As we say goodbye to what has certainly been an eventful 2020, we would like to take a moment to thank all of the wonderful business professionals who have attended our courses and events this year, engaging, learning and growing in spite of any adversity.
Also, to all our staff and speakers who have adapted so well to make these events and training programmes so impactful for everyone involved.
Let’s look back and reflect upon some of the important leadership lessons our monthly KnowledgeBrief Innovation Day expert speakers shared with us this year.
1) Remember the Importance of Play
What we learnt
Expert in Innovation, Creativity and Leadership, Ana Cueva fuelled our imaginations by promoting the importance of a playful organisational environment and shared research that shows the physical and psychological benefits of play for a growth mindset, creativity and innovation, resilience, and a positive organisational environment.
How can we promote play?
- Abandon the belief that work and play are contradictory terms and appreciate that play supports a multitude of positive organisational outcomes.
- Promote action learning. Playful approaches need to combine hands-on experience with reflective practice to be useful. Prioritise gamified activities with a strong problem-solving element that can be related back to a real work context.
- Don’t view play as a luxury or an activity which should be reserved for a special annual event. Work to implement elements of playfulness into your working schedule on a regular basis. This may be something as small as opportunities for jokes or interactive exercises during team meetings.
2) Encourage Belongingness
What we learnt
Leadership and organisational strategist, Tamara Thorpe, provided us with a newfound appreciation for the importance of fostering feelings of belongingness within our working teams. She highlighted that belonging is a combination of both diversity and inclusion, and to foster feelings of belongingness we must:
- be willing to demonstrate sensitivity and show genuine interest toward the needs of individuals.
- unite all our team members, so they feel both connected and accepted.
How do we encourage belongingness?
- Challenge assumptions. Find out how your colleagues perceive the concept of ‘belonging’ and discuss how they believe belongingness could be fostered in your organisation.
- Encourage mentorship and support mechanisms which enable everyone to belong. This may also involve educating others around the damaging impacts of exclusion.
- Promote unlearning: encourage others (and indeed ourselves) to challenge our existing assumptions and work toward building a more inclusive culture. Remember, some biases may be deeply engrained in our culture, but we must not be afraid to identify them and challenge them.
3) Develop an Entrepreneurial Spirit
What we learnt
Antonia Koumproglou and Konstantinos Biginas from the University of Coventry provided us with some fascinating insights regarding the key strategic, environmental, and cultural factors which underpin the actualisation of our entrepreneurial potential. They highlighted the importance of the entrepreneurial spirit and spoke of how leaders must not be afraid to challenge the status-quo, take the opportunity to realign missions and objectives, reinvest in resources, and re-evaluate their core capabilities.
How can we develop an entrepreneurial spirit?
- Develop the conditions required to overcome the challenges of a VUCA environment by:
- overcoming volatility through investment in preparatory resources.
- understand uncertainty through analysis and the collection of key information.
- combat complexity through clear decision-making and the development of alternative strategies.
- address ambiguity through regular review and frequent experimentation.
- Understand the global environment. Consider not only the local strategic environment, but also broader and ever changing political, demographic, technological and sociocultural environments.
- Those wishing to develop an entrepreneurial spirit should seek to turn their focus away from traditional skills such as manual dexterity, reading, writing and spatial awareness, and instead, invest time toward the development of skills which have been evidenced to be in greater demand in the current climate. Skills including: analytical thinking and innovation, emotional intelligence, technological design, programming and complex problem-solving.
4) Unleash Your Creativity
What we learnt
This year, creativity was listed as the number one soft skill companies look for when hiring new talent. Dr Sara Jones of City, University of London Business School reminded us that creativity doesn’t have to be the preserve of the lone genius. In fact, with the right conditions (and the right leadership) we all have the capacity to be a positive creative presence within our organisations – generating new and exciting pathways for enhanced employee engagement.
How can we unleash creativity?
- Promote cognitive diversity. Creativity is likely to thrive in environments which champion a multitude of different insights. However, with multiple voices, comes greater opportunity for certain ideas (and individuals) to be overlooked or dismissed. Work toward introducing collaborative processes, in which there are clear ground rules in place when idea sharing. These rules include: 1) Remember every idea is valid; 2) Everyone gets a say, and 3) Be open-minded and supportive.
- Adopt a ‘yes and…’ as opposed to a ‘yes, but…’ approach to feedback when critiquing creative ideas; the former opens the door to further innovative thinking, the latter restricts it.
- Take the opportunity to engage in regular reflection. Through exploring past events, we find ourselves better positioned to question “what can I do differently next time?”. In turn, this provides a stimulating foundation for the development of new and innovative ideas.
5) Get Some Grit
What we learnt
In his presentation, Performance Psychologist, Dan Sly, suggested that if the events of 2020 have taught us anything, it is that passion and perseverance are valuable commodities in the continued pursuit of our long-term goals. This notion of passion and perseverance has come to be regarded as grit, a powerful yet underappreciated psychological resource which could very well hold the key to successful goal attainment within our organisations. Through cultivating grit, we can increase workplace performance and wellbeing, as well as reduce staff turnover.
How can we cultivate grit?
- Practice self-regulation. Grit requires an ability to effectively manage our emotional and behavioural resources effectively, even in the face of adversity. Take time to develop these capabilities by engaging in practices such as problem-focused coping – addressing the issue at hand rather than avoiding it; adaptive appraisals – learning to view new and unfamiliar situations as a challenge as opposed to a threat; and using opportunities to vent, reflect and recover in the aftermath of difficult situations.
- Promote positive psychological capital by providing colleagues with feelings of hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism. Cultivate feelings of hope through setting challenging yet attainable goals; develop self-efficacy through highlighting your employees’ performance accomplishments; fuel resilience by encouraging a growth mind-set, based on notions of positive risk taking and regular reflection; and finally promote optimism by ensuring members of your working team possess a strong internal locus of control and maintain the belief that success is built on internal effort not external forces.
- Develop psychological flexibility. Continual focus, commitment to values, and the ability to deal effectively with adversity are all key driving forces in the development of grit. Furthermore, they reflect the core elements of psychological flexibility – the ability to stay in the present moment and persevere in the pursuit of our core values. Through encouraging regular mindfulness practice, taking time to realign our collective values and promoting the notion of acceptance – the ability to accept difficult thoughts, feelings, and situations, rather than expend personal energy attempting to rectify them – we can develop greater levels of psychological flexibility within our own organisations.
We hope this learning, amongst all the other lessons learned this year, will help stimulate new ways of thinking and encourage the development of new strategies, which can be used to enhance the quality of your leadership and managerial practices in 2021.
With that in mind, we would like to wish you a very merry Christmas and look forward to you joining us for a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2021.