Personal Innovation

I want to talk to you about innovation. Not company innovation, not product innovation, but personal innovation. If we truly want to consistently innovate for our company, for our product, for our service, we need to be innovating personally. We need to have an attitude of learning and growing, but beyond that, we need to take actions. Whether it's reading books or going to conferences or just getting exposed to new ideas, if we want to truly innovate within our companies, we need to innovate personally.

Just the other day, I did a great exercise with one of my clients that I want to share with you that may help. It started by getting the team together, this happened to be a leadership team, and I asked the members of the team to reflect on where they needed to get better. It might be a hard skill, it might be a soft skill, but in the next year, where do they need to get better as an individual in order to help themselves, and more importantly, help the team and help the company?

I gave them 10 minutes to think about that and come up with 2 things. Just 2 ideas, not 10, but 2 ideas/thoughts as to where they needed to get better. That in and of itself is a great exercise in vulnerability, because sharing that with your team members is sometimes not easy to share. So that was the first step. Where do I need to get better, and sharing that with the team.

Then, I gave each member of the team 15 minutes to not only share their thoughts with the other team member as to where they thought they needed to get better, getting down into more detail, maybe asking some questions of the team. I gave each member 15 minutes to get coached, get advice, and just brainstorm some specific ideas on how they can improve. Some of the ideas they came up with is that one person wanted to do a better job of coaching their team. They're great at giving advice, not so great at asking questions and coaching. Another member of the team wanted to learn technology at a lower level so they could be a better part of some of the technology innovations that were happening within the company. So some hard skills, some soft skills.

So step 1: Where do I need to get better? Step 2: 15 minutes to share with the team, get coaching, advice, and brainstorming. Then, most importantly with step 3, it was time to make commitments. Based on all of the 15 minute coaching folks got from the rest of the team, it was now time to go around the room and have them commit and actually document over the next 90 days, based on all that coaching, based on where they wanted to improve, what specifically they were going to commit to. What behaviors, what actions were they specifically going to commit to over the next 90 days? That, again, is important. It brings out some vulnerability in people as they make those commitments, but most importantly, it allows the rest of the team to hold that person accountable for making those changes. At the end of the quarter, they're going to follow through and make sure that they did those things.

So my question for you is: where do you need to get better, and what specific actions are you committed to take to be more effective at personal innovation this year?