Innovative Teams -- Getting out of the way

How to manage a team of innovative thinkers?

Becoming a leader driving change while making sure legacy systems, procedures, and operations are maintained while seeking innovative improvements to boost performance and efficiency. John Bremen writes, “While innovation often is associated with creativity and the “spark of an idea that changes the world”, the reality is that innovation also involves hard work, tenacity, constant iteration, and learning. Effective innovation also requires rationality and business fundamentals that allow good ideas to come to life (Bremen, 2023).” Working on complex projects over the years I find Bremen’s statement to be true.

When building teams to make major innovative changes within our organization I look for team members with historical experience with the current system or application we are looking to innovate. Then I pair them with a team of creative technical experts to perform in depth process and system analysis to understand existing inefficiencies and process blockers.

What I expect to see is my technical team identifying areas for improvement and making suggestions to the team with historical experience. The business team will show where some of the new ideas could cause potential interruptions to the workflow or agree the idea(s) would bring new efficiency and performance to the system.

To pull out the best ideas and present solid innovative concepts to senior leadership I have found it important to step back from assigning project tasks and allow the teams to lead their own creative processes (Amabile and Khaire, 2008). Teams need to be able to collaborate and not feel pressure from their leadership around technology, process, or what will or won’t work for the organization.

Some of the best innovation ideas I have allowed to be moved from concept to development and testing have been ones I would not have originally been open to. Being a risk adverse person from experience involving poorly implemented ideas in the past and operations outages it took me having to learn to step away and let my professionals do their jobs.

Taking a leadership development program (LDP) with my current employer I was on a team assigned the task of developing the framework for a Mentorship program. With my executive leadership training from my MBA, I had pre-conceived notions for what a Mentorship program should be. After working with several of my team members and employees of the organization that expressed interest in mentoring.

Some of the discussions backed up what I learned through school, but some were new concepts that opened new pathways to provide mentorship in a new way. This was my proving ground that stepping out of my head and my limited scope of understanding opened new opportunities. I have taken the lessons learned in that LDP program and put them to use every day with the teams I manage. The ideas my teams have come up with have allowed us to be one of the top performing teams in our organization.

As designers and developers of systems and applications we all have an obligation to step out of our ego and let our teams do their thing. When we as leaders realize we don’t have to be the smartest members of our team we can and will break down barriers that keep our organizations from reaching its next big goal.