Leading Innovative Teams: Evolving from High-Performing Teams to Ensembles
Inspire and Guide
As a leader, your role is to inspire and guide your team towards success. In an operational work environment, the focus is on executing tasks and driving results through a hierarchy. However, the leader’s role is different in an innovative work environment. The leader must create an environment that fosters creativity, collaboration, and ingenuity.
Leaders must focus on building collaborative ensembles rather than high-performing teams to achieve this innovative environment. The book The Five Principles of Performance Thinking by Dr. Mark Powell and Jonathan Gifford describes an ensemble as a high-performing team with an additional creative dimension. In other words, it’s a culture of collaborative ensembles who have “group intelligence.” They generate ideas that no single member would have thought of on their own, know their purpose, and can tell a story that conveys something meaningful at an intellectual and emotional level about the company or a product.
To lead an ensemble, the leader must be involved in creating and delivering performance but not the performance itself. The leader will determine challenges or problems to solve, guide the ensemble through the process, and remove hierarchy so everyone is equal for the task. However, they are not ‘in charge’ and do not provide solutions to the challenges.
Tips to Building Ensembles
Here are some steps to take to build ensembles:
- Create a Culture of Collaboration: The first step in building a collaborative ensemble is encouraging your team members to work together, share ideas, and achieve a common goal.
- Foster Creativity: To foster creativity, you must create an environment that allows your team members to think outside the box. Provide them the freedom to experiment and try new things without fear of failure.
- Encourage Risk-Taking: Nurturing a cohesive ensemble requires motivating team members to embrace risks. You must encourage them to experiment and try new things.
- Embrace Failure: Failure is essential to the creative process. As a leader, you must embrace failure and encourage your team members to learn from their mistakes.
- Be a Mentor: As a leader of your ensemble, you must mentor your team members. Provide them with guidance and support to help them develop their skills and abilities.
- Remove Hierarchy: To build a collaborative ensemble, you must remove hierarchy. You must create an environment where everyone’s ideas have equal value and everyone has a voice.
- Focus on the Long Term: To ensure your team is heading in the right direction, it is essential to focus on long-term goals clearly. This helps put short-term successes and failures into perspective.
- Maintain Creative Tension: To build a united ensemble, you must maintain a level of creative tension as a leader. You must avoid “keeping things running smoothly” by allowing play, vigorous debate, experimentation, and the risks of unthinkable ideas and options. You must also support them by helping them choose the best implementation ideas.
Building an ensemble is about creating a collaborative culture, fostering creativity, and encouraging risk-taking. As a leader, you must mentor your team members, remove hierarchy, and maintain creative tension. By taking these steps, you can build a collaborative ensemble that generates ideas no member would have thought of and achieve success through collaboration and innovation.
