Ben Fletcher Advisory Helping Startups

1 minute guide to boosting initiative and innovation in your team

Everyone wants to have a team working for them that they can trust to get on and do the job, be full of new ideas, and not come to them every five minutes asking for help or approval. Some people naturally develop their teams this way, most of us have to work at it.

Some key things to watch out for

1. Make sure you recruit the right people in the first place. If you do not trust them from the beginning, you’ll watch them too closely, give them too much instruction and stifle their creativity. This is a vicious circle, because you do not trust them, you micro-manage, because they are micro-managed they don’t feel free to be creative.

2. When people come to you with suggestions, be very careful how you react. Maybe you’ve thought about their idea before and decided it wouldn’t work. Maybe you’ve tried it and it didn’t work. If your first reaction is to tell them that, they will just feel that you dismissed it. Listen to their suggestion carefully, ask them questions about it, check there isn’t a new angle you might have missed, then explain why you think it might not work, and listen to their response.

3. When you set out your plans for something new, do you ever get dissenting voices? These people are not necessarily being negative (although they might be), so listen carefully and make sure you understand why they are saying what they are saying. Often it takes great courage to tell the boss he is wrong, so these people may be your best staff, as they are showing they really care. If you never get dissenting voices, it is more likely that you have effectively taught people that there is no point dissenting than it is that you are right all the time.

4. Make sure that when people do something new that you recognise it – either directly to them or publicly (or both) – even if it didn’t work that well (provided it didn’t work well because it turned out not to be a good idea, not because it was poorly implemented).

5. When setting strategy, set principles and outcomes, not processes. If you set processes, people will just do what they are told even if it is not achieving the desired outcome. If you make people responsible for outcomes, they will innovate to achieve them.

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