As part of my social media experimentation and engagement strategy (that’s code for “learning it by doing it”), I sometimes participate in one of Harvard Business Review’s #HBRchat sessions on Twitter about leadership.
These can be a great—if chaotic—place to discuss business and management issues with other leaders on Twitter. Even if you miss the weekly chat sessions, the posted recaps always include a few insightful zingers, in tidy 140-character bites.
One of the questions I recently answered was “What are the qualities of a great leader?” My immediate tweet back? “A sense of fun.”
Leaders generate better ideas (and greater innovation) when people are willing to take a chance in proposing a wacky idea. Fun breaks down the barriers and fear of failure.
During the chat, I went on to argue that the most effective leaders make a conscious effort to build a sense of fun in their teams. They are intentionally approachable, which in turn encourages people to go out on a limb, look silly and even fail.
Let me put it another way: I strongly believe that leaders with a sense of fun will get better ideas from their team, because their team members will be less afraid to propose or pursue them.
I can tell you this: I can offer up the most hair-brained idea to my CEO fearlessly. While I typically put serious effort and thought into honing things before they get in front of him, I still feel the sense of fun, the permission to be foolish that makes innovation possible.
For example, at Pixar, mistakes are celebrated along with successes—the nothing-ventured, nothing-gained mantra is “He who fails the most wins.” Pixar’s appetite for risk has removed layers of fear that stifle creativity and limit an individual’s willingness to go out on a limb with a crazy idea.
What I love is that Pixar hired top-notch creatives who were considered “unmanageable” and gave this group free reign to do their best work. Result? Their film, The Incredibles, won Academy Awards and became a best-selling DVD, even though its budget per minute was lower than any previous Pixar film.
I have to imagine that fun was more than just a movie goal. It was an essential mandate for being part of the team.
Google tells a similar success story; it enables its engineers to spend one day per week or up to 20% of their time working on anything that interests them. Here, I see fun at work as a product of autonomy—getting to choose to do what you love.
Both Google News and Google Product Search were spawned by this permission to innovate. Pulitzer-winning author David Vise explained, “Google … technologists think first of ways to solve problems; only later, if ever, do they worry about how to ‘monetize’ them.”
For an extra helping of fun, take your meeting outside, or somewhere more interesting than your office.
One of my most successful projects was proposed twice, dismissed twice, and finally left for dead by a boss that fostered a sense of fear, not fun, in the workplace. It’s hard to keep pushing your idea at what feels like a brick wall.
But, when things changed and I had a new opportunity to pitch my idea, the project was resurrected (and we had a lot of fun doing it).
Fun beat fear, and the results speak for themselves.
What’s getting in the way of your ability to innovate? Maybe it’s a lack of fun, or the presence of fear of failure. So instead of tackling the innovation problem, consider taking a step back and asking a simpler question: How can we make this more fun?
GO.
