Team Innovation

Today, businesses large and small like to say they are “team oriented” (whatever that means). I guess it means they work in teams. Big deal. Does that improve their performance? Does that mean that the quality of their product or service is better than the competition? Does that allow them to complete a project more timely, profitably or effectively? Is teamwork really a better way to go about solving problems than say the “hermit” approach? What about Thomas Edison or Leonardo DaVinci or Alexander Graham Bell?

If you’ve ever worked on a team you know there is one thing that can not be avoided: CONFLICT. At some point someone is going to disagree with somebody else and then, look out! Getting to a simple solution can take hours or days while these two “team-members” fight over minutia. Sound familiar?Let’s face it, often times, teams can hit roadblocks that can sabotage their success. There are a number of things that can be done to ensure good teamwork:Conflict is GoodAs team leaders we must not allow ourselves to think that we solely carry the burden of resolving conflict. I see so may managers, owners and team leaders rush to squish the most subtle sign of conflict within their team. Without conflict we can not reach the best solution. This also places us in a patronizing, parental position that encourages your team members to abdicate personal responsibility for resolving conflict. It keeps them from developing the skills to necessary to grow, mature and hold each other accountable. Allow the team to detect conflict and manage only those that escalate.Guidelines for Managing ConflictAs leaders we need to model guidelines that set the tone for resolving conflict. In this way we will be educating our team members to take responsibility. These should include:

No personal attacks
No heated outbursts
No backbiting
No hostile assumptions

Establishing Expectations
Over the years I have noticed that communicating expectations to the team is paramount in achieving exceptional team performance. The following are areas that team leaders should develop clear expectations for members:1. Work methods – Make sure your team knows the methods and procedures you expect them to follow when completing the job. If they do not they may frustrate themselves by taking the “long route” and end up disillusioned.2. Deadlines – Make sure that the team fully understands the time frame for completion. This should include non-negotiable dates as opposed to to dates that can slip.3. Responsibilities – Ensure that every team member understands their role in the team process. This should be communicated one-on-one with each team member prior to establishing the team. Also ensure that the team members responsibilities are consistent with the teams responsibilities.4. Priorities – It is critical that team members know the proper priorities. What’s to be done first, second and so on.5. Performance – Paint a picture of the outcome for the team. Show them a vision of a “good” job vs. a “bad” job. Make sure they understand the degree of effort that you expect them to each contribute to the successful solution.6. Measurement – Establish a system to measure performance in small increments.7. Communication – Establish a format for consistent communication with the team. This forum will give you the ability to ask the right kind of questions to determine whether the team is “on-track.” At this pint you can provide feedback to the team and make suggestions on course correction.8. Resources – Make sure that your team members understand the resources that are available to them. This could include staff, facilities, technology, equipment, outside consultants and so on. Encourage them to use the resources to their best advantage but in a cost effective way in order to achieve their goals.As leaders it’s our job to foster innovation. Team members look to us for confidence, guidance, direction and innovation. What can you do to set the stage for creative thinking in the teams that you lead? How can you get your team to discover the best solutions in the most cost effective manner. Remember teams are not just resources, they are people. As I have said many times, we line in an age of relationships. How can you create relationships that go beyond just getting the job done. How can you create relationships that can produce the kind of Edison, Bell and DaVinci innovation.

Office Politics

Someone asked me the other day: “Mark what do think is the biggest challenge for small businesses today?”

I didn’t have to think about this very long. I know they were expecting me to say something about: the affects of the economy or the stock market or the impact of technology or the lack of funding or resources or even the breakneck speed which we are expected to operate at.But the reality is that these are relatively minor forces when compared with the most powerful force of all:Office Politics!If you could walk with my consultants and I, in and out of businesses we each see everyday you would see the obvious yet devastating result of office politics. I believe it is by far the biggest obstacle to change and growth for companies today. Not that this is new. Office politics has been with us for decades. But the changing financial, political and social landscape makes it more insidious than ever and literally threatens the survival of many small businesses and even larger organizations.Why? Because of the exorbitant cost associated with office politics.The cost of office politics is a kind of activity-based cost. It includes time lost, waste of resources, low staff morale and ineffective delegation. Some of these costs are tangible but not accountable. Often time this kind of loss is ignored or neglected. Since many political activities are cross-departmental, office politics can render an organization completely dysfunctional in a very short period of time. While it is usually unwise to let office politics freely develop, unfortunately many companies cannot tackle such a political problem and let it erode their productivity and profitability and sometimes even endanger their survival.Office politics is about the application, distribution and negotiation of power and resources in an organization. This power includes authority (formal power) and influence (informal power). Politics is basically the application of that power. The desire for power is determined by one’s personality. Leaders can affect this principal in every organization. Strong, ethical leadership regulates the application of informal power (i.e. influence) to avoid the overuse and abuse of authority. Abuse of authority will lead to a chain of negative effects such as low staff morale, conflict, bias, bad image, poor communication, dishonesty and social conflict.When ethical leadership exists, office politics will abate. This is because ethical leadership is essentially self-management and self-control as an example for subordinates to follow. It is the strongest influence for change in any relationship. As I’ve said before, leaders act the way they want their team members to act. Cultural actions cannot be ordered or commanded. Most political office issues are symptoms of weakness at the senior management and organization level.While every organization is different, most have some type of definable culture. Some call this the organization design. It is essentially referring to the general distribution and structure of authority, responsibilities and resources in the organization. Poor organizational design is a common cause of office politics because ineffective organizational structure allows too much room for the negotiation for authority and resources.The organization chart in the business leader’s mind is far more important than the official one. Ricky W.O. Lau, author of Politics in Business calls it the “hidden organization chart.” Often times this means that the leader has bias and personal favor to individual members but does not act openly and his delegation is based on the hidden organizational chart rather than the official one. This is a common yet unfair and very detrimental management practice.While delegation is the distribution of specific work, responsibilities and authority, in an effective organization, delegation must be based on the organizational structure. Otherwise, there would be structural overlap, confusion, conflict and politics. Conflict usually involves different interests of different people (especially in different departments). Conflict may be minimized if the focus is on the whole organization rather than individual department or individuals. Some management styles may easily lead to office politics because the focus is on the performance of individuals and departments rather than the organization as a whole.Certainly interdepartmental conflict cannot be completely eliminated. Nor should we attempt to do so. It is important to remember that disagreement is not equivalent to conflict. People may disagree or criticize others if:

They view the matter from another viewpoint
They have misunderstood other’s meaning
They want improvement
They want to challenge others’ position or power.

Out of the above four motives of disagreement, only the last one is the result of conflict and is a political motive. However, when a manager is too politically sensitive, he may mistakenly treat the first three motives as political motives, and interpret the conflict as an intention to challenge his position or power.Desire of power may be a strong motive to perform, but it may also lead to a negative and destructive result. An effective manager should apply his influential power rather than authority because abuse and overuse of authority can lead to poor relations, distrust, misunderstanding and disorganization.Are office politics an issue in your business? If any of these symptoms are present in your business, its time to think about making some core changes to your business culture. At the Small Business Advisory Network we like to say that we influence decisions, improve performance and inspire change. That’s what our consulting, workshops, web site, weekly articles and The Small Business Hour Radio Show are all about.

Failing to Fail

Are you doing the same things you did a year ago? Are you doing things the same WAY you did them a year ago? If so you’re bound to fail. Not that failure is bad mind you. The sooner you fail in fact, the better off you’ll be. So raise a glass with me and let’s toast all of our failures past, present and future! Ahhhh drink deep. Now wasn’t that thirst quenching? No?

Let’s face it, our culture doesn’t reward failure. We condemn it. Our condemnation is so prolific that most folks do whatever they can NOT to fail. They shudder to even speak of a failure to associates. They train themselves in fact to not even THINK about failing. It’s not an option! We walk around telling everyone who will listen to us about all of the great successful things we have accomplished in our lives. We have convinced ourselves that we must continue to succeed and more so, that we must become innovators.

Innovate or Die
In fact innovation has become kind of a buzz-word in our society. We hear, “innovate or die.” What about “innovate AND die?” All the excitement about all things new has obscured the fact that most new ideas fail while most old ideas are still with us. With hundreds of breakfast cereals introduced every year how could it be that Cheerios and Wheaties still outsell them all? Why are Beanie Babies a faint memory yet Play-Doh is still a best seller? Evolution? Survival of the fittest? Maybe.Is there a way to combine innovation with proven methods? We’re all familiar with the old Rudyard Kipling quote: “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing the same way time after time and expecting a different result.” In this shrinking economy, it stands to reason that we need to do things differently. We all know we have to get creative, but how? How can we harness our creativity to create success rather than failure? Or better yet how can we train ourselves to endure our failures yet remain focused on the hope of a successful outcome?Not Creativity but Productivity
The truth is that creativity is less about wild talent and more about productivity. To find a few ideas that work you need to try a lot that don’t. Successful people don’t have a higher success rate. They just do more and they do a range of DIFFERENT things. Research shows that the success of individual geniuses like Mozart, Shakespeare, Picasso, Einstein, and Darwin himself, is best understood from an evolutionary perspective, where excellence results from “a range of differences.” These famous creators generated a wider range of ideas and completed more products than their contemporaries. They also followed proven methods in order to accomplish them. They didn’t succeed at a higher rate than others. They simply did more. So they had both more successes and more failures.An Example
A similar philosophy helps explain the success of Capital One, which has been called the most innovative credit-card company in the world. Just a few years ago, all credit cards were pretty much the same; you could have whatever you wanted as long it cost $20 per year and had an interest rate of 19.8 percent! Capital One has been the leader in offering thousands of different credit cards, with varying rates, and limits, which are targeted at people with different beliefs, hobbies, and affiliations: “They tinkered with credit lines, mileage awards, with the design of the cards, and with the color of the envelopes of their mailings. They tried different ways of retaining customers and pursuing deadbeats. Essentially they made Capital One an endless experiment.” The company tried about 45,000 experiments in the year 2000, for example. Capital One has succeeded by targeting smaller and smaller audiences for these experiments, like a “platinum MasterCard for middle-income hikers who drive Saturn automobiles.” Most of these ideas fail, but the constant experimentation with one variant after another, and constant learning, are big reasons why Capital One has over 30 million credit-card accounts.Repackaging the Old
The other thing about innovation and creativity is that success is not usually the result of totally new ideas as it is the repackaging of old ideas in new ways, places and combinations. IDEO which is probably one of the most innovative companies in the world, has developed more than 4,000 products for firms in all kinds of industries. Their designers are constantly mixing and matching technologies to produce creative new solutions. One IDEO development group got the idea to create a “slit valve” for a bicycle water bottle out of a heart valve that was made for a medical products company. Henry David Thoreau said, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” When you look at your product or service offerings what do you see? What do your customers see? Better yet what should they see?Challenge Accepted Practices
Often times ideas that are born from this kind of haphazard creativity are diametrically opposed to “accepted” practices. Entrepreneurs start new companies partly because they are purported to be more innovative, free from the pressures in established firms to follow ingrained precedents. Yet entrepreneurs can fall prey to ingrained habits just like managers in big firms. Don’t be afraid to challenge accepted practices. I’m not talking about a free-for-all but rather controlled experimentation in order to cultivate innovation. Some of the greatest inventions in the world were a result of an extra component here and there pieced together. Thomas Edison said, “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”Here’s some advice that will help to promote creativity and innovation:

Expose yourself to new ideas. Increase the variance of your available knowledge. Study other industries that face the kind of challenges you face.
See old things in new ways. Don’t just get OUT of the box. Walk around it. Look at the top. Don’t be afraid to pick it up and look at the bottom.
Break from the past. Stop talking about your past successes and hoping the history will repeat itself. We stand in a new place today a place we have never been and will never be again.
Understand that creativity as all about productivity. Be willing to turn the focus to more rather than better at times.
Embrace failures. Reward failures. Plan to fail – knowing that success in just one more failure away.
Challenge accepted practices. Become a tinkerer.

Play with these ideas in your mind and experiment with a few in your company. Treat them like toys that you might buy to mess around with: Try to break them, try to take apart the pieces to see how they work, try to improve them, and mix them (or parts of them) with your other toys. I offer these ideas not as immutable truths, but as methods that have helped other companies produce beautiful and profitable mutations, and that just might help your company as well.