Guiding Principles and the GC Entrepreneurs : crowd sourcing our work-in-progress
An important part of everyone’s job is to share experiences and lessons learned with others so that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. In our first days as entrepreneurs, we had a visit from Neil Bouwer. Neil exemplifies innovation. A few years ago, under his leadership, the Free Agents were born. If you haven’t heard of the free agents check out Abe Greenspoon’s blog post. The idea of the Free Agents actually came from the IN.spire team at NRCan (core members of this team are now working on other options to reform GoC approaches to recruitment and staffing under Talent Cloud). Neil was convinced that exploring mechanisms to encourage employee empowerment and autonomy was a great idea, and decided to let the group recruit Abe as the program’s manager and work together to run a pilot. The Free Agent program is now growing quickly, under the leadership of Abe and others!
So when Neil came to give a pep talk to the entrepreneurs it was certainly a treat, and he was very inspiring to say the least. One thing that stuck out from our discussion was that the Free Agents had put together a set of guiding principles.
We were still coming off the high of being hired as entrepreneurs when Ismar Fejzic decided that we should do the same. Through a rigorous process, we decided that we should have 11 principles to reflect the 11 points in the maple leaf of the Canadian flag. That would be super cool if it was true, but I have no explanation why we have 11, besides it was a complete coincidence. But that is ok because we are venturing into the unknown! Is it a perfect list? Of course not, that’s impossible, but it is a draft of where we are at this moment. We of course will have to revisit them soon to reflect on what we have learned, and consider if the way we are working reflects those principles.
So in no particular order, the current draft list of 11 guiding principles for the GC Entrepreneurs includes:
1. Each GC Entrepreneur is encouraged and supported in bringing his or her individual passions and values to the role and project work
2. Challenge the status quo, question everything
3. Create a safe space where people can speak openly, and respect that all ideas and divergent opinions are valuable input to the process
4. Acknowledge, complement and amplify — rather than duplicate the efforts of the innovation community
5. Be inclusive, open, engaging, and transparent
6. Listen, inquire — Be quick and nimble, but do not sprint before you can walk (do your homework)
7. Be honest when things may not be working
8. Innovation is half the battle, capturing and sharing the experience is the other half
9. Innovation is not an end in itself; it is a process that aims at solving a particular problem — make sure to know what the problem is before trying to fix it
10. Be respectful and understanding of competing priorities and demands (departmental obligations, work-life balance) — both to communicate and appreciate limitations
11. Don’t give up when facing hard times and resistance
Google’s project Aristotle found that team culture is key in the success of a team. These principles certainly represent many of our values and serve as an example of one of the many things we are doing to build our team culture. The entrepreneurs decided that an important part of our job was to be as open as possible and share our experiences with others through many forms of media, such as our weekly blog, Twitter, and our monthly newsletter.
But we are also more than sharing, we are also looking for feedback. As you can see there is lots of work to be done with our principles, and this is where we are doing some crowd sourcing. Do you have ideas what you think should be changed, added, combined, etc. in our principles? I hope you do, because you can send us your comments at the bottom of this blog, on Twitter and by email!
