[Edit of June 20, 2020]
While the health crisis has affected many organizations, it is also an opportunity to reinvent themselves. Companies must become more agile and innovative, and they face the challenge of responding to their employees’ perceived need for meaning and well-being.
However, managers are at the forefront of transforming the company, in their ability to implement new working methods and enable collective innovation.
To achieve this, the management community must urgently consolidate certain activities and skills in order to foster innovation within the company. New skills, but which must become a priority for the management team. Agile manager.
What are these 12 essential activities and how can they be put into practice in concrete terms to promote Management innovation ?
1. Set an ambition for your team
Like a company, a team must be driven by a shared ambition. To find that ambition, the manager can rely on the techniques of Simon Sinek’s Golden Circles and his “Start With Why” Define the why, the reason for the team’s existence before the what, the activity of the team (what it does).
By defining the team’s ambition, the manager then gives meaning to all the actions the team undertakes. He or she participates in strengthen the sense of belonging to the team and to the company’s mission.
2. Form a complementary team
Stop, stop recruiting clones! To foster creativity within your team, recruit complementary, or even unique, profiles—profiles that challenge your ways of working and will take you out of your comfort zone.
3. Develop the skills of his team
This is the daily task of the manager. He must transmit both his own knowledge and the knowledge of the company. Above all, he ensures that the skills of his team are up to date, and if necessary, he offers appropriate training. This is a genuine coaching approach that the manager must adopt to develop the skills of his team.
4. Doing something feedback in everyday life
To enable his teams to move forward, the manager must provide them with a clear direction. feedback Everyday. Whether it is positive or negative, that is not the issue: it must first and foremost be honest in order to bring the team onto a path of progress. To do this, the manager must be in an attitude of listening to his or her employees.
The feedback is a key skill for managers to engage their teams. Constructive, he will help the teams become more autonomous. Honest, the transparency of the feedback will participate in developing a sense of belonging to the company.
In the white paper “How to start a Feedback Revolution” written by the agency Flashbrand, There we can read: “Millennials prefer to see their manager as a coach who gives them continuous feedback and helps them develop personally”.
5. Promote autonomy
In his book “Management 3.0”, Jurgen Appelo defines autonomy as the ability to give your teams the latitude to make choices. Encouraging the autonomy of your employees is to give them the ability to make choices. But beware: autonomy is not linear. It depends on the projects and you need to be able to adapt the degree of autonomy given to your teams according to the situations. Above all, it is important to set a framework in advance of a project if you don’t want to end up in the position of having to exert control afterwards.
6. Create rituals with your team
The organization of rituals allows us to work on the sense of belonging to the team. The creation of rituals is inspired by agile methods: they allow time to be saved and collaborative work to be developed by giving each member of the team the opportunity to know where the other team members are on a project. If someone has difficulties, they can share them with the team during these rituals, which take the form of debriefs, needs assessments, daily 15-minute meetings or more relaxed moments.
Testimony Sosh
Towards a new management culture to accelerate transformation
7. Dynamizing with agile techniques
Be inspired by Agile methods to energize your meetings and make them more effective by organizing sessions of creativity and ideation instead of the eternal repetition of meetings. brainstorming. In everyday life, when a problem arises, try to invoke agile techniques to bring up new ideas: they will allow you to solve your problems faster.
In meetings, the manager must adopt a leadership style a posture of facilitator rather than leader: he organizes, sets the rules of the game and the objectives, but does not propose the ideas. It is the team that animates the meeting.
Our Certifying training in agile methods It allows you to master the essentials of agile practices in 10 days.
8. Promoting initiative and entrepreneurship
…by giving the right to make mistakes! The manager must create a climate of trust with his team so that initiatives can emerge. Specific formats can be organized by the managers to encourage the emergence of everyone’s ideas, such as organizing an internal hackathon.
9. Encourage the creativity of his team
Once the right to error is granted, creativity can take place within the team: creativity that is useful to the user experience and to the reflection on new ideas. business models. Managers can undergo training in the method of Design Thinking to more easily stimulate this creativity within their team.
10. Building a network within the company
We are in the age of influence: it is now essential to involve all your employees in your project. The more you build your network within your company, the more likely your project will be accepted by the hierarchy. You must then master some communication rules in order to succeed. convince your employees to join your project.
11. Be effective in oral and written communication
Be effective both orally and in writing! We live in a culture of speed. Emails are no longer read: you have to be quick. master the art of synthesis to convey your ideas and projects, but also to onboard your teams. Mastering the pitch will serve you both with your team and with your clients and your hierarchy.
12. Accompanying the professional career
Career progression is one of the most important selection criteria for employees. millennials in their job search. They want to develop their skills within the company, especially those that will enable them to achieve their “dream job”.
Managers therefore play a key role in developing the skills of their teams: they must know the aspirations of each individual in order to give them the means to achieve them by offering them appropriate support.
Practical advice