Ralph’s whistle reveals both the problem and the power of innovation: namely that innovation is a practice, not an idea. Invention is an idea, a novel idea, and, like all ideas, a novel idea is easily transferable from person to person—introduce one person to the concept of personal liberty, he tells another, she passes it on to a third, and, like a benign infection, pretty soon the whole country is swept up in the mission to secure personal liberty for all.
Innovation
is “novelty that can be applied.” This means that there is a person involved, someone actually doing the doing, a Ralph. An innovation is transferable only if the person you are delivering the innovation to has the same strengths as the person who created it in the first place. What is effective and authentic in the hands of one person looks forced, fake, and foolish in the hands of another.
We see this most glaringly on the world stage. The equivalent of the “whistle” for U.S. presidents is the military photo-shoot. If a president or a presidential candidate can secure an appearance with the military, the visual image reads as powerful and authoritative. But, of course, this “best practice” depends heavily on who the practitioner is. Have President George W. Bush land on an aircraft carrier and emerge in full flight gear, and he looks authentically presidential (despite the subsequent overreach of the “Mission Accomplished” banner behind him). Have Michael Dukakis poke his head out of the turret of a tank and he looks, well, silly.
But it also applies to any best practice, in any position or endeavor. Recently my company, TMBC, undertook a best practice study of the top 10 percent of Hilton’s Focused Service brands’ general managers—Hampton Inn, Hilton Garden Inn, Homewood Suites, and Home 2. Since Hampton Inn was just voted the best franchisor in the country by
Entrepreneur
magazine—ahead of the likes of McDonald’s and Subway—and since Hilton Garden Inn and Homewood Suites are multi-year J.D. Power award winners, we knew that, in targeting their top 10 percent, we were interviewing some truly excellent performers.
Although during the interviews it became apparent that they shared similar approaches to some things, it was their differences that were most striking. Diana runs the Hampton Inn and Suites in Ephrata, Pennsylvania. Vivacious and excitable (and chatty—my forty-five minute interview was still going strong at an hour and fifteen) Diana has been a perennial award winner since she opened the hotel five years ago.
“What’s your secret?” I asked her. “I mean, if there were a few things you would tell every manager they should do if they are to succeed, what would they be?”
“First, get a mascot,” she replied.
“A mascot?”
“Yep. A mascot. Every hotel should have one. It gives the employees and the guests something to rally around. A personality. A purpose.”
“What’s yours?”
“The turtle.”
“What? Why?”
“Because, like the turtle, we won’t make any progress unless we stick our necks out. The turtle is so cool. We have them everywhere here. If you could see my office, it’s full of plush turtles. When you win employee of the month, you are the ‘turtle of the month.’ Our regular guests get little toy turtles to take back to their kids. It’s an awesome thing. I’ve been telling every hotel manager I run into that they should get a mascot. In fact, I’ve just heard that another Hampton down the way are now ‘the bees’ because, you know, they don’t get anything done unless they work together.”
So I talked to Diana for an hour or so about her turtles and a part of me thought,
Really, turtles
? and another part thought,
Well, if it works, it works
, and then I hung up the phone and called Tim. Tim runs the Hilton Garden Inn in Times Square, and he’s another superstar. But he’s no Diana. He’s quieter, more cerebral.
“A practice I would share with others?” he repeated my question. A long pause. “Well, I don’t really have one. I think my people have all the answers. That’s the way I run my hotel. I tell my people that they are closer to the guest than I am, that they know this hotel better than I do, and that, whether it’s a guest issue or something to do with the property, they’ll know the answers.”
I kept probing. “That’s an interesting perspective, Tim, but can you think of any ways that you put this perspective into practice? Anything, anything at all?”
“Well, there’s our lending library, of course.”
“Excuse me?”
“We have a lending library. I decided that if my people were going to have all the answers, then we needed to be a learning hotel, and what better way to symbolize learning than to ask every employee to bring in one book per month and we would set up a lending library. It doesn’t matter if it’s a fiction book, nonfiction, or even a kids’ book, we still want you to bring it in. All of you have something to teach us, something we can learn from. So bring in a book, borrow other people’s books, and we’ll all learn together.”
These are but two innovations from two superstar managers. With my prodding Tim told me about many more. So did Diana. So did they all. And yet, very few of these innovations would have been transferable from one person to another, even though they all came from top performers doing the same job, at the same level, in the same organization. Tell Tim that he absolutely must have a mascot for his hotel and what would he have picked? The bookworm? The owl? Most likely he would have picked nothing and procrastinated in hopes that the new corporate “mascot” program would soon wither away. Tell Diana to start a lending library and, while she might rouse herself to put her own spin on it, most likely she would dismiss it. Not exciting enough. Not her thing.
Two engineers in one of the social media giants offer us another example. David writes code. And he’s a certain kind of coder. He is a “massager.” Give him ten or more hours of uninterrupted coding time and he will massage the code, working and reworking it until it is so efficient and so elegant that others will read the code just to admire it. He refuses to come to the office. He works from home, alone with his dog, Bit. His secret sauce, he said, is extended solitude.
Not so for Luke. He’s another exemplary engineer at the same company, but he’s not a massager. He’s a “salvager.” He takes one person’s failed coding experiment, reconstructs what the person was trying to do, combines it with another person’s experiment, and creates something neither had initially intended. His genius— although he’d be uncomfortable with that label—is asking probing questions without making the original designer defensive, a practice he calls the “Guessing Game.”
During his company’s once a month code-a-thons—where all engineers who want to can stay up the entire night coding, drinking, munching, and then shipping code the next morning— he can be found moving from one engineer to another, playfully guessing where they were intending to take the code, and throwing in a couple of intriguing “guesses” of his own. These guesses, in turn, prompt new ideas from the original designers, which he then pieces together into a workable program.
Tell Luke to spend ten hours of solitude a day and he’d see it as a punishment, not a best practice.
Try to teach David the mechanics of the “Guessing Game” and he’d dismiss you as a know-nothing crank.
We have studied the country’s best high school principals, the best affiliate leaders of Habitat for Humanity, the best emergency room nurses, and the best pharmaceutical sales reps, and whenever we interview excellent performers in the same position, we find this same phenomenon—extraordinary results achieved in radically different ways. Yes, there may be some similar practices among those who excel in a certain position (see
chapter 5
, the Technical Summary, for a few examples), but no, for any position, there is no “perfect” profile; there are only perfect practices that fit your particular profile.
So, what your organization wants are not the few innovations that can be scaled to the many. Instead, what your organization wants are
many
practical innovations and a way to deliver these innovations to those
few
people who share the strengths of the person who dreamed up each one of them.
And this is what you want too. Instead of top-down initiatives that feel awkward and inauthentic, you want to be introduced to practical innovations that you might well have thought of . . . but haven’t yet; techniques that, when you try them out, feel as though you’ve done them before. You want to accelerate your creativity and yet still retain your authenticity.
This is why we built the StandOut strengths assessment. Over the last decade, we captured many hundreds of techniques, practices, and insights—for leaders, for managers, for client service positions, for sales, for individual contributors of all kinds—and we loaded them into the back end of the assessment. Once you’ve completed it, you will receive only those practices that fit your particular strengths. You will receive the best practical innovations, broadcast on the You channel.
Facebook, Netflix, Slacker, and StandOut
By filtering content to fit you, StandOut is mirroring in the field of best practices what we see happening in other fields.
For example, in the entertainment world content used to be gathered in one central place and then pushed out to you, no matter who you were. ESPN pushed out sports programming. CBS broadcast comforting sitcoms. The History Channel collected, edited, and distributed newsreel footage of World War II. To get what you wanted you had to sort through all five hundred channels and pinpoint the one or two shows that truly matched your tastes.
To some extent this still works, but with such a proliferation of centralized content, the burden is on
you
to sift through it all.
Today’s most successful companies are working to relieve you of that burden. And at the same time matching you with content more accurately than you could yourself. Facebook is now an advertising powerhouse not because it has a centralized stock of better ads, but because the first question it asks is “Who are you?” and only then, guided by its understanding of your unique profile of likes and dislikes, does it deliver ads that “fit” your profile.
Netflix does the same. Before you can stream a movie, it gives you a “movie quiz.” It presents you with a series of movies, asks you if you’ve seen them and how you’d rate each one, and then based on the results of your quiz, it suggests only those movies that match your past preferences.
Pandora radio and Slacker radio do much the same thing with music. Both of these services, in slightly different ways, “listen” to what you choose to listen to and then play you only music that is similar to your inferred musical tastes.
In each of these cases, what’s centralized is an understanding of you. This understanding of you, this algorithm-derived avatar, then becomes the filter through which the content is delivered. The algorithm isn’t perfect—sometimes you find yourself listening to Lady Gaga when what you really wanted was a Lady Antebellum song—but its focus is. Its focus is you: your habits, your preferences, your movie favorites, your musical quirks, and, in the case of StandOut, your strengths.
Within your job alone there are hundreds of possible practices and innovations; across all the different people who do your job there are uncountable combinations of strengths and weaknesses. What you (and your manager) need is a Rosetta stone to make sense of this complexity and match the right innovations to the right strengths. StandOut is your Rosetta stone.
CHAPTER 2
The New StandOut
Strengths Assessment
The StandOut assessment measures you on nine strength Roles and reveals your top two. These two strength Roles are where you will make your greatest contribution. They are your
edge
—where you will have a natural advantage over everyone else. And they are your
multiplier
—you will most quickly learn and improve upon any innovations, techniques, or best practices that complement these two Roles.
With each of your top two Roles you will receive this advice:
• Phrases to describe your edge
—As most of us do, you probably struggle to find the right words to capture what makes you stand out. You are either too vague: “I like challenge.” Or you overcompensate, and lurch into flagrant self-promotion: “I was in President’s Club five years straight.” You need suggestions for how to be specific about your strengths, without being a braggadocio.
• How to make an immediate impact
—
You’ve just joined your new team or stepped into a new position within your current team. You want to make an immediate and solid first impression. How can you do this purposefully? What are your quickest wins? Where will you surprise people with the speed of your uptake?