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project teams

Selecting Innovation Team Members

Posted on 01.05.21

As engineering, project, and product managers, we often struggle with identifying the right people for innovation teams.  Of course, there is a need to match skill sets with the required deliverables of the project.  There is also a need to match the organizational structure with the level risk acceptance for radical innovation. 

Safi Bahcall presented an interesting theory on organizational structure for innovation (Harvard Business Review, Mar/Apr 2019).  He argues that organizational risk tolerance for radical innovation is a direct function of project skill fit relative to return on politics.  Let’s look at these variables a bit more. 

Project Skill Fit

All innovation team members have choices to make on how they will spend their time.  Should they invest in design and experimentation or should they invest time in promoting the idea to an influential manager?  When the technical investment pays off the most, the team members will spend their time working out new technologies. 

To increase innovativeness in an organization, you must accept some risks and encourage innovation teams to learn.  Learning comes through experimentation.  High project skill fit occurs when employees are stretched to learn – but not stretched too far and not too little.  If a staff member feels his skills are not good enough to technically support the project, he will spend his time “politicking”.  When team members are more vested in building their personal reputations with bosses, the risk tolerance for the organization drops precipitously. 

Return on Politics

Another factor that drives radical innovation is the span of management control.  If there are lots of levels for advancement and salary increases are significant for each promotion, an employee will spend her time on self-promoting politics.  A big raise is valued more by individuals than generating project outcomes in this case. 

Flattening the organizational hierarchy helps to reduce the “return on politics”.  Moreover, as Bahcall notes in his HBR paper, decreasing the hierarchy of an organization increases the opportunities for collaboration across functions.  Multi-disciplinary teams have the highest rates of success with innovative product development.

Overcoming Organizational Barriers to Innovation

To overcome structural barriers to innovation, organizations must encourage reasonable risk-taking and experimentation.  Organizational reward systems, including non-financial recognition, can encourage team members to focus more on project outcomes than politics.  Consider rewarding innovation team members with opportunities to present their research to senior management or peers at international conferences.  (Incidentally, I have presented at several different conferences in the past year with the virtual environment expanding our opportunities for presentations.  Check out my speaking page here – I’d love to present to your group.)

Another way to overcome structural barriers in organizations is to provide training.  Training has multiple benefits for innovation teams.  First, training creates opportunities to enhance cross-industry knowledge so team members generate more ideas.  Next, people want to practice what they’ve learned; thus, increasing the focus on project outcomes over politics.  Finally, training helps keep staff sharp with their technical skills. 

How Do You Select Innovation Team Members?

One key conclusion from Bahcall’s work is that innovation team member selection cannot be “gut feel”.  He recommends neutral assessments by third parties to identify project skill fit, for instance.  A great tool that can be used for identifying project skill fit is the Team Dimensions assessment.  Team Dimensions can help you identify skill matches between jobs and project personnel.  You can read about Team Dimensions here and listen to my podcast interview on Team Dimensions here.  Feel free to contact me at [email protected] and we can develop a plan for your team to use this versatile assessment. 

Next Steps

After you complete an assessment of team members and encourage an emphasis on project outcomes over company politics, you will want to continue developing your teams for effective innovation.  One place to start is New Product Development (NPD) Fundamentals.  Join me for one or all four short courses to establish innovation best practices in your organization.  Learn more and register here.  We are offering NPD Fundamentals at a bargain basement price because we are passionate that innovation gets a great start in 2021! 

© Simple-PDH.com

A Division of Global NP Solutions, LLC  

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3 Myths about Innovation Teams

Posted on 07.18.19

As much as corporate leaders talk about the importance of innovation, they still complain about a lack of results.  Innovation is not magical nor is it easy.  Successful new product development (NPD) relies on deploying the right technology at the right time into the right market segment.  Complicating the situation even more is that you count on effective, cross-functional teams to ideate, design, develop, and sell the new products.  Yet building productive innovation teams requires leadership skills and temperance. 

Of course, lots of managers think that teamwork is easy – just pull together a group of people, tell them what to do, and then sit back waiting for the results.  Unfortunately, most of us have learned it’s not so easy to build and sustain effective, cross-functional innovation teams.  Let’s look at some myths of team building and how you can invert these assumptions to accelerate your innovation programs. 

Myth #1 – All Engineers are the Same

Or we could say all designers are the same and all marketers are the same and all salespeople are the same.  This myth is busted as soon as you consider your work colleagues on your existing and previous NPD teams.  We all know engineers who are extraverts, designers who are methodical, marketers who are analytical, and salespeople who are quiet and reserved. 

One way to better understand the work styles of your teammates and to build open communication is through the DiSC® Workplace assessment.  DiSC identifies a preferred work style for each team member:  dominant, influential, supportive, or conscientious.  While many engineers have a conscientious work style – with a preference for analytical, “heads-down” work – others are also dominant, influencing, and supportive.  The same goes for designers, marketers, and salespeople. 

When your team completes a DiSC assessment, it opens new conversations and builds camaraderie among the team members.  As an innovation team leader, you can match tasks and activities to the work style preferences of your team members.  When team members understand what drives motivation for others, productivity improves.  And when productivity improves, new products get to market faster spurring profitability.

Myth #2 – Everyone is Equal

Another assumption I see in my work with innovation teams is that managers assume everyone is equal.  As a Christian and as an American, I do believe everyone has equal opportunity, but not everyone has equal skill, nor should we populate an innovation team in exact percentages. 

Sometimes, managers make the assumption that if there are 100 hours of project work, then each of the five team members needs to 20 hours of work. Unfortunately, this situation is exacerbated by Myth #1 so that all the R&D work is assumed to be done by engineers and all of the marketing work to be done by the marketing department. 

Cross-functional teams increase the go to market rate and profitability of new products because the team members are not equal.  Each individual brings his or her own experiences to the team.  These experiences include successful and failed product launches in similar product categories, global customer knowledge, and lessons learned. 

The Team Dimensions Profile model teaches us that innovation projects go through stages of initiation, selling the idea, organizing for implementation, and actually designing and building the new product.  We rely more heavily on creative personalities to generate ideas at the front-end and more analytical work styles to organize and execute the project tasks near the back-end.  Cross-functional team members will find that as they understand which team members are “idea people” and which are “executors”, they will work together more effectively. 

Moreover, using a common vocabulary of our work style preferences can help moderate the pace of work. Creators are tasked to a higher degree when an NPD project is initiated but need to tamp down their style when operations and manufacturing decisions are made.  Understanding how each team member is unique – and not equal – enhances communication and improves the quality of new product delivery. 

Myth #3 – Teams Don’t Change

Unfortunately, I’ve met some very cynical managers in my time.  They assume that they’ve been saddled with a group of people to do work and that no one can change.  Carol Dweck describes this as a fixed mindset.  (Read my book review of “Mindset:  The New Psychology of Success” here.)

The fixed mindset assumes talent is given at birth and cannot ever change.  Knowledge is like a reservoir that empties over time and cannot be refilled.  In contrast, a growth mindset is one that cheers on failure for the sake of learning and praises baby steps because those baby steps will become leaps of knowledge in the future.  Great innovation leaders exhibit the growth mindset and challenge teams to find new ways of working.  One model of building effective, cross-functional teams is through the Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team®. 

In Five Behaviors, team members assess their levels of trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results.  They learn how their work styles influence their responses in different team situations and how to manage conflict in a healthy way.  Applying a growth mindset, teams learn new ways to commit to project goals and to achieve mutual accountability.  And over time, the needle moves on trust to demonstrate the building of an effective team innovation team. 

How Do You Bust Team Myths?

Innovation is critical to the success of every business.  The product life cycle is shrinking so that companies need to launch more and better products faster just to keep pace with global competition.  But managers often fail to build the appropriate infrastructure to support and nurture NPD teams. 

First, job titles are not reflective of a team member’s work style.  Use a DiSC assessment to understand and share work style preferences.  Team members learn new skills and can adapt to situations across the NPD life cycle better as they begin to understand each other at a deeper level.

Next, everyone is not equal at all times on every project.  Successful innovation teams capitalize on different skills at various points in the NPD process.  Creators are great at brainstorming ideas, advancers can sell the concept to executives and customers, refiners analyze and organize relevant processes, and executors design and build the new product.  Each unique team member contributes to the project based on his or her experiences in life lessons.  The Team Dimensions Profile helps the team recognize how each person can excel and help each other during the different stages of the product development life cycle.

Finally, people can change and want to grow and learn.  A fixed mindset will doom any innovation project to failure.  Instead, adopting a growth mindset and teaching the team about trust, conflict, and accountability will build cohesiveness, yielding tangible financial results. 

Learn more

Act now to improve the effectiveness of your cross-functional innovation teams.  Space is limited in our complimentary Q&A webinars on Building Effective Cross-Functional NPD Teams.  Part 1 is 31 July at 12:00 noon CDT covering Steps 1 and 2 in the process:  team member self-awareness and managing team behaviors.  Part 2 is 28 August at 12:00 noon CDT covering Steps 3 through 5 in the process:  team processes, team charters, and virtual teams.  You will be automatically registered for Part 2 when you register for Part 1.  Anyone who attends the Q&A webinar will have access to your choice of work style assessment (DiSC, Five Behaviors, or Team Dimensions). 

Learn firsthand how applying a growth mindset can improve cross-functional NPD team effectiveness.  REGISTER NOW – spaces are filling fast!

© Global NP Solutions, LLC  

Building Innovation Leadership

This was first published on the blog at www.GlobalNPSolutions.com. 56

Collaboration as Cooperation

Posted on 08.02.18

About a year ago, I took a lovely vacation in Quebec.  The scenery along the Saint Lawrence seaway and the Saguenay Fjord is spectacular!  I hiked 43 km (about 27 miles) at three separate parks and was rewarded with outstanding vistas (and dozens of mosquito bites).

Quebec is a 95%+ French-speaking province in Canada.  I don’t speak French, but I can read menus in French, especially if it’s “croissant”!  Most people in Quebec speak some English though it varies from poor to excellent.  Menus and signs are often only presented in French, especially in the countryside where we spent time hiking.  Some signs and notifications are roughly translated to English.

In a couple of hotels and restaurants, sings notified guests not to smoke, and in French, thanked guests for their “collaboration” with the no-smoking policy.  The accompanying English translation noted “Thanks for your cooperation.”  Because we read and hear so much about collaboration these days – especially for innovation – it is interesting to consider cooperation as the primary element of collaboration.

Collaboration

In today’s business world, collaboration often is imagined as a random meeting of the minds to create a new idea by people with diverse and unrelated backgrounds.  Office spaces are being designed to foster collaboration through chance contacts with open layouts, comfortable shared spaces, and even entertainment areas with Nerf® basketball and ping-pong tables.  These office designs are expected to elicit creativity and collaboration for new innovations where the individuals with diverse educational backgrounds and work experiences might not previously have interacted.

Collaboration is expected to result in consensus design and development of new products and services.  This view of collaboration means that everyone contributes something to the end product and should have equal participation.  As a business trends, collaboration is anticipated to solve a lot of communication problems as well as to enhance creativity for project teams.

Cooperation

Cooperation, in my mind, is a different concept than collaboration.  Whereas collaboration is “all-in”, cooperation means providing what is required when it is needed but not necessarily being emotionally committed to a single outcome.

Consider the example of not smoking in a hotel room.  As a non-smoker, I do indeed want the smokers to cooperate to enforce the rule.  However, I do not expect them to collaborate on the policy or on an end result to eliminate smoking to reduce lung cancer.

Project team members do not always get to choose the solutions that customer request, yet they must work together (cooperate) to develop and build the chosen solution.  Cooperation means working together to meet project requirements within the context of a professional relationship, but it does not necessarily include the social aspects desired among advocates of open office spaces equipped with foosball tables.

Cooperation also means sharing data and responding to cross-functional requests by using your expertise.  Not all project team members are core team members.  Auxiliary team members must be willing to cooperate to provide timely and cost-effective information to assist a project team.  Cooperation may mean a short-lived, purposeful business relationship, while building consensus for collaboration can be a more time-consuming endeavor.

Use Cooperation for Collaboration

Collaboration has become a hot buzzword over the last few years and companies are trying to change the way they do business to increase collaboration.  Chance encounters in an open office layout may generate a great new idea.  However, old-fashioned cooperation – working together for a common purpose and sharing knowledge as needed – is a great start to forming effective product development teams that will grow to collaborate.

To Learn More

Please contact me to apply for a space in our new Life Design Master Mind Group where you will use the tools of design thinking to creatively generate ideas for the next phase of your life or career.  The Houston Master Mind Group starts in September.  Learn more here.

In our on-line tutorial on Design Thinking and in our Agile NPD course, we also discuss collaboration for project teams.  Join us for the Agile NPD course or check out our self-study and other NPDP Workshops.  Feel free to contact me at [email protected] or 281-280-8717.  At Simple-PDH.com where we want to help you gain and maintain your professional certifications.  You can study, learn, and earn – it’s simple!

 

Reading Recommendation

We discuss different project team structures in NPDP Certification Prep:  A 24-Hour Study Guide, and you can find additional references at https://globalnpsolutions.com/services/npd-resources/.   Some other books you might enjoy:

  • Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
  • The Power of Little Ideas by David C. Robertson and Kent Lineback
  • Well Designed by Jon Kolko
  • 101 Design Methods by Vijay Kumar
  • The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen

 

Speaking on Design Thinking

  • 15 August 2018 at Houston Organizational Development Network Meeting
  • 7 September 2018 at Texas Association of Change Management Professionals Conference

 

Study. Learn. Earn. Simple.

© Simple-PDH.com

A division of Global NP Solutions, LLC  

 

 

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