Success Secrets and Stories
To share management leadership concepts that actually work.
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Success Secrets and Stories
Creating a Fun Work Environment Through Creativity
Ever wondered how the best leaders inspire creativity and innovation within their teams? Join us on "Success Secrets and Stories" as we uncover the secrets of creative leadership with your hosts John Wandolowski and Greg Powell. We’ll explore how creative leaders like visionary conductors use innovation and collaboration to foster a cooperative and dynamic work environment. Greg draws a vivid analogy between an orchestra and a jazz ensemble to highlight the contrast between traditional, rule-bound leadership and the improvisational, mistake-embracing nature of creative leadership. Tune in to learn about key traits that make these leaders stand out, such as being open to new ideas and lifelong learners, and discover practical advice on enhancing communication and motivation within your team.
In this episode, we also spotlight Alberto Savoia, book called "the right it". Alberto describes Jeff Hawkins incredible journey from the setbacks of the GRiDPad to the revolutionary user-centric Pinocchio effect approach to create the Palm Pilot, which transformed how user experiences are understood. We discuss the evolution of digital tools in HR, from employee self-support portals to advanced HR software like PeopleSoft and Workday, that streamline processes and enhance engagement. As we wrap up, we delve into the modern digital workplace transformation, emphasizing the need for integrated systems to ensure seamless communication and data management. Listen in for insights on fostering creativity and fun at work, and be inspired to incorporate these elements into your own leadership approach for a more innovative and uplifting work environment.
Presented by John Wandolowski and Greg Powell
Well, hello everyone and welcome to our podcast, success Secrets and Stories. I'm your host, john Wondolowski, and I'm here with my co-host and friend, greg Powell. Greg, hey, everybody. Yeah, and today we had talked about this in one of our previous podcasts, and creativity and innovation is usually synonymous, but I really do believe that there's a different mentality for creative and I've been given the compliment that you know. The ever famous line from my engineering manager was how do you come up with this stuff? When do you have the time? And what was kind of interesting because he's coming from the formal side of an engineering department is you're in facilities. You're not part of my engineering team technically, but you're always creatively, looking at a different way of doing your job, and you know he admired my new approaches and trying to think out of the box, which is all those buzzwords that you try to use when somebody's creative. And I think, when I think about creative leadership, it's a management style that uses creativity to solve problems and improve the workplace, but it's also encouraging innovation and collaboration and to find new ways to achieve the goal from the team, trying to pull them together.
Speaker 1:Some characteristics that are associated with creative leaders being visionary. Creative leaders inspire others to generate and implement new solutions to problems. Probably the next key would be cooperative, with a star on top of it. Creative leaders encourage collaboration, embrace diverse concepts and diverse ideas. Here's one that rings true for me Lifelong learners.
Speaker 1:I have never stopped learning. I find it fun. Creative leaders find ways to find new knowledge and to look for feedback and to adapt to changing situations. And that same breath. I don't know if there's a difference, but open to new ideas, always trying. Creative leaders are always open to fresh perspectives and fresh ideas. It isn't. We've done that before. It's tell me how you would do it. We might have done it that way in the past, but how would you do it differently? And the other element is considering the impact of a creative leader, understanding the impact on the employees and on the customer and if they're anyone somewhat in tune to what's going on around the planet, they understand how it's affecting their environment, so they're a little bit more engaged in that. When I was playing with this and Greg and I use the podcast, we do a little storyboard and try to put it together and I was trying to give ideas for Greg and I to try to kick around. Greg, why don't you describe this one that's on the page Okay.
Speaker 2:One that really captured my attention was the chess pieces. We've got five pawns and then we have a shadow being cast on them, and now we have four pawns, but the middle one is a king, which is just great imagery when you think about creative leadership.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that whole idea of helping people to see a new idea. That sometimes is an unusual element. It's something that people who are creative, it's something that people who are creative they understand it pretty well. The next element in terms of creative leadership is frequency.
Speaker 1:The creative leader is often useful in industries that have constant change With things like technology or fashion. Some of those skills are important for creative leadership. That include allocation of resources, building positive relationships. Here's a newsflash. Which one do you think I'm going to come up with next, greg?
Speaker 1:Communication, oh yeah, communication, of course. Not only that, but if you're going to deal with being creative, understanding the goals and expectations that are associated with whether you can communicate those correctly Someone who's also a creative leader is someone who understands the listening skills and to listen to employees, listening and talking. Communicating is an active sport between both. And then probably the most interesting component about a person who understands creativity is understanding what effectively motivates people, whether it be the staff, internal products or the customer. And then there's the element that I think is most important is creative is to have fun. I mean, literally, you can be happy at work.
Speaker 1:A creative leadership style is based on working in a cooperative kind of environment. But you can make that cooperation sort of like when you were a kid. You really didn't have a structure and the whole idea was to have some fun in the process, and the whole idea was to have some fun in the process. And you can even come up with a storybook, because you hear storybooks when you're growing up and it's so fun to see kids creating their own storybook. You don't have to have it come off of a shelf, you can write it yourself. You can create your own story and all those things I think are kind of putting a mindset in terms of creativity. Greg, why don't you take the next one?
Speaker 2:Thanks, john. Now I'm going to give you a point counterpoint the difference between traditional leadership and creative leadership. So traditional leadership is one way, right, you can almost see it on the side of the road, the sign that says one way. Creative leadership, though, is interactive, it's engaging, essentially two-way, three-way, whatever, four-way. Under traditional leadership, there's a strong concern about being right, but with creative leadership, the concern is about being real.
Speaker 2:On traditional leadership, you follow the manual, right, that's what it says. Right, this chapter and verse, that's what we do. But with creative leadership, you improvise when appropriate. So you have a guideline to start with, but you don't rest your laurels on that. You improvise where you have opportunity to make things better. In traditional leadership, you love to avoid mistakes. Right, avoid them like the plague. But with creative leadership, you know that you'll learn from mistakes, so you learn to love that. In traditional leadership, it's all about reliability, but with creative leadership, it's validity. Traditional leadership, it's the orchestra model, the very static. Here's a horn section, here's the percussion. And the creative leadership it's the jazz ensemble right, you can imagine that. Right, bass, guitar, working trumpets, I mean really, really just all kinds of instruments, french horn, stand-up bass, whatever, having fun In traditional.
Speaker 2:What's that, john? And having fun, and having fun, absolutely. In traditional leadership it's community and harmony. But in creative leadership, it's community and conversation. You want those conversations you learn and develop, to come up with great ideas for conversations. And then, finally, with traditional leadership, people want to be right Right, we said that earlier. But in creative leadership you hope to be right Very, very different. And, john, I think you've got a story that's going to take us back down memory lane and I'm going to hand it to you, store that's going to take us back down memory lane and I'm going to hand it to you.
Speaker 1:So the example that I thought was kind of interesting actually comes from the computer history museum, which was a product called the Palm pilot, and I researched it a little bit and found this very interesting book that was written by Alberto Sodera, the right it, why so Many Ideas Fail and how to Make Sure Yours Succeeds. And what I liked about it is he went into one of my favorite stories about a product and that being the Palm Pilot, and what he headed the description was the Pinocchio prototype and as he describes it, in the mid-90s, brilliant inventor and entrepreneur Jeff Hawkins had an idea of a personal data assistant that would eventually become the Palm Pilot. But before committing to it and investing in building an expensive prototype, which would have required a full team of engineers and a lot of time and money, he wanted to validate some of his assumptions about the device. He knew that he could build it, but would he use it? What would he use it for and how often would he use it? His solution was to carve a block of wood to match the intended size of the device, whittling down a chopstick to make a stylus and to use paper sleeves to simulate various user screens and functionality. He carried this block of wood in his pocket for several weeks and pretended that he was an actual functioning device in order to get the insights on how he would use it. If someone asked him for a meeting, for example, he would pull out his wooden block. He would start tapping on it to simulate checking his calendar and scheduling his meeting for later. This Pinocchio was a wooden puppet who dreamed of becoming a real boy. The Palm Pilot was a wooden PDA that Jeff dreamed might one day become a real product, and I love that example Just the idea of going inside the consumer's mind.
Speaker 1:Well, I can explain a little bit more. Let me give you a little bit of his backstory. It was a painful experience for Jeff to go through spending millions to produce a product called the GridPad and the product turned out to be an engineering marvel but a marketplace failure. It was a painful realization that the mistake was not building it wrong, but he had built the wrong it, which is obviously the essence of the book that was written by Alberto. To commit to not making the mistake twice, he went down this road of creating the Pinocchio effect and by creating a non-functioning prototype not to test if the pilot could be built, but to test to see how someone would actually use it was actually innovative. He was using his imagination and, while mock-ups of a functional prototype are quite common, for innovation to act like you're pretending it is a functioning device really kind of stood out in terms of how Jeff did his job of looking into the product. Now, what I really found interesting was a summary and Mr Hawkins was actually a neuroscientist who had worked on pen-based computers, which is, who had worked on pen-based computers which is, I think, really interesting how a neuroscientist moved into working with computers and then got to the point where he failed and then succeeded by first looking at it from an engineering's perspective and then turning around and designing it from a user's perspective.
Speaker 1:Now, what was kind of sad about this example is as, like any organization, that creativity was lost over time and it wasn't keeping up.
Speaker 1:The organization didn't grow, didn't adapt, didn't understand that they had to stay within the marketplace, because computers are probably the most aggressive in terms of change, and by 2010, palm was acquired by Heward Packard and then the product was disbanded. So if the Palm Pilot team were still innovative and still engaged, they would have created Palm Pilot 2 and Palm Pilot 3 and Palm Pilot 4. And the whole idea of looking for that next best thing that the customer would want would be probably the best example of what an Apple computer looks like right now as far as an Apple phone, the best example of what an Apple computer looks like right now as far as an Apple phone. I personally believe Apple saw the Palm Pilot and knew that that was the next place they had to go and just showed that innovation that was at a faster pace than the folks at Palm Pilot could do, and that's the industry. But they were first and that's probably the key. Greg, I think you have a few examples of creativity in the world of HR concepts together.
Speaker 2:We've got something from LinkedIn. Raoul Neisser, a regional manager in HR and operations, in a LinkedIn article, talked about the top 10 examples of successful HR innovation this year, in 2024. So think about this Just 22% of workers are actively involved in their jobs. Since there are so many disengaged workers around the globe, hr managers are constantly searching for innovative approaches to motivate their staff. Hr departments might look to digital innovation for fresh concepts and procedures in this situation. So let's start off with the definition what is HR innovation? So, hr management innovation is a process of creating and utilizing cutting edge tools and methodologies. Hr innovation can take many different shapes and entail several approaches, such as things like designing and adhering to new policies because we know policies are always on the forefront and policies that support employee engagement, well-being, and now, in 2024, we're talking about AI, power technologies and streamlining HR procedures. So we're going to talk a little bit about more focus on HR innovation, one of the things that in my time and now it's really become a big issue, a big opportunity employee self-support portals. There's a word here that's important. It's not portals, it's self-support, and it's just what you think it is. It means what can the employee do themselves? Employees still like to talk to human beings when they can, but a lot of employees, especially some of the younger folks, like the self-support portals. So these portals give staff members easy access to HR materials, you know, policies and things like that payroll information, benefits and policy information. They can do it on their phone, their iPad, laptop, whatever. By allowing employees to easily locate the information they require without having to contact HR, these portals help businesses relieve the workload of the HR departments and sometimes the gridlock when they're waiting for one or two people to get back to them. Right, if you can get the information, it's pretty easy to understand. Set your fingertips, why not? There's a lot of HR software out there. I had a chance to get involved in PeopleSoft and there's Workday, bamboo, hr, a lot of other widely used tools. When employees have the required authorization, they can act as central platforms for all HR-related activity. They can view and control for their needs In 2024, the digital workplace. That's where we are today.
Speaker 2:The digital workplaces are additional instance of HR innovation. In essence, it's the conversion of the traditional office space into a more network and digital one. You remember the old offices big wooden desks or metal desks and drawers and just not very efficient because you didn't have computers back then. Right, you were handwriting or typing on something right? So, very different. It's a digital workplace. You want to give staff members access to the technology they need to operate remotely or in a distributed team setting as part of the workplace digital transformation. So the work environment is different.
Speaker 2:Yes, covid certainly taught us that you can get work done outside of the standard office. You can have the equipment, get access from IT, have the security piece put in there and you can be very, very productive. A digital workplace can be established with the use of a range of tools, including special enterprise resource planning systems, project management software. Thus, you've already started down the path towards HR innovation. And if your company uses things like Slack, which a lot of people have heard of, or other business communication platforms. So one of the things that I think that's really important to understand even with the digital onset of things going on, you still need a human being and nothing frustrates employees more when they maybe try the digital thing and they can't get in or, you know, get stopped, you still need an HR person to help walk them through and help them retrieve information they need.
Speaker 1:John, and a creative piece of it is where the HR teams are talking about what the user needs, and that kind of software is constantly changing. Because you guys are involved from not only the user's point of view but from leadership's point of view, that it's always being current, that changes happen in terms of the environment, you're accommodating those as quickly as you can, whether it's a newsletter.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry, go ahead. I'm saying that's exactly right, john, and we also have to make sure that the tools talk to each other. So communication is key. But within the systems, the compensation piece, how does it work with the benefits piece? Do they interact or do you have to double enter information from one system to another, or do they actually populate themselves? I have talent management, talent assessment information, learning and development information, and how are these all integrated together so that the HR person can really help a manager or an individual contributor with their needs?
Speaker 1:So there's our discussion about creativity, and I think it's a little bit different than innovation. People who have a clear understanding of how to be creative understand a little bit about fun, in my opinion, and the ability to not follow the same path and try to find a new path. Greg.
Speaker 2:So, jim, one of the things I wanted to mention was a gentleman I work with, at my last company actually, and this individual, if he listens to this podcast, he's going to know it's him Very innovative, I think that was his middle name. Definitely middle initial is I. This individual had fun written all over the face along with business. So he's about business, getting things done. But he came in with an attitude that was we can make this happen, we can do something special today, let's kick butt today. He did that every single day and it was exhausting sometimes being around him, but it was also infectious and it was also uplifting. Always came in with an idea of how can we have fun with this? Let's toss this around, let's do something different, let's do something revolutionary right. And we have leaders like that and this gentleman definitely epitomizes creative leadership. It makes the job more fun, it gets more things done and I would say it can be a competitive advantage if you use it right.
Speaker 1:Sure, sure, and if you think about it, so a competitive advantage. If you use it right, sure, sure. And if you think about it, so much of your day is spent at work. If you're not having fun at work, good grief, it really makes the day long, and it is. I guess my challenge for you is to find ways to bring fun into your work environment wherever you can.
Speaker 1:So, if you like what you've heard, yeah, I have written a book. It is called Building your Leadership Toolbox and it's available on amazoncom and Barnes and Noble websites. The podcast of Success Secrets and Stories is on what you're listening to, thank you. Success Secrets and Stories is on what you're listening to Thank you. And also on popular formats like Apple and Google and Spotify. A lot of what I talk about that Greg and I have discussed is really based on Dr Durst's concepts associated with management by responsibility. His information can be found at wwwsuccessgrowthacademycom and if you want to get a hold of Greg and I, my email address is wandos75.jw at gmailcom and Greg, I can be reached at gpowell374 at gmailcom.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the music's being brought to you by my grandson. So we want to hear from you. Send us a line, tell us what you think. A lot of our content really comes from you guys, so we do appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks Greg, Thanks John, as always.
Speaker 1:Yeah, next time yeah.