Toby O’Rourke is the President & CEO of Kampgrounds of America, Inc. and a thought leader in outdoor hospitality and travel.
Once a month, we invite various people from across the company to roast s’mores together at our “campfire chats.” At these meetings, staff share ideas and become more comfortable being transparent with one another. We build relationships and break down silos. While some who join have only been with us for a month, others are 20-year-plus company veterans. And, for our remote teams attending on Zoom, we send s’mores kits to their homes so we can roast marshmallows together online.
To me, this is kaleidoscopic leadership in action.
A kaleidoscope brings different pieces together to create a beautiful picture: It is a symbol of collaboration and change. Others have described kaleidoscopic thinking as seeking to understand the same circumstances from a hundred different angles and joining new and old ideas into innovative combinations.
When I break down the kaleidoscopic approach to leadership, I focus on three main aspects: collaboration, process optimization and transparency. This is how leaders can adapt to evolving consumer expectations and stay agile.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Our national camping organization was once extremely siloed: operations versus marketing; owned properties versus franchised properties; people doing the same things in different departments; buying separate software platforms to solve the same issues.
Without a free flow of information between teams, departments and franchisees, we were far less efficient. But through greater collaboration and constant work to remove inefficiencies, our company has made great progress.
For example, one of our ongoing projects demonstrates the kaleidoscope in action. A couple of years ago, we invited all employees to form teams and ideate what camping would look like in 2030 based on trends in technology and changing consumer expectations. We initially created virtual reality models of the ideas and have already implemented several of the concepts at our campgrounds. Inspired by these results, we have started annual one-day hackathons where cross-functional teams form and build out new ideas to add to our project.
Just as the kaleidoscope brings lots of different colors together, cross-functional collaboration is how we break down silos and use diverse perspectives for innovation and to drive change. To put this in action, hold weekly team meetings to bring together leaders of cross-functional units and gain valuable insights and agreement around decisions before making them. Take in diverse input before making decisions to ensure more people will be on the same page when they come into effect.
Constant Process Improvement
When you turn the kaleidoscope, the view shifts, creating something new but just as beautiful. In the same way, leaders should always revisit what they have done at the end of a project or midstream, step back and rethink their approach.
With a background in the discipline of business architecture, I am always looking end-to-end at our processes to find where things aren’t efficient and ask questions: Where are there breakdowns in workflow? Where are teams not working well together? What have we missed? Does everyone involved need to be involved?
At 60 years old, our company had to update our traditional ways of doing business to launch a brand in the luxury market segment. So, we blurred the lines between marketing and operations, keeping those teams and philosophies interconnected without any of the usual trade-offs or tensions. By defining the customer, brand and customer experience, they created a beautiful brand—not just in concept but how it was operationalized. That only happened because of the connection between the teams.
By documenting and defining business capabilities and processes, you can look at them from multiple angles and better identify what is working in an organizational structure and what is not. But this documenting is not a set-it-and-forget-it deal—and reorganizations are not one-off events. Leaders need to remind their people of the operational workflows and continue to tweak the process.
Transparency: Seeing The Light
When we hold the kaleidoscope so the light shines through, it creates an even clearer picture. The more people can be upfront with each other about what works and what needs fixing, they get farther faster.
There is a natural tendency for departments to not share everything with each other. Even if unintentional, franchisees or other teams can feel frustrated if left in the dark. Leaders have to be diligent about sharing information and creating open lines of bi-directional communication.
Transparency does not always mean collegial-style agreement—disagreements on serious topics will still exist. But when leaders bring people together regularly in the spirit of transparency, they can work to prevent the inefficiencies from slowing down their organization.
Building Flexibility Into The Future
Often, process improvements relate to communications, but ensuring transparency in how we communicate is a constant work in progress. When someone hasn’t been given sufficient information early enough—or when team leaders withhold information or don’t bring in another team—it only creates more problems later on.
Even as your project outcomes have become more effective, continue breaking down silos when you find them and encourage more cross-functional collaboration. For instance, my company hosts an offsite retreat to allow leaders to open up about bottlenecks in structure and workflow; to make sure that everyone agrees that the right people are working on the right projects; and that things are moving as effectively as possible.
With this approach to constant improvement, taking a kaleidoscopic view lays the foundation for us to be nimble and innovative. We still talk about what the kaleidoscope represents at our campfire meetings because we are more than the sum of our parts. Kaleidoscopic leadership equips you to modernize a timeless business by working together.
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