24 Aug Collaboration in Innovation: How Do You Handle It?
Contract lawyers often talk about the notion of pie (no, not that pi). Yes, the food pie. Why? A common misconception about contract drafting is that there’s only a certain amount of ‘good’ to go around—if one party gets several positive advantages in the contract, then the other must necessarily get several distinct disadvantages. That’s not necessarily the case. The best contract lawyers try to expand the total pie for everyone—making sure that all parties receive the most possible benefits.
The pie metaphor is also an important one for businesses—and not just in the case of business contracts, but rather, in terms of employee interaction. As a firm focused on innovation, we often encounter corporate innovation teams that struggle to play nice. In other words, innovation can get quite competitive from an internal standpoint, and it can be intimidating for your innovators to throw around ideas in front of their colleagues, for fear that it may be shot down and their credibility/intelligence called into question. How can we fix the problem? A recent piece in the Harvard Business Review discusses solutions to employee interaction—we’ve tweaked those ideas and applied them to innovation teams. Here are our three most important tips.
Top-Down Process
Your innovation team needs to know that creation is a process, and that failure is both expected and encouraged. Why? Because it is often through developing ideas that don’t work that we discover ones that do. By treating innovation in this way, you convince your teams to play with a variety of ideas—which not only boosts the likelihood of innovation by giving them more freedom, but it also relaxes the atmosphere. If you instill in your teams that good ideas aren’t ubiquitous, then they will share the same thinking—creating a more collaborative environment in which to work.
Communication
Open lines of communication between you and your teams, and among the employees on your teams, can directly advance the collaborative atmosphere that you need to establish. The more comfortable your teams feel working with one another, the more likely it is that problems will be addressed appropriately and positively. Why? Think about it. Everyone has a different style of communicating—and it can be difficult to know what works best for someone without spending a good deal of time with him or her. The more interaction your teams have, the more they will learn to adapt and adopt certain communication tactics depending on the person(s) to whom they are talking. This creates less conflict and more innovation.
Let Them Eat Cake
OK, not quite. The lesson here is simple though: there is no pie. Much like the contract lawyers above, your innovation teams need to understand and appreciate that when it comes to innovation and business, pies are far too limiting. Instead of thinking about how a pie can be split up, focus instead on how these pies can be expanded, so as to give more parties more slices. If an idea is suggested and not accepted, it does not mean that the proposal of said idea was a waste—rather, it might lead to something valuable. The more your teams can openly discuss with one another and with you their ideas for innovation, the more likely it is that the pie will expand and your company will see positive change.
Curious about team building and innovation? Shoot Harvey Robbins an email at hrobbins@axiomcom.com or Rob Beachy at rbeachy@axiomcom.com.
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