How can you inspire innovation in your team?
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— The LinkedIn Team
Innovation is the key to staying ahead of the competition, solving problems, and creating value for your customers. But how can you foster a culture of innovation in your team? Here are some tips to help you inspire and empower your team to generate and implement new ideas.
Encourage curiosity
One of the essential traits of innovators is curiosity. They are always eager to learn, explore, and experiment. As a leader, you can stimulate curiosity in your team by asking open-ended questions, sharing relevant information and insights, and challenging assumptions and norms. You can also create opportunities for your team to learn new skills, attend workshops, or visit other departments or organizations.
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Innovation, like collaboration, emerges naturally when a team feels valued and works in a healthy environment. Little kids solve tens of thousands of physics problems before they start kindergarten. People innovate to solve problems or jump on opportunities at work when the environment allows innovation. Sadly, not every work environment does. Sometimes, stepping out of line or experimenting can get someone in trouble. If you want people to innovate, you have to reward their failures in innovation as well as their successes.
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Curiosity outside of their comfort zones is a great way to see innovation flourish. As human-beings we are all naturally curious about topics that interest us, it's encouraging curiosity in spaces that scare us that can lead to true discovery!
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Provide autonomy
Another way to inspire innovation is to give your team autonomy over their work. Autonomy means letting your team decide how to approach their tasks, choose their tools and methods, and set their own goals and deadlines. Autonomy boosts motivation, creativity, and ownership. It also allows your team to adapt to changing situations and customer needs. To provide autonomy, you need to trust your team, delegate effectively, and avoid micromanaging.
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I believe that inspiring innovation in your team begins with providing them with autonomy. From my experience, granting autonomy allows your team members to feel a sense of ownership and empowerment, which in turn fosters motivation and creativity. By giving them the freedom to decide on their approaches, tools, and goals, you encourage them to think outside the box and adapt to evolving situations and customer needs. Trusting your team, effective delegation, and avoiding micromanagement are key elements in creating an environment that nurtures innovation.
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This segment perfectly captures the essence of autonomy and its role in fostering innovation. Giving team members the freedom to decide how to tackle their tasks fuels a sense of ownership, and motivates them to put in their best effort, consequently sparking creativity. Autonomy also encourages adaptability, a crucial element in today's ever-evolving business landscape. Trust, as the basis of autonomy, creates an environment where people are comfortable taking risks and learning from their failures, thereby inspiring innovation. However, it's important to strike a balance between autonomy and guidance.
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Support risk-taking
Innovation involves taking risks and trying new things. Sometimes, these experiments will fail or produce unexpected results. As a leader, you need to support your team's risk-taking and celebrate their efforts and learnings. You can do this by creating a safe and supportive environment, where mistakes are seen as opportunities to grow and improve. You can also encourage your team to share their failures and feedback, and help them analyze and learn from them.
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I’d rather have my team members try and fail than not fail at all. So they report back in weekly at team meetings about just that. “This week I tried XYZ. I totally crashed. But learned ABC. LOL” This mindset has been game changing for all.
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Absolutely! I couldn't agree more. Recently, I attended a thought-provoking keynote where the speaker said, "Every idea is a bad idea." It struck a chord with me, emphasizing that the initial stages of ideation might not be perfect, yet it opens up a 50/50 chance for success or failure. And you know what? I find those odds exhilarating. 👏🏆
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Reward creativity
Another way to inspire innovation is to reward creativity in your team. Creativity means coming up with original and useful ideas that solve problems or create value. As a leader, you can reward creativity by recognizing and appreciating your team's ideas, providing constructive feedback, and implementing the best ones. You can also create incentives for your team to generate and share more ideas, such as recognition, bonuses, or career opportunities.
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Creativity plays an essential role in stimulating our minds and hearts, keeping us passionately engaged in our work. Thus we need to: - Recognize and celebrate creativity: When a team member comes up with a new idea or innovative solution, acknowledge it publicly. - Implement a reward system: this should include tangible rewards such as bonuses, promotions, time off, awards, or other perks & non-tangible rewards like responsibility, autonomy, or the opportunity to lead a project. - Provide & protect time for creative thinking: designate a specific time for brainstorming sessions where new ideas are encouraged & valued. - Encourage learning & exploration: provide resources, opportunities and funding for continuous learning.
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Everyone wants to be valuable and good at their job. Most employees instinctively assume this means protecting and continuing what works. If you want to encourage innovation, you need to flip this on its head. Encourage and reward people thinking differently, challenging the status quo, and trying something new. We reinforce this by constantly repeating "What Got Us Here Won't Get Us There." (WGUHWGUT). It's a motto you'll often here in our brainstorming sessions. People really embrace it. And it forces them to think outside of their current frame of mind and try on new ideas.
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Promote collaboration
Innovation is not a solo activity. It requires collaboration and diversity of perspectives, skills, and experiences. As a leader, you can promote collaboration in your team by facilitating communication, cooperation, and feedback. You can also create cross-functional teams, involve external partners or stakeholders, or use online platforms or tools to enable collaboration. Collaboration can help your team generate more and better ideas, learn from each other, and overcome challenges.
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To foster innovation, we must create safe and transparent spaces where out-of-the-box thinking is encouraged, and intellectual friction is viewed as a catalyst for new ideas. That's an environment where people are able to engage in safe and yet intellectually deep collaborative brainstorming and think and create outside the box.
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This section aptly underlines the significance of collaboration in the process of innovation. A diverse confluence of perspectives and experiences not only generates more ideas, but also fosters a collective intelligence that fuels innovation. As leaders, fostering open communication and cooperation is key to facilitating this synergy. The inclusion of external partners and stakeholders provides a fresh perspective, further enhancing the breadth and depth of ideas. Leveraging technology to enable collaboration is also a significant point, particularly in the era of remote work.
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Lead by example
Finally, one of the most effective ways to inspire innovation is to lead by example. As a leader, you can model innovation by demonstrating curiosity, autonomy, risk-taking, creativity, and collaboration in your own work. You can also share your own stories of innovation, challenges, and failures, and how you learned from them. By leading by example, you can show your team that innovation is not only possible, but desirable and rewarding.
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I call it RND. I try to find what the best companies are doing and pull their ideas into my company. I share where I’ve leaned them from too. My team knows I’m not that smart, I just RND the smart people.
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In my experience leading by example is an ongoing process. Always demonstrate curiosity, a thirst for knowledge and a tireless commitment to your personal growth. Example: for social media professionals, show enthusiasm for learning. Explore the ways you could use AI in your organization to create efficiencies and to positively create opportunities. Be open-minded. As new social platforms come to life, avoid dismissing ideas too quickly, and instead promote exploration. And show people your mistakes, not only your successes. How did you make it to the top of your pyramid? Let people see the journey. Attend conferences, take courses, participate in workshops, earn a certification. Your team will see this and it sets the tone for others.
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Here’s what else to consider
This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?
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To inspire innovation in team you must: ✔️ Create a safe environment for idea expression and risk-taking. ✔️ Encourage and accept all the ideas. ✔️ Ensure access to tools, training, and guidance for innovation. ✔️ Define innovation expectations and align individual goals with broader initiatives. ✔️ Acknowledge and incentivize innovative thinking and achievements. ✔️ Support continuous learning and skill enhancement. ✔️ I allow experimentation as well. That's what I do at Digital Height with my team.
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For innovation to truly take root, we must accept failure and celebrates it. The fear of failure and its repercussions often prevents individuals from thinking creatively and innovatively. When individuals are judged solely on their outcomes rather than their potential, it becomes challenging to venture beyond established norms and find innovative solutions. Stepping out of one's comfort zone requires trust and psychological safety. It's an environment where vulnerability is not only accepted but also celebrated. Fear of judgment, marginalization, or exclusion should never be a hindrance to this process.
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