As an entrepreneur one of the traits that we all are blessed with is to simplify , to see a situation from a different perspective and have an undying faith that the story will unfold as you have it in your imagination. However the journey of manifestation of your imagination to the real world is a journey of a lifetime. Each time something of your imagination has become real , your imagination is already thinking of a new virtual world.
During this journey one of the key thing is to ability to innovate – which probably comes naturally to many of us as we are constantly imagining where we want to go.
There will come a time where your imagination and your innovation is not enough to keep up the pace of growth because you now have a team and then they have a team.
Faced with this issue in my organization. I realized as an entrepreneur I need to do 2 critical things with my second in commands to make innovation happen from team.
First – discuss elaborately about the vision I have about where we are headed. [ sounds too obvious but trust me we assume everyone in team knows about your vision , do a reality check ]
Second – Define innovation for our business.
Will leave the first bit for some other time. But the second point is what made me write this post.
We all use and abuse the word innovation and we want innovation and honestly was not even sure if I was using the right word to describe to my colleagues of what is it that I am expecting from them.
And In an attempt to clarify what I mean I said the following to my team :
For us in Tekno Point innovation means to discover new ways that
1. Save Time / Save Money
2. Empower yourself , team , customers , vendors.
Examples :
1 ] One of the issues which constantly would eat up my time was getting changes in forms done on our website. Since we highly rely on web leads , small change in form could mean more business for us. But getting changes in forms meant a long cycle of to and fro with development team and honestly for a developer creating a form is not exciting at all. So I started hunting for a solution and a form creation service called wufoo came to my rescue. I think I would have saved hundreds of hours of development time and stress related to it.
2] In 2004 in order to survive I got into selling domains and hosting service. It would bring in regular money enough to help me pay my rent and allow me to wait for my idea to take shape. Ended up creating 300 customers and a descent amount of renewals. But meanwhile my idea manifested into reality and I stopped taking new customers in 2006. Trained a very junior person to handle renewals and life moved on. But over the period of time realized lot of time and energy of my senior folks is going into servicing expectations of this customers. In 2011 we took a call to sell the business to a trusted company whose core business is Domains and Hosting. Customers are happy and my team no longer has to spend time explaining people how to add new email accounts etc.
I mention this example basically to make you ask yourself that are you and your team spending energy on things that is not related to your core ? If you did something as a stop gap, are you still holding on to it after it has served its purpose ? If yes , think and let go – free up the energy and direct it towards your vision.
3] Moved website from static HTML to a complete CMS driven application where every element of the website is customizable and scalable. Saves time and has empowered us to constantly improvise on our website in less time .
4] Added a certification portal which will be used to conduct tests and also empower students to take practice tests related to certification courses they do with us. This is being created in a way that it empowers our instructors to add questions and monitor performance of our students.
5] Added a placement portal which is under development. This will empower us and organizations to work with each other in making pre-trained resources available to them in shortest possible time.
6] Created an app for our consulting business which will help our clients to hire our consultants on demand with few clicks
Many more small and big things but I hope you get the point.
Being genuinely interested to empower others will lead to amazing innovations in how you do your business.
So now I and my team have a better framework and I think I have bridged the gap of making innovation happen from team members.
Hope this helps give you an idea on how you can help your team members contribute to your journey and set the ball rolling for making innovation happen.
Image Source: community.ca.com / geraldheralds.com