May 2022 Management Newsletter

May is packed. I am attending a destination wedding across two cities I love, London, UK, and Venice, Italy. I am visiting friends, family, and, more importantly, customers. So, I will be out for almost three weeks. I am trying to cram in my monthly LinkedIn articles and Medium articles this week. Hopefully, quality will not suffer.

In this month's newsletter, I will ponder Multimodal Leadership and Innovation with Science Fiction prototyping.

Value of Multimodal Team Leadership

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Team leadership requires a multifaceted approach; there is no going around it. Cultural shifts and the evolving needs of team members and productivity metrics all necessitate a more robust approach to leadership that best enhances productivity while empowering employees. Enter the concept of multimodal team leadership.

Multimodal team leadership is a leadership model that has been gradually adopted during the new normal as teams realize the value in true team collaboration like innovation and collective learning in-person while handling routine tasks and coordination virtually. The increased shift to hybrid work models that around 76% of companies have adopted has necessitated a more agile, shared approach to leadership. Multimodal leadership provides strong value for organizations trying to adapt to a new way

How Multimodal Team Leadership Works

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Multimodal team leadership creates a type of workplace where the skills needed to successfully lead teams face-to-face and virtually are more dynamic. To enact these dynamic skills, multimodal team leaders must keep in mind four key roles to properly adapt to managing a hybrid workforce. They are:

●?????Champion - Leaders advocate externally for teams.

●?????Catalyst - Leaders primarily focus on stimulating innovation and collaboration.

●?????Conductor - Ensures good team chemistry, making sure that team members work well together and do so harmoniously.

●?????Coach - Makes sure that individual team members are in the best position to achieve optimal performance.

By leveraging each of these roles, organizations develop viable approaches that allow leaders to function in virtual collaboration and face-to-face collaboration mode. In the virtual mode, leaders establish goals, oversee progress and promote information sharing among team members. Meanwhile, in face-to-face mode, innovation, deep learning, and dedication are fostered, driving productivity and creativity so teams achieve the highest possible performance levels.

The Value of Multimodal Leadership is In The Details

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Multimodal leadership goes beyond the traditional means to determine how teams operate daily. With multimodal leadership, teams see the value of doing more administrative and reporting tasks from the comfort of home but also realize that solving complex problems, forming strong emotional connections, and building a formidable work culture cannot be done virtually. Each of the latter traits is achieved much more successfully in person due to technology limitations.

Complex tasks such as collaboration, innovation, dedication, and acculturation are vital in-person traits to consider.?

●?????Collaboration involves a shared understanding and strong relationship-building to formulate ideas.

●?????Innovation includes shared learning, knowledge integration, and bonding in a stress-free environment.

●?????Acculturation requires extensive face-to-face connections to reinforce norms while developing understanding between team members.

●?????Dedication - Derived from a shared purpose and a sense of community.

How Each Role Affects Team Leadership

Conductor

The conductor, as mentioned above, is charged with ensuring teams have good chemistry and work together in harmony to achieve the collective goal.

While mostly a virtual team leadership role, conductors in a multimodal team leadership approach make sure that all plans, decisions, and objectives are shared to properly motivate team members, ensuring effective collaboration. Leaders tasked with this orchestra-like type of team leadership role have to establish a strong balance between showing genuine care and micromanaging. Conductors have to be efficient and engaging while ensuring teams are in sync virtually.

Champion

The champion role necessitates that leaders advocate externally for the teams they represent, meaning that they secure multiple resources, delve into key information sources, and communicate all accomplishments to team members. The role also requires establishing a trusting relationship with organizational shareholders and influencing as much as possible without having formal authority.

Catalyst

As a catalyst, a necessary in-person role, leaders spur innovation and creativity, creating a shared culture where team members are afforded the freedom to develop strong ideas and strategies that ensure the highest productivity from teams.

Catalysts must create safe environments that prove psychologically advantageous for team members, allowing them to engage in quality dialogue and engage in positive, creative conflict. The emphasis is on allowing team members the control to create without judgment and facilitate engaging collaboration.

Coach

As a dual face-to-face and virtual role, coaching necessitates that leaders ensure team members reach high-performance levels while also looking out for team members on a human level, caring for their physical and mental well-being. Effective coaching requires a strong amount of emotional intelligence and a balance of helping team members push the highest possible levels while showing levels of empathy towards employees.?

Sustaining connections, establishing trust, and leveraging performance are the fundamental aspects of multimodal team leadership that make it so valuable and important in this new age of work. Teams that grasp this leadership model are the ones that are most likely to achieve sustained success.

Now on to the next article for this month -->

Innovating Faster With Science Fiction Prototyping

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Science fiction prototyping explores the concept of leveraging science fiction to explore and accurately define all implications of futuristic technology and the social structures that they enable. Essentially, this type of prototyping is a way for people to reimagine the future and use it as a consistent driver of innovation. The methodology behind science fiction prototyping focuses on using science-fiction narratives that are grounded in existing practices, written to act as prototypes for people exploring different kinds of futures.

Organizations are increasingly adopting the prototyping methodology, directly leveraging it, or working with companies that specialize in prototyping. What science fiction prototyping does for businesses is help them understand the potential of technology without needing a ton of technical specifics. Here’s why such prototyping is effective and helpful for businesses looking for a much-needed creative spark.

The Beauty of Science Fiction Prototyping is In Its Simplicity

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Science fiction prototyping, when broken down into its simplest form, is storytelling. People love a good story, especially if that story has some connection to real life. Science fiction prototyping is a narrative about the future, predicting how technology will be utilized going forward and the ramifications that technology will have on people. Science fiction prototyping includes a variety of touchpoints that are foundational to the narrative that science fiction prototyping puts forward. These touchpoints are:

●?????Picking Your Science & Building Your World

●?????The Science Inflection Point

●?????The Ramification of Science on Humans

●?????Human Inflection Points

●?????Learning Points/What Have Humans Learned?

Technology is at the heart of the above-mentioned narrative playing out and yielding results for the businesses that invest in science fiction prototyping. This form of prototyping uses the present day as a baseline before envisioning the state of the world years ahead. While visualizing what the future will look like, science fiction prototyping focuses on the technology that will be prevalent going forward and what that technology will mean to the people who interact with it.

From an organizational perspective, science fiction prototyping allows leaders to get precise, predictive knowledge that determines how much technological advancement will affect their consumer bases. As science fiction prototyping evolves, organizations develop a stronger understanding of how to be at the forefront of technological innovation, coming up with ideas and strategies that are ahead of their time, gaining them a superior competitive advantage.

By understanding how to use the technology of the future, organizations can improve their positioning by not only driving the digital transformation that’s becoming the new normal but also by actuating new developments that lead to enhanced creativity.

Prototyping Helps Organizations Readily Adapt to Disruptive Technologies

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Accelerated by the pandemic, the adoption of disruptive technologies has forced organizations to modernize their operational approaches and changed how teams solve problems. Businesses that successfully adapt to the increased advent of disruptive technologies enter periods of radical growth and create significant value. Seamless implementation of these technologies helps teams and organizations understand what radical change involves and the social impact technology will have, improving relatability with their customers while also improving team productivity.?

Science fiction prototyping in organizational settings helps leaders consistently generate intellectual property and leverage a platform that envisions and establishes business tools, as well as products/services, created through disruptive technologies. The engaging narrative developed through science fiction prototyping enables businesses to create products/services that directly address the real needs of their consumer bases, increasing business relevance.

Science fiction prototyping is an asset for businesses, helping them to inspire and align various stakeholders, both internal and external. Leaders can successfully develop and share layered innovation strategies using science fiction novels or illustrated short stories to tell compelling narratives about the impact of future technologies. And this form of storytelling also highlights the wider ecosystem of disruptive technologies, likening their effect on people and their effectiveness in driving positive change that enhances business objectives.

Getting people within an organization to understand complexities can be a hassle, and ensuring teams are aligned to leverage disruptive technologies to achieve business outcomes is even more challenging. However, science fiction prototyping essentially does the hard work for leaders trying to drive innovation and change within their organizations. By establishing narratives and highlighting disruptive ideas that enact positive change, prototypes can be developed, and organizations can start to envision a future where they are at the front and center of technological innovation.