Happy March 2024! These past two months have flown by…
At the heart of just about every conversation I’ve had this year to date, there’s been a story about CHANGE. The business is changing, the industry is changing, the people are changing - and generally it’s all in combination.
It’s amazing how resourceful and resilient we all are, despite the changes we’re undergoing and so much more change looming. This is not to say that all the changes have been good or bad, just that it’s a LOT of change.
As for FountainBlue, we too are changing.
This month’s leadership blog will be the foundation of our ‘Cultural Transformation’ initiative to support organizations and leaders through rapid and unpredictable changes.
As a follow-up to the mediation training we completed in January, we are launching a ‘Corporate Mediation’ option, to facilitate conflicts and disagreements and efficiently align to corporate mission, vision and values.
As a follow-up to our recent board certification and our recent talk on ‘The VUCA Vectors’, we are launching a board recruitment practice.
If you’re curious about any of our new initiatives or would like to connect for a quick chat about what could be next for you, given the changes you’re experiencing, feel free to calendar a call with us by visiting https://cal.mixmax.com/fountainblue/15.
A Recipe for Excellence
In my broad and deep travels I have encountered excellence in individuals, in teams and in organizations. This month, I asked myself, “What are the necessary qualities for excellence?” and came up with the list below.
I’ve divided these qualities into the individual, team and organizational level.
Every team has individuals with qualities of excellence. The magic of these teams, built from the greatness of their individuals, comes together to create a recipe for excellence within the organization as a whole.
While prioritization of these qualities may vary as we adapt to changes, it is my experience that each of these elements are foundational ingredients for excellence.
Individual Level
Humility
Knowing yourself and humbly accepting your strengths and weaknesses will help you step into your potential and bring out the best in others around you.
Curiosity
Embracing the novice mindset no matter your experience level will help you see a more divergent and broader range of possibilities.
Openness
Being open to new experiences and possibilities supports growth and expansion, bringing positive and constructive energy to yourself and those around you.
Kindness
Adopting a kind outlook with yourself and others will help everyone be strong enough to adopt qualities of excellence as an individual, as a team, as an organization.
Team Level
Grace
Grace is an expression of humility, openness, kindness and curiosity for the full team.
Acceptance
Accepting the diverse range of perspectives across the team invites collaboration and synergistic thinking, contributing to sustainable team success.
Agility
Communicating and pivoting with agility, in concert as a team helps the team to grow, expand, and achieve exceptional results through a wide range of circumstances.
Perseverance
Developing endurance to push through challenges and opportunities helps teams create ‘better together’ stories, which in turn, contribute to more success stories.
Organization Level
Purpose
Providing clarity on the mission, vision, value and purpose of the organization defines WHY individuals, teams, partners, customers, engage, driving teams and individuals forward with momentum.
Drive
Managing and leading the organization well motivates and empowers teams and individuals to passionately deliver on goals and commitments.
Excellence is a journey, not a destination. But it’s also a North Star - a guiding star worth following.
Notes from last month’s When She Speaks Online Program
FountainBlue's February 15 When She Speaks program was on the topic of 'Leading with Passion, Agility and Resilience'. Please join me in thanking our esteemed panelists.
We were fortunate to have such a diverse and dynamic panel this afternoon to speak about leading with passion, agility and resilience. In this dynamic business climate, our panelists are experiencing a wide range of change, including organizational (M&A), financial (fundings and private equity), technological, and social.
They each shared some best practices for leading with passion, agility and resilience through these changes:
Choose Self Awareness and Manage Your Self-Talk.
Choose to be flexible and roll with inevitable changes.
Consider the concept of Agency - focusing on the things you CAN impact and change rather than feeling overwhelmed by the things you can't change.
Take a longer-term view if you have to slog through shorter-term challenges.
Consistently Choose to Grow.
Adopt a 'Growth Mindset', thinking positively and constructively.
Make that perceived poison exactly the medicine you need.
Be curious about the possibilities rather than hanging on to what-worked-before.
Embrace a 'Learning Attitude' and be better and stronger for the challenges you've navigated.
Relationships Matter.
Build trust and grow relationships. They keep you centered and help you succeed.
Create those magical team connections so that the team succeeds and grows better together.
Choose to do the things that matter because you care, not because you expect a reward for it. It's amazing how that benefited our panelists in unanticipated ways!
Help everyone around you become better versions of themselves - because you can, because it helps everyone, because it's the right thing to do!
Connect the Why, the What and the How to drive trust and empower and inspire the team to deliver results.
Frame Your Choice by Business Needs, not just personal needs.
Be 'Customer Focus', even when it's overwhelming personally to deal with the changes around you.
Act with rational intentionality, with a view of the business drivers.
Speak about the business imperatives for leading with passion, agility and resilience.
Our panelists shared stories about how the following helped them better lead with passion, agility, and resilience:
Defining clearly the organization's/team's Passion/Purpose and how individuals support that purpose
Seizing opportunities to be creativity, resourceful and agile while solving problems
Creating Collaborations across teams within and outside the organization
Adopting Culture-Forward Initiatives from the top-down, from the bottom-up
Adopting a New Technology/Plan/Process/Structure to address new challenges and opportunities
Delivering on Customer-Focused Projects
Below are some suggestions to help reset and recover your own confidence, passion, agility and resilience:
Lean on your relationships to help unplug
Leverage Mentors/Sponsors/Champions for their support, perspective and insights
See challenges as an opportunity for you and your team to showcase some creative Problem-Solving
Adopt a Fail-Forward Strategy, accepting failure as a growth opportunity, a badge of courage
Build Alliances and Partnerships
Read about and welcome qualities of a Proactive, Engaged Culture
Showcase your Bottom-Line Results - even if they don't quite meet the expected levels
Brainstorm - How can we all better lead with passion, agility and resilience when so much is unknown?
Lead by example
Getting people engaged
Getting feedback and input from trusted others
Embrace the change
Learning mindset
Grow despite the circumstances
Encourage innovation
Listen and take a temperature
Lead with Curiosity, Understand Gaps
No matter where you sit in the org chart at work, leadership is a challenge and a privilege. Those who choose to lead with passion, agility, and resilience will leave a positive and lasting mark on us all.
Notes from this month’s Front Line Managers Online Program
FountainBlue's February 8 Front Line Managers Online program was on the topic of 'A People-First Mindset'. Please join me in thanking our panelists.
as a People Leader - Tammy Sanders, Lam Research
as an Operations Leader - Louise Lamb, former Coupa
as a Product Leader - Ronald Goossens, ASML
as a Business Leader - Suvidha Kovuri, Cisco
Although they represent a wide range of backgrounds, experiences and responsibilities, our dynamic and passionate panelists had much in common:
As leaders and managers, they are strategic and empathetic, consistently putting their people first.
As authentic and transparent leaders, they build credibility and trust, working in community with their people to create value and deliver on metrics.
As flexible, lifelong learners, they challenge themselves to be better and do more, while empowering and inspiring their team to do the same.
Below is a compilation of their recommended best practices:
Bring your full self to the table.
Show up fully and be present to contribute to the common cause.
Nurture and grow a culture who welcomes people with diverse backgrounds to participate.
Build a community and lean into it, so you can be better together.
Share your successes and your stories.
Support each other with inevitable setbacks.
Empower and enable those around you to succeed.
Leverage each other to come back stronger from setbacks.
Challenge each other in constructive, positive ways.
Embrace the differences which make us all unique and valuable.
Communicate to inform, to connect, to inspire, to deliver.
Be curious about how your communication is intended and how it is received.
Be curious about how what you heard might be in alignment with the intended message.
Communicate with transparency, vulnerability and authenticity, in alignment with corporate values, mission, goals.
Create value, working toward a common purpose.
Work for a company, product, service which creates value.
Ensure that people understand how what they do creates value for others.
Align projects and work with corporate objectives.
Measure and report on the impact made, the value created.
Align a people-first mindset from the top-down, from the bottom-up.
Brainstorm: What can we each do to shift the culture more toward putting people first?
Listen better
Practice Self-reflection
Reflect: How you do anything is how you do everything
Transparency
Lead by example
Tell stories
Be vulnerable
Learn from failures
Curiosity
Learn to re-set
Be metrics-driven
Create space
Put people first while honoring boundaries
Respect and support your people and their needs
Have a sense of humor
We ended by stating the 'culture eats strategy for lunch' - our people must come first! And we must prove that people come first by consistently aligning our thoughts, speaking and actions to reflect that mindset.
Notes from last month’s VIP Roundtable Online Program
FountainBlue's February 16 VIP Roundtable was on the topic of 'Leveraging AI to Facilitate Innovation'.
Our executives in attendance represented a wide range of backgrounds, industries and roles. They collectively remarked on how quickly technology is advancing and how broadly AI solutions are being applied in practical ways to facilitate innovation, to improve decision-making, to support problem-solving, to optimize productivity, to raise quality standards, and to provide other business benefits.
Our executives remarked on the noteworthy technology advances which have occurred/ are happening to address the rising demand for AI solutions, including ChatGPT and Large Language Models (LLMs). This includes the fact that chip-to-chip interconnections are becoming more complex, including clusters of multiple GPUs running in parallel.
Our executives also asked many questions including:
How do existing hardware and software solutions address the need for low latency and low power usage when so much data needs to be processed?
How do we optimize storage, organizing for short term, medium term and long term access, real time
How can software solutions help support the hardware advances around memory?
Granted, there are policy, ethical, bias and other challenges ahead as AI inevitably broadens and expands, but the shift is already happening, so forward-thinking leaders and companies must put guardrails in place and take progressive steps toward applying AI solutions to meet specific business needs.
Below are some examples of how AI is leveraged to facilitate innovation:
providing real-time quality checks on manufactured goods, to ensure conformance to quality standards, with clear definitions of faulty or unacceptable defects
creating real-time language translation solutions
supporting engineers with code creation, code review, debugging
ensuring data quality/validity, resilience/protection, availability/access
optimizing power availability based on individual power usage patterns
coordinating access to data by multiple applications
generating ideas and encouraging divergent thinking
designing prototypes based on customer criteria and past models
compiling records of multiple formats into a common system for more efficient vendor (or customer or employee) management
automating calls and emails
creating original content/materials based on predefined criteria and objectives
researching reports, history, data to inform business and product decisions
conducting AB product and marketing testing to better understand market needs and interests and to understand what works and doesn't work for which audience(s)
The bottom line is that AI has the potential to take away the mundane, repetitive tasks more quickly and more accurately. When leveraged well, looking at the big picture and putting guardrails in place, humans can potentially more efficiently deliver on the business needs, in partnership with a wide range of AI solutions.