Ideas Make Money. So Make Time for Ideas.
We all know that as a manager you are strapped with a finite amount of time to perform so many activities in a day, week, or month. In this unstable economy most managers are doubling their efforts due to a shrinking team and limited resources. As costly as it may seem, you as the manager need to make time to brainstorm with your team and innovate your products, services, offers, processes and everything else. Otherwise, the value of your product or service stagnates and inherently loses value in the eyes of your customers.
Here are some ways to make brainstorming productive and manageable for you and your team:
Consider all ideas, initially – In order to get to the good ideas you must sift and sort through a multitude of bad ideas in order to uncover a nugget of innovative gold. Most of the time that nugget of gold was not considered to be anything more than a pebble within the sifter when first discussed. Over time the idea was polished into something of value. If you and your team didn’t take the time to go through this process, then perhaps the idea would never be realized.
Allocate time for brainstorming – There is a time investment for nearly everything you do, so why is brainstorming treated differently? If you are concerned about spending too much time brainstorming then there are two simple ways to reduce the amount of time you and your team spend brainstorming. First, have your team do some homework in advance by coming up with some ideas to discuss ahead of time, instead of waiting until the meeting to brainstorm. This will allow the discussion to eliminate some ideas off the bat, and others to be focused for refinement.
Second, give your team members the tools to properly brainstorm. If you read the Working Smarter post back in February entitled, “Why Communicate Visually,” then you will remember that people think and communicate in various ways. Take this into consideration and provide the tools necessary that allows all of your team members to properly capture their ideas. Give them a tool that allows them to capture their ideas visually, such as mind maps. Below is a mind map that I created while I was brainstorming ideas for posts for this blog.
Click here for a full-sized version of this image.
Evaluate everything, even what isn’t broken – Boy, think of all the wonderful things that would have never been discovered or improved if everyone thought “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it!” Just because something is working, doesn’t mean that it’s perfect. Managers need to challenge themselves, and challenge their teams to constantly evaluate everything all of the time to discover areas for potential improvement.
Give yourself and your team the ability, time, and tools to innovate by brainstorming. It is as critical as ever when you are strapped for time, not the other way around.
If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.
