Team management, communication, and collaboration are all essential elements of organizational success.

Episode 186: Team Management and Innovation with Thierry Picq

Thierry Picq discusses the key role of managers in team performance. This discussion leads to considering the deliberate role that managers must take in the context of innovation teams.

He specifies that the team manager works with five key ingredients, the "5 Cs":

• Common goal: the project, for example.
• Competencies: the skills of individuals to achieve what is expected.
• Coordination: rules, tools, and processes for working together.
• Clan: a sense of belonging, a shared identity.
• Cooperation: creating links between members.

The manager does not "do" but creates a favourable ground for performance and relies on processes to achieve it.

Innovation is based on a process.

To innovate, we must learn to make mistakes, co-create, and work with others. There is also leadership: knowing how to ask the right questions, how to inspire, and how to step aside.

Innovation, therefore, brings a style of management that is more inspirational and much less controlling.

Just as the success of innovation relies on a clear process for ideation, exploration, validation, and implementation, it also requires managing the team context.

These rules must allow the right to make mistakes, fail, and learn.

The manager plays a deliberate role in developing these favourable conditions.

Questions: Is your innovation process structured and predictable? How do you measure the success of your innovation process? How do your managers create a space that is conducive to innovation?

Listen to the French episode here: https://www.intelliaconsulting.com/episode186

Episode 184: Leadership and Communication: Decoding with Bernard Motulsky

The episode with Bernard Motulsky brings to the forefront the importance of communication.

Defining strategies and aiming for excellence and agility are good. However, successful implementation requires cohesive teams and coherent actions. This is where the impact of communication is essential.

Benard Montulsky tells us:

• A good leader must be a good communicator.
• Non-verbal is often more powerful than verbal.
• Measuring the impact of communication is essential.

"If by communicator we mean someone who knows whom he or she is addressing, who knows how to perform, who knows how to listen and understand his or her audience, who knows how to take the pulse of a group, then yes," a good leader must be an expert in communication.

The important thing is to know how to listen!

The message must be adapted to the audience. In terms of preparation and strategy, you have to keep it short to reach a large audience, but you can work longer with small groups.

We have frequently addressed the importance of communication in the podcast episodes. It is a key component for any manager to master.

Highlighting your ideas, convincing and inspiring require this mastery.

Questions: How are communication skills developed and reinforced for managers within your organization? Can you increase the performance of your teams through better communication skills?

Listen to the French episode here: https://www.intelliaconsulting.com/episode184

Episode 182: Positive Deviance, Agility and Leadership: The Keys to Innovating and Leading with Claude Emond

Claude Emond talks about "positive deviance" - the art of cultivating constructive differences - and how it can revolutionize your approach to management and innovation.

He mentions in particular that:

• Positive deviance allows you to question the established order and cultivate a constructive difference.
• Agility is about moving quickly in a constantly changing direction.
• The positive deviance method encourages the collective definition of problems.
• Collaborative culture promotes collective intelligence and agility.
• Co-creation makes it possible to mobilize localized intelligence.

Better exploring problems and solutions requires the contribution of the group and collective intelligence. We must ask ourselves whether it is possible to do better or differently. Thinking outside the box allows you to generate new solutions and opens the door to innovation.

As Claude Emond says: "the important thing is to create a sociological environment that allows participants to go in the same direction."

Once again, we find this notion of team and collaborative performance.

As a manager, it is about creating the right conditions for the success of the team and projects. This requires strong emotional maturity and a culture that values collaboration between the organization's stakeholders.

Questions: How does your organization deal with questioning? Is it possible to cultivate a constructive difference to seek new sources of innovation?

Listen to the French episode here: https://www.intelliaconsulting.com/episode182

Remember

Team management, communication, and collaboration are all essential elements of organizational success.

Financial and operational elements often monopolize maximum attention in organizations.

However, it is clear that the "softer" elements are just as important and represent an asset for organizations that master them.

What do you think?

Have a good week

Eric L’Heureux