Encouraging Innovation & Learning

Here are some suggestions for how you can enhance your skills in the leadership behaviours of Encouraging Innovation & Learning:

• To create an environment of learning and innovation, it is crucial to have a culture of ‘psychological safety’ where people feel confident to question the status quo, think creatively, offer suggestions, and involve themselves wholeheartedly in seeking solutions to problems.

  In a culture of psychological safety people respect and trust each other, and feel comfortable asking questions, seeking help, admitting mistakes, and voicing their opinions or ideas without fear of being judged or shamed. In other words, they can think freely and feel supported.

• Team meetings should not only include dealing with set agenda, but also, be used as opportunities for individuals to share their concerns, problems, challenges and other issues to be discussed and supported in finding a solution.
• Consider in your next team meeting setting aside time to invite a colleague to describe a particular challenge they have. Invite members to break into triads or small groups to generate various strategies or new ways of approaching the issue. Encourage them to focus on what the specific outcome must achieve, then let people be free to challenge some of the underlying assumptions, for example, or take different perspectives, or be creative in identifying solutions, including possibly challenging the current status quo or traditional ways of handling taks/roles/situations.
• Share the ideas and then, perhaps, agree as a team of 2 or 3 alternative strategies or solutions to return to and probe or explore in more detail.
• Consider yourself sharing a mistake, problem, challenge you have, with the team and inviting probing questions or suggestions.
• Take it in turn for each member to run the meeting, or a particular item or discussion, based on something they’ve read, viewed, experienced, that challenged their thinking, or found useful in undertaking their role more effectively.
• At the end of each team meeting, ask each person to briefly state what they have learned as a result of the discussions etc in the meeting, or surprises, or that they found most interesting.
• Also ask each person to mention in 1 or 2 sentences, what they are going to do differently, or approach differently, as a result of the meeting/discussions.
• In all the suggestions above, include yourself in the activity.
• Consider inviting each person to offer a suggestion as to one thing the team (and/or you) can do differently at the next meeting, that would enable it to be more useful, interesting, or that would improve morale in the team/department.
• Remember to genuinely value each contribution individuals make. Thank people and praise them where appropriate.
• Try to be realistically optimistic and stress the positive, rather than being pre-occupied with problems, and the transactional aspects of work.
• Notice, and possibly make a note, of anyone who isn’t actively participating, but bear in mind that it might take a few such meetings to convince some members that this new form of meeting isn’t a disingenuous attempt to make people reveal information that might be used against them. This is more likely to be the case in a culture of blame. Nonetheless, this is consistent with research on highly-effective and innovative teams/organisations.
• Consider having a conversation with someone who looks uncomfortable with this form of team meeting to explore their concerns. Be open and honest and even reveal that this is new to you. But it is based on research evidence. However, transforming a culture of blame to one of engagement and innovation, takes time.