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5 Steps to Create Innovation With Your Team

Innovation is a team sport. It comes easier and faster when you work together. If you're going to create solutions to difficult problems or find new ways to exploit opportunities you'll need innovation. Here are the five steps to innovating with psychological safety on your team:

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1. Generate ideas to solve a problem or exploit an opportunity.

Focus your ideation on solving problems or exploiting specific opportunities. Allow free-flowing ideation that is agnostic to title, position, authority or status. Do not critique, edit, limit or disqualify any ideas. The more ideas you have the better.

2. Choose the best idea given your resources and constraints.

Once you have ideas you can introduce your constraints. Consider the resources, experience, and capability required to implement. Analyze and critique each one based on value, cost, time, and risk. Choose the one with the greatest overall potential. Let the best ideas win even if they are not your own.

3. Build fast, test, and iterate.

Immediately begin prototyping the best MVP (minimum viable product) you can in the shortest amount of time and for the least amount of cost. Iterate and test until you have a solution that clearly works. You may revisit steps one and two.

4. Sell to internal stakeholders.

Build a coalition among stakeholders to help you secure resources, expertise, and support to implement the solution. The more internal support you have the easier it will be for you to implement the solution at scale.

5. Implement your solution.

Implement the solution, refine and scale. Communicate proof sources to the organization demonstrating its impact based on value, cost, time, and risk. Celebrate your wins with your team and keep innovating.

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Lead With Influence, Not With Power

Lead as if you have no power. We are being asked to lead in increasingly-dynamic environments. Those who chase innovation will lead as if they have no power. Otherwise, your competitive advantage will expire faster than your adaptive capacity can keep pace.

Building Connection in a Remote Team

Today, teams are built differently. Remote work has changed the way we interact and connect with our colleagues. While team-building activities and personal moments can easily slip through the cracks of your living room couch, valuable connection isn’t off the table. With intentional effort, your remote team can feel just as connected as an in-office team. Here are some LeaderFactor tried-and-true methods of remote connection:

How Psychological Safety Cures Imposter Syndrome

Imposter syndrome. The all-too-common feeling of inadequacy that makes you doubt your successes and achievements. It occurs outside of the comfort zone and triggers a fear of exclusion that motivates you to work harder than necessary to prove your worth.

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