Challenge 2: Is your team effective enough to foster innovation through collaboration?

Diagnosis

As a leader supporting innovation, you will need to understand your team and most of all, the team concept and what makes your team effective. The company itself and the degree it develops, and fosters innovation depends on teamwork and collaborative skills of each employee. A team is more than the sum of the people forming the group and it should be approached as such. The less the team members interact with each other, the less they are psychologically aware of each of the other team partners, and the less they perceive themselves as a group, the less the team will be able to share a common goal like innovation, for example.

To try to understand how effective and prepared your team is to foster innovation, please analyse the aspects presented in the table below.

Positive aspects	Negative aspects
The employees have a clear understanding of the team’s objectives and goals	The employees are not aware either of the company objectives, or the teams’ goals.
The team members were selected so that they cover a wide range of skills and know-how so that they can handle tasks effectively	The team members have more or less the same skills and cannot handle tasks effectively as they lack necessary abilities
The team members have a variety of personality types and strong points that help them better approach tasks	The team members are quite similar from the personality point pf view, and they face difficulties when approaching different tasks
The employees respect each other, and they manifest a mutual trust toward the rest of the team members. The team is seen as an individual entity	The employees do not respect and trust each other’s judgment and abilities, and consider that only their own contribution to the team performance is important
The company has developed an effective system that recognizes and rewards the employees’ results and efficiency	The employees are not rewarded by the company for their good results and efficiency. No such system was implemented within the company.
Each team has a strong leader that keep the employees motivated and the team united to better accomplish tasks	There is no team leader officially or the team leader is weak and cannot keep the team united and motivate it to become more efficient
The employees appreciate the contribution of each team member to team performance	The employees consider that only their own contribution to the team performance is important
The employees have a clear image of their role within the team: what are their responsibilities, abilities needed to use and further develop, tasks and deadlines	The employees are not fully aware of the tasks they must complete, their task change permanently and they lack continuity leading to frustration
The information within the team is exchanged according to well established protocols. No important information is lost. Everything is prioritized according to relevance.	Most of the times the information does not get to all team members, it is not sorted according to relevance and time is lost analysing less important data
The employees are aware of the importance of being part of a team and the strength it brings to the company	The employees do not understand the importance of being a team member and a good team player. Individual activities and recognition being more important than the team’s

1. Fill in the table with your initial assessment regarding each aspect and the way it is reflected in your company.

2. Take between 2 and 4 weeks to intentionally observe your team and the way the employees behave, communicate, and collaborate with each within the team, in every area stated in the table.

3. Go around your company’s departments and observe each team dynamics. Participate to daily meetings no matter the subject and pay attention to the way the team members interact, communicate, collaborate, respect, and trust each other as an individual and as contribution to the team effectiveness.

4. At the end of the selected period, organize a meeting with your team leaders and discuss the conclusions of what you have identify as weak and strong points of each team from the effectiveness and collaboration point of view. Also, prepare together with your team leaders a plan to implement team awareness within each group, build necessary abilities to better collaborate to foster innovation and increase efficacity.

Actions for implementation

If you observe that negative aspects are common in your company, while positive aspects are barely present, you must take seriously implementing team awareness within your organisation, increase effectiveness and collaboration of each team and team member to become more flexible in embracing innovation.

Your objective should be to understand what makes a team successful from the collaboration point of view, meaning that you must analyse moment-to-moment interactional dynamics of your team(s). You should rethink, as a leader, your group creativity and innovation and find the best actions that could move innovation forward.

Activities to be implemented to reach your objective can include:

1. As a leader, you may know that fostering successful innovation takes time and requires team members to gather, combine and structure the right ideas. For this, encourage your team members to brainstorm and share new ideas on a daily/weekly basis and start building innovative concepts on those ideas over time.
2. Successful collaborative teams practice active listening. Team members usually are too concentrated on their own presentations and speeches during meeting and do not pay attention to the others’ ideas and contribution. For this, make active listening one important point to tick during team meetings and help your employees get mare familiar to the deep listening skills through professional trainings and webinars.
3. Recognize the potential of each team members’ contribution during discussions and, teach your employees to accept that the ideas are the collective asset of the team, not of one member. Only together the innovation process can move forward.
4. Encourage team members to put as many and as out of the box questions during meetings and discussions because this is the way to have surprising insights on the difficult route to innovation.
5. Encourage your team members to use a bottom-up approach to innovation. Teach your employees to start brainstorming about innovation from small details and increase awareness of the big pictures along the way.
6. Work together with your employees and teach them that mistakes are a necessary part of the learning and development process. Finding the best innovative ideas can be a difficult and messy process, but working as a team, can lead to real breakthroughs.