John C. Maxwell: How to Become an Idea Catalyst

John C. Maxwell: How to Become an Idea Catalyst.

Start crafting innovative ideas with these seven tips.

Mike Duke spent 16 years working for retailers that competed with Wal-Mart. So when he joined Wal-Mart’s executive team, Mike had a pretty good idea of what made the discount retailer so tough to beat.

“When you thought you had Wal-Mart pegged,” Duke once said in a magazine interview, “they’d be evolving into something else.”

Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, instinctively knew that great leaders create ideas that are the key to organizational growth and success. And while the leadership has changed since Mr. Walton’s death, Wal-Mart maintains its industry leadership position because its leadership maintains its commitment to new ideas.

Such a commitment goes beyond merely coming up with ideas. Sure, leaders come up with ideas. That’s part of the job description. But if no one else generates and improves ideas, then the leader is only leading one person—himself. Great leaders are the catalysts for great ideas.

So how do you become a catalyst for ideas? Here are seven ways:

Think about the business. 
Ideas come at the strangest of times, but they never come when our minds are closed to them. Great idea people always have at least one eye on the boat dock, just in case opportunity sails up for a visit.

Ask questions about the business. 
Great idea people are great questioners. They strive to understand the people around them and the processes that make their organization run. They embrace what works, but they challenge the system.

Focus on potential and problems. 
Great idea people focus on two areas of the business: ideas that develop more potential and ideas that reduce problems.

Know your idea people. 
INJOY has an “idea room.” But we don’t invite all our employees when we want to have an idea meeting. Instead, we call 12 to 15 idea people—those who understand the particular topic and who consistently come up with great ideas.

Include your idea people. 
When great idea people have an idea, the first thing they do is bring other trusted idea people together for their opinions. Don’t try to make it better yourself. The fact is, you probably already hit your limit by getting the idea! Get other like-minded people and let them jump on that idea, too.

Have high expectations. 
Great idea people leave team meetings charged up, not drained, because the people around them took an idea and improved it. But if they didn’t improve it, then the team needs some changes. Your idea people need to know that you expect them to improve the idea. If they can make an idea much better, they get to come to the next meeting. If they can’t make it much better, they don’t come to another meeting.

Give credit where credit is due. 
When someone makes an idea better, they deserve the credit. This is huge! People are motivated when their good work is acknowledged. Tom Peters had it right when he said, “Weed out the dullards and nurture the nuts.”

Clearly, there’s more to creating great ideas than just coming up with ideas. Creating great ideas is a process that involves many people, and those people need a leader—a catalyst who ensures that ideas, like people, mature into something special.

Why Do You Do What You Do?

Why Do You Do What You Do?

When I was growing up, I remember reading a story in Reader’s Digest about a young woman preparing a holiday meal. It went something like this:

As this young woman was preparing a holiday ham to go into the oven, her new husband watched as she cut both ends off of the ham before putting it into the pan. This struck him as odd, so he asked, “Why do you cut off the ends of the ham?” She paused for a moment and then replied, “I’m not sure. That’s just how my mom always did it.” They immediately called the young woman’s mother to find out why she cuts the ends off of her ham before putting it into the oven. The mother, too, paused and then replied, “I’m not really sure. That’s what my mother always did so that’s how I’ve always done it.”

Their sparks of curiosity were now fanned into flames, so the young woman called her grandmother to get to the bottom of this mystery. As she shared the reason for her call with her grandmother, her grandmother burst into laughter. After she had finished laughing, the young woman asked what was so funny. “Oh my dear,” the grandmother said still chuckling, “the reason I cut the ends off of my hams was that my pan was too short and I couldn’t fit it in otherwise.”

The lesson I took from this story when I first read it was to always know why I did everything. Later in life, I realized this story is a cautionary tale about how blindly we fall into the trap of best practices at the expense of ourselves and our organizations.

The story of the ham illustrates some key flaws about best practices:

Best practices, by requirement, are old practices.

For a practice to elevate to the status of “best,” it requires that some person or group of people originally created a new practice, often in a large company, and documented the results of the practice over time.

Eventually they share their work with others. People at other organizations hear about the practice and decide to start convincing their own organization to implement this practice. This takes time. Sometimes a lot of time. And this usually happens several times before we even hear about it.

In a business climate where an organization’s ability to adapt and respond to change is a critical competency to survival, turning to “best” practices is like looking to the past for solutions to problems that only exist in the future.

The value of a practice is situational and depends on context.

For Grandma, cutting both ends off of a ham was effective given that her pan was too small to fit the whole ham—a clear best practice for her. As soon as her daughter (who likely had access to a larger pan) began copying this practice, it became wasteful and unnecessary—hardly how we would typically define “best.”

Journals, blogs and conferences highlight “case studies” of success for others to emulate. We hear the stories of what Southwest Airlines, Zappos or Google did to achieve their remarkable success. And our instinct is to take what an organization did and apply that to our own organization without understanding why they did it. This is the equivalent to seeing Grandma cut the ends off of her ham and deciding that’s what I should do, too.

The problem, of course, is that we rarely understand the complex situation in which these practices were designed and implemented. The true value in case studies is to understand the thought process and approach used to arrive at an effective solution, not the solution itself. To do this implies using a strategy most effectively employed by 3-year-olds—to ask “why” over and over and over again.