People First — My approach to managing an innovation team

Patrick Pena
Jul 20, 2017 · 2 min read

When I learned that I would be switching into a new role, and that I would have an innovative development team reporting to me, I was equally excited and nervous. We would be tasked to work together as one development team with a focus on innovation. In practice, we help our clients think differently about the problems they are trying to solve. It’s a type of creativity that requires a strong team culture focused on communication, education, and collaboration. As I thought about how to bring that culture to life, I realized that everything came down to how we treat people.

The most successful leaders I’ve worked with were ones that focused heavily on communication and treated people with respect and understanding. Communication happened frequently, and you always had an opportunity to share your point of view. They inspired the people around them, which resulted in better engagement. It’s amazing to see what can be accomplished by a team that is engaged and inspired. Our first tenet needed to be that we always put people first.

I also wanted to make sure that as a team we nurtured the engineering mindset, the natural inclination towards problem solving and learning new things. Everyone should be encouraged to learn and everyone should be responsible for teaching other people on the team. By helping each other improve, we improve the team. To reinforce that, we would also need to encourage failure because without it we wouldn’t be comfortable experimenting with new ideas. Failure means we’re learning, and failing fast means we can make course corrections early in a project. Our second tenet would be education.

Project outcomes have always been better when we take a collaborative approach to working with our clients. I even hesitate to use the term client, instead I consider our clients to be partners and temporary extensions of our team. Partners are people we are working with instead of people we are doing work for. Ultimately, we are only successful when we are working together towards a shared goal. Our third tenet would be we have partners, not clients.

With the vision of our culture defined, my next challenge would be to start guiding the team. We would be required to go through all the phases of change while maintaining a high level of creativity and out of the box thinking.

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