Is there an I(nnovation) in Team?

Elise Foster gives her insights on experiences and learnings with working in teams and using creativity.

Host:Welcome to Listen For Insight. I’m your host Evan Lynch. We have for you Elise Foster, a leadership development coach and creator of elisefoster.com, and her insights on team based leadership and creativity. I send you now to our interviewer David Ternik

David:Do you have any examples where you have really seen that transform in a company or in a school, or on a team?

7:33 (Elise)-- umm, one of the particulars of every company that we’ve worked with again they can kind of give some uhh, souls searching if you will to identify and look at within their social media marketing team, the people who send out the emails, is that, you know, for the retail, he said, when is it okay for us to experiment and make mistakes, and when is it absolutely 100% not okay with a team that they’re struggling to come up with new, exciting ways to get customers to actually and quickly buy something. And, when it came down to it, and they did this experiment around where can we make mistakes, and where can’t we. They boiled it down to, and I’m sure I’ll first ask, so when you think about that, you think about doing marketing for an organization, how many ideas do you think will fall in that not okay to experiment phase?

8:55 (David)--Uhm, as a percentage, I’d say maybe half of them.

9:02 (Elise)-- And that’s probably where they started, and what it came down to at the end and if you can picture post it notes on the board some with okay, and some with not okay to fail, they ended up with one single post it where it was not okay to fail. And it was the month of December. That’s when we make the greatest revenue from online sales. All we’d known at that point I think were tried and true. Now imagine what that does leave is the other eleven months of the year.

I’d be spending that other eleven months of the year trying to figure out how do I make my crazy idea the next tried and true that we are using for sure in December.

Do you notice differences in the common pitfalls or maybe the types of diminishers that you find in, you know, the business world versus in academia?
10:34 (Elise)-- the biggest differences that we probably saw were in terms of language. For example, the words that they used, because uh, a treasured word in business is a less treasured word in education. People are put off by the idea of debating a topic and so, we found that it is more resonant with leaders who think about being a community builder versus a debate maker on that continuum of how we make decisions. what I probably see more frequently is in education you have more leaders who tend to be the rescuers, the leader who wants to, you know, avert crisis. They don’t want to see anyone fail, they want to see everyone succeed. So they step in maybe a little bit too early or a little bit too often.

12:50 (Elise) – Uh, as opposed to on the business side um, the two that probably are more prevalent are the idea guy, the person who, um, you know wants to throw out a few ideas to get their team thinking creatively uh or the leader who repeats things uh over and over again that leader who’s always on. So there are a few different subtle differences, but I wouldn’t say there are large scale differences between the types of organizations.

16:13 (David) – if I’m, if I’m the leader in a situation and my idea is to you know get the conversation of creativity kind of started but I don’t wanna overpower, how have you seen people successfully start that conversation, whether it’s at a meeting or a more of a one-on-one or individual team basis is there a pretty tried and true way of of starting that?

16:50 (Elise) – So I certainly have some thoughts on that, and first I’d love for you to just take a second to reflect on your own experiences. What what has driven that for you when you’ve not been the leader?

17:01 (David) – I think it’s important to begin by asking questions as opposed to making statements. It seems like if you kind of open it up at the beginning, then it sets the tone that this is collaborative and not just me talking.

17:15 (Elise) – Yes you’re spot on. And that’s probably one of the biggest takeaways in experiences that we share with people who you know go through our workshops or do coaching with us and it is you know even more the ??? from having the answers to having the questions the more effective and productive the organization is going to be. Um and uh uh big piece of that is how do you structure the questions so that you get the greatest you know intelligence on the table in other words, you know we want thought-provoking questions as opposed to the very close-ended yes/no kinds of questions.

Elise: And there are tons of resources out there on how to do that and uh we use a tool called question value writer just to show people the difference from when you start at the bottom end of the closed ended kind of one word, yes no questions and move all the way up to challenge questions. Those are the ones where the leader has an assumption in mind that might be driving our decisions and it’s asking questions to challenge those core assumptions.

So I want to talk about the idea of immunity to change. I had a little bit of a harder time kind of grasping this one. Could you explain kind of what that is and a little bit how you’re involved with it.

Elise: Uhh, so.. I’m chuckling a little bit because I consider myself a bit of an immunity to change (delinquent?). So the concept of immunity to change is the idea that as individuals when we talk about wanting to get better at something.. almost everybody has self-development, self-improvement, you know, I want to be a better listener or I want to be more collaborative, you know fill in the blank. I want to you know..uhmm.. you know.. lose weight, I want to be more fit and healthy. Everyone has something like that and they uhm… they are…. there are, uhh... they know lots of ways to get better. If I want to be more fit and healthy, I go to the gym more, I eat less etc etc...And they might even be able do that - think about New Year’s resolutions or people you know that have made them - they might even be able to do that for a couple of weeks, a couple of months but then over time they slip back into old patterns. Often people think this is just a case of willpower and you know, not strong enough to stick with it and what immunity to change helps us to see is that, well, on the one hand you’re committed to being more fit and healthy and on the other hand there are some internal competing commitments that get in your way and it’s how we make sense of the world and so it’s some assumptions that we might hold uhm that keep us committed to, you know maybe, uhm..., never looking like an idiot. Now you can imagine if you are committed - and by the way these are the commitments we don’t say out loud, we don’t tell people and we probably don't know we have them until we start to uncover (????) . If you are committed to being fit and healthy and one of the things that you’re not doing that gets in the way of that is going to the gym and you’re also committed to never looking like an idiot, well I’m certainly never going to go to the gym and use that piece of equipment if I’m going to look like an idiot.

David: Right

Elise: And so you’ve got one foot on the gas, one foot on the break and there’s some underlying assumptions about, you know, the person is fit because I’m committed to never looking like an idiot well they have some assumption in their head, “ I assume if I look like an idiot, then this dire consequence is sure to happen.” So if we can help people uncover that meaning-making and how they’re making sense of the world and those core assumptions then they actually have a shot at making sustainable change.

Elise: instead of going through the cycle that a dieter typically goes through where they lose the weight and within a year they gain that weight plus seven percent more back. And so by uncovering these internal computing commitments and how the assumptions that allow us to sustain these commitments we can then really attack change from a different perspective.

David “What do you think someone should do to increase their leadership aptitude to be an effective part of a creative environment?”

Elise: and um I think there are a few things at the heart of becoming a more effective leader and encouraging innovation and creativity and the first piece of it is um maybe a mental shift in the assumptions of what a leader’s job is I think many people assume that a leaders job is, I think many people assume that a leaders role is to have the answers and our research shows that it is quite the opposite yes of course the leader needs to have a vision and some idea to where we are going but the more they can be thinking in terms of having the questions and not the answers, the more productive and innovative an organization can be. And so after you reshape and reframe the assumptions about what the role of a leader is then it is then it is how to I take that and get a good picture of myself in action and have some degree of self-awareness, some people call it emotional intelligence, um I think at the base level, how do I not just know that I have annoyed someone in a meeting, cause you know, I think the really interesting thing about all the leadership work that I do and when these leaders come in and they do a 360, they get their input from the people above them, the people below them and the people at their level, when they read that 360, nine times out of ten it is not a surprise.

32:50-35:00 & 47:20-49:10 Evan
Elise: So, the more people can make visible to themselves and actually be able to take hold of what is getting in their way, and having that self-awareness, the more likely they are to overcome it. (32:32 – 33:02)

Elise: Okay so I’m Elise Foster and I am a leadership and organizational development consultant and if you’re interested you can find more information at elisefoster.com and I want to thank you for listening to insight. (34:06-34:25)

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