Want your team to think out of the box? Here's the guide

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten” – Tony Robbins.

Innovation is the order of the day. It is a major competitive advantage for companies across all industries and all over the world. Companies don’t only need innovative ideas at the top level to stay afloat; they would need innovation at all levels of the organisation. Even the smallest innovations have proven to be major game changers in this ever-changing competitive world.

As promising as incorporating innovative thinking sounds, it can actually be quite a challenging task to put it into action. Nonetheless, by engaging your team with few creative practices you might drive your team to think in the right direction.

Stay away from the standard:

At offices, people very easily get used to a certain way of doing things. Hence, your first step towards encouraging your team to think out of the box should be to break loose of these standard protocols.

Redefine the rules by using the following methods:

• Try to have scheduled brainstorming sessions on a monthly basis where people can openly discuss ideas. This will help the whole team to come up with common implementable ideas.
• Try adding innovative and challenging goals to the regular set of goals of the team members and give out broad guidelines on how they can achieve them. This will give them an extra bit of push to think out of the box.
• Make regular meetings and discussion sessions interactive and fun for the team. This will allow free communication between the team members. Ask them to do something far away from usual. Generally, when you add an element of fun to activities people tend to break out of their moulds.
• Make everyone feel involved. No matter how junior a team member is, involve him/her in the process and consider their ideas. If you are not acting upon their suggestions, provide them with a logical explanation as to why you are not doing so. However, don’t forget to congratulate them on thinking of something in the first place.
• How about reverse mentoring? Mentoring is when senior team members guide junior team members. Reverse mentoring is the right opposite of that. While senior employees bring experience to the table, junior employees bring fresh ideas. By putting them on the same level for certain tasks, you might come up with new ways of doing things.

Create an experiment-friendly environment:

When your team is trying something new, there are bound to be a couple of failures on their way. Your job is to make them comfortable with the idea that failures in the process are inevitable

• The fear of failure is the most common reason why people don’t try inventive methods. Try to remove this fear from the team. When people come to you with ideas, don’t out rightly reject them. Give them a chance to defend their ideas and provide your insights to make them better.
• As a leader, you need to reassure them that a reasonable level of failures would be overlooked. Offer to analyse why a particular idea failed. Try to be liberal with the deadlines.
• Reward your team members when one of them does something different. This will also encourage the others to follow the innovative path.
•  Create a peer to peer rewarding system within the team. Remember you might not be around for and aware of every small detail of their work. This will help you not leave any innovation go unnoticed.

Be a Leader and a Pioneer:

• Lead from the front.  It is always the best to be the change you want to see your team. If you do something way out of normal, it will not only give them a reference point to do the same but it will also encourage them to courage up to start something new.
• Apart from just sharing your success, share the struggles and hurdles you had to face on the path and how you overcame them. This will make it more relatable to them. They might also learn from your mistakes and will feel more confident to approach you in case they are facing any difficulties.
• Try to share your ideas even at the planning stage and ask your team for their feedback which might be valuable in implementing your plan. Even better, you might convince few of your team members to get on board with you by doing so.
• Be a mentor to your team. Sometimes, people may have amazing ideas but would not always know how to execute them successfully. Give your insights if they need it. Guide them throughout the process while still giving them enough breathing space to do it in their own way.

Thinking-out-of-the-box need not be a one-off event. Make it a way of operating for your team. Your team members already possess incredible qualities and ideas. As a leader, it is your job to nurture these ideas and build an environment where innovation can thrive.

After all, your team’s innovation is your innovation.