Leading innovation in teams
At the end of last year, I’ve taken up an art hobby. I’ve been painting! I never really considered myself artistic. Like most people, I’ve just relegated that to the artists and considered my amateur status a reason to not even bother trying. I still struggle a lot with giving it a go- I see beautiful sketches on Instagram and spend a considerable amount of time planning it out in my head before I pick up the paintbrush. Once I do, I get frustrated easily that a sketch isn’t coming as easily or naturally to me and end up abandoning ship quickly.
What’s helped me a lot is painting with my friend. She is incredibly talented, and I often ask her questions about technique and her response often sounds like, “try it out, see what happens, trust your instincts”. I wrestle with that because I just don’t know that I have instincts when it comes to such a new hobby. The more she encourages me though, the more I’ve started to give myself permission to try things out, and permission to fail.
So much of my work involves encouraging teams to break things down into experiments, to take a test and learn approach. Yet when I pick up the paintbrush, that mindset somehow seems to vanish. This experience has helped me to appreciate just how deeply ingrained perfectionism is, both in me personally and also in our workplaces. Our educational experiences and work experiences all We are primed for finished products, neat packaging, complete thoughts, final plans, fully formed ideas.
That serves us fine when we were dealing with predictable situations and problems with knowable solutions. But more and more of our work is falling in the uncertain and complex terrain which requires us to be willing to try things, fail fast, learn and evolve. Leaders play a crucial role in fostering environments where it’s safe to fail.
I’ve sometimes seen leaders take up the role of unrelenting cheerleaders- they will keep encouraging and supporting their team no matter what. The problem is, cheering someone on when they’re moving in the wrong direction or failing to offer productive feedback does not create psychological safety. Really that’s people pleasing. Making it genuinely safe to fail requires far more consideration and deliberate support.
So how can leaders foster safe to fail environments?
Define the objective. Without a clear north star and alignment around it, your team may end up failing without purpose. The whole point of making it safe to fail is to learn quickly and keep pivoting until we hit the mark. Without knowing what that mark is, your team may just be flailing.
Define the guardrails. A study by landscape architects explored how children responded to a playground with and without a fence. Surprisingly, the children huddled close to the teacher in the playground without a fence and felt safer to explore farther and go further out in a playground with a fence. Boundaries are incredibly supportive, regardless of age. Guardrails and parameters tell us how far to push, what to trade off, etc. Making guardrails explicit helps people understand the parameters of what is and isn’t safe to try.
Share and invite feedback early and often. This is a tough mindset change in a culture that privileges finished products. As a leader, sharing thoughtful and specific feedback regularly can be a real gamechanger for people. In addition, when you let people in on your own work in progress and ask for feedback, you build trust and help your team exercise their feedback muscle.
Coach. It may be easier to define the solutions and tell people what to do, rather than take the time to coach them through their process. But in the long run, leaders who coach build capability and empower their team. What’s more, the team may find better and faster solutions sometimes. That’s a great thing!
Set clear behavioural agreements, together. Hold your team accountable for showing up and behaving in line with your team agreements. When behavioural agreements slip and go unaccounted for, it affects the psychological safety of the whole and it becomes harder for the team to take risks and try things.
Reward the learning. Recognise and celebrate your team’s learning, not just their success and not just their effort. Share direct feedback and celebrate growth.
One of the hallmarks of corporate culture has been perfectionism. We have to dress a certain way, speak a certain way, work for a defined set of hours, communicate a certain way, etc. That’s not all bad or wrong, there are benefits and conveniences that arise from that. But it feels like we are in the midst of reimagining the world of work, what it would look like if we stopped treating people like robots and started treating them like humans. It’s an act of revolution to show our humanity, to share imperfect work, to privilege learning over success, to consider how we win together. When I think about my journey with art, it’s so important to keep failing and trying because that’s par for the course when you’re trying to create something new. If I’m just trying to recreate something that already exists, technique may be enough. But to be bold and champion new solutions, new ideas, new products, we have to be willing to fail a lot along the way and we have to foster spaces where we can fail and learn together.
