Innovation depends on people feeling safe enough to think out loud, disagree and try things that may fail. Process-Oriented Leadership builds that safety deliberately, by attending to the relational and emotional conditions in a team rather than only its outputs — and the research shows the results reach the bottom line.
Business is a uniquely human enterprise.
When humans feel safe, valued and have a sense of belonging, their brains release a number of important chemicals. Oxytocin (our bonding and relationship hormone) and serotonin (our feel-good neurotransmitter) enhance our sense of connectedness to self and community, and lead to increases in cooperation and creativity, and to deeper engagement, collaboration and flow.
Social awareness and our desire to belong, or to fit in, are intrinsic to our anthropological growth. We are wired to want to feel welcome and valuable parts of our social group. Concern about what others think of us is also an essential driver of prosocial behavior; we are a social species by design. We humans have thrived for 50,000 years not only because we’re driven to serve ourselves, but because we are also inspired to collaborate with and serve others.
Early humans were threatened by almost every aspect of their environment, and even today there are forces we perceive as dangerous both outside and within our organizational environments. While they perhaps are not carrying the same literal threats to life, our systems often still perceive them that way. Intimidation, humiliation, isolation, feeling dumb, feeling useless and rejection are all stresses experienced inside organizations — yet all are entirely avoidable.
It should be the goal of leadership to set cultures of safety, inclusion and empowerment that are free of danger, bullying and the like. Ones that offer a sense of belonging and the sense that all voices are valued and heard. This means offering people a strong culture based on a clear set of human values and beliefs, that gives them the power to make decisions, and that offers an environment of trust and empathy.
Close studies of high performing organizations reveal something fascinating. Their cultures — ones that support employees to feel safe, fulfilled and valued, instead of a more hostile competitive scenario where each group is in pursuit of finite resources — resemble the conditions under which the human animal was designed to optimally function and thrive as a species. Which also works to help those organizations achieve the same.
If certain conditions are met and the people inside an organization feel safe, serotonin and oxytocin flow and access to that 95% plus of our processing power opens. Together they are able to achieve things none of them could have achieved alone, and the result is that their organizations tower over their competitors.
A shining example of this principle is 3M, which owes its development of the Post-it Note, and so many of its other products, to one simple thing: its culture of sharing. The cross-pollination of leads — combined with an emphasis on sharing product lines — has led to an atmosphere of collaboration that makes 3M a place where employees feel valued. “Innovation from interaction” is one of the company’s favorite mottoes.
More than 80% of 3M’s patents have more than one inventor. The company has over 20,000 patents, with over 500 awarded in 2012 alone. In 2009, in the middle of a very tough economy, when other companies were slashing their R&D budgets to save money, 3M still managed to release 1,000 new products. 3M’s products are ubiquitous, though typically unnoticed — and almost always taken for granted. 3M has succeeded because it has a corporate culture that encourages and rewards people for helping each other and sharing everything they learn.
Instead of leading by using carrots and sticks, we clearly need the type of methods that release oxytocin and serotonin, which can facilitate the 95% and bring out the best. The Process-Oriented Leadership approach is explicitly designed to do exactly this.
By learning some simple skills — the skills of CHOICE — leaders can learn to access the 95% and facilitate their direct reports and teams into the same. It’s a win-win strategy.
Process-Oriented Leadership training is designed to enable all participants — whether they’re simply leaders of their own self system, or of a workforce of thousands — to access, integrate and work with their 95% and significantly upgrade their impact in life and as a leader. Our skills and tools have evolved from decades of research into the area, as they have from our own decades of facilitating leaders, teams and participants in our programs to evolve themselves into a whole new and upgraded way of functioning and thinking.
It’s clear that the rules are being shredded these days by disruptive technologies such as AI. In order to meet these new and challenging environments we need new and better tools. Process-Oriented Coaching and Leadership Training are those essential tools for this future, providing the crucial and powerful edge needed to navigate this rapidly changing world with nimbleness, flexibility and innovative responses. The ability to work with this 95% is the key to that edge.
Curious how this lands in your organization? The assistant can point you to the right program, or you can tell us what’s going on.
