Permission to be Wrong: Fosters Creativity and Innovation

Have you ever wondered why you were having difficulty getting members of your team to engage and share their thoughts? If you've ever led a team huddle, I bet you've experienced what I call the "huddle-look". This is when you are standing before your team attempting to engage them, and in front of you, are blank stares looking back at you. Why won't they say something, you might've asked? As leaders, we should strive to develop teams full of creative innovators. In a world full of rapid change, we must be prepared to quickly develop solutions to the challenges we face. To do this, we must create safe spaces for innovation and creativity. With innovation and creativity, there's a good chance that we might create solutions that may not work. How many people do you know that are comfortable being wrong? My advice to leaders would be to ask open-ended questions to make it easy for our teams to come up with outside-the-box, creative solutions. One of my favorite questions is: If you had to guess, what would you think? This question, automatically lets your team member know that it's ok if you don't have the answer, just guess. This question gives the team permission to dream of solutions that may or may not work. It acknowledges the fact that it is ok to be wrong. Using this question, I've seen teams come up with creative solutions for challenges that plague healthcare every day. While engaging the people that are closest to the work, you make strides in patient safety, workflows that make it easier for clinicians to do their work, and ultimately foster engagement in the workplace. When your people know that you trust them and have confidence in them, you open the doors of possibility, excitement, and engagement in the very important care that healthcare workers provide every day!