October 2020 - EMERGENT ELEMENT

How Design Thinking Makes You a Better Leader

Growing up my leadership image was a charismatic, extroverted, and in control person. One who was having all the answers, always telling people what to do, and in charge. And it made sense, after all the Latino culture at the time valued hierarchy.

Later on, I learned that different leadership styles vary from command and control to servant leadership and a mix in between. And after reading and being in the workforce for a while, my leadership is definition changed. Her is my definition:

Leadership is the art of facilitation and collaboration to achieve objectives by solving problems, setting direction, and give team ownership.

However, when I looked at how to improve my skills, I found that most of the literature focuses on the leadership definition, looking at what made past leaders successful and improving essential leadership skills such as interpersonal, communication, and management. These are crucial skills to develop and master; however, I found four gaps.

It focused on the end goal, personal objectives, and not much on who was doing the work.
Improving skills focus mostly on managing the individual and not working with the team.
It lacked how to foster collaboration and working as a team.
Lack of a framework to put different skills to work together

Leadership is human-centered at its core

These points sound self-serving. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t have anything against improving personal performance and skills. After all, as an athlete, I know how important it is to improve on a technique. Leadership is s human-centered at its core. And in a rush to get things done, sometimes we tend to forget this.

Problem Solving is key to Leadership

A strategy is deciding what to do and not to do. And a critical part of the process is identifying what problems are worth the effort.

“The ability to identify critical problems is the most underrated skill in management.” The MIT Leadership Center

If the ability to identify problems is the most underrated skill, then traditional leadership styles need to adapt to a new mindset and a new way of working.

Design thinking is a creative problem-solving process. It provides a framework for listening, learning, and then leading in today’s environment—a way of thinking and method to improve our leadership skills.

How does Design Thinking make you a better leader?

Let’s look at the process:

Empathize: Set aside your assumptions and understand the people you seek to serve and their challenges. As a manager, team leader, or team member, the people you want to help are the people who are working with you. Seeking to understand the problems people face, seeing things from their perspective before attempting to come up with ideas and create solutions will help fine-tune their real challenges.

Define: Clearly define the problem worth solving. Once you understand the many barriers that are stopping him/her from moving forward, working together, you choose one to three issues that have a high impact and low implantation effort to focus.

Ideate: Brainstorm to generate ideas and select one to three to prototype. After you had agreed on crucial problems to solve, you generate ideas that can provide potential solutions as a team.

Prototype: Create a model or a simple version of the final product (or process). This step could be as simple as working together to create a plan with three action tasks on what to do next.

Test: Test to learn. Here as a team, you define how you will know that things are working, agreeing on the implementation for some time, and observing what is working, what is not working, and if the assumptions made were right or not?

Iterate to fine-tune a solution. The last part is checking back on lessons learned and brainstorming to improve the areas that are not working or new challenges that arose from the test period.

Tackling risk and uncertainty is the new norm.

Businesses face many challenges from demographic shifts, diverse workforce, employee, and customer expectations. Add to this rapid industry, market, and technology disruption, and you are continually navigating white rapids.

Design Thinking provides a leadership framework to listen, identify problems worth solving, work as a team to bring solutions, and testing to learn what works and does not work.

You Can’t Change Minds Without Winning Hearts

Will pushing harder do the trick?

As a kid, I hated eating meat. The harder my mother pushed me to eat, the harder I resisted. As a result, I stayed seating at the table for two to three hours after everyone was gone. I couldn’t stand up until I finished my plate. Luckily, I had a German Sheppard that will save me from the pain of chewing one more bite.

The assumption is that pushing harder will do the trick. However, the approach often backfires. When someone pushes, the other person pushes back. They push back to keep doing what they are doing, in my case, avoiding chewing meat.

My mom’s objective to influence, convince, and reason with me had a good intention – eat your food to stay healthy. However, it mostly focused on her desired outcome, finish your food. She was so focused on her own goals that she pushes and pushed, forgetting to understand why I was not eating.

Seek to understand to create a meaningful connection

Inciting action and changing minds starts with empathy. Understand the fears, uncertainties, and desires are (FUD) of the people you want to serve. In other words, learn what drives them and what is blocking them. The insight will help lower the barriers to action and build trust.

79% of consumers said that brands have to demonstrate that ‘they understand and care about me’ before they are going to consider purchasing.’ – Wunderman study

I didn’t eat meat because it was difficult to cut and chew. It was a fight between me and the stake. Besides, I was a slow eater, and that made me feel worst. All my family had to wait for me to end eating before they could get up. That usually took about fifteen minutes, except the days we had a stake in the menu. Those days, they will get up ten minutes after they finished. I stayed until my plate was empty.

It wasn’t until she understood this that she changed how the steak was cooked and served. Maybe that’s why I love “Lomo Saltado” so much. After the change, I enjoyed dinner and finished with the rest of the family, which made me feel great.

Help them advance where they want to go.

People like to be in control of their choice and actions. Telling people what to do does not help. On the contrary, it falls with resistance and deaf ears. That’s what happened when we worked on the Zika campaign in Puerto Rico.

The Zika virus was an emergency campaign and an immediate threat to unborn babies. We hit the ground running, telling pregnant mothers and their partners what to do. However, we had not considered that Puerto Rico is an island, that living with mosquitos is part of everyday life, and mosquito-borne disease was nothing new to them. Our audience knew what to do. They have heard the same preventing behavior campaign since they were kids. They received the message with hesitation and anger. Thus, they were tuning out.

Moms and pregnant women wanted a healthy baby. However, they were overwhelmed with all that was going in Puerto Rico and how that affected their lives. What moms need to hear was a reminder to do these activities and not feel like a “bad” person for not doing them. We learned that two out of the four preventing behaviors were not doable.

With these insights, we designed social and traditional media stories that reminded them about two preventing behaviors they can do each day, like brushing your teeth each morning. We placed ads on venues that will trigger reminders such as on top of mosquito repellent shelves, cinema, and restaurant bathrooms. Results were outstanding, intent to “Use Insect Repellant” increased 39%, and repellent sales increased 15% from the previous year.

You can’t change minds without winning hearts. Winning hearts requires listening, building trust, and creating a meaningful connection. Understand the people you want to serve, gain insight that helps lower the barriers to action and, helps them get where they want to go.