You are currently viewing Collaboration For Innovation! Get Your Team to Stop Competing and Start Producing.

Collaboration For Innovation! Get Your Team to Stop Competing and Start Producing.

Collaboration for innovation The unique qualities that make the innovation process so exciting can also produce a lot of stress and anxiety for both you as a leader and your team. Time is of the essence, and it’s hard to know what will work until you have tested a lot of ideas that don’t. After several weeks of being stuck in the same stage of your process, you may start to question what’s really causing the slow-down. Are you looking in the wrong places? Is it time to hire some new people? Is there just no more room for growth in your industry? Are you approaching burnout and feeling like you’re just not cut out for this high-pressure position? What is that critical difference that makes innovation such a slippery thing to manage? First of all, innovation is both a science and an art; it’s creative and unpredictable. For most of the companies I have worked with, the science part is no problem. You either know chemistry, data, engineering, or what have you, or you don’t. What most innovation teams struggle with is managing the uncertainty of what exactly is going to work? Who is responsible for making it happen? And how much should we spend on discovery or creation?  Now we are getting closer to a big-picture understanding of what is holding your team back. There is a lot at stake for the company, but also for everyone on the team as individuals. Everyone wants to be the hero who comes up with the perfect solution and gets the team out of the rut. Nobody wants to try the crazy thing that fails, costing the company time and money. At the root of unspoken issues like these, the crux of the issue is usually how your people engage.  As creativity and problem-solving lose momentum, a well-balanced team can quickly devolve into “every man for himself.” That competitive dynamic needs to be broken and intentionally replaced with a new culture of flexibility, teamwork, and fast failure. I have helped many teams get unstuck from their old patterns and create a new atmosphere where it’s safe to have ideas that are a little off-the-wall, try some of them, and get comfortable making mistakes, especially early on. And you know what? Some of those crazy ideas are usually kind of brilliant, and they move the team one step closer to their next victory. Here are some of my best tips on reframing innovation for yourself as a leader and for your team:

1.   Find Your Voice Collaboration for innovation

This is about much more than who you are as a leader or a manager. It’s more about uncovering what unique sense of purpose drives you to keep going back to the drawing board for each new innovation cycle. What do you ultimately want to contribute through your work? You’ll know you have found your distinct voice when you take a step outside the role created by your boss, the leader who had the job before you or (if you are in a male-dominated field) the men who came before you—and start chasing a slightly different vision. This can take a long time to figure out. Start by asking: What are your strengths as an expert in your industry? What experiences have got you to where you are? What are your weaknesses and blind spots? What can your team expect from you, and why should they trust you? You have to know yourself in order to complete the next step…Collaboration for innovation

2.   Seek Your Opposition Collaboration for innovation

For everything you stand for, you must define your antithesis, and then make sure that voice is present on your team. You will never be able to see what your competitors are doing behind the scenes, but you can create a diverse team in-house and leverage your differences to move forward. Innovation comes with friction and some challenges!  Once you’ve got a diverse team, however, you need to model the kind of behavior and communication you want to see. Throwing them a challenge and asking them to work it out will only get results if your people have some established norms and guidelines for working together. Otherwise, it will take up a lot of valuable time and cause some of your team members to completely disengage. Rather than pitting your team against each other, help them get to know each other’s strengths. Change the dynamic so the team is working together to challenge you. 

3.   Keep Your Process Flexible

You probably work with some variation of the Innovation Funnel or Stage Gate product development model. Both are designed to make linear, forward progress without losing any ground. This is great for business but can be detrimental for innovation if you follow these processes blindly! Sometimes a discovery along the way changes the path entirely. This is where trust comes in—trusting your people and your data rather than sticking to a rigid process. To keep those ideas moving forward, you need to make one small adjustment: add some holes to those pipelines, or points of iteration, to test and refine ideas as needed before moving to the next stage. Adding iterations may appear to take more time but building in more flexibility earlier in the process will get you a better product in the end and cost you less money than putting a sub-optimal product or service out in the marketplace.

4.   Embrace and Encourage Passion

This might be the most difficult point to master, but it definitely comes with the most rewards. Your team’s creative strength can exceed the sum of its parts if each individual feels that their passion is not just accepted, but a true asset. I tell my clients that “you can teach skill, but you can’t teach passion,” and of course, trying to manage or control passion may kill it.  Instead of closely managing each project yourself, make space for your team to cultivate their individual passions, then step in with questions and suggestions to steer them in the right direction. The more you can share with your team about the higher-level business goals they are working towards, the more they can take responsibility for their own work and do some of that “steering” themselves. As you work these four tips into your own process and leadership practices, you will notice a shift away from a competitive culture towards a cooperative and collaborative one. Once your team is free from the pressure to prove themselves as individuals, they can tap into their passions and uncover more daring, interesting ideas more consistently. What’s really beautiful is when teammates start to see the results of indulging their individual passions, realize just how valuable those multiple inputs are and grow in appreciation for each other’s genius. And remember, your team will be more motivated and competitive as a whole if you can be their antagonist and get them working together!  Perhaps it’s time to reimagine the way that innovation funnel works. Rather than progressing from left to right one step at a time, forward progress might look more like a game of Pong or a tennis match, bouncing back and forth as many times as necessary (and sometimes going out of bounds) until the goal is reached. As your team gets used to these new patterns and takes more ownership of their individual roles, your pipeline will get back to moving just as quickly (if not even faster) than before. One of the things I love to do is bring in a fresh perspective for leaders who have tried some new approaches and are still having a hard time getting those ideas bouncing in the right direction at the right frequency. If that’s you, please get in touch and let’s find some time to chat!  To receive more information on fresh perspectives for leaders, sign-up for the newsletter and stay connected!Collaboration for innovation

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