Matthew Rodriguez

The best creativity and innovation come from a space of psychological safety, which happens best when teams are at play. It helps to create games that draw out the creativity of teams. Exercises like empathy maps, design challenges, and design post-mortems all help creatives develop stronger connections to the outcome they're serving in a way that builds their creative muscles.

Gathering details is a great exercise to build rapport and get the right picture of success. It helps deliver an outcome that is bespoke to the stakeholders' expectations. It also helps the stakeholders get a better understanding of what they want. I always say, "They'll know what they want when they see what they say." A well-structured line of inquisition gets stakeholders to build a vision and understand where they can help facilitate success. Use Questions that begin with "What" and "How" to open dialogue.

Assertiveness is a tactic I don't recommend. It assumes a posture of force. While others might defer to it based on their level of comfort with conflict, it does little to build rapport and is not a long-term strategy. It bears a very "alpha" energy. Any time one needs to make a point, it makes more sense to listen empathetically and prime your audience or counterparts' attention by leveraging questions. It's the smartest thing I've learned from the F.B.I. They use tactical empathy to talk people into jail time as the best option.

While I don't necessarily agree that it is important to build assertiveness (I believe in a more empathetic approach to make a point), practice makes better. It feels like this guidance was meant for introverted folks. It can be dangerous to assert your presence when it is something that doesn't feel natural. I would advocate confidence comes from experience, and so leveraging a more inquisitive posture to understand your audience or counterpart will open roads for you to shape your communication in their world. This will help you to assert your point in a way that lands with them.

While mindset is great, especially if you're in a zen enough place to pull toward the high road, resilience, like any skill, requires a habit be formed. It helps to journal feelings and impressions of things that have gone wrong, and then to determine what new triggers can be put in place that contribute to a more productive mindset. For example, when I fail, I will divide a piece of paper in half and write on the left, what went wrong (the failure), and on the right, what went well, and what I learned for next time." These behaviors ensure that when we lose, we don't lose the lesson, and we turn challenging moments into positive action that build new strengths.

It helps to recognize that we all have biases based on similarity, experience, expedience, distance and safety. Understanding that leads us to mitigation strategies. It's hard to read the label from inside the bottle, so catching ourselves when it is happening is a challenge, but we can employ tactics to mitigate. For similarity bias, see out alternative view points or designate a devil's advocate. For experience bias, make it a habit to seek out alternate perspectives. For distance bias, make sure to solicit feedback from those that might be in a different location (like in a virtual meeting).