A Time to Innovate
“A time to laugh... and a time to weep. A time to mourn... and there is a time to dance. And there was a time for this law, but not anymore. See, this is our time to dance.” Ren McCormack, as played by Kevin Bacon, Footloose.
Let’s start with an odd fact that I learned in the research for this post. The film Footloose was based on a true story. You heard me correctly. There was actually a town that had a law banning dancing for ninety years and then a bunch of high school kids challenged the law and got it changed so that they could have a prom. Now, dancing has absolutely nothing to do with this blog but that was too good of a nugget not to share it.
Today we are going to talk about how sometimes a shakeup in the status quo, even a negative one, can be the key to innovation. As per usual, I will start with some backstory.
At a previous job where I was leading a team of technical people, we had been experiencing significant growth both as a company and as a team. Our team’s executive leader was also a very technical person and understood the cost of building a team like mine. He was very keen to let us grow the team as long as we could justify the need for it. I was able to justify adding several team members in a very short amount of time, mostly by taking over responsibilities from other teams or creating new processes to fill in gaps. Things were going pretty well.
That was until two events happened in rapid succession that completely changed the way my team was moving forward. First, my boss moved on and joined another company, Second, our company decided to tighten our budgets as our industry slowed down. That meant no more growth for my team in the foreseeable future.
Here was the issue. We had created a whole lot of new work and hadn’t yet back filled the positions needed to support it. What happened next is probably pretty obvious. Despite my best efforts as a leader, and my team’s best efforts in their areas, we started to fall behind. At first it wasn’t huge issue, as we just reset our expectations of what we could complete in a given time frame. But as more work kept coming in and big changes kept occuring, we fell further and further behind.
I started having to make tough calls about what we would prioritize and to be frank, several times I didn’t even have an choice in the matter. Instead, the biggest fire of any given day determined what we would work on. I knew the sad truth that once a team reached the point of only focusing fixing the biggest emergency every day, a cascade of predictable negative outcomes was likely to follow.
And that’s exactly what started to occur. The team members became overworked and I became more and more stressed. Truthfully, we still did have fun together. We used our teams meetings as a space to not just talk about work but also to play games and stay connected to one another in a positive way. For that reason, the team was able to stay bonded as a cohesive group and still enjoy working together. I considered that a big win with the circumstances that we faced.
The bigger issue was we stopped innovating. Those constraints forced us to leave the common practices that had worked so well for us in the past. Things like using new skills to rework old processes to ensure they were not only standardized but also as efficient as possible.
I was trying some different ideas to help the team move forward and several of the ideas worked in the short term. But the real thing that helped was when one of the team members came to me with an idea to give people on the team a small amount of time each week to ignore the fires and innovate around other projects.
I loved that idea and with their blessing, I moved forward to create something we called Innovation Time. What it boiled down to was that each team member was required to take four hours per week where they weren’t allowed to focus on any of the top priorities. Instead, they could choose to focus on anything else that they believed would benefit the team or the company.
What surprised me most about this idea was how much my team pushed back at first. They felt, rightly so, that they didn’t have the time to spare to work on less critical ideas. I explained that the lack of time was a primary reason to do this. But reflecting back, I completely understand where they were coming from. My team was filled with amazingly talented people who were much smarter than me and yet they still weren’t able to see the rut from which they needed to climb their way out.
And that makes sense because when everything is an emergency and you can’t keep up, it’s hard to focus on the big picture. That’s where you come in as a leader. You have the best chance of being able to see the big picture from your position overseeing the team. The biggest trick was of course getting buy in from the team. I was asking them to do something that seemed in direct competition with the priorities given by the executives. Here’s how I approached it.
Admitting the contradiction: I started by calling out the fact that I knew we had a lot of fires to put out, but I believed that over time it would help us complete the assigned tasks more effectively.
Removing fear: I promised the team that if the Innovation Time got stopped them from making a deadline, that I would take the blame for that and they wouldn’t have any repercussions.
Eliminating permanency: I also promised that we were only giving this a trial run and if it truly didn’t work, we would drop it and move on to something new.
What’s in it for them: I reminded the team that this allowed them to work on ideas which could in turn save them a lot of time in the future and also meant that they would have a break from the monotonous emergency work.
Here’s the cool thing about the steps I mentioned above. They can be applied to any new idea you are bringing to your team that may appear to conflict with the current goals. This is especially true in time where resources are constrained. For me, I worked in a industry where a slow down could mean five to seven years of constraints, and I knew that the work my team supported couldn’t possibly survive that long without innovating. Any team or company that fails to innovate will eventually become obsolete — and there’s a fair chance they won’t ever come back from that.
It’s on us as leaders to help ensure that we are forward thinking enough to not allow that to happen. For the record, my team did learn to value the Innovation Time. Even if they hadn’t, they still understood that the reason I was making those decisions was because I cared and wanted them to succeed.
Sometimes knowing that your boss has your back and your best interests in mind is all you need. So go out there and give it a try. Maybe Innovation Time isn’t for your team specifically, but I still encourage you to allow your team to try new ideas!
-Jason