Are you trying to foster innovation in your organisation?
Coaching a team to encourage insights is a skill you can develop with the right knowledge and practice.
Innovative organisations have leaders who encourage people to think for themselves. To become a great innovation coach you need to become passionate about about improving not what people are thinking about, but the way they think. To do this, focus on facilitating a self-directed learning process.
David Rock has some great suggestions for how to lead for innovation in his book Quiet Leadership.
Here is a summary of some of the key mindsets:
- Process vs Content: When a leader is having a conversation to help someone thinking something through, it's important that the leader focus on the process rather the content of the conversation.
- Explicit vs Implicit: In order for something to be made explicit, it needs to be said aloud, with words. Making things explicit frees up everyone's neurons to focus on central issues, because we are less distracted by uncertainties.
- Interesting vs Useful: Discussing problems is interesting. Discussing solutions is useful. When something is interesting, we don't put much energy into memorising it. But when something is useful, we consciously make the effort to learn it so that we can apply the learning elsewhere.
- Deconstruct vs Reconstruct: Deconstructing the hard wiring in the brain is very difficult (when we try to eliminate ingrained habits). It's much easier to create (reconstruct) new wiring, and create new habits.
- Why vs Learning: There are two types of questions you can ask of others. Those with the word 'why' in them don't lead to learning; they lead to reasons and justifications. Learning questions help make new connections, by bringing about new insight.
- Intent vs Impact: Sometimes the intent that we have in a conversation is not achieved and the conversation has an undesired impact on the other person.
- Thinking About Thinking: Thinking about an issue a person has brought to you means you come up with ideas for them. Thinking about thinking means thinking to figure out what questions to ask that will help the person come up with their own insights. The leader is focused on the person, not the issue on the table.
When you are having a conversation with a team member remember the following to be most effective:
- Let them do all the thinking. Don't tell them what to do. Let them think, then help them think in more efficient ways.
- Focus on solutions. Focus only on the way ahead.
- Remember to stretch. Stretch people, and help to normalise any unsettled emotions they may feel along the way.
- Accentuate the positive. We are all our own worst critics. We need more positive feedback, this helps embed new mental maps.
Leading in this way will create motivated, inspired team members who constantly grow in self-awareness, skill and empowerment. They will find work both challenging and rewarding, and will produce innovative outcomes everyone is proud of. You will foster an environment where everyone does their best work.
“What got me to being a successful designer was being good at having good ideas. What makes me an impactful leader is not about the quality of my ideas but my ability to enable those ideas in others.”
- Tim Brown, President and CEO, IDEO
