Your best people stopped bringing the risky ideas.
No one planned it. It happened by reward.
It is happening in your business now. From the inside, it looks like everything is fine.
The Domestication of Leaders
The best description of this problem I have heard came from a CEO. His leadership team were excellent. Competent, diligent, committed. Not one of them was a radical thinker, himself included.
A company that stops creating new things does not hold steady. It declines. He knew that, and he knew his people had stopped pushing for the new things. They had got too good at running the business well to risk changing it.
That is domestication. The organisation rewards the smoother version of its people. It stops rewarding the edge, the part of them that pushes and will not leave a thing alone. So the edge goes. Year by year the whole team settles at half its judgement, half its nerve, half the ideas it is capable of, and nobody chose it.
This is why an innovation programme does not touch it. It is built to add something, and nothing here is missing. The creativity is in the people already. They have learned to keep it to themselves. The talk does not try to put an edge back. It goes after what took the edge off.
For teams that run well and have stopped taking risks.
Leadership teams that are excellent at the day to day, and know the appetite for the new has quietly gone.
Founders and CEOs watching the bold ideas slow to a trickle, who want to know why before it costs them.
Emerging leaders, before the organisation smooths their edge off. Keeping an edge costs far less than getting one back.
The edge comes back, and new ideas come with it.
Not a workshop forgotten by Friday. One change to what you reward. The behaviour follows.
It starts with the leaders. It does not stay with them. A team takes its cue from the top, which is how the caution spread in the first place.
Three things change.
People bring the risky idea.
They stop editing the bold option out before the meeting. You hear the idea that could move the business, not only the one that is safe to say.
The team challenges again.
The awkward question gets asked in the meeting, not afterwards in the corridor. Plans get tested while there is still time to change them.
The team gets better than any one of them.
Trust lets people build on each other’s ideas instead of guarding their own. The team reaches answers no one in it had alone.
None of this is about reckless bets. It is the opposite. It is a business that can back a bold idea on purpose, with its eyes open.
That is what I mean by becoming dangerous again. Not reckless. Grounded. Dangerous.
I spent thirty years getting smoother. Then I saw what it cost.
Strategist in advertising. Managing director of a creative production company. CMO in PE-backed businesses, under the kind of pressure on the numbers that never lets up. Each one rewarded the careful version of me. I gave it to them.
Television, radio, podcasts, more corporate stages than I can remember. I can hold a room. That is not why I give this talk.
I give it because I watched the edge go blunt in good people, and felt it go blunt in me. Getting it back has been the work since.
“Clear, elegant writing about the need for leadership to be organic instead of mechanical.”
Forty-five minutes, or longer.
A forty-five minute talk with questions, or a longer working session with your leadership team. Built live on a flip chart, in front of you, not from slides. It works in three moves. For founder gatherings, leadership teams, offsites and executive education.
If this is the talk you’re after.
Tell me about it. The team, the occasion, and the edge you want back.
We take it from there.