If trust is nowhere to be found, if no one knows what their colleagues are doing, if waste and entropy abound, and if the customer is a mystery, then achieving an organizational flow state is highly unlikely. I’m not saying that it’s impossible, but to find flow in a large, toxic, chaotic organization would be a real oddity.

If you’re a leader and are frustrated that flow is difficult for your people to experience, then make your purpose, vision, and cultural aspirations crystal clear; align goals up, down, and across the organization; respect your people by treating them as your most valuable asset; minimize waste and unnecessary organizational friction; foster a maniacal focus on the customer; install effective visual management systems; and make sure incentive systems are congruent with all of the above.

Did we grouse about how busy we were? Maybe a little, but for the most part we just got after it. Our spouses were incredibly supportive and were involved in the business from the start—stuffing envelopes, talking to customers, and packing boxes of soft-cover books to be shipped to all corners of the globe.

As I look back, the work didn’t feel like work. We had entered a flow state.

If your people truly are your most valuable asset, it becomes a business imperative to ensure that the skill portfolios of your team members are maintained and nurtured in good times and in bad—especially when the seas get rough.

A steward is aware of the balancing acts that surround them, is adept at navigating the treacherous waters of extreme viewpoints, and acts with the interests of myriad constituencies in mind.

The fact is that emotions do play a role in business and to ignore them is a sure-fire way to ensure a “car wreck” between individuals and teams. Communication, empathy, situational awareness, and self-awareness are just a few of the skills that must continually be nurtured to create high-functioning teams. An understanding of various forms of cognitive bias is also important.

The practice of giving will create a deep well of experiences that you’ll be able to tap into to bring the emotion of gratitude into the foreground. When you’re grateful, the emotions of anger, resentment, and jealousy have less room to cloud your mind. Perspective and balance become easier to achieve and maintain. The path back to balance after unexpected shocks and change events also becomes more straightforward.

At the core of the “to work from home or not to work from home” debate is the balancing act between organizational trust and accountability. In my opinion, to tell an employee explicitly (or implicitly) that the only way to confirm their productivity is if the manager can directly witness their work in an office setting is to tell that employee that they are not to be trusted.

This past Thursday, we launched our six part series, “Nobody Wants to Think Anymore” with a kickoff episode featuring my co-host, Dan Strafford. In this series, we’ll be interviewing business leaders from various industries for practical advice on what critical thinking means to them, how critical thinking is applied within their sphere of influence, and what it takes to build critical thinking skills.

You can’t help improve that which you cannot see. You can’t hold an individual or team accountable for that which is not measured. Visually showing the blinking red or amber lights in addition to the green ones in your department lets others in the organization see that your part of the company is not perfect. Adopting and weaving visual management systems into the flow of work is an important tool to show that it is not only acceptable, but expected, that we all work together to improve upon organizational challenges.

Today's brief message is a plea for humanity, balance, and healing in the wake of last Saturday's mass shooting in Buffalo, NY.

Progress is to be found through #diversity, #equity, #inclusion, and #education.

Grace. Dignity. Compassion.

Andy

A gemba walk is an opportunity for leadership to see how work is accomplished with their own eyes, listen carefully to the challenges and opportunities the team faces, and ask questions with the intention to seek to understand challenges and opportunities so they can be an advocate for and supporter of the team or department.