What makes a high-performance leader or employee tick? Research shows that companies win more often when they build genuinely diverse, equitable, and inclusive cultures (learn more here).

These can be high-performing companies or individuals stepping into bold, authentic leadership styles that set them apart from others. Companies and leaders considered to be “high performers” are spread throughout key, identifiable workplaces around the globe and the one thing that binds them together is that to be consistent in high performance they’re setting themselves apart from the status quo and fighting for a new way to do work better.

Thanks to the Covid pandemic and other social and demographic changes, we’re living through a once-in-a-generation power rebalance between employees and employers. Gone are the days of top-down hierarchical dictatorships in workplaces. We’re seeing a new era emerge with new norms, where people have their voices heard —and feedback turns into new possibilities for organizations to pursue.

High performers win more not because they go against the status quo and this is due to the way that they solve problems. The best way to solve modern-day organizational problems is to have competing ideas on the table to thoroughly discuss, not just the wisdom from a few of those at the top or who are the loudest. New research from Harvard Business Review titled  Approaches to Solving Problems in the Workplace , states that, “Highly effective teams solve problems the right way and have common features: the teams are cognitively diverse and psychologically safe.”

So, companies who build more diverse teams and create “speak up” cultures where there is trust and respect amongst cognitively diverse people do far better at solving everyday challenges than those that who have a more traditional and less cognitively diverse and psychologically safe spaces for problem and solution discussion.

According to Boston Consulting Group’s 2017 Diversity and Innovation Survey, companies with above-average diversity scores (via investing in creating conditions for cognitive diversity) generate nearly 20% more average revenue from innovation than companies that have below average diversity scores (and subsequently have not invested in creating the conditions for cognitive diverse in their organizations).

Companies with more diverse Leadership report higher Innovation Revenue

Companies with above average diversity scores

Average innovation revenue 

Source: Boston Consulting Group’s 2017 Diversity and Innovation Survey

The latest research from Kaspersky, a leading enterprise innovation and security company states that, “88% of successful high performing organizations encourage innovation at every level, in every team,” and don’t silo innovation into one small department. And, in their follow up report on Bottom-up Innovation in Enterprise shows they share the most important values required for building high performing and innovative organizations.

• • Instilling Entrepreneurialism
  • Creating Diversity (of thought and personnel)
  • Empowering individuals

Not convinced by the research? We can tap into the wisdom of others, so let’s analyze what Steve Jobs has said.

Working with the world’s most innovative companies at Swae, we know that high performers thrive in workplaces where there is an idea meritocracy, not top-down authority and dictatorship.

An idea meritocracy is defined as a decision-making system where the best ideas (irrespective of who proposes them) win out. The concept has been around for a long time but was popularized by Ray Dalio in his best-selling book Principles: Life & Work, which shares an in-depth exposé of his organizational and operating strategy within his company called Bridgewater (learn more here), which is arguably the most successful hedge fund.

Dalio attributes the “idea meritocracy” at Bridgewater as a decision-making system where new investment and policy ideas can come from anywhere in the hierarchy, can be challenged by anyone, and the most debated are the ideas put forward for institutional decisions, as the system responsible for the quality and quantity of good decisions made to lead to such an outsized performance gap against all other competitors in their space.

Examples from these cultural icons and highly innovative business tycoons helps paint the picture of the powerful underlying constructs that Swae brings to the table. It’s built for any organization or leader who wants to unleash the collective intelligence that lies within a workplace.

Swae is not a fickle chat or upvoting app. 

Swae is not a boring idea enablement workflow platform. 

Swae is not just a product innovation platform.

It is so much more; turning feedback into organizational change and creating a bottom-up idea meritocracy.

Swae can help your workplace become an industry example and high-performing entity due to the help in building a more constructive speak up culture. As demonstrated above, this is a critical step for driving more innovative ideas forward, faster.

Swae’s AI and Collaboration features help people refine ideas together in an inclusive way. Imagine an open suggestion box combined with a conditional guarantee of a decision. Anyone can suggest ideas within the organization they belong to, and ideas compete for decision attention equally. The ideas that receive the most debate graduate to a decision. Leaders commit to making a decision about the fate of popular ideas directly on the platform.

Fair, transparent, bottom-up, and meritocratic decision-making. That’s the Swae way.

How Swae supports high performers everywhere:

Swae serves the people that love to disrupt the status quo (for the good).

Swae serves DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) by using Swae’s collective intelligence, collaboration, and crowdsourcing features allowing members of DAOs to create proposals anonymously with the support of AI that will improve the quality of those proposals and then open them up for the input of the larger community.

The crowdsourcing feature will enable the proposals to be debated on their merits, edited with others’ perspectives, and voted on by all active members of the community. The proposals that receive the highest engagement (positive or negative) automatically percolate upwards to a decision DAO community and its “council,” where projects can be funded or supported in whatever way the DAO chooses.

This process for revealing decision-ready ideas from the bottom-up can be adapted to any organization that is bold enough to desire it and for the leaders ready to disrupt the stale and boring hierarchical status quo and create environments that value people and what they have to say.

To further expand on the Kaspersky’s Bottom-up Innovation in Enterprise report, the top three barriers larger organizations face when trying to innovate more include:

A. Organizational structures add too much complexity (48% agree)

B. Too many people are involved in the [decision-making] process (42% agree)

C. It takes too long to make decisions (40% agree)

40%

It takes too long to make decisions

Swae helps to create diverse and inclusive environments with less pain and less noise.

We know that when employees speak up, good things happen. An MIT Sloan study shows that when employees are comfortable in speaking up more often about many emerging topics, they are more likely to stay at the company longer, and to exhibit positive employee behaviors.

Employees who spoke up more were 92% more likely to want to stay with the company (even if offered a comparable position elsewhere)

96%

The more diverse and inclusive the teams, the better because people feel comfortable and safe to be more open, engaging, and speak up more often.

Swae is for the brave.

Swae exists to build positive workplaces that debias decisions, empower constructive debate, deepen collaboration, and tap into intrinsic motivations for engagement.

Breaking down the biases and structures that zap out our motivations in the workplace is critical for creating high performing organizations and cultures.

Unchecked bias has a massive impact in the workplace that can derail businesses from finding great ideas and making significant decisions every single day. An article by McKinsey & Company How Biases, Politics, and Egos Trump Good Strategy  shows data that proves cognitive bias eats away at the positivity within a company’s culture.

Here are a couple of the top biases according to McKinsey & Company to look out for:

• Overconfidence: this type of bias leads people to ignore contradictory information. They don’t hear anything other than their “own voice” when considering options.
• Confirmation Bias: refers to the human tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. One study found, for instance, that 80% of executives believe that their product stands out against the competition—but only 8% of customers agree.

A more empowered and engaged way of doing business is on the rise…

We see a bright future ahead!

We at Swae envision a world where everyone understands their value and is seen for that value in their workplaces and where everyone can feel included and have a voice. Call us crazy, but we’re passionate about this vision and are working hard to make it as obvious as the current system that works in the opposite manner.

Swae is helping organizations across the world to solve today’s problems and create tomorrow’s strategy. From Start-ups to Charities, and Enterprises to DAOs, our clients find that their greatest resource is their people, and Swae is proven to help get the best from the untapped potential within their workforce.

Find your next winning ideas using Swae

More to explore…