Creating Team Innovation - Chapter One

As the manager of a group of creative employees, how do you consistently create great Team Innovation?

In order to create constant Team Innovation, first and foremost, the manager needs to understand the characteristics and traits of a well-functioning team.

Here are the Top Seven Characteristics of a high performance team that leads to steady and substantial Team Innovation:

1. The atmosphere is relaxed and informal, and work is fun

How does this compare to your team? Is very team member looking forward to their work day? Are they coming to work happy & enjoying what they do?

2. The task and goals are clearly understood by all group members

Do you have a team mission & vision statement? Is it well aligned with your company's mission & vision? Do all members know what they need to carry out on a day to day basis? What are the monthly & quarterly goals?

3. Ideas and feelings are expressed freely and openly, and with creativity

Are you coming in the way? Do you encourage employees to express their ideas & feelings, or discourage them? Who brought up the last big idea? Did you reward that person? Do you have ways to catch good ideas?

4. Conflict is productive and often, centered on issues as opposed to on people

Conflicts are healthy. Often, conflicts lead way to great ideas & solutions. But, they should be always about issues & challenges, and not about people. Create a mindset to pay immediate attention to all conflicts, and resolve them so that everyone's happy about the solution.

5. The group is aware of its own functioning and dynamics, including inefficiencies

This is important! Group dynamics are core for a well-functioning team. Everyone should be aware of everyone's strengths, and weaknesses. And the role of a great team manager is to create positive group behavior, and help those who need help.

6. In almost all cases, decisions are made by consensus, and consensus is not forced

Do you always make decisions for the entire team, or help them make a decision? It is important that everyone's opinions are taken into account whenever faced with a big decision. And it's equally important to keep all decisions transparent and communicate about them to your team members.

7. When individual tasks are assigned, they are accepted and carried out in a timely manner by group members

Is your group member on the same page with you on what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, the quality of work, and by when? What are the dependencies? What resources do your team members need to complete the tasks? Make sure they have what they need to deliver in a timely manner.

*Adapted from Nelson, D. L. & Quick, J. C. (2000) Organizational Behavior: Foundations, Realities, & Challenges, Cincinnati: South-Western Publishing and eCornell.

How does a manager create such a high performance team and successful Team Innovation?

Creating Team Innovation - Chapter Two will provide further details on this.

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If you enjoyed reading this Innovation best practice, I recommend the complete list of Creativity Innovation Best Practices.

References:

eCornell

Creating Team Innovation - Chapter Three - Unleashing Creativity And Innovation

How do leaders create highest performing teams that unleash unmatched creativity and innovation, thereby making the best products built on repeatable processes in the marketplace? Increasing the team’s productivity, creativity, innovation, and potential for success is every manager’s goal. Importantly, how does a manager avoid team frustration and disruption, and at the same time manage team dynamics? Creating Team Innovation – Chapter Three – explores these key elements of team structure and behavior that create constant Team Innovation.

Creating Team Innovation – Chapter One presented the seven characteristics of highest performing teams resulting in consistent Team Innovation. Chapter Two – Examples of Effective Teams provided examples of successful teams in various organizations.

Here are the Ten Principles for creating highest performing teams that produce continuous Team Innovation:

Ten Principles for creating the highest performance teams and team innovation:

1. Establish the reasons and objectives of forming a team. Create a concise team vision and mission statement that is crisp and well understood.

2. Recruit the best team players who will be the most adept at achieving the said team objectives, vision and mission. Find employees both from within the organization through your own network of friends, peers and managers, and externally through the best recruiters available.

3. Establish clear, participatory, effective and elevating team goals and plans, preferably using SMART system. Ensure that the team’s plans and future direction are clear and supported, the team is kept informed of the ongoing progress, quality standards and effectiveness set, and there is complete commitment from team members towards achieving these objectives.

4. Articulate and communicate team task functions and relationship functions, and help the team understand the differences through examples. Organize and lead the team so that the team coordinates the efforts and cooperates well. Create a high degree of trust and confidence among the team members, ensure that the team members participate fully and communicate openly making sure that everyone is always included, encourage different viewpoints and foster diversity in thought and members, and build camaraderie, closeness and friendship within the team.

5. Develop healthy and productive group and meeting norms, grow team cohesiveness by building collaboration, and manage social loafing consequences. Make decisions by consensus after seeking opinions from each team member, help the team towards making its own good decisions, resolve problems and find solutions through mutual effort and open communications, and evaluate team behaviors and perceptions openly.

6. Proactively manage team behaviors and conflicts that could either encourage or harm member relations, and regulate situations where individual needs are not satisfied. The emphasis is on “proactively” managing conflicts. A high performing team will have conflicts, openly and often. Conflicts are a healthy sign of a team cooperating and communicating ideas frequently. The manager should create sound conflict resolutions techniques wherein the conflicts are addressed in a timely manner, and conflicts remain rooted in problems and issues, and not about members.

7. Cultivate and unleash Group Creativity and Innovation. A leader becomes indispensable and important to the organization when they can develop creativity throughout the organization--in their team, and in the processes the leader uses to tap and leverage that widespread creativity. What processes drive Group Creativity and Innovation? The team leader leverages Group Creativity techniques including Basic Brainstorming, Nominal Group Technique (NGT), and NGT-Storming. A creative team leader will always ask a lot of questions, never judges, encourages free-wheeling, goes for quantity (of ideas), and promotes piggybacking during the group creativity meetings. Finally, a witty quote about change, and stepping into the team member’s offices and asking a simple question: “any creative ideas today?” will always encourage creativity and innovation among the team.

8. Analyze, update and maneuver team communication according to the twelve categories comprising Bales’ Interaction Analysis. Bales’ Interaction Analysis allows the manager to review the team’s member communications in four categories: Positive reactions, Attempted answers, Questions and Negative reactions. By analyzing this once every few months, the leader can not only get insight on how the team communicates, but also provide individual members feedback. If the overall communications are moving towards increasing Questions and Negative reactions, the leader can take appropriate steps to enhance the communication flow.

9. Create a Team Assessment Inventory on the team’s general productivity and climate, team goals, processes and procedures, and member relationships every three months to analyze and calibrate the team performance. This is very important if the team is going to be working together on projects for the long term. Also, this would provide the manager a self-assessment on how well the term is performing.

10. Have fun!! Create an environment wherein the team members enjoy their work, and the team morale remains high. The leader needs to exude excitement, and inject that passion so that the team members also work with high degree of energy and excitement. Every month or once every few months, the leader should take time to enjoy the achievements, and plan fun activities with the team.

If you enjoyed reading this Innovation best practice, I recommend the complete list of Creativity Innovation Best Practices.

References:

eCornell

Creating Team Innovation - Chapter Two - Examples of Effective Teams

In Creating Team Innovation – Chapter One, the characteristics of a high performance team that led to consistent Team Innovation was presented. Before I jump into how to create high performance teams, I would like to provide quick illustrations of three such teams.

Chapter Two – Examples of Effective Teams provides best practices of effective teams in various organizations, looks under the hood on what made these teams effective, and exposes areas in which these teams could have done better.

What are some examples of effective teams in an organization of which you have either been a member or a leader?

What made it an effective team? What could the team have done better?

Example One

Team:
12 Department heads and 175 employees in a Golf & Spa Resort.

Team Goal:
Business turnaround.

Team Achievement:
The team managed to turnaround a resort that was losing significant money to a hotel that actually began producing profits.

What made it an effective team?
1. One of the major factors that turned the hotel around financially was that the management focused on having the right people in the right jobs.
2. The hotel management focused on selecting (both management and hourly staffed) the right talent, setting the expectations, and defining the right outcomes.
3. Over time, the hotel ended up with a group that embodied the term “team work”.

What could have been done better?
Give everyone a fair opportunity to prove themselves (after giving the tools and training necessary to be successful). However, once you have determined that it is not going to work out, you cannot wait too long to deal with poor performers. Not dealing with those issues will create frustration amongst those that are performing well.

Example Two

Team:
Kitchen crew at a restaurant.

Team Goal:
Product Innovation.

Team Achievement:
It was the most highly creative and fun group, that created great camaraderie and spirit in the kitchen that led to new innovations in food and service.

What made it an effective team?
1. A spirit of creative freedom was fostered by everyone, from the top down. Even though it was a very busy kitchen, there was always time to work on a pet project or to create a new dish or daily special.
2. For the most part, people were able to put aside their egos. It was very common to work on a dish, and to have someone come over and give his input, and then another person would come over and contribute his two cents. After awhile, a great new dish would emerge, which usually had little resemblance to the original thought - but was a collaboration of creative effort. Everyone would look at it with pride.
3. People were publicly praised and recognized for a job well done
4. There was a common passion and enthusiasm for what we were doing. The owners seemed to be very good at attracting and recruiting this type of employees.
5. The standards and expectations were always being raised. There was no room for complacency.

What could have been done better?

Many individuals eventually left and opened their own restaurants in the area.
Ownership was at times unreasonable, did not tolerate or forget mistakes.
The kitchen atmosphere took on an "us against them" mentality, which ironically brought the kitchen crew members together.

Example Three

Team:
Process Quality team consisting of over ten managers from sales, service, product and infrastructure organizations.

Team Goal:
Process Innovation.
The goal of this team was to surface any quality issues that the sales or service team experiences with the currently released or soon to be released products. If the issues required follow-up, the product and infrastructure managers provided a detailed follow-up analysis. If the quality issues required immediate resolution, the product and infrastructure managers will escalate these issues to executive management until they are resolved.

Team Achievement:
The team was effective in generating timely feedback and follow-up on quality issues.
A detailed log of quality issues was generated after each meeting, and the product or infrastructure managers were required to follow up on these issues via email and before the next meeting. A new meeting will go over any outstanding issues, and then dive into the new issues.

What made it an effective team?
1. The team goals were clearly defined.
2. The team deeply cared about product and service quality, and customer satisfaction.
3. There was active participation, frequent communication and collaboration among the team members and management.
4. The product and infrastructure managers followed through on the quality issues, and resolved them in a timely manner.
5. The team took pride and enjoyed the moments when the quality issues were resolved.

What could have been done better?
When there was a change in senior management (a new VP took over products), his position on the activity and escalation of issues by this team changed. Thus, when issues were escalated, they were not resolved, ignored, or even challenged. Ultimately, the sales and service team who were giving their pro-active feedback began realizing the lack of follow-through from the product and infrastructure teams (owing to the change in guard). Hence, the team was eventually dissolved. Later on, the new VP realized this mistake, and created a new team to handle this.

Lessons learned:
What are the incentives for a new manager to re-invent existing processes?
Cost saving, the recognition from upper management, the recognition from clients, make an impact on existing processes by making them more efficient, cheaper or faster, to show that the experience they bring can take the company to the next level, better align processes to the company goals & objectives.

These are just a few examples from various segments of the industry on how effective teams deliver and execute, and innovate with creativity.

Creating Team Innovation - Chapter Three will examine forming such a well-functioning high performance team.

If you enjoyed reading this Innovation best practice, I recommend the complete list of Creativity Innovation Best Practices.

References:

eCornell