Today is the day for you to create your professional innovation team. Congratulations! You are your team’s charter member. The purpose of the team is to keep you focused on what’s next, what’s new and what’s possible. Who else needs to be on your team?
Go ahead. Make a list. Check it twice.
First, how many of your current team members are on that list? Professional innovation teams usually start off looking amazingly like the current teams we are members of. That’s because we get extremely comfortable doing things a certain way. Especially as we deal with so much uncertainty surrounding how our workplaces have morphed during this pandemic.
Next, how many team members are from the same professional discipline, generation, pay grade, job title, or department? There’s a tendency for professional innovation teams to start off looking like a “stick to your own kind” team. You know the saying, birds of a feather flock together.
Then, how many team members come from “your side” of the business? Even though you may have ventured outside of your own department. Professional innovation comes from moving one millimeter beyond what is professionally comfortable. Like crossing out of your side of the business “continents” and traveling to the other side of the table, to gain a more diverse perspective.
Consider what is next, new, and possible by creating a professional innovation team reflecting the breadth and depth of professional diversity in your workplace. All you need to do is move one millimeter beyond what is comfortable, Today. Towards what is professionally possible tomorrow and moving forward.
Often, it is the people in our organization who are currently invisible to us who become the most professionally valuable to our project outcomes. Do you know who these people are? Would you like to learn how to ask the questions to get you to where you need to go?
Also, it is the people who solve problems differently than we do who catalyze us to become comfortable being uncomfortable. Because, together, we are far more capable of solving more complex problems. How can you discover who these people are, and develop a discussion guide to kickstart your professional synergy?
To hear my Tuesday, September 29, 2020 keynote presentation at PMI Minnesota Professional Development Days 2020: “Build Trust. Your Purpose-Driven Story is the Key to Professional Innovation” click on this link. Register for the entire virtual event. Get to where you need to go. Together. With us!
Finally, consider that your professional innovation team may open doors for your professional development that you never considered before.
When the focus is making small, incremental changes to our professional habits, biases, mindset, and skillsets, we become far more professionally interoperable. Today, tomorrow and moving forward. Together.
If you feel you are not as visible, relevant, and valuable within The Project Economy as you need to be, take your first, one millimeter step forward. Cut yourself loose from what’s holding you back. A professional innovation team may be just the professional project you have not been looking for. Until now. The next, purposeful actions you take make all the difference to your professional success. Let’s take your next steps, Together. Set up a 15-minute discovery call with me, here.
Babette Ten Haken is a card-carrying STEM professional and left-brain thinker. Her focus? Cross-functional leadership, new product development and professional innovation. She leverages Voice of the Customer Market Research and Design-Driven Storytelling to translate across strategic communication and collaboration disconnects between people and professional disciplines. Babette’s One Millimeter Mindset™ virtual and in-person speaking programs get everyone to where they need to go, together: one millimeter at a time. Build trust. Retain employees and clients. Her playbook of cross-functional tools, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Contact Babette here.
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