One of the toughest jobs in an IT World is not Sales, Marketing or Technical development, it is the job to lead a team of Highly talented, creative team of technology innovators who can and will build innovative solutions for your organization thereby leading to financial benefits.
Technology innovators are people who are creative open thinkers who rely on their intuitions, logical thinking and creative ideas. Such people also need an environment of experimentation, failure and resources to perform their R&D.
In most cases, the leader leading such teams miss out on understanding the above needs and fail to lead the team, which either leads to failure to deliver and lose the innovative people.
There are 4 principles to keep in mind, when leading technical innovators, to ensure they get what they need to be innovative.
Let’s deep dive!
Trust
The first and fundamental principle to follow and keep in mind is to build and maintain the trust with you as a leader and amongst the team members. Anything else you try to inculcate into the team will not be fruitful without the trust.
Trust cannot be built by having visions and objectives, but driven by your decisions, are the decisions aligned towards team’s objective or for personal gain only. Are the decisions made are fair and transparent with the team. Transparency is critical when decisions are made is going to negatively impact the team or team members.
With Trust built and maintained, following below principles will give better results.
Attitude, Not Skills
It is not the skills that make you unique, it is the Attitude
When you are identifying the members for your team or finetuning existing team, the only criteria to choose is the attitude they bring in. With too many technologies, frameworks releases across, it is impossible to have all the skills required, but with right attitude of continuous learning, ability to accept challenge, and think out of box.
Discipline Instead of Speed
Speed Kills, Discipline Builds
When bringing in new initiatives or ideas into a team or building a product/platform, what ensure success is the discipline instead of speed.
Fail Together, Succeed Alone
The last but not the least principle is the about how success and failure is treated within the team and how you respond.
Typical team, tries to identify a individual person or instance when something negative is seen in the project, while saying “The team has done a great Job!” when a successful release is done, a deal is won or a positive comment from the customer.
Such response will not add much value to the members and the team , quickly forgotten in the busy schedule of moving to next deal or project.
Instead, to build a great team with collaborate, you need to ensure point out individual members when a success is seen, and when a failure / negative is seen, take responsibility as a team and address it as a team.
Even if you identify the root cause of a negative issue , it is important not to highlight in front of the team, but to do it privately.
Conclusion
When leading a team, especially a technical team, it is important to have basic principles to ensure trust, communication and collaboration is built to ensure the team focuses on the deal, project or product, instead of worrying about the risk of failure and how it would be picked up across the team and the leader.
