Driving Innovation Part 2

Experts need teams

Technical experts drive innovation. Never underestimate the importance of the individual expert. But teams also play an important role. Because innovation is the creation of the new and different, innovation activities are big. They require creativity, problem solving, and execution. This is typically way more than one individual can handle.

You can’t innovate without technical expertise.  You won’t innovate without effective innovation teams.  The composition of the team and selection of the team leader are critical. Here’s what I’ve learned about leading effective teams for innovation:

Pay attention to the composition of your innovation teams.  Ask ten people what makes the more effective team, a diverse team or a homogenous team. Nine times out of ten (or more), the response will be the diverse team. That’s not correct. At least not totally correct.

The most effective and easiest to manage teams are comprised of people with shared values and who genuinely like and respect each other. You want dysfunction in a team? Just throw a bunch of people together who have different values and see what happens. The different perspectives might, might lead to great creativity. But innovation is more than creativity.

Effective innovation teams are comprised of deep experts with shared values, complementary specialties, and each with enough perspective to connect with the others.  They benefit from diversity of expertise, different specialties.  And it’s where the specialties intersect that the magic happens.  When deep experts connect, innovation follows.

Bottom line: the most functional and productive innovation teams are comprised of deep experts that have diversity of expertise and experience but share similar values. They like and respect each other, and contribute equally.

The team leader plays a critical role in the innovation team, the most important role.  Peter Drucker likened managers to both the composer and the conductor of a symphony orchestra. I like this analogy when considering the role of the leader of an innovation team. Imagine an orchestra conductor dealing with all those great musicians, each one a deep expert. Each musician has spent thousands of hours practicing alone in their studio apartment, playing the same piece over and over, seeing patterns in the score, and building the muscle memory that enables them to play so effortlessly. The conductor must have credibility and a high degree of skill to get all those experts to play well together.

So it is with the leader of an innovation team. They must manage the egos of deep experts and get them to play nicely together. They can’t do this unless they’ve got considerable emotional intelligence to build relationships with and between the team members. They must manage their own ego and be comfortable in their own skin in order to set the right tone, to create a team environment that is safe and non-threatening.

The most creative and productive atmosphere is charged with energy, animated, engaging. An oppressive atmosphere kills creativity and productivity.  Effective use of humor, especially the team leader’s self-deprecating humor, can help set the mood that fosters creativity.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of leading an innovation team (assuming you’ve done a good job of assembling experts with complementary specialties) is creating an environment in which it’s safe to make mistakes. That is easier said than done. Remember that experts, above all else, want to be recognized as the expert. Imagine the group dynamics in a team of experts.

Each is likely to feel a desire to be recognized as the expert among experts, some more than others. In that environment, some will hold back in order to avoid a misstep that would mar their reputation. Others will be aggressive and tend to dominate. The team leader can’t allow either to happen.  The best team leaders are adept at reading the team members and knowing when and how to encourage reserved team members and subdue the grandstanders. The goal is a team in which there is equal participation and contribution from all.

Innovation team leaders need credibility with their expert team members to win their trust.  The symphony conductor may not be able to rival the skills of any individual expert musician in the orchestra on any particular instrument, but the conductor may be the most versatile musician and have familiarity with many instruments.  Like the conductor, the team leader must have at least a basic understanding of the specialties represented on the team.  At a minimum, team leaders must be conversant with their expert team members.  They must speak the same language.

Lay the foundation with trust and shared goals.  No team will be productive unless team members have trust and confidence in each other and share common goals. Addressing these issues is the first and most important job of the team leader, and what I’ve previously shared about these topics in the chapter on engagement apply here. These are important enough, though, to reinforce.

Creating trust isn’t always easy and should be the starting point to create team effectiveness.  You can’t really trust someone you don’t know.  You can’t have much confidence in someone who’s unfamiliar.  The team leader needs to help team members get to know each other on a personal level. This isn’t natural for most deep experts who are often introverted.

Introversion contributes to building expertise.  Experts need time alone to practice, reflect, and develop their unique expert point of view.  The time experts spend alone is essential to building their expertise and innovation capability.  But introverts have their challenges.  They are generally uncomfortable initiating conversations, especially conversations of a personal nature.  Leaders of innovation teams have their work cut out for them when it comes to building relationships within the team so members trust and have confidence in each other.

Our team leaders were taught to kick off each new team with a get-acquainted activity followed by an in-depth discussion of the mission and goals of the team. When new teams convened with members who were not well acquainted, the team leader paired them up and asked them to share two things with their partner: 1) take four or five minutes to talk about someone whom you care about deeply, and 2) share an embarrassing story about yourself, the most embarrassing thing you’re willing to share. After about ten minutes when everyone had an opportunity to share, the team leader would share this same personal information with the entire team.

Think about what this activity accomplishes.  Asking team members to talk about someone else makes it easier for them to open up.  When they talk about someone they care about, it provides personal insight and helps their partner learn about them on a fairly intimate level.  Sharing something embarrassing is a way to let down defenses, lighten the mood, and send a message that it’s OK to make mistakes and even to look foolish.

The way the team leader facilitates this activity and personally shares will really set the tone and help define the team’s culture.  I’ve led this activity many times and can tell you that, as uncomfortable as it is to share something embarrassing, it sends a clear signal that none of us should take ourselves too seriously. This can be a breakthrough for uptight experts who are nervous joining a team of other experts and concerned about protecting their image.

Drucker compared the manager to a composer as well as a conductor, and it’s the composer role that applies to goal alignment. Just as the composer defines the time signature and melody, the innovation team leader defines and clarifies the team’s goals.

You can’t assume there’s alignment with the goals just because they’ve been clearly communicated.  The leader must facilitate team discussion of the goals. The team leader may need to check in with individual team members to identify concerns and points of misalignment.  Make this a top priority with every team that’s formed. Create buy-in to the team’s goals. Create alignment. Verify it. Reinforce it.

Create urgency without creating threat. The innovation team leader role is very demanding. In addition to the ability to build relationships and manage the egos of a group of deep experts, the leader needs to be skilled at organizing and measuring work, managing processes, and driving for results.

In my experience, the leaders who focus on achievement and send positive messages are far more effective than those who focus on avoiding failure and are in the habit of using threatening messages. This seems like it should be intuitive, but it always surprised me how many team leaders, especially first-time team leaders, think they have to be a hard-ass to be a good leader.

For deep experts, the nastiest threat is a threat to their ego, to their status as an expert.  Each will want to establish and maintain a favorable position in their team of peers, and an insensitive team leader can unwittingly devastate an expert by criticizing them publicly, dismissing their contribution, or simply ignoring them.

I’m not saying leaders don’t need to be tough. I’m not saying that sometimes they don’t have to be a bit of a hard-ass. They sometimes do. But they should demonstrate their toughness appropriately and in a way that doesn’t threaten the expert team members who are the ultimate drivers of team success. This may entail private conversations with team members, but at a minimum, it requires that team leaders carefully consider the messages they send, especially when conversations are public.

Promote constructive conflict.  The best innovation teams are not collaborative. Not in the traditional sense. When Joe shares an idea, Jane makes a suggestion, Jean adds an input, and then everything gets mushed up in a compromise, the result is almost always a sub-optimal solution.

The best innovation teams debate.  They compete.  They argue. They don’t settle.  They don’t compromise on sub-optimal solutions.  And they can do this all constructively because they respect each other, they like each other, and they’re united by a shared goal to create and implement something new and different and exciting.

When my brothers and I were kids, we used to beat the crap out of each other in the morning but be best friends by the afternoon. We still sometimes argue like hell when we go on fishing trips. But we’re still brothers, always brothers. I don’t want to overstate this, but the best innovation teams have the feel of a family.  Members can disagree, can argue without damaging relationships. In a family, it’s because of familial love. In an innovation team, it’s because of deep respect for each other’s expertise and contribution.

The team leader is responsible for creating an environment in which it’s safe to disagree, to stand alone, to debate. It’s got to be safe to make mistakes. That doesn’t mean mistakes are celebrated. It means that team members don’t take themselves so seriously that they hold back or exhibit negative and unproductive behavior. It starts with a team leader that models the right behavior and reinforces it in team members.

Senior leadership plays a key role in innovation

The contribution of deep experts working independently and in teams led by a skilled leader is the stuff of innovation.  Capable experts and team leaders are essential, but senior organizational leadership has a huge part to play in driving innovation. The most important responsibilities include everything I’ve written about talent in the preceding pages.  Senior leadership needs to recruit, align, engage, develop, and deploy talent. Innovation is next to impossible without the right talent management strategy and execution.

Senior leadership also has very important responsibilities related to providing focus, dedicating resources, defining risk, and shaping the organizational culture.  Here’s what I learned about the role I played as CEO of an innovative organization:

Be intentional about culture.  Our culture is simply the collective normal behaviors we exhibit at work.  The way we do our jobs, solve problems, communicate, hire, fire, celebrate, dress, and even park our vehicles are a reflection of our culture. When norms of behavior are narrowly defined, we say we have a strong culture.  When there’s a lot of latitude given to behaviors in the organization, it indicates a weak culture.

Behaviors are a reflection of our values and assumptions about how the world works. Values are important and should be selected to drive behaviors that are aligned with our strategy. It’s a primary responsibility of senior leadership, especially the CEO, to define the values that are important to the organization. It’s not the job of employees or anyone else to define organizational values.  Senior leaders who don’t define and clearly explain the values that are important and the behaviors that reflect those values are, simply stated, shirking their responsibility.

Innovation can occur within a wide range of cultures, but there a couple of attributes that are prevalent in innovative organizations:

1.     In most innovative organizations, relationships are informal and leaders are approachable. Even if there are many levels in a complex structure, employees feel free to interact with leaders at all levels.  A high level of approachability is typical in innovative organizations.

2.     Related to approachability, the second cultural attribute common in innovative organizations is freedom of expression.  Employees not only feel free to approach and interact with leaders at all levels, they also are free to challenge and disagree.  A punitive culture that squashes dissent will squash innovation.

Focus innovation efforts.  As the CEO, I could give direction to my innovation teams and set some high-level goals, but it usually wasn’t possible to get very specific.  The nature of innovation is such that there is a lot of ambiguity about even the problems, let alone the solutions. What I could do was provide focus on a particular customer issue, production problem, or market opportunity.

For example, I could launch a team to find a way to reduce weight and simplify assembly of the coaxial rotor drive in a particular model of helicopter. Although this sounds like the problem is defined, it’s really not. There’s a lot of ambiguity that the team will have to deal with even in the problem statement.  They will have to really understand the problem, why it’s important to the customer, and identify many related issues that will impact possible solutions. Innovation is an exercise in problem solving, and problem solving is an exercise in dealing with ambiguity.

I could further provide a sense of urgency by being specific about targets related to quality and efficiency, but especially related to time and cost.  For instance, I could communicate to the team that in order for us to participate in the upcoming CR2 program, we need to be ready on September 1st to demonstrate how we can reduce the weight of the coaxial rotor drive by 20% and reduce assembly time by 30%.

What’s important is that I provide focus and create a sense of urgency by setting some targets. There should always be focus, but sometimes the goals can be blurry. For instance, I might choose to launch an innovation team that is directed to work on generating new business with our helicopter customers. The team may be given a wide field with ill-defined borders in which to identify opportunities and develop solutions.

Senior leadership should create a sense of urgency and focus on innovation. Focus is important, but don’t be so focused that there is no slack or freedom to pursue unexpected opportunities that arise.  The way you dedicate and distribute resources should back up your messages about what’s important. Resources and focus can’t be separated, and resources are necessary to provide some slack and freedom to benefit innovation.

Organize for innovation.  You also provide focus through your organizational structure.  The way you choose to organize—around customer segments, geographies, product lines, functions, or anything else—shapes the focus of your organization. In addition to focus, org structure helps define decision rights and accountability. Your org structure will impact your talent management strategy, help or hinder your organizational agility, and influence employee engagement.

Org structure should be thoughtfully designed to serve your strategy and business model, but consider also the implications for innovation that extend beyond the way it might serve to focus our energy and resources.  Innovative organizations don’t let org structures get in the way of nimbly responding to opportunities.  The way I organized my business might not work for others, but I’ll share it because it gives me an opportunity to talk about my granddaughter.

Amy is a great student and athlete and wears number 10 on the soccer field. She’s now in high school, but I’ve been attending her games every chance I could since she was very young.  The players on Amy’s high school team all have assigned positions to play and a skill set to match. Her current team is disciplined, very different from her first team of under-9s in which everyone seemed to have the same position— ball chaser.  Watching the little kids play was hilarious.  It was like watching a swarm of beetles chasing a rolling ball of dung.

My org structure has elements of both those soccer teams.  We have functional pillars, enabling functions such as Finance, IT, HR, Legal, etc., in which employees have assigned roles and responsibilities. They play their positions like the advanced players on Amy’s current team.  But many of our employees work on project teams that morph and change with the needs of the business and our perception of opportunities.  They have bursts of energy.  Bursts of focus.  They swarm. However you choose to organize, make sure you build in some ability to swarm in order to seize an opportunity for innovation.

Clearly define acceptable risk.  You won’t learn if you don’t take risks. Learning occurs when you risk moving out of your comfort zone and risk making mistakes. So it is with innovation. You won’t innovate if you don’t take risks. Just telling employees they’re empowered doesn’t mean they actually are empowered. And telling employees to take risks doesn’t mean they’re able to take risks.  You need to help them understand the difference between acceptable and unacceptable risk.  You need to show them what smart risk looks like and, importantly, what it looks like to take stupid risks. Give this some serious thought and take the time to develop examples to illustrate what smart and stupid risks look like to you.  There’s no shortage of innovation gurus who promote the celebration of failure as a way to encourage risk.  But this can backfire unless you’ve clearly defined what you mean by desired and undesired risk. In that case, it’s probably OK to celebrate a smart risk that ends in failure.

Aggressively manage organizational expertise.  Expertise is an important type of capital. You need to conserve it, protect it, and grow it. Create an infrastructure to do this—a defined process, managers who are accountable, and perhaps a structure such as Communities of Practice. Senior leaders need to do whatever it takes to ensure expertise is preserved and disseminated in order to build innovation capability. It starts with capturing and documenting the tacit expertise of your senior specialists.  Don’t worry. You don’t have to capture the knowledge of all your senior people.  Only a small percentage of employees will have acquired a high degree of tacit, mission-critical expertise. In addition to all I’ve written above about leveraging deep experts and using them to teach and coach others, we implemented several practices that helped us capture and manage expertise and to better innovate:

1.     After action reviews.  We initially held AARs because clients required them as an embedded process step to conclude projects. The value, though, was apparent, and we adopted the practice internally for nearly all projects.  We developed a simple template to guide exploration and documentation of lessons learned over the course of the project.  We saved our documentation on a shared drive, and every single person in the organization had access to all AAR documentation for every project.

2.     Scenario sessions.  These were monthly lunch meetings in which we identified a particular topic or problem and invited interested parties to stump one or two deep experts.  We had one or two of our top experts from a key area — usually from material science, tool design, instrumentation, or composite manufacturing — participate on a panel of sorts.  We asked the experts to begin by describing a particularly difficult challenge they’d faced and briefly describe their solution.  The engineers and technicians who attended posed questions and probed, prodded, and challenged the experts.  We all viewed this as kind of a game and had fun with it. But it was serious stuff. Questions explored all aspects of the problem scenario. When experts are pressed to address time, space, and context, the tacit slowly becomes explicit. I often attended these meeting and joined in the questioning and recognized the experts and participants who had the most insightful questions.

3.     Pre-mortems.  Innovation requires more than development of a solution.  It requires implementation.  Before a solution was fully designed and implemented, project teams conducted a pre-mortem in which they tried to envision every conceivable thing that might go wrong with implementation of the solution.  They then created plans to mitigate the risk of implementation failure.

Innovation is the way to grow your business profitably. It is incredibly difficult to do well. You need deep experts who, as Yuri did last night, make their craft appear deceptively simple. You need team leaders who are able to get deep experts to play together as a maestro does with an orchestra. And you need senior leaders who can assemble and deploy this talent in an engaging environment.

This post was adapted from Lessons From a CEO’s Journal: Leading Talent and Innovation.