Differentiate Yourself as a Leader: 4 Ways to Challenge the Status Quo
by LinkedIn Learning Solution
Being a leader isn’t about a title or a role. Instead, it’s about taking the initiative to chart new paths forward and make innovation possible. Developing this capability makes professionals very valuable, but as the Harvard Business Review notes: “Innovation requires deviation.” And deviation can be scary.
Working up the courage to challenge your workplace’s status quo is a start, but it’s not quite enough. To make any real progress, you’ll also need to convince the rest of your team to follow your lead. This is often the tricky part.
Challenge the status quo: 4 key focuses for disruptive leadership
Ready to get past the tricky part? Read on for proven tips from leadership experts on setting this culture of innovation and growth as a leader (or aspiring leader) in your organization.
1. Speak to the possibilities, not “rights or wrongs”
Maybe the biggest reason why challenging the status quo can be so hard is because it can make people very uncomfortable, especially if you’re questioning processes that have been in place for a long time. “Questions which challenge the status quo may make others react defensively,” says Nina Bowman in her course, Coaching Your Team to Think and Act Strategically. “It’ll be important for you to coach your team on how to effectively handle these situations.”
If you can’t persuade your teammates to put aside their defensiveness and at least entertain your disruptive ideas, you’ll never get far enough to even consider implementing them. Fortunately, Bowman provides an excellent way to circumvent this early discomfort: Reframe the conversation around what could be, rather than all that’s wrong with what is.
“Start by asking your team to speak to possibilities instead of positions,” she advises. “By not anchoring their own idea on which side is right or wrong, they can minimize other’s defensiveness of the new ideas.”
By focusing on possibilities, you can reduce initial defensiveness and prove that you’re interested in having a productive discussion, not pointing fingers or taking over. “Most people don't like change,” Bowman says, “but staying focused on interests and the possibilities created by new ideas will help keep colleagues open and listening.”
2. Encourage disruptive thinking with collaborative leadership
Once you’ve brought your team around to thinking about possibilities rather than roadblocks, they’ll be primed to have a productive conversation about how to disrupt the status quo.
At this point, the most important thing you can do as a leader or a teammate is to encourage and spur on everyone’s thinking. After all, being a leader isn’t about having the best idea all the time — it’s about finding the best idea and bringing it forward.
No matter your formal role within your team, you can make this happen by practicing collaborative leadership. In her course on Collaborative Leadership, Dr. Carol Kinsey Goman lays out the three essential skills for collaborative leadership. Using each of these skills will help you empower your entire team to disrupt the status quo together:
Empathetic listening: “The purpose of empathetic listening is to understand the speaker’s perspective,” Dr. Goman says. “Focus totally on the other person without letting your mind wander to other issues or preparing your response in advance.”
Social sensitivity: “When Google studied hundreds of their teams, they found two behaviors that all great teams shared,” she says. “First of all, team members spoke roughly the same amount of time. No one dominated the conversation and no one withdrew into silence. Second, successful teams all had high social sensitivity, which meant that group members were good at gauging how others felt based on nonverbal signals, their body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions.”
Visual thinking: “Visual thinking is the use of simple sketches and pictures to illustrate a concept,” Dr. Kinsey Goman says. “Encourage your whole team to make their ideas visual.”
3. Imagine a novel combination of existing ideas
Not every alteration to the status quo needs to be some bold, brand-new concept. In many cases, it’s about rethinking how we approach existing processes and conventions. And that can mean simply drawing inspiration from another process or convention.
As Anil Gupta reminds learners in his course, Leading with Innovation, Henry Ford did not invent the automobile. He simply devised a production method (the assembly line) to make them inexpensive and scalable enough for mass-market viability.
“And how did Henry Ford stumble upon this idea?” asks Gupta. “By visiting meat packing assembly lines. The Ford Motor story illustrates how powerful innovations can emerge from novel combinations of two or more existing ideas.”
This example helps show why it is valuable for leaders to engage with other departments and functions across the organization. You never know when you might find inspiration in how others get things done.
4. Use techniques proven to spur outside-the-box thinking
There are several strategies and frameworks used throughout the corporate world to nurture paradigm-shifting mindsets and actions. Depending on the makeup of your team, and what you hope to accomplish, any of them could be useful. In Leading with Innovation, Haiyan Wang and Gupta cover several strategies:
Experimentation and the lean startup process: Wang shares how lean startups test and validate novel products or services: “Conduct lots of focused experiments at a rapid pace and let feedback from the ground teach you,” she says. “Learning through experimentation is the more effective way to minimize wasting time, effort, and resources.”
Design thinking: According to Gupta, design thinking focuses entirely on the end user. To practice design thinking, ask yourself what your end user truly wants from your product and how you can design it in such a way that they get it as easily as possible. Design thinking is typically applied to product development (it was instrumental, for example, in shaping the simplicity of Apple devices), but can be used in a variety of scenarios. Whatever you’re working on, you can improve it using design thinking — all you have to do is center people and their experiences in every aspect of your change-making focus.
Skunkworks: This term refers to an independent department or business unit that is put in place specifically for focused research and development. “The skunkworks approach can offer key advantages,” says Gupta, “including freedom from the baggage of a legacy mindset, the ability to pursue high-risk projects that are likely to pay off in the longer, rather than shorter, term, and support from senior-most corporate leaders.”
In their course, Gupta and Wang dive deep into how to put these methodologies and more into practice while avoiding pitfalls for innovative outcomes.
Final thoughts
Remember that challenging the status quo isn’t necessarily about taking on a whole new role in your organization — or even necessarily reinventing the role you’re in now.
All you need to do to become a leader who challenges the status quo is think critically about how things work right now and how you and your teammates can take action to make them work better. Taking these steps will help set you on the right path toward becoming the leader that others are eager to follow.