Building an Innovative Team
When you hear the word innovation, a lot of people immediately think of technology. That’s not always the case though, innovation can be seen across all sectors. Whether its innovating a new product, changing the way you communicate with clients, or changing the process of how you do something.
All businesses and organizations of any size can benefit from workplace innovation. If your company or organization is looking to innovate within, it's important to have the right team in place. You need to have a variety of personalities on your team; this allows for people to look at things from different perspectives, question things, and offer different opinions. Innovation in the workplace is proven to lead to increased productivity, a greater innovation capacity, market resilience, overall business competitiveness, and ultimately helping to grow and improve your business or organization.
There are certain skills that are attributed to innovators. These skills are; associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting. Each of these skills can be associated with a personality, and for your team to be innovative you may want to make sure you have a couple of these personalities on your team! Here are five personality types that will help make your team as innovative as possible!
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The Builder: associated skill- associating A builder starts with one building block and keeps connecting more and more, before you know it they have built an entire house (or idea). Ideas are like building blocks, and the more you can collect the better chance you have of putting them together to make a successful idea! A builder on your team will collect many ideas from all different sources and use them to create a solid foundation for innovating. |
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The Reporter: associated skill- questioning Reporters are known for asking questions (like it’s their job!) They ask questions to understand how things work, why things are the way they are, and how they can be changed, just like an innovator would ask. They will provoke new thoughts/insights that others may not have thought about. Their queries frequently challenge the status quo and that is the very reason it is beneficial to have a reporter type on your team. |
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The Detective: associated skill- observing Detectives are often around but not always noticed. They are there sitting back and observing, carefully watching everything around them- customers, products, processes, competitors, etc. They can then use this information as insight to help when looking at new ways of doing things. |
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The Gardener: associated skill- networking Every innovative teams needs a member that builds relationships. When the gardener builds relationships they open themselves up to people with drastically different views of things, and people with diverse backgrounds and experiences. These people help them to cultivate new idea and nurture them as they develop. |
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The Scientist: associated skill- experimenting The scientist is focused on learning new things. They like to visit new places, try new things, look for new information, and ultimately experiment. They continually make hypotheses, test them, and learn from them. The scientist on your team will continue to explore the world both intellectually and experientially. |