I love working with leaders who want to unleash innovation with their teams. They often come to me asking for lessons in innovation – how to get people to think innovatively, or to try things and take risks. Learning ideation and innovation techniques is great, but what I often find is that the leaders themselves are doing certain things that hinder their team’s propensity to innovate. Here are a few that I see often.
1. Hiding your own failures
As Ken Robinson said, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” Common innovation wisdom is to take risks, fail quickly, and learn from it so you can try something different.
The leaders I work with believe this. They often say things like, “of course, people can try and fail. I just want them to think about it, learn from it, and to do something.” However, when I ask them what failures of their own they have shared with their people, many of them can’t think of any.
The experiences they have working with you help them to form beliefs about what is right and wrong.You are their model to follow. When you don’t share your own failures openly, people don’t believe that it’s okay for them to try and fail.
What to do: At your next team meeting, share a personal failure and what you learned from it. Then ask your team to come with their own examples to your next meeting. You could even try a “Failure bow.” Have everyone share how they failed and what they learned. Then have everyone take a big, dramatic bow, and celebrate the learning.
2. Discouraging conflict
One of the most common difficulties I find in the teams I work with is discomfort with conflict. People worry about hurting relationships, or about speaking out against their boss’ ideas. When conflict is not encouraged and practiced, innovation will stall. If you avoid difficult conversations, or react negatively when challenged, people will quickly learn to go along with the status quo. They will stop asking “why?” or “why not?” about processes, products or systems.
It is important to teach people how to be courageous and curious in conflict, and how to challenge each other with respect. Questioning and listening, and being confident enough to express concerns, are must-have skills.
What to do: Nominate people to be the “devil’s advocate” or “questioner” at meetings. This person should be responsible for listening for assumptions or “that’s how we’ve always done it” attitude, and challenging it with “Why” or “why not” questions. You can also bring us in to facilitate our Courageous Conversations workshop and Team Charter Session.
3. Always moving too quickly to the next thing
Driven, high performing individuals are often jumping into the next project as soon as one is complete. This ambition and self-motivation is a great trait, but it can stall team motivation. It is important to stop and celebrate successes – even little ones.
when you miss this step, people start to wonder if their hard work was appreciated. When you pause to celebrate what they did, in a genuine, meaningful way, they will remember it and seek to achieve again.
What to do: Don’t save your post-mortems and “lessons learned” discussions for the projects that go wrong. Have these discussions after projects that go well, to find out why they worked out, how the team worked together, and to celebrate their accomplishment.
4. Ignoring external networking
When you’re busy, it’s difficult to find time to network outside of your own company. In fact, the longer you stay at one company, the more likely it is that you stop looking outside the four walls you’re working in.
When you have business discussions with people outside your organization, or even your industry, it often sparks new ideas and insights. In their book, The Leadership Challenge, Kouzes and Posner call this “outsight.” I love this term, and encourage the leaders I work with to look for opportunities to attend external events, conferences and meetups to gain outsight.
What to do: Next time a vendor calls and asks you to have a coffee, do it! Encourage your team members to do the same. You never know what you could learn or who they could introduce you to. Go to meetup.com or eventbrite to find events in your area, and attend one – even if it’s not directly related to your job or industry, chances are you’ll meet people who you can learn from, or who are facing similar challenges to you.
5. Talking too much
Leaders often feel like they need to be the one leading the discussion, providing insight and information to others. The truth is, some of the best leaders are much better at listening than talking. I often see leaders have team meetings where they spend the first hour pontificating on various subjects at hand, and then get upset when nobody has anything to say when the floor is open for questions. Leaders tell me that they worry that their team members don’t get enough out of their one-to-one meetings. When I ask how they manage them, they share that it is usually an information download or status update.
As a learning facilitator for the past 20 years, I know that you have to get people talking within the first 5 minutes of a meeting, or they will likely stay quiet for its entirety. Whether it’s a larger group meeting or a one-to-one, start with questions for others. Get them sharing and talking. Stop yourself from talking for more than 5 minutes at a time whenever possible.
What to do: Remember the acronym WAIT: Why Am I Talking? If you’re trying to get your team to share ideas, ask questions or be more engaged in the discussion, that means you need to talk less. If you’re not adding value, stop yourself and WAIT.
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