It is said that in a corporate world, the most successful businesses understand the power of creating the right mindset?. When you get it right, it’s incredibly effective. But how do you find out what’s best for your business
Naturally, most of us flock online to find the answer. Let’s just say that you’ll have a plethora of often witty suggestions to pick from. This includes a few humorous comparisons as well.
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Take Mary Jo Asmus’ philosophy that leaders need to think like plumbers. That’s right, a plumber.
Think about pressure for a minute,” she explained. Plumbers deal with pressure all the time in their case, water pressure. Consequently, plumbers know all about safety valves and their benefits when the pressure gets too high.
The link here is that leaders deal with pressure all the time as well. She suggested that this pressure can generate much overheated energy”, and “get to the boiling point of anger”. Thats where a safety valve is needed.
“When it comes to your teammates, that safety valve is you,” said Asmus. “You must provide a safe outlet to release that pressure. Teammates must feel comfortable walking into your office, or calling you on the phone, to express their anger or frustration. And you must be able to patiently listen to this pressure release, and not funnel it to any other dangerous place, or worse yet, go the opposite direction and build the pressure up to the point of an explosion. It takes a lot of patience to be a safety valve but in the end, it pays off.
And you don’t even need a wrench.
Just look at Mario! He gets rich from collecting coins, gets to test new contraptions, travels to various islands, sometimes even enters a race or two, fights the bad guy and saves the damsel in distress, all in a day’s work.
This leads onto the next point: Why it helps to think like a game designer.
While completing his PhD, Jason Fox started playing World of Warcraft “a lot” apparently.
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This was bizarre,” he said. Despite lecturing on the topic of motivation, and having some very important goals for fitness, finance and thesis writing, I was spending all of my spare time playing a video game. It was only when I moved house and lost my internet connection that I realised what was going on. Somehow, thedesignof this game had displaced all of the motivational structures I had. And so, henceforth I embarked upon a quest to unpack why some games are so effective at sustaining motivation and engagement.
He explains that one of the reasons why online games are such a success is due to a feedback system: It makes sense that we are more inclined to invest in things that contribute to progress. Game designers know this.
Fox added: All work can be viewed through the lens of game design. In fact, much of life could be viewed this way.”
For example, a project has various “gaming rules” such as goals and time restrictions, and there are key performance indicators and milestones to achieve along the way, which creates feedback.
And if you’re looking to get more motivation and engagement from your staff, the easiest thing you can do is offer a reward. Indeed, most of gamification is about creating fancy incentives to influence behaviour.
In his 27gen blog, Bob Adams believed that business leaders needed the “soft skills” associated with product, fashion, or even architectural designers instead.
“Design must start with establishing a deep understanding of those we are designing for,” Adams said. “Leaders who thought like designers would put themselves in the shoes of their team or client. It involves understanding both their emotional and ‘rational’ needs and wants. Great designs inspire they grab us at an emotional level. Yet we often dont even attempt to engage our customer or team at an emotional level let alone inspire them.
“Leaders who thought like designers would see themselves as learners. Leaders often default to a straightforward linear problem-solving methodology: define a problem, identify various solutions, analyse each, and choose one the right one. Designers arent nearly so impatient, or optimistic. They understand that the successful invention takes experimentation and that empathy is hard won. So is the task of learning.”
IKEA was based on this concept. Almost every aspect of the companys legendary business model” was a result of experimental response to urgent problems.
Founder Ingvar Kamprads mantra seems to be: Regard every problem as a possibility.
According to Adams: “All too often leaders play the role of scientist.”
Admittedly, this concept is a popular one, despite the fact that scientists are often stereotyped as “apt to be odd and peculiar”. This is a misconception that the science community is partly responsible for, suggested professor Alice Gast upon discovering Ipsos Mori research. The report indicated that the UK public viewed scientists as secretive and poor communicators.
“Scientists are, even when pursuing discovery or curiosity-driven research, keenly aware of potential future applications of research and how it will impact society,” Gast explained. “Science is also a profession that embraces change. We are seeing the epithet ‘scientist’ applied to new disciplines outside of the conventional laboratory, such as the data scientist.”
A changing profession requires a broad and diverse range of skills, and the Chartered Science Council has so far identified ten different types of scientists “based on skills rather than subject disciplines”.
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“I therefore believe scientists have skills and ways of working that are relevant and transferable to problems outside of science,” Gast concluded. “Other commentators agree. For example, John Beddington, then the UK governments chief scientific adviser, argued in 2013 that we should ‘put scientists and engineers at the heart of government’ because of their range of skills and evidence-based culture.”
In his 2012 book “The Icarus Deception”, Seth Godin advocates applying an artist’s mindset to your business.
“We can agree that Jackson Pollock was an artist,” Godin said. “It’s also art when you go to a restaurant, and they serve you a dish made with care. It’s art when your insurance broker says, ‘You know, there’s a guy down the street who can sell you something better than I can’.”
He explained his theory in the below video.
Another book, “How to think like the Chinese”, contemplates either running your company like an emperor or a parent.
Co-authors Haihua Zhang and Geoffrey Baker explained: “Within a business context, decision-makers can be viewed as ’emperors’, often more so in the SEO environment. The subordinates are ‘ministers’ and are not meant to argue or disobey orders. The prevailing Confucius teaching endorsed zhong loyalty to one’s emperor which is much encouraged in the business community. We have known a case where a Chinese subordinate went to jail on behalf of his boss to show his loyalty.
“However, there is a saying that ‘working for an emperor is like being in the company of a tiger’, meaning such a position is very dangerous and that one could lose one’s life should the emperor turn in anger. Such fear often brings a torturous amount of politics into the organisation. Often the ‘ministers’ spend more energy making sure that they are always ‘seen to be loyal’, rather than focusing on the commercial operations.”
On the other hand, small companies are run as if they are families. Respect for and obedience to parents is “a pre-requisite of an ideal person xiao, which can be translated into ‘filial piety’.” Most business leaders strive to duplicate the atmosphere of a family at the workplace, and treat their employees like children.
“The positive result of such leadership style is when the leader is a kind parent who makes the right decisions, the employees feel trusted and motivated, and the business expands accordingly,” they explained. “However, when the leader is dominant and strict, it usually creates a somewhat fearful atmosphere in the business, and employees are criticised and punished without appropriate respect or communication.”
The strangest suggestion, however, is to run your business from a military stand point. Ecolitics specifically highlights the role of the sniper and what business leaders could learn from them.
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“The military has invested heavily in training snipers to achieve an optimal mental state one that allows them to focus better, ignore distractions, act quickly and efficiently, and get the job done,” Ecolitics explained. “Drone pilots and infantry soldiers maintain a certain distance from their targets, whether physical or emotional. Snipers, on the other hand, have to study their prey.
“They learn their habits, their likes and dislikes. They learn their schedules and study their movements. They become intimately familiar. Snipers are also held to a far higher level of scrutiny than many of their peers. They are accountable for each decision to shoot or not to shoot, and need to justify those decisions to their superiors. They can even be held criminally liable for making the wrong call.”
