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In 2008, Lego launched an open innovation pilot project. Fifteen years later, a community of 2.8 million customers is sharing and debating its product ideas. Customers whose ideas are retained earn 1% of the sales generated by that product. For some, such as the inventor of the best-selling “Medieval Blacksmith” model, this represents a small fortune.

How can you inspire yourself from this approach to build your own successes? In addition to the—important—sharing of value, this article reveals two lessons.

First, trust your customers to detect potential successes. Lego compared the predictions of its community to those of its employees and experts. The customers were incomparably better predictors, as long as their responses were sufficiently numerous. At Lego, ideas receiving 10,000 votes or more are the ones that are studied further.

Next, be sure to manage disappointments well. Out of 143 ideas receiving over 10,000 votes, only 23 have eventually seen the light of day. Lego observed that people whose ideas were rejected could become negative and harm the dynamic. The solution consisted in involving them in events allowing them to build personal relationships with other passionate customers, which compensated for the feeling of rejection.

Source: Lego Takes Customers’ Innovations Further, Michela Beretta, Linus Dahlander, Lars Frederiksen, Arne Thomas, MIT Sloan Management Review, September 2023.

“Managers are cracking”, states Gartner in publishing the results of its annual survey of 9,000 US employees and managers. The numbers are staggering. Less than one surveyed employee out of two believes that their manager is able to lead their team down the right track. And 54% of surveyed managers state that they suffer from their working conditions. Cause for concern, given that good managers multiply by 15 their team members’ chances of being highly effective, and by three their loyalty to the company.

What can be done? One enlightening finding of this study is that training only improves managerial performance by 4%. On the other hand, if managers believe they have the means to manage their missions over the long term, their performance improves by 21%.

Gartner identifies four levers to act on this dimension. It is beneficial to redefine expectations so that they are more realistic, to revisit management routines, to eliminate the obstacles that prevent the manager from truly playing their part; but the most impactful of these levers is to modify the process of acceding to the position of manager. When potential managers have been asked to indicate if they were tempted by this role, their performance in this new role is multiplied by 2.3.

Source: Managers Are Cracking—and More Training Won’t Help, Gartner, August 2023.

Career paths are growing increasingly choppy. For a long time, women were the ones most affected by interruptions in their careers, often motivated by familial considerations. Today, the phenomenon extends beyond that context and is growing in scale. More and more employees are taking pauses in their careers: personal project, time for reflection, partial retraining, etc. However, it is not always easy to get back into the professional flow, which has itself not been interrupted. This challenge concerns employees as much as companies: the latter have every interest to make the most of this workforce—which often returns with renewed dynamism.

This is why certain organizations have implemented specific support programs. Mastercard and Amazon, for example, offer programs running over a 12- to 16-week duration, aimed at any new employee joining the company after taking an extended career break.  Others target this population to attract employees in areas in which they need to reinforce their capabilities. Certain subsidiaries of Avanade, an IT services company, provide financial assistance to women undertaking to retrain in the IT field. And you, what do you offer employees to get back in the saddle after a career break?

Source: Working Women and the War for Talent, Bianca Bax, Andrew Schwedel, Fai Assakul, Nicole Bitler, Bain & Company, September 2022.

Many companies have a policy of incubating new activities. However, while a great number of them manage to successfully experiment with new offerings, very few of these reach the scaling-up stage. This is partly explained by the risks inherent in innovation—but also by causes that the company could give itself the means to better control. In particular, it appears that many teams do not have a sufficiently methodical approach to anticipating large-scale deployment. Feedback from some thirty successful experiments shows that it is fruitful to consider the desired point of arrival from the outset, so as to better prepare the journey that will allow getting there:

- Equip yourself with a both precise and ambitious vision of the desired outcome. What will your project look like once deployed? Successful projects are characterized by proposing a bold vision, which notably shakes off short-term constraints.

- Starting from this target, work backwards. What skills and resources will you need to reach the target? How can you acquire them? How can you convince the desired number of customers? Review your options for achieving this: development of what already exists, acquisitions, partnerships, etc.

The idea is not to define a fixed deployment plan: uncertainty when launching a new activity is far too high. But clarifying at a very early stage the target being aimed at and the options for reaching it helps prepare the way in which to move beyond the experimentation stage.

Source: The Missing Discipline Behind Failure to Scale, Andy Binns, Christine Griffin, MIT Sloan Management Review, April 2023.

Finding meaning in one's daily missions is a growing expectation on the part of employees and a powerful lever for commitment. How can managers contribute to making their teams' work more meaningful? Research shows that they have every interest in drawing on the reactions of the people directly concerned by this work: customers, colleagues, partners, etc. Allowing employees to see the tangible effects of their work greatly fuels their commitment, more so than explaining to them why it is useful to invest themselves in this or that mission or objective. Indeed, psychologists have documented that this responds to the deep-seated need to feel that our actions have a positive impact on those around us. Here are some practices that will enable you to activate this lever:

- Create opportunities for direct exchanges between the employee and their interlocutors around questions such as: “In what ways does my work have an effect on your activity?”; “In what ways does it help you to achieve your own objectives?”

- Encourage your employees to express their gratitude to one another as soon as an opportunity arises.

- Systematically collect and disseminate testimonials that offer feedback on your employees' work, even those that may seem anecdotal.

Source: The Simple Way to Inspire Your Team, David Burkus, TEDxReno, May 2023.