How do I encourage more ‘change agent’ behaviours in my team?
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We now live in a world where change is continuous, and we are all encouraged to be change agents so how do we develop ourselves and our teams to achieve this? By scoping out the role and value of continuous improvements and incremental change and encouraging continuous feedback and failure!
How curious are your team? Do you encourage them to question and review the work undertaken: to visit customers to see how well products or services meet their needs, to conduct surveys or run ‘secret shopper’ events, or visit other sites or teams your team hands-off work to, or to examine the stats on failures, returns and faults? Questioning the status quo to see how the work your team produces can be improved and developed is a great starting place for everyone.
What continuous feedback loops can your team put in place to capture this kind of data and insight on a regular basis? There may be any number of ideas so why not test them out and see which is most effective? Encourage openness and a culture of ‘what if…?’ where everyone can benefit from re-examining and questioning what is done and how.
A ‘no blame’ culture is vital to continuous improvement and incremental change. All mistakes are opportunities to learn – for everyone. In fact, scientific and manufacturing advances are often based entirely on this premise! Dyson developed 5,127 prototypes before he believed the new technology was ready to go into his vacuum cleaner. You can see that as 5,127 failures or 5,127 opportunities to learn! Guess which view Dyson takes! When Unilever found the nozzles used to produce washing powder were clogging too often too quickly it took 449 ‘failures’ before a type of nozzle was developed which solved the problem and far outperformed the original.
If your team are highly analytical, they may struggle with encouraging or supporting new ideas and changes – even small ones – so use pilot studies to test out ideas alongside your business as usual processes so change can be evaluated systematically. Not only is this safer but it also provides more opportunities to learn. New start-up businesses are more successful when they launch ‘good-enough’ services and products and deliberately use these to learn more about what the customer wants and needs. This is especially true for new services people don’t know they need or want – until they experience it! It reduces start-up costs and failures are cheaper as the ‘perfect’ solution hasn’t been laboriously designed beforehand only to fail spectacularly like Clive Sinclair’s C5 (yes, I’m really showing my age now but google it – it’s was a small one-person electric battery ‘car’).
Encourage external awareness in the team: get them out to conferences, seminars, product launches, networking events, industry sector groups, all with the aim of learning about what others are working on, interested in and where new thinking and developments are heading. Get them to feedback to the team what they’ve learnt, heard, discussed and seen so everyone benefits.
Finally, don’t forget our old friend Brainstorming. Use team meetings to discuss issues and challenges together by brainstorming new ideas and thoughts about how you might address these. Silent brainstorming is great for teams with a mix of extrovert and introvert thinkers and having got out new ideas you can then open the floor to discussion, debate and criticism. Just lay some ground rules around language and criticising the ideas, not the person. Critical feedback spurs more discussion and will give you sounder ideas to test out for further feedback and review.
TAKE AWAY
We can’t all be innovators, but we can all be change agents. Encouraging your team to question everything, to seek continuous feedback, to test out new ideas and approaches in pilot studies, be more externally aware and to see failure as an opportunity to learn will be a great place to start.