders engage in dialogue that offers others the opportunity to use their initiative and make contributions. Once decisions are collectively taken, people are sure of what to do and how to do it with support from leaders to accomplish tasks successfully. It is the “Yes…but…and” style of leadership.

This style requires a high degree of effort in building organizational decision-making capabilities. You need to build a culture that ensures that everyone has an equal interest in an outcome and shared levels of expertise relative to decisions. But nothing provides better motivated employees.

For those keeping track on the leadership style bingo card, this requires mashing democratic and transformational leaders together (with a hefty flavoring of servant leadership). Just the democratic style is not enough, you need a few more aspects of a transformational leader to make it work.

Idealized Influence means being the role model and being seen to be accountable to the culture. Part of this is doing Gemba walks as part of your standard work.

Inspirational Motivation means inspiring confidence, motivation and a sense of purpose. The leader must articulate a clear vision for the future, communicate expectations of the group and demonstrate a commitment to the goals that have been decided upon.

Through Intellectual Stimulation, the leader presents to the organization a number of challenging new ideas that are supposed to stimulate rethinking of new ways of doing things in the organization, thus seeking ideas, opinions and inputs from others to promote creativity, innovation and experimentation of new methods to replace the old ways. The leader articulates True North.

Decentralized decision-making around these new ways of doing are shared by all. Decisions are taken by both the leader and the group where criticisms and praises are objectively given and a feeling of responsibility is developed within the group, thus granting everyone the opportunity to use their initiative and make contributions. Decentralized decision-making ensures everyone empowered to take actions and are responsible for the implementation and effectiveness of these actions. This will drive adaptation and bring accountability.

Reading list

Arenas, F.J., Connelly, D.A. and Williams, M.D. (2018), Developing Your Full Range of Leadership, Air University Press, Maxwell AFB
Gastil, J. (1994), “A definition and illustration of democratic leadership”, Human Relations, Vol. 47 No. 8,pp. 953-975
Hayes, A.F. (2018), Introduction to Mediation, Moderation and Conditional Process Analysis, 2nd ed.,The Guilford Press, New York, N

Can we be too much a problem solver?

Interesting perspective on adapting what makes us successful as problem solvers as we move into more senior leadership positions. Resonates very well with some of my own challenges, so I stronly recommend listening to this episode.

What to Do When You Realize You’ve Made a Mistake

Take responsibility. Say, “I was wrong.” (Don’t say “mistakes were made” or “it didn’t turn out the way I had anticipated” or any other version that deflects or minimizes your personal contribution). Offer a brief explanation, but do not make excuses. Acknowledge that your error had a negative impact on others, and be willing to really listen, without defensiveness, to others’ recounting of that impact. Do not interrupt. Apologize.
Address what you need to do right now. Taking responsibility is critical, as is taking action. This is core to crisis communication, even if your mistake doesn’t constitute a major crisis. Tell others what you are doing right now to remedy the mistake, and distinguish between the parts that can be fixed, and those that can’t. Include what you are doing to address the substantive impact (money, time, processes, etc.) and well as the relational impact (feelings, reputation, trust, etc.) of having been wrong. Be open to feedback about what you’re doing. Over-communicate your plans.
Share what you will do differently next time. Being wrong is messy. Being wrong without self-reflection is irresponsible, even if you hate self-reflection. Take some time to think about what your contribution was to this situation, and identify how others contributed as well. (Try to stay away from using words like “fault” or “blame” — which tend to put people on the defensive.) Then tell those impacted by your error what you’ve learned about yourself, and what you’re going to do differently in the future. For example, you might recognize that you tend to dismiss the input of someone you don’t see eye-to-eye with, and that in the future, you’re going to actively engage her, and consider her perspective. Ask for help where you need it. And ask others to give you frequent feedback down the road on the commitments you’re making.

Continual reminders to myself to do better.

Being a Quality Salesperson

A core function of quality leadership is building the case of quality and raising the level of awareness and adoption through the organization. As we work to mature our quality system we build commitment. This is the salesperson aspect of our role where we go out and sell quality and the improvements we are advocating for.

Understand what the customer is buying

You first need to understand what the customer is buying. A person selling a food processor is really selling the ability to easily make tasty food. A person selling a car is selling a whole lot of cultural assumptions about mobility, and power, and the dream of success. Similarly, our stakeholders are not buying specific quality methodologies and tools (e.g. process management, knowledge management, risk management), they are buying something wider, which quality methodologies can deliver to them, and you need to understand what that is. Two of the more wider things that the customer wants that quality usually promises are protection and opportunity.

Quality at heart offers protection against deficiencies and risks. Quality protects against loss of capability.

Quality is also an opportunity – gaining more value from our resources.

Segmenting your audience

Every salesperson needs to know their market and their customer base which we can think of in terms of three market segments:

Those who ‘get’ the quality improvement and become immediately enthused, moving rapidly from first contact to positive perception and trial. These are your allies, supporters, and early adopters.
The folks who just do not care about maturing quality. They will engage with quality if they must, if it is part of the job, or if everyone ese is doing it. If the improvement is voluntary, or unusual, they will not bother. Moving them to the trial phase of buy-in will require a range of influencing tactics.
Those who do not like quality, seeing it as a threat to their way of working, or even as a personal threat. These people will resist everything unless it is embedded into the very structure of the organization. They can be exceedingly difficult to move to the positive perception state, let alone higher than that. Here your primary tools are peer pressure, social proof, appeals to authority and compulsion.

Think through the types of quality initiatives you are working on. Those that are voluntary will only reach the first third, and that is the best place to start. Or you need more inescapable methods. I usually find for any set of improvements it is a mixture of experiment with early adopters, build social proof and introduce a few critical compulsions.

Influencing Tactics

In their book Mind Gym Sebastian Bailey and Octavius Black outlined nine influencing tactics you can select from, based on the character and situation of the ‘buyer’.

To add context to these, I am going to provide an example of implementing Gemba Walks for leaders, managers, and floor level employees, with standard work that emphasizes pushing to a learning culture.

Tactic	Includes	Example
Reasoning	Using logical argument to make a case. Reasoning is necessary to support your case with all stakeholder, even if other influencing techniques will create the closing sell. You need to create a compelling logical case for quality improvement, and it needs to be a case for the individual was well as the company.	Presenting case studies and evidence on how this is successful.
Inspiring	Appealing to emotions and creating the vision. Inspiring people generates an emotional commitment to the vision. Being inspiring demands conviction, energy and passion but is especially effective with the early adopters.	A vision of a gemba walk being the hallmark of quality culture and building a culture of inclusivity.
Asking questions	Leading the other person to make their own discovery of the value of the quality improvement.	Drawing out examples of an individuals own experience of the value of observation and good coaching.
Ingratiating(Be a buddy)	Your stakeholder will almost feel positive toward someone who makes them feel good about themselves. This is not a great approach for people more senior than you, it comes across as sucking up. You also need to be sincere – people always detect insincerity.	Friends helping friends get things done
Deal making	When you give another person something in return for their agreement with you. Your ability to use this approach depends very much on your confidence and ability to offer something in return. To keep trust, make sure you deliver on any promises made.	Through introducing the Gemba walk we will see a reduction of human error deviations and we will be able to close minor deviations in three days.
Favor asking	Simply asking for something because you want or need it. This works well only when the other person cares about you or their relationship with you. If used sparingly, it is hard to resist, but be prepared to pay back that favor!	If you can support the Gemba Walk, then we will be able to free up the time for that important project of yours as a result.
Using silent allies (aka social proof)	Using the fact that others are getting value from the quality improvement as an argument in its favor. Social proof is sharing the stories of people as like your ‘buyer’ as possible. This really gets to that big middle of uncertain individuals. Each success, no matter how small, is an opportunity to gather social proof. Hold lessons learned, don’t be afraid to capture good feedback on video!	Listen to Nancy here as she discusses how much Gemba Walks have changed the work in her team.
Invoking authority	Appealing to a rule is one you use late in the roll-out program to convince the laggards once the quality improvement has become a clear expectation.	Your boss tells you to do Gemba Walks and enforces them happening (report a metric of how many Gemba Walks)
Forcing (“do it or else”)	Bringing senior management in to demonstrate clear requirements with clear ramifications that can include temporary or permanent removal of the individual. This is a tactic of last resort.	Do this or else

Influence Tactics

Influencing Tactics per Implementation Phase

Be prepared to spend a lot of time in “Yes…but…and” territory, especially in the Strategy Phase.