FountainBlue's January 11 Front Line Managers Online program, on the topic of 'One Plus One Makes Eleven'. Please join me in thanking our panelists.
as a Product Quality Leader - Lili Yeung, Workday
as an Engineering Leader - Sam Gupta, Pure Storage
We focused this month's conversation around building teams and helping them evolve from good to great. Below are some thought-provoking suggestions from our esteemed panelists:
Be compassionate and supportive while maintaining a high quality standard and inspiring participation and engagement.
Create a culture which values growth and learning, a safe place where failure leads to success.
Ensure that the tasks, role, and assignments are clear and in alignment with the organization.
Be metrics-driven, clear on what's being measured over what timeframe with clear rationale.
Integrate diverse perspectives and build creative and agile teams, committed to delivering exceptional results.
Encourage the Outliers, enabling them to succeed, but beware the Disruptors who can't commit and align when a decision has been made.
Establish clear and reasonable objectives and boundaries while modeling the way and rewarding success.
Make it easy to share and transfer knowledge, to help enable collaboration and resourcefulness.
Aim for delivering at the 80-90% level, because targeting 100% solutions may not be realistic and may not be worth the much increased investment of time and resources.
Focus on building a broad range of skill sets, not just deep expertise on specific skill sets.
Below are thoughts on how to embrace innovation opportunities with a high-performing team:
Welcome a combination of strategic and tactical skills within the team, and create a culture which values both perspectives.
Adopt a growth and partnership mindset which creates mutually-beneficial relationships and ecosystems within and across your organization and industry.
Be curious about solutions from adjacent markets and industries, in the context of how that might support the needs of your own customers.
Take chances; fail fast, fail forward and fail in new ways, on your path to innovation.
Collect detailed and specific information about problems and needs from customers and work with customers directly to design customized solutions.
Consider the market opportunity in delivering solutions for niche audience/niche problems.
The bottom line is that the work is challenging and demanding, but the rewards are great if we can work together and deliver exceptional results in alignment with a common purpose.