Digital Dealer - August 2018 - 20

D E A L E R OP S & M ANAGEM ENT: L e a d e rshi p

By Adriana Puente
Associate, The Rawls Group

Disciplined
Innovation
How do you develop a
creative culture in your
company? Your company
doesn't need to have ping
pong tables or napping
pods to entice creativity, But
your team does need to
have an open mind and
view innovation as an
experiment and not take
failure personally.
Your company may have
a cultivated "best practices"
to lean on, but these can
also act as roadblocks to
the future. An owner's view
of how the past has affected
the present and dictates
future, influences key leaders. This shapes culture,
impacts the organization's
ability to plan strategically,
and optimize opportunities
in the marketplace.
Here are five ways you
can identify areas where
you may be "stuck," as well
as strategies to encourage
leaders to think innovatively
to drive the bottom line, and
create buy-in when implementing new ideas.

1. THE PARADIGM
QUESTION. How do you

generate ideas and empower your people to think creatively? Consider starting
with the paradigm question:
"If we could do things different to streamline a process,
generate more revenue, or
increase productivity what
they would be?"
20

AUGUST 2018

If your team is new to
brainstorming or no one
is piping up with ideas, an
exercise that encourages
"silent brainstorming" may
be the best strategy to
get the ideas flowing. To
facilitate silent brainstorming, ask your team to pull
out a piece of paper and
write down four or five
things related to the question. Then ask each team
member to pass their paper
to the right and add one or
two things to the list. Keep
repeating this activity until
the paper ends up back at
the originators position. Go
around the room and ask
each team member to read
their paper and begin to list
the ideas on a whiteboard
or flip chart and watch the
discussion begin.
Mixing up teams will also
inject a dose of creativity.
Everyone has the same
goal, to make the company
as successful as possible.
But does everyone know
what their colleagues do or
what challenges they face
in their perspective areas
of the business? Who buys
your product/service? Why?
What is the consumer's
biggest challenge with the
current product/service?
What is your company's
challenge? This is the time
to get creative.
2. NARROWING FIELD

D I G I TA L D E A L E R . C O M

OF FOCUS. Often when we
ask our people for ideas, it
might feel like they took the
crayon way out of the lines,
missed the paper all together and are just creating a
big mess. So, a question
we often get is "How do we
encourage creativity while
at the same time keeping it
focused. The quick answer
is to provide guidelines,
they can color outside the
lines, but keep certain
criteria in mind. Critical to
providing guidelines are a
defined mission, vision, values and guiding principles.
To keep your people
focused, provide them the
tools to be creative, which
will come from the mission
statement. If you don't
have a well-defined or
engrained mission statement in your organization,
start there. The mission
statement is key to your
ability to lead your people
in the direction you/and the
organization want to go.

3. HOW TO KNOW IF
YOU ARE STUCK IN
THE BEST PRACTICES
RUT. With all the creative

juices flowing your team
is bound to hit a wall. To
break through the wall ask
yourselves the following:
 What is working?
 What is not working?
 What are we learning?
 What can we do

differently to become more
effective?
These four questions will
help you and your team
to grow and challenge the
status quo.
4. PRIORITIES. Another outcome of a creative
environment is the slew of
great ideas. So, how do you
prioritize strategies? When
we work with clients in this
situation, we use what we
call a Priority Matrix, which
allows you and your team
to debate which strategy is
more or less important than
others a over a specified
period of time.
5. NURTURING
INNOVATION. Often as

leaders, we can get in a rut
of making proclamations
and telling people what to
do. If you find yourself in this
space; change your approach to asking more questions, motivating your people
to think, generate ideas and
use the mission and vision to
guide them. If you are finding
it difficult to create buy-in
from your people - or your
leadership - ask them to suspend disbelief. A question
we often find affective is - "If
it could work, what would
it look like" That approach
tends to engage the creative
mind, create participation,
which then leads to buy-in.
Company leaders and
employees should reignite
passion in developing goals
and pursing industry or company achievements.

ADRIANA PUENTE is an
Associate of The Rawls Group,
a business succession planning
ﬁrm. For more information visit
www.rawlsgroup.com.
http://www.rawlsgroup.com http://www.DIGITALDEALER.COM
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Digital Dealer - August 2018
