The secret sauce: how to build an innovation team?
By: Jason Lawson
I’ve spent the better part of the last five years building and developing teams focused on research, data, partnerships, and innovation. I’m the Director of Experimentation and Partnerships in TBS-OCHRO, a relatively new team whose goal is to tackle wicked, complex problems and provide robust, evidenced-based solutions on how to solve them.
This is now my second time building an innovative team from scratch. In both cases, I can proudly say that I built teams with some of the most competent, passionate, and dedicated — IMPRESSIVE — public servants. These people are the vanguard for positive change and are effective in driving it. Bringing these people together and watching the magic that unfolds is very much part of the positive change.
Why am I sharing this? Innovation teams help us to keep up. Sharing what I’ve learned and seen could help others find the right ingredients to build their own team of innovators, and when that happens, Canadians win.
These teams start with a strong leadership team that is anchored on values and principles that create time, space, and trust for employees to use their knowledge and expertise. In other words, don’t hire specialists and experts if you don’t intend to trust that expertise, give them the space to flex their specialist muscles, and invest the time and resources into ensuring their success. Strong leadership also acknowledges the complexity and the challenge wicked problems while having the courage not to shy away from them. The more aligned leadership is on these values, principles, and most importantly, actions, the more it will result in an attractive environment ripe for incubating innovators and their ideas.
Once you’ve set the stage, it’s about building the actual team and if you’re looking to foster innovation, diversity is key. I mean diversity in the broadest sense of the word — cultures, education, experiences (professional and personal), and personality. Our current team has expertise in behavioural science, human-centred design, quantitative and qualitative research, policy, partnerships, and communications. The diversity in skills and knowledge on the team gives us not only many tools to use for the complex problems we face, but we’re learning that we can achieve even more impressive feats by using these tools together and are finding out how they complement each other.
It’s cliche, but I really do believe we need to move away from command and control, rules-based environment towards one anchored on principles and outcomes. In other words, here are the values and principles by which we live and here’s where we need to go. Your team, the experts, will guide HOW we get there. Also, while those principles and values must be shared and to a certain extent co-created, I take on a lot of responsibility as a leader to set out at least the minimum/baseline.
The diverse skills and knowledge build the foundation, but innovation will really be born out of constructive challenges, critique, and dialogue that only a diversity of lived experience and personalities can truly provide. It’s the complementarity of these people, their knowledge and their lived experience that sparks change and innovation.
There are certainly many ways to build a team and create an environment where people can thrive and consequently, where innovation happens — I’ve gone through what has worked for me. I would love to hear your thoughts, including if you feel this was useful and how you might apply it, in the comments. If comments aren’t your thing — reach out! I’d love to chat.
To read in French click here: experimentationrh.medium.com
You can find out more about us on our wiki: HR Experimentation — wiki (gccollab.ca)
