5 Behaviors Every Data Leader Should Encourage in Their Team To Foster Creativity And Increase Business Impact
When it comes to successful teams, culture eats strategy for breakfast.
As a Data Leader, one of the most important decisions you have to make is the culture you want for your team. And one of the traits that sets successful teams apart is creativity.
It helps with:
- Creation of new products and solutions
- Dealing with the problems every team faces
- Finding new ways to challenge the status quo
However, there is a problem.
Creativity is notoriously difficult to foster. You can’t issue an order for a team to be more creative. I’ve struggled with this problem for years.
As the years went by and the data teams I lead became larger, it only got more difficult. One of the best ways to make your teams more creative is to define certain behaviors that will result in more and better ideas.
Here are five behaviors I encourage in my teams to foster creativity which will drive better results for the business.
Embrace Discomfort
Make your team do new things.
Allow for them to color outside the lines. If people only do what they are asked for nothing new will result. If you as a leader only ask specific questions you’ll never get unexpected answers.
Don’t Wait For Conditions To Be Right
There is always a catch.
There is always a budget issue, time pressure, someone frowning somewhere. If people wait for the right conditions, nothing new will get done.
Encourage your team to build small prototypes of their ideas and take things from there.
Don’t Run From Diversity
As a leader, forming a diverse team should be a priority.
Once the team is there, you should strive to make people with different backgrounds interact as much as possible. If Data Scientists interact with each other, and the product team does the same you are losing a huge asset. It’s not only about having people with different backgrounds.
You need to make them interact too.
Over-communicate
Conway’s law states:
Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
Make teams speak to each other. Oversharing is a great idea in the beginning, it builds trust through transparency and assures everyone is on the same page.
Never assume what is obvious to you will be obvious to others, specially in new and ever-evolving fields as data.
Let Go Of Hierarchies
In every organization, some level of hierarchy is always necessary.
Yet, some people is never content with the limits of the box they’re put in. Those are the ones you want to spark a creative culture. Encourage people to paint outside the lines, to pitch ideas and ask questions not paying too much attention to hierarchy.
Respect is important, solemnity is not.
