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Innovation Teams – Categorized by Behavior

I like to categorize teams based on predominant behavior rather than function in order to highlight helpful or unhelpful behaviors for an organization. Below are three common types of R&D/ Innovation teams.

  1. The Siloed Team

  2. The Collaborative Team

  3. The Managed Team

The siloed team has strong technical contributors, they are very skilled technically, they are actively inventing and learning.  The siloed team tends to be competitive internally, the technical contributors hold back their insights and are reluctant to share what they know and what they plan.  This is both a strength and weakness, a strength because it often increases the quality of the science done by the team,  yet it is a weakness for the company because internal collaboration would significantly speed up time to market.

The behaviors of most in the siloed team is a product of both team members disposition and management’s promotion criteria.  The siloed team tends to have learning curves that move with the ability of the individual contributors. Managers often later compile learnings (learnings that are shared up) and then make business decisions. 

The collaborative team is characterized by team members who do not mind sharing what they are learning and sharing credit for team progress.  The behavior of the collaborative team is mostly result of the team members level of maturity and the ability of the managers who oversee it. The collaborative team learns the fastest for the company and ‘get to the point’ of new innovations as fast as possible.

The managed team is the third type of team. The managed team works well with their leadership and enjoys communicating up.  The meanaged team is open to sharing credit and the individuals on the team do not mind making their manager successful. A weakness of this team may be that those who are very strong technically may dislike this type of team and avoid it also corporate bureaucracies can sometimes thrive.

The goal of any science and engineering innovation team is to learn quickly and ‘get to the point’ to where new innovations thrive for the company or university and get there as fast as possible.  The collaborative team typically gets there the fastest. The siloed team can repeatedly learn the same things over again because they don’t take the time to learn from one another competing for that next promotion or award.

The biggest harm created by the siloed team is time wasted, time to market is the key to new innovations for a company.  The ability of an R&D organization to get from siloed to collaborative will have a large impact on how successful the company or university department will be over time, some may never get there and are simply wasting money, they may be the most intellectually talent people around but they are still wasting money.

Do you have tips for making a team less siloed?

I have decided to ignore all comments on this blog due to excessive amounts of spam so please tweet comments to @Colliers2 or email me directly at colliersengineering@gmail.com,

Adam Collier

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Increase Your Collaboration

Collaboration is critical to innovating successfully. Working within any sector no two employees are the same, each has a unique set of skills and knowledge.  Whether it be skill with understanding physical mechanisms and designing complex experiments or in-depth knowledge about a supply chains.  A company’s greatest asset is the knowledge lying within its employees.  Monetizing this growing and diverse knowledge base can occur faster and more complete by connecting all of this knowledge. 

poster session

Connecting the knowledge that lies within the heads of our employees can occur easiest through collaboration.

According to Miriam Webster the definition of collaboration is:

: to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavors
 
I think that ’employees helping employees’ summarizes well the concept of collaboration any business related topic should be considered ‘intellectual endeavors’.
 
This is all well and good but we can not ignore the fact that collaboration does not always come easily. I have worked for almost 20 years and with dozens of R&D scientists, engineers and technicians through the years and have never met one that always enjoys collaborating. There are good reasons that we do not want to collaborate, however I think the biggest reason is the need to get credit  for our work, we need credit for our work if we are to enjoy career growth.
 
Why should I share my latest ideas, insights and learnings with people who will then pitch them to management and take credit?
 
This is the number one obstacle to collaboration and I believe is the number one hindrance to speeding up R&D and innovation.
 
This credit issue is not always easy to talk about, it is like the elephant in the room, it is not related to technical skill or intelligence but is a behavioral management issue, it is an organizational health issue, we feel selfish to admit that we want credit, we feel selfish to say ” why should I work with him or help him, when I wont get any credit?”  But the truth is most of us feel that way, most of us realize we need credit, we need managers to recognize and give us credit if we are to go anywhere in our career. Those heavily promoted are almost always skilled at getting credit for their own and/ or other people’s work.
 
Imagine what we could do together if it did not matter who got the credit.
 
Below are three ways I think that we can increase collaboration within large innovation centered organizations:
  1. Design and enforce a corporate-wide fair distribution of credit, being mindful and cautions of the type of people who you are promoting, don’t allow credit stealing, don’t allow champions at politicking to dominate the culture, remember we get more of what we promote, for the good or for the bad. Promote collaborators, promote teachers, promote maturity in your workforce not extreme loyalty.
  2. Employ social collaboration tools, software for social collaboration is growing rapidly, these tools will only become more widespread and I believe should be adopted as soon as possible.
  3. Build an indexed storehouse of corporate knowledge of summarized reports and IP.  Knowledge management and access is critical to minimize re-learning, parallel learning and total loss of learnings to email and overworked managers.

 What else hinders collaboration within organizations?

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Competency is Critical

Good Leader Bad Manager

Have you ever wondered what makes a great manager? It is more than leadership skill, I know of several good leaders who make ineffective managers. There are also effective managers who don’t seem to be strong leaders. What can explain this discrepancy? How could a strong leader not manage well? I think that competency makes all the difference in high-tech R&D leadership.

In the field of high-tech R&D an effective manager needs to be competent in their field. The level of competence needed for effective management is often underestimated. Many think strong leaders will lead well wherever they are. If they are trained in management then they will lead well even if they are not competent in their field. Project leadership teacher say one does not necessarily need to understand the science in depth to lead a technical project. I believe this is often not the case.

“Competence is possessing skill and knowledge that allows us to do something successfully. It also describes the ability to apply prior experience to new situations with good effect. Our competency usually increases over time as we acquire more information and ability through inquiry, observation, and participation…” –  www.wisdomcommons.org

High Tech Competence

Most R&D projects require high-tech competence beyond the average person. Compared to running a retail business or marketing products or managing a construction project, high-tech competence is difficult to find. Therefore managers of these projects must be willing and able to learn from his/her scientists. Even be able and willing to work as a scientist in order to gain the necessary competency to manage.

Often the employees who are highly competent in science don’t make great managers because they are not interested in management. They became scientists because that’s what they wanted to do, they love science and love inventing. Few want to move into the stressful field of management? As a result many scientists are not accustomed to making difficult decisions under pressure.

But for those brave enough to venture into management I think there are at least three things we can do to prepare ourselves to manage R&D projects.

  1. Pursue competence through study and research, don’t take the shallow expert in everything approach, go deep into whatever you are working on.
  2. Always be in the habit of learning from your own experiments or other scientist’s work?
  3. Become decisive, develop the habit of making decisions and correcting bad decisions, break through the fear of making bad decisions.

Have you ever noticed a strong leader who is a lousy manager? and was competence part of the problem?

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