The Design Gym

In moments of great complexity and constrained resources (i.e. now), I find leadership teams are best poised to focus energy on the timeless rather chasing the trends. And there's one place we consistently find good inspiration for leadership foundations... Our team The Design Gym decided a long time ago that we shouldn't attempt to use sports metaphors in public any longer, but we do look to it for inspiration in leadership and coaching. (anyone else crush The Last Dance several times during COVID?! So many good stories on leadership, coaching, and team culture. I digress...) Our most recent blog post from Erin Lamberty breaks down a FANTASTIC Freakonomics podcast episode that looks at the NFL's first employee listening program and the parallels that emerged for more traditional corporate cultures. Although these environments look different from the outside, the findings speak to shared, universal human needs that we all share and every leader should be conscious of. A few top take aways that remind us of the foundations that can easily be compromised: 1️⃣ Seek out feedback from employees. Take action on what you learn. 2️⃣ Cascade the organization vision and strategy to all employees. Make it personal. 3️⃣ Consider optimizing performance at a team level vs. individual level. 👉 Check out the full blog post with some more examples and detail to learn from at the link in the comments 👇 👇 👇 #CultureChange #leadership #strategy

I had the chance to give a talk to an Executive Education program at Parsons School of Design - The New School last week. I was asked to share my reflections on the state of work and what the next few years might look like - this is what I shared... This image shows up in every pitch deck, every executive briefing, and every workshop we lead. It's not a philosophical framework to inspire imagination, it's a distillation of our 12-years worth of learning at The Design Gym about what is required to actually execute high-impact, business critical, and long-lasting work. Great work must start with strong strategies and leadership level alignment. And that #strategy must be rooted in the real needs of a well defined customer group. But if your employees are not aligned, excited, or involved in that strategy or #product, you will never be working at full potential. If any leg of the stool is broken, the other two will suffer. This is where we see most organizations failing in our modern state - treating each of these three components as separate work streams. And treating the needs of these incredibly different, yet critical, people groups as unrelated (our leaders vs. our customers vs. our employees). It leads to inefficient use of time, energy, and dollars when strategytransformation is executed this way. The advice I offered the students is to learn how to lead at the intersection. To be a great leader in today's world, you must be skilled at wearing a strategist hat, an experience design hat, and a change management hat. You must be able to get curious - obsessively curious - about the needs of each of these groups. What motivates them. What excites them. What keeps them up at night. Then design at the intersection of that understanding. This is where durable transformations are born. #strategy #transformation #experiencedesign #employeeexperience #changemanagement

Ever been grocery shopping with an employee? What if I told you it's a key part of most transformation programs we do with clients. Here's why... This is a picture of me from just a few weeks ago - grocery shopping with an employee at one of our biggest clients. We spent time at work with him. We rode the subway on a 75-minute commute home to deep Brooklyn. We bought supplies for sweet potato tacos together. Companies usually tap us (The Design Gym) in moments of #change - Defining a new #vision. Unveiling a new #strategy. Overcoming company-threatening challenges. Big mergers. Product #pivots. #Leadership changes. Navigating pandemics. For leaders to successfully lead these changes, they must find intersectionality between their vision for the organization, and the beliefs, behaviors, and mindsets of their employees. Successful strategies are dependent on employee adoption and activation. But so often the flashy CEO keynotes and offsites focus so much on the 'where' and the 'what', that the 'how' gets left behind - usually alongside our employee support. That strategy might limp along for 1-2 years, but by year 3 you will see the collapse - employees who aren't clear where the org is going, and more importantly, their role in helping it get there. (Multiple studies show that 70-80% of corporate transformations FAIL - some links in the comments 👇👇👇). While many organizations rely on pulse surveys (often done only once-a-year and anonymized), they fall short on equipping leadership teams with what they need. Pulse surveys are capable of telling you 'what' employee sentiment might be, but they fail to illuminate the 'why' behind your employee's beliefs, behaviors, and mindsets. So back to taco shopping - the research we do with clients is relational and participatory. It's aimed to build understanding with the broader scope of an employee's life. It builds trust and holds space for them to share the broader scope of their life, and how their work fits into it (or not). Think of it this way - would you spend $300M on a new product before getting customer insights? Then why are executive teams investing that in corporate transformations without getting rigorous employee insights? It's because most teams undervalue the role of employees in bringing that big strategy to life - and THAT is why most transformations fail. ➡ It doesn't delay the transformation process - it accelerates and focuses it. ➡ It doesn't make transformation more expensive - it de-risks what you do spend. ➡ It doesn't risk trust with your employees - it deepens it. ➡ It doesn't water down your vision - it pressure tests it. In the most recent addition to our most recent blog post (link in comments 👇👇👇) , the always insightful Kelsye Gould breaks down 3x Better Approaches for #EmployeeListening to go beyond the pulse survey. I promise once you experience this way of engaging employees, you never look back.

This headline frustrated me this morning. Then I realized I agreed... I'm a firm believer that, for the majority of organizations, high-caliber 3innovation requires some element of in-person #collaboration. Having worked with hundreds of organizations over the past 15 years on creating disruptive products, experiences, leaders, and cultures, it's irrefutable how powerful it can be to get the right group of people together around a well defined challenge with a shared outcome in mind. Innovation, alignment, and acceleration are all achieved much more easily in-person and the outcomes generally last longer. BUT - to blame a weak innovation pipeline and holistic breakdown in business performance entirely on people working from home is reductive. It's lazy #leadership. Treating #hybrid as a binary decision (ex. we must hybrid or we must return to office) is a failing framework. Times have changed and some element of hybrid will be here to stay. AND at the same time, I believe many organizations will require increased in-person connection than they are at right now. It's a nuanced conversation that requires nuanced leadership. I'd love to see more leaders getting curious about the challenge, asking questions like: ❓- What are the specific moments where in-person connection measurably improves our potential for innovation, connection, and acceleration? How might we design our in-office policies around amplifying those specific moments? ❓- What are the high-priority, but often hidden, needs of our employees that are being met now that are drastically improving their lived experience as an employee and a human? How might we find creative ways to make sure those needs can still be met as we experiment with hybrid models, whether that is continuing to embrace partially remote models or new benefits? ❓- What are my own leadership insecurities or biases that might be motivating my strong opinions on return to office? How might I have a more nuanced conversation with myself about whether those impulses are backed up by data and feedback? This isn't a knock on Nike - I've spent a lot of time inside of Nike and consider them easily one of the most innovative companies in the world. You can replace their name in this article with any other #Fortune1000 company right now. Every org is wrestling with this in some form or another. Ultimately, we don't yet have the data or language to make sense of the seismic workplace shifts we're all in the middle of. Undoubtedly, we will all look back in 20 years and marvel at how it all turned out. But in the meantime, these are the moments that require some better question asking and that must start with the leaders in charge. What do you all think? Where have you seen bright spots for what the future might hold? #hybrid #leadership #strategy #nike

Creating lasting impact takes a village, and this program is a testament to that. Kicking off in 2018 The Design Gym went on a multi year journey with Meta to reimagine how sales could be done throughout Latin America. The inspiring leaders at Meta driving this charge Agustin Couto and Santiago Palacio worked tirelessly to create a sales culture built on customer centricity, co-creation with clients, and true, strategic partnership. Six years after starting this work we all finally sat down to document it. We’re grateful to Developing Leaders Quarterly for giving us the platform to tell this story, Roddy Millar and Roland Deiser were incredible partners. And to our current and former team members, across New York City and Sao Paulo, who conceived of this idea, brought it to life, and helped tell this story; Kelsye Gould, Gian Taralli, Jason Cha, Laura Dusi, Laura Lemos, and Bruno Gonçalves what a journey it’s been. And for the hundreds of incredible internal partners at Meta that brought this to life, and the courageous brand leaders that were open to a new way of collaboration, a very heartfelt thank you. Very few things are cooler than when clients, and collaborators become dear friends. This is one of those programs that will stick with me for years to come. #sales #consultativeselling #InnovationHacking https://lnkd.in/eEKPhfPm

Working on a piece trying to pull apart the areas that I've seen most frequently break when programs/projects are launched with heavy expectations on exponential scale out of the gate. Curious based on the list below, which of these topic areas either most resonate, or are most in need of being further pulled apart. Would love to hear your thoughts on the top 3. 1. Gaps in Preparation, or Alignment  2. Rushed or Assumed Employee/Stakeholder Buy-in  3. Misjudging Needed Resources  4. Glossing Over Onboarding/Training Requirements  5. Quality Breakdowns in Key Project/Program Elements  6. Sacrificing Testing and Feedback Cycles  7. Cultural Assumption Misses (Perceived vs. Desired Approach)  8. Customer Relationship Impact of an Untested Pilot  9. Lacking Options for Alternatives or Pivots (Build or Bust) Also anything major I'm missing? If you've got wild stories about any one of these areas that you think would help in context building, I'd love to hear them.

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Come join my leadership team! We're on a transformation journey in more ways than one. I'm recruiting a Vice President, Learning Design & Development who can bring vision and leadership to our team who designs, develops and implements learning solutions globally across every part of the organization. It's a hugely impactful role that impacts the learning solutions and interventions used by more than 800K individuals around the world who wear a name badge representing a Marriott Bonvoy brand or work in one of our offices whether it's service, brand, operations, ethics, systems, and everything in between. Bethesda, MD based with relocation available. Let's talk! #jobs #career #beginbelongbecome #learninganddevelopment #talentdevelopment #talent #VP #leadership #marriottcareers #marriottinternational