- As a leader of a team it's often tempting
to focus on how the team is doing,
are they getting things done, do they seem
to be collaborating well, is the work they are
producing clear?
It's harder to reflect on yourself, and to dig into
how you impact the team.
Understanding the skills of a leader
in an effective, creative problem-solving environment
and your own relationship with those skills
is crucial to developing your own leadership.
So design thinking is making-based
problem solving by collaborative teams
working from a shared mindset that's
experimental, human centered and optimistic.
That's what you're seeking to foster in your teams.
So what skills do you need to help that happen?
At the very highest level, I think you need
two things.
Confidence in your own judgment,
so that you don't need to seek outside security
in an answer or the one solution.
With this confidence, you allow and encourage
optimism of the team, and you give them
the freedom to experiment.
This confidence in your own judgment
is, however, quite different from being sure
you're always right.
A leader who approaches ambiguity
with an instinct to control and shut down
exploration will struggle.
And it's also very different from needing
validation for every decision.
There is a time in each iteration of thinking
to learn from what's being made, but it's
the leader's responsibility to be confident
in the re-framing of the problem from
what we've learned.
The second skill is the ability to be alert and present
in what is going on with the team.
When you're with the team, if you're
worried about the next meeting, the budget
or how the team is thinking about you,
you aren't in the thinking with them.
As a leader, you need to be in it,
asking "Why".
Helping to frame the problem and encouraging
those "What if" questions.
If you have this confidence in your own judgments
and you are present with the team, you'll find
you're much better able to address ambiguity
and to focus the team's energy on
experimentation and making.
Over the next week, observe yourself at work
or in any project you care a lot about
where significant unknowns exist.
Note when you're in the flow, that moment
where things are just working and you've
lost track of time and you're deep
in the making.
And note when you're feeling stressed,
worried or controlling.
Open the link below where I've shared
an example of how I've reacted to a
stressful moment, and I'd love you to
join in the conversation.