If you know that continuing to follow certain of your traditions is hurting you, why is it so difficult to abandon them in favor of something new and necessary?

One tradition that is currently playing out in many segments of society is workforce diversity – especially around hiring and promoting women, particularly women of color.

Quotes from scholars, spiritual, religious and business leaders about why diversity is needed abound. Diversity increases the size of our talent pools, it fosters creativity, it is morally necessary, it makes us better people, and so forth. And yet—it isn’t happening, at least not on a grand scale.

Traditions are more than habits. They define our tribe. Abandoning them, no matter how justified the reasons, threatens our sense of who we are.

How can you overcome that barrier? Here’s one way to begin. It’s about how you frame the challenge. Rather than see the change as a threat, ask yourself what it would take to see diversity as a way to strengthen your existing tribe – both in size and capability. Identify how many new growth opportunities become available with a broader set of skills that can only happen with a more diverse culture. 

This is not a simple, one-time exercise. But it’s vital to your continued success.

We spend a lot of time thinking about this in terms of how we can help our clients address this challenging need. If you’d like to explore this in greater detail, contact us. We’d be happy to start a discussion that could open unseen doors of opportunity for you.

To explore more in upcoming posts, follow us at Axies Group on LinkedIn.

The post Cultural Traditions – Do They Build, Strength or Threaten Your Survival appeared first on Axies Group.

When you live in a reactive organization where your goal is survival, you are running on a treadmill. When the fear of making a mistake by doing something new outweighs the thrill of succeeding in unfamiliar ways, you are running on a treadmill. When you dismiss the disruptive changes that threaten your continued relevance and justify your actions as being “practical,” you are running on a treadmill.

When you are content to let the growth rate of your market dictate the growth rate of your business your people will be busy, doing the stuff that needs doing in order to maintain what you already have. They will be in motion, but they won’t be moving. Life today will be the same as yesterday, and all your tomorrows will look like today – until one day you wake up and it hits you. What you do is no longer needed or valued. But you never saw it coming. A blind spot of epic proportions.

The comfort found in the sameness of habitual behavior is about motion. 

Adaptability is about movement. Movement requires continuous awareness – of a changing environment and the challenges and opportunities it presents. Movement requires that you embrace the discomfort of learning new skills and habits and becoming an awkward student and making mistakes and falling and getting back up. 

Movement is reinvention. 

Where, on the spectrum of being in motion vs. moving, are you right now? And if you’re just moving, what are you going to do about it? Today.

To explore more in upcoming posts, follow us at Axies Group on LinkedIn.

The post Lifeless Living – Motions Without Movement appeared first on Axies Group.

• “Acknowledge when failed policies demand a change in direction.”
• “Gather firsthand information, ask questions.”
• “Find time and space in which to think.”
• “Exhaust all possibility of compromise before imposing unilateral executive power.”
• “Anticipate contending viewpoints.”
• “Assume full responsibility for a pivotal decision.”
• “Understand the emotional needs of each member of the team.”
• “Refuse to let past resentments fester; transcend personal vendettas.”
• “Set a standard of mutual respect and dignity; control anger.”
• “Shield colleagues from blame.”
• “Maintain perspective in the face of both accolades and abuse.”
• “Find ways to cope with pressure, maintain balance, replenish energy.”
• “Keep your word.”
• “Know when to move back, when to move forward.”
• “Combine transactional and transformational leadership.”
• “Be accessible, easy to approach.”
• “Put ambition for the collective interest above self-interest.”

Lincoln applied those principles in 1862 to lead our country away from the danger of destroying the dream of our founders, with all its flaws, and back to being one nation, living on the foundation of our constitution.

Here we are 160 years later, facing a descent into that same abyss, albeit it for different reasons, but similarly grounded in hatred, seeing anyone who disagrees with us as an enemy that must be destroyed. Listening to one another is weakness. Collaboration is cowardice. 

Lincoln’s principles are as relevant today as they were in 1862. They beg the question: What must define great leadership in all segments of society today? And most importantly – what would it take for you to apply them – right now?

To explore more in upcoming posts, follow us at Axies Group on LinkedIn.  

The post The Leadership Principles of Abraham Lincoln appeared first on Axies Group.

Here is an approach to avoid falling into that trap.

First, know that inductive reasoning is normal. It’s part of our survival mechanism. Our brains are wired to project single, or limited occurrences onto a larger group of people or circumstances that seem to have similar appearances or behaviors to the one in question. 

Since you will always be tempted to act inductively, the time to get out of that trap is immediately after you have the thought, but before you take any action to either act on it or use it as a tool to guide future actions.

One effective way to approach those situations is to force yourself to shift your perspective from inductiveto deductive reasoning. In deductive reasoning you go from general assumptions/observations to specific conclusions. 

For example you might say: any employee that is addicted to video games and plays them during working hours will not be a good employee for us. John is addicted to video games; he will not be a good fit for us. Notice that the connecting arguments that provide the foundation for your decision are based on specific behaviors attributable to individuals – not groups. And there is no connection between a person’s date of birth and your basis for a decision.

This approach requires awareness and practice. But it’s worth beginning now. The costs of not doing it are too great to be ignored.

To explore more in upcoming posts, follow us at Axies Group on LinkedIn.

The post Inductive Reasoning – Avoiding the Trap of Faulty Thinking appeared first on Axies Group.

Here’s a major challenge to doing that. Faulty inductive reasoning. 

Fundamentally, inductive reasoning is the science and art of developing probabilities based on the results of a sample and attributing those results to a larger population, i.e. what is true for the sample will be true for the whole. The accuracy of inductive reasoning is based on the source and intelligence of your assumptions and the size and appropriateness of your sample.

Inductive reasoning hurts you when you take too small a sample (like one event) and attribute the result to your entire population.

For example, you’re a boomer. You hire a millennial. He spends too much time playing video games. You fire him. You conclude that all millennials are lazy. You will never hire another one. You dramatically shrink the size of your talent pool. 

You’re a millennial, leading a tech company. You hire a boomer for a role in strategy development. He is slow to grasp the tech knowledge needed. You fire him. You conclude that all boomers are dinosaurs. Then, you find yourself disadvantaged because none of your employees have the needed wisdom to develop great strategies. 

That kind of simplistic, inductive behavior is normal for most people, most of the time. It comes into being whenever you don’t want to think more deeply. It becomes the cover story that justifies your unwillingness to act transformationally. You are leading by allowing the situation to define you, rather than you shaping the situation. It is NOT the way great leaders operate.  

What should you do?

In our next blog post we’ll take a deeper dive into how to use inductive reasoning in ways to improve the quality of your decision making while avoiding the minefield of mistakes that explode when you make decisions simplistically.

To explore more in upcoming posts, follow us at Axies Group on LinkedIn.

The post Inductive Reasoning – The Common Misunderstanding That Becomes a Minefield  appeared first on Axies Group.

         – Albert Einstein

The past: Employees serve the company. 

The future: Employees are a new category of customers.

Your new customers have needs. Here’s a list:

• To be heard and have their opinions respected, taken seriously, studied and when appropriate, acted upon. When not acted upon, told why.
• Have a stake and a voice in defining the culture – a kind of “cultural equity.”
• Share in the profits – based on their measurable contributions. To satisfy this need, you will have to redefine the balance and resolve the conflict of interest between your employee/customer and your shareholders. This is a tall order.
• Have a say in determining whether and to what extent they can construct their work schedules, i.e. remote, hybrid or in the office; plant; warehouse; laboratory, etc.
• Be responsible for achieving the results that contribute to their compensation Yes, most people wantto have a stake in outcomes. It makes them feel relevant. Relevance is an important part of cultural inclusion. Inclusion begets commitment and ownership.
• To know that they matter and that what they do helps make a difference.

You’ve most likely heard or read about all of these. But what we’ve experienced is that most leaders are picking just the one or two that they’re willing to address, i.e., being locked in the level of consciousness that created the problem.

In upcoming blogs we’ll start to unpack these elements and explore ways to address them.

To explore more about transformation in upcoming posts, follow us at Axies Group on LinkedIn.     

The post Transformations – The Talent Challenge appeared first on Axies Group.

Without that kind of diversity, you will be leading in an echo chamber. What might feel like creativity is merely your voice, your ideas coming back at you. Group think prevails.

However, merely hiring people with diverse views is only the first step.  The easier one.

Your greatest challenge/opportunity is welcoming their differentness, and regularly seeking their perspective – truly listening to them.  If you fail to accomplish that, cultural diversity will be a revolving door. People will come. They will be marginalized. They will leave. And you might conclude that, in your organization, diversity is a bad idea. But you’d be wrong.

So, what should you do? Ask some what would it take questions.

• What would it take to truly accept people with diverse views, and diverse ideas?
• What would it take to listen to those people, especially when their ideas contradict cultural norms, traditional beliefs and historic behaviors that have shaped your success – up to now?

And when you discover answers to those questions, then ask: What would it take to infuse those answers into the fabric of your culture?

This is a tall order, a huge ask. When you consider the magnitude of this challenge, we think you will have a sense of what cultural adaptability is really about, and why the real meaning of transformation should never be trivialized.

To explore more about transformation in upcoming posts, follow us at Axies Group on LinkedIn.    

The post Transformations – How Diversity Shapes Adaptability appeared first on Axies Group.

Adaptability is the key. Adaptability is the art of embracing disruption.  

It is the single most critical characteristic needed to transform. 

There is no wiggle room. Failure to adapt results in failure to transform. Period. 

Over 100 newspapers went out of business because their cultures could not adapt to the shift from print to online dissemination of content. Welcome to the Internet age.  

Manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of almost everything imaginable have had to create new operating departments, staffed by trained, tech savvy people whose purpose is to move products through interactions with the algorithms of Amazon. An entire eco-system with virtually no interpersonal contact. The same shift holds true in the areas of marketing and sales.   

What would it take to create and sustain a highly adaptable culture?

So many organizations have not yet fully embraced this question. Even some that believe they have, still have many blind spots, and huge opportunities to improve. 

We urge you to address this what would it take question. In our next blog post we’ll begin to unpack and explore some answers to this question – answers that might help you address adaptability more responsively and more profitably.

To explore more about transformation in upcoming posts, follow us at Axies Group on LinkedIn. 

The post Transformations – The foundation of a transformational culture appeared first on Axies Group.

The post Transformation – One thing to know and one thing to do appeared first on Axies Group.

Culture is the collective body of what, how and why you do what you do.

It has been said and demonstrated over the years that organizations work better and achieve more when employees take “ownership” of the company’s culture.

How does that work? What, exactly, do people “own?” Usually it’s not stock. And even if it is, stock ownership can feel financially transactional. It’s more opportunity than ownership.

So what is ownership?

It is purpose. People own their purpose. Purpose gives meaning to the doing part of life. Pursuing one’s life purpose can provide a deep sense of fulfillment; it feels like a life worth living.

When that purpose aligns with what they experience in their work, and their workplace, when they support and live their company’s real Values, when their purpose aligns with their company’s Vision and Greater Purpose – when those stars align – emotional ownership becomes a reality.

Sounds straightforward, and in principle, it is. Getting to that shared reality with lots of people is really hard. Perhaps that explains why so few company cultures experience that shared ownership. In fact, many leaders don’t even try. Instead, they double down on the tried-and-true means and methods to achieve greater shareholder wealth. Their rationale is simply that the world of business is quantitative by nature. Nothing will change that. Employee turnover is aligned with the natural order of things. It’s a normal cost of doing business. While financial incentives remain a primary weapon in the race to riches, additional lifestyle perks have come into play as well. Those perks can ease anxieties over things like healthcare and family time balance, and they can foster better human interactions. Yet, they still fail to ignite the passion of purpose.

Neuroscience has reliably demonstrated that those traditional beliefs and the actions they stimulate are obsolete. So what should/must we do instead? And what are the rewards – the ROI – for this transformative shift?

We will be sharing more on this topic in the coming weeks. To help enrich those writings, we invite you to share your thoughts and experiences in this area of “cultural ownership.” We think that we can begin to create some powerful conversations that will lead all of us to better, more fulfilling results.

Axies Group

The post Culture – What Employee Ownership Looks Like appeared first on Axies Group.