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Three Tips For Leading A Team That Rocks Innovation

Hey, everybody, I’m super excited to be here with you today. And I want to give you some tips that’ll help you.

When you’re leading innovation. There’s something really hard about creating alchemy in a business or an organization when you’re trying to do something that’s never been done before. It can feel like a slog, it can feel like you’re kind of trying to push through sand or move fast through the water. It isn’t always apparent why it feels so hard, because you think, well, we’re just doing our normal thing. But if you’re actually innovating, then it can be really hard.

So, I just want to give you some tips for leading innovation. And it’s really designed to just optimize some flow. And when I think about flow, I think about when a team is trying to get together, what’s your role as the leader in helping move things forward. So, I think there are some really key places where you can be really good at what you do when you’re sharing information or passing tasks to your team.

So, the first of those is in how you brief your team on the work that they’re doing. So if you can get incredibly clear with your team about what you want them to do, what the timeline is, what the requirements are, and how they’ll know when they’re done, or what data they’re supposed to collect, what research they’re supposed to do. If you can get really clear on all of those and become excellent at the briefing, then you’ll see your results change. So you’re giving them all of the constraints. I spend a lot of time thinking about bottlenecks and constraints and constraints management. But you want to actually when you pass a task, be really clear on the constraints, it’ll improve your communication. By the way, it helps me think about it when I use the word brief in my head. So if I’m passing a task, I somehow feel like I can be a little messy, or I can just kind of throw things at the wall and hope they can read my mind. But when I actually think, Oh, am I briefing this properly, then somehow my skills improve. It’s like it’s a briefing task, not a passing task. And just a pro-tip. If you are feeling frustrated with someone that reports to you, or someone isn’t getting the work done, go back and think to yourself, how did I briefed them, and query whether you need to re brief them to be clearer about your expectations and hopes and the guidelines and constraints for what you pass to them.

The second thing I always talk about is, buckets are the buckets big enough that you’re passing someone if you’re passing someone a task. Picture, having someone that all day long, you were like get me a glass of water, bring me a vitamin, could you push my chair in and out, it would become really tedious because the tests are too small. But if you said I really want to make sure my calendars are handled, I want you to do the social media for our company, I want you to hold this piece in this deliverable. We have an accounting deliverable, I want you to be the person in charge of us delivering it, then that really helps the person have investment, they get to see the project as a big picture item, they get to see it from beginning to end. And that will improve their level of commitment to it.

And then finally, My third tip is both its twofold. So maybe there are four tips, but to kind of go together, check in daily. You don’t pass a project to someone and then just walk away. Your job as a leader is to hold them while they do the work. You also want to be a team member. You don’t want to remove your expertise from them. You want to be fully present to your team. You want to be a resource but instead of you going to them for things because of your attention as the leader. With a lot of things moving forward it is very divided. It’s hard for you to push anything forward.

It is easy to check in with team members and pick up a piece, put it down, pick up a piece, put it down, pick up a piece, put it down. So, if you do small check-ins frequently, you can keep yourself from being the bottleneck to their forward movement. And the more forward movement you can create, the more innovation you have in your organization. It’s like magic. So be a team member and then check in daily 15-minute stand-ups. That’s a great way to check-in. What do you need from me to move forward? Another great question for a leader, you’re giving them the bucket and then you become a resource for them to help them. You aren’t removing yourself and hoping they’ll just do it. You continue to be in the equation. You’re just helping them as a team member, not leading what they’re doing.

Those are my three tips for how to lead innovation. I’d love to hear what you think about what’s hard about these things like bounce off of me, tell me what’s hard, what’s easy. What do you want to do in your work? Also, feel free to share this with somebody that you know that is trying to lead innovation and share it with them that might be helpful to them. It’s been great chatting with you today. Go experiment!

 

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