Team’s performance and productivity fluctuates from time to time for all sorts of reasons, such as overworked or overwhelming responsibilities at a time. Scott Anthony, the managing partner of Innosight and author of The First Mile, pointed out that every employee is day-by-day monitoring the same data, interacting with same people, and having same conversations, hence making them feel that the ideas coming out feel as though they have all been done before. But as a manager, you can get your people back into the groove with a little work, advised Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg, a partner at The Innovation Architects, the advisory firm, and the co-author of Innovation as Usual. All you need to do is to rethink what you are doing.
Experts at HBR suggest the following tips to get your team’s creative juices flowing.
The first step is to disengage from the situation and diagnose the problem. “Observe what’s going on and ask other people’s opinions. Think about when, where, and how your team has been most innovative in the past. Can you recreate that environment or group dynamic? Figure out how people share ideas, and how open others are to those ideas,” suggests Wedell-Wedellsborg.
Another action is to review ideas and schemes generated in the past and assess if they are worth resuscitating. Maybe it was a good idea early for its time or a brilliant idea that was not managed well. The objective is not to seek the perfect idea but to do something with the idea that matters.
Open brainstorming sessions with lofty goals like generating “500 New Ideas” are theoretically fine but ineffective and inefficient in practice. Instead, what works is directing your team’s attention toward solving a narrowly defined problem. For instance, what ways are there to fix a specific customer issue or to generate 2 percent cost savings in your division?
Define the task so your team is very clear on what it is trying to accomplish and can work towards that. Management literature tends to associate chaos with creativity, but in fact, providing constraints is one of the greatest enablers of creativity. Providing firm limits allows teams to explore space with new possibilities emerging from what is known and extending the boundaries of those limits.
Most of us tend to live in filtered worlds, reading the same papers and magazines, listen to the same newscasts, get our daily updates from the same RSS and Twitter feeds, and have lunch with the same people. But great ideas come from people immersed in more worlds than just their own, with a broad range of experience. It is the responsibility of management to create opportunities to expose their team to different perspectives and points of view.
Touring the offices of companies in different industries or inviting employees from other parts of the business to regularly present ideas to your team helps generate new ideas, based on fresh input. The point is, as Anthony suggested, “to touch and interact with people who are thinking differently. The magic happens when different skills and mindsets collide”.
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The Steve Jobs-Mark Zuckerberg-Richard Branson “genius” innovation narrative is omnipresent in business blogs, books, and magazines. But to most work-a-day folks, those figures are irrelevant and are difficult to relate to. To people with normal jobs in an SME, these examples can seem terribly ambitious and too remote.
For relatable inspiration, offer success stories that are closer to home, shining a spotlight on innovative things that have already been done within the organisation. The message should be: “This is something we can do; your peers have done it.”
One of the most common reasons for stagnation is not a lack of ideas but the fear that existing ideas are neither good nor actionable. This fear of failure is very pervasive, with many employees choosing not to voice or champion their opinions. Naturally, this hinders innovation. Leaders must therefore manage the political realities of brainstorming.
What’s essential to success is making sure there is room for people to share ideas, in a way that is under the corporate radar and allows them to retain their credit as its originators. Managers have to cultivate a safe environment that is tolerated and facilitates learning, as well as allows staff to express their perspectives and develop it further to a practical point.
Ideas only matter if you act on them. “People get cynical fast after they have a fun and empowering brainstorming session and then nothing happens,” said Anthony. As a manager, you need to commit to moving innovation forward.
Setting aside a small budget to create rough prototypes and simulations, or relieving workers of some duties to free up their time for new projects works towards this, like Google’s 80:20 rule or 3M’s 15 percent Model. Testing ideas on a small scale is recommended as it forces people to come up with practical experiments, so they then get honest feedback about what works and what does not.
Innovation is a cliched, tired and overused term. In some organisations, you can still talk about an “innovation initiative”’ and create excitement, but in most companies, the term is highttps://hbr.org/2014/08/what-to-do-if-your-team-is-in-a-ruthly overused and suffers tremendous fatigue. Consequently, buzzwords will result in feigned ignorance and internal dismissal, as well as a disconnect. The alternative? Encourage teams in language that is meaningful to them, framing it as a team developing ideas for a “Making Your Company a Better Place to Work Strategy” rather than an “Employee Retention Innovation Plan”. It aligns with the self-interests of employees and generates more beneficial outcomes.
Some principles to remember going forward are the following:
Things To Do:
Things To Avoid:
When dealing with team dysfunction, it is important to be sensible, principled and action-oriented. Prolonging a rut can lead to loss of talent through resignations. In the end, though, prevention is still better than the cure. Learning how to manage team under-performance now leads to preventing it, rather than dealing with the consequences later.
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