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How can you create a culture of innovation using design thinking? How do you scale up excellence? Customer-Focused Innovation shows you how by combining cutting-edge social science frameworks with design thinking tools and techniques.

What it takes to scale up excellence in organizations? Huggy Rao, Professor, GSB, Stanford University and Robert I. Sutton, in their article “ Bad to great: The path to scaling up excellence“, described methods that can help leaders.

Efforts to scale up excellence stall when bad behavior crowds out good. Scaling is one of the toughest challenges that senior leaders face. Executives can always point to places where a company is doing a great job.

Negative actions and beliefs also come in different flavors. Whatever their exact characteristics, bad behavior undermines scaling efforts by introducing confusion, destructive conflict, distrust, and dead ends. To spread and sustain something good, you’ve first got to take out the bad. These methods can help leaders who are bent on “breaking bad.”

“Broken windows” theory

In 1982, criminologist George L. Kelling and political scientist James Q. Wilson observed that in neighborhoods where one broken window was left unrepaired, the remaining windows would soon be broken, too. Allowing even a bit of bad to persist suggests that no one is watching, no one cares, and no one will stop others from doing far worse things. (George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, “Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety,” the Atlantic, March 1, 1982)

Charles O’Reilly and Barton Weitz studied 141 supervisors in a large retail chain. They focused on how supervisors handled salespeople who were tardy, unhelpful, uncooperative, discourteous to customers, or unproductive. O’Reilly and Weitz found that supervisors of the most productive units confronted problems more directly and quickly, issued more warnings, used formal punishments more often, and promptly fired employees when warnings failed.

This isn’t an argument for striking fear among employees. The best bosses nip bad behavior in the bud but treat people with dignity.

Many employees who are prone to selfishness, nastiness, incompetence, cheating, and laziness change their ways after getting feedback and coaching or moving to a workplace where such behavior isn’t tolerated.

Stanford’s Perry Klebahn is known for his mastery at coaching and turning around dysfunctional teams in the hands-on creativity classes for master’s students and programs for visiting executives at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (which everyone calls “the Stanford d.school”). During several recent executive programs, he and his fellow coaches identified some bad apples who harmed their groups. So Klebahn put all of these destructive characters together “in the same barrel”—a new team. Then he moved it to a corner where they wouldn’t infect others and recruited a no-nonsense coach to guide them. This technique works. A couple of bad-apple teams have performed poorly, but a few others have produced “shockingly good” prototypes of new products and improved customer experiences. When a team filled with alpha types has a coach who can handle them, constructive dynamics often emerge. Although those big personalities may trample on less aggressive people, a “balance of power” emerges when you put a bunch of these overbearing types together. Such people, Klebahn observed, usually have lot of energy; the trick is getting them to channel it toward the design challenge rather than pushing around their teammates.

“Poets” and “plumbers.”

Stanford’s James March distinguishes between leaders who are “poets” and “plumbers.” Getting people to focus on small, mundane, and gritty details is effective for eliminating negativity. In “You’ve got to fix the plumbing before you spout the poetry.” Before you can spread something good, the first order of business is to drive out bad behavior. Great leaders and teams are masters of the obvious—a rare talent.

Recruit role models to squelch bad behavior

The people you recruit for a scaling effort have a big impact on its success. Recruit your organization’s most admired and connected people, teach them what “bad” looks like, and encourage them to stop being perpetrators.

Some warning signs

How can you recognize when bad behavior exists—or soon will? Here are four feelings to watch for; when pervasive, they signal trouble.

1. Fear of responsibility, especially the sense that it is safer to do nothing—or something bad—than the right thing. Silence is among the most reliable signs that people fear personal responsibility and that the learning and self-criticism needed for excellence aren’t happening.

2. Feelings of injustice. Numerous studies show that when people think they are getting a raw deal from their employer, bad behavior runs rampant. As Stanford d.school professor Michael Dearing told us, his experience as a senior executive (and, more recently, as a venture capitalist who financed more than 80 start-ups) taught him that “there is a difference between what you do and how you do it.” Whether you are doing something difficult (such as announcing pay cuts or demotions) or something pleasant (raises and promotions), employees work harder and more loyally if you explain your actions, talk about how changes will unfold, and treat people with dignity.

3. Helplessness. When people feel powerless to stop bad forces and events, they shirk responsibility.

4. Anonymity: the belief that no one is watching you closely, so you can do whatever you want.

Original article: Bad to great: The path to scaling up excellence, By Huggy Rao and Robert I. Sutton, McKinsey Quarterly