The Innovative Brain Archive
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Humility: The Foundation Value of Innovation Leadership“If you kNOw, there’s NO curiosity, there’s NO learning, there’s NO listening, there’s NO innovation!” In last month’s issue of the Innovative Brain, we laid out a set of values for leaders of innovation. Certainly there are many values required for effective leadership, and many values required for regular, business-growing innovation. Pop quiz: the five key values are…To review, the key values for innovation leadership are:
Of these five values, we list Humility last for two reasons: 1) it’s the foundation of the other four, and 2) it spells out a catchy acronym. Remember the acronym the next time you find yourself itching to get better performance and innovation from your group, then start with the foundation — be humble. Like a building, you need a strong base on which to build, which brings us to the first value of innovation leadership. Free Offering!You’e seen them in our programs, you’ve walked on them as “ground rules,” and now they can be yours for FREE! If you’d like us to email you a set of illustrated “Suggestions for Working Together” handouts suitable for framing, posting in your workspace, or duct-taping to your colleagues’ heads*, send an email with “Suggestions for working together please” in the subject line to: freeoffer@newandimproved.com *We don’t really advocate doing this… removal of the duct tape is painful. Really. This isn’t Jackass (the Movie/TV program)… please don’t try this! How to work together more effectively to generate new ideas
Spreading innovation…and germsTwo interesting articles came across our desktops recently that are perfect illustrations of how humility drives the leadership of innovation. The first was a story written by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, the co-authors of the current best-seller, Freakonomics. In this New York Times article (dated 9/24/06), the authors share that “44,000 to 98,000 Americans die each year because of hospital errors — more deaths than from either motor-vehicle crashes or breast cancer -- and that one of the leading errors was the spread of bacterial infections.” With statistics like that, you’d think that healthcare professionals would be incredibly diligent about washing their hands. Yet “studies have shown that hospital personnel wash or disinfect their hands in fewer than half the instances they should. And doctors are the worst offenders, more lax than either nurses or aides.” There are many reasons for not hand-washing on the part of doctors: inconvenient or obstructed sinks and busy schedules. Yet conveniently located dispensers of anti-bacterial disinfectants don’t solve the problem either. According to a doctor at Cedars-Sinai hospital, the two psychological reasons they don’t do it are 1) they don’t actually wash their hands as much as they think they do and 2) arrogance, or a lack of humility. “The ego can kick in after you have been in practice a while,” says Dr. Paul Silka, the hospital’s chief of staff. “You say, ‘Hey, I couldn’t be carrying the bad bugs. It’s the other hospital personnel.” Serious problem. How do you fix it?In order to increase the rate of hand-washing to the rate of 90% required for hospital certification, the hospital tried a communication campaign involving e-mail, faxes, and posters. Then they tried handing out bottles of Purell hand sanitizer as doctors came in the building from the parking lot. Next they tried a “Hand Hygiene Safety Posse,” that handed out $10 Starbucks gift cards to doctors who they saw washing up (and if you don’t think doctors will snap up $10 gift cards, think again!). Compliance rates rose to 80% from 65%, but it still wasn’t enough. Finally, at the close of a lunch meeting with doctors, Rekha Murthy, the hospital’s epidemiologist took a culture of the doctors’ hands. The photos of the cultures, according to the epidemiologist “were disgusting and striking, with gobs of colonies of bacteria.” Yum, how’s that lunch sitting now? One of the resultant photos was made into a screen saver that “haunted every computer in Cedars-Sinai. Whatever reasons the doctors may have had for not complying in the past, they vanished in the face of such vivid evidence.” Even doctors who’d been in practice — and had established habits — for 40 years changed their behavior very rapidly.
Change can come quicklyFortunately for the patients of Cedars-Sinai, the doctors (some of the best in the world that we’ve actually been fortunate enough to have treat us) were humble enough when confronted with the evidence of their failure to recognize that they needed to change their behaviors — right now! -- and they did. A happy ending to the story, but it could have been happier. What if doctors would have changed their behaviors sooner; how many infections could have been prevented? And what if there hadn’t been a sharp team of people trying to ensure compliance who were constantly humble, curious, courageous, tenacious, and lived in integrity with the Hippocratic oath? What if there was no epidemiologist ready to jump into trying to solve the problem in the face of “I’ve always done it this way before?” What if the person with the infection was one of your loved ones? This writer can name three people who suffered serious infections that they picked up in hospitals. Our thanks to the epidemiologist and the other innovation leaders engaged in solving the problem who provided us with this example of how to get things done against an extremely challenging obstacle: habit! Arrogance stinksImportant to remember is that humility, like halitosis, is not a permanent condition (a shout out to our friends working in oral care!). Each of us has moments in time where we have more and less humility as we go about our day. Some of us recognize when we are not experts, so we are much more likely to admit that we don’t know all there is to know. And some of us will become even more arrogant in such a situation in order to cover up our ignorance. Our “humility index” (if there were such a thing) is not a constant. It varies according to our state of mind, success, health, biorhythms, horoscope and the amount of alcohol we’ve consumed among other variables. Like an asymptote (a shout out to our friends who paid attention in algebra!), we never reach perfect humility, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive for it. The question is not if we make mistakes, but when. And how we deal with it. Do we cover up or admit it? Bury it or learn from it? What happens if you Google “arrogance?”Consider the other example from an interview that aired September 26, 2006, on Marketplace, a business radio-program produced by Public Radio International. So what have we learned?That’s innovation leadership. It’s being humble enough to recognize a mistake and learn from it, and it’s being humble enough to not punish someone for making a well-intentioned mistake. Because you recognize that you could have made the mistake just as easily as the other person. And that there’s a valuable lesson to be taken away from the experience. Human being, not human doing
At least, that’s what we’ve learned thus far. Is it absolutely the truth? To say so would not reflect our humbleness. So let us know where we got it wrong. That way we can learn from our mistakes too. |
Yet the set of five key values discussed in the last issue fit into the overlap of both Leadership and Innovation. These are the key values necessary for being a leader — no matter where you sit on the organizational chart — of innovation.
If you do research to find out what productive people and teams do when they’re working together, you’d discover a list that we call “Suggestions for working together.” Several of these guidelines require significant humility, things like “Be coachable,” “Listen generously,” “Look for what’s possible,” “Commit to learn,” and “Be a know-it-all.” Okay, the last one isn’t really on the list; it’s just a check to see if you’re paying attention. Further, when you research the most effective ways to generate valuable new ideas, you discover that key principles like “defer judgment,” “tolerate ambiguity,” and “consider novelty” are also powered by a need to not be a know-it-all. Yes, supported once again by humility
As told by reporter Adam Lashinsky, one of Google's most senior executives, Sheryl Sanberg, a vice president who runs all of the Google automated advertising systems realized that she’d made a multi-million dollar mistake. Did she try to hide the mistake? Nope, she blamed it on one of her subordinates. Not really!! What she truly did was to walk over to Google co-founder Larry Page and tell him about it. So what’d he do, fire her? Nope, he said, “Yeah, we shouldn’t have done that. We’ll know better next time. But, oh, by the way, it’s good that you made this mistake. I’m glad, because we need to be the kind of company that is willing to make mistakes. Because if we’re not making mistakes, then we’re not taking risks. And if we're not taking risks, we won’t get to the next level.” 
Humility is not something you do, it’s a way that you be. It’s an on-going state of mind that requires you to constantly check in with yourself to see if you’re being a know-it-all who does things perfectly. Or better yet, you check in to see if you’re in touch with the fact that we all make mistakes and you choose to learn from your own and the mistakes of others.