Your team needs critics and thieves
The critic and the thief - adapting and adopting the ideas of others. Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Most teams need more critics and more thieves! Not literally, but in terms of how we engage with the work to be done, these are two useful approaches to elevating the performance of teams. Here's what I mean...
The easy one is the thief.
In so many instances, teams can benefit from taking ideas that have worked for others and applying them in their context. Being a thief is about keeping an eye out for things that others are doing and adopting the practices that you think are going to work for you or could be scaled up.
When team members are celebrating the theft of each others' ways of working it accelerates the adoption of best practices across the team. The key is to 'steal' with an acknowledgement - not to pretend its our own work! It's the right thing to do and encourages others to share more of their ideas and the benefits flow on.
The more nuanced approach is that of a critic.
When this gets misinterpreted, people can see this as an excuse to try and point out all of the shortcomings in others' ideas or processes. That's not particularly helpful. The criticism that is useful is a more deliberate and constructive critique. It looks like "I can see why that could work for them, and I wonder if there might be an even better way".
When it's working, the critic allows for good ideas to become great or for stale practices to be refreshed. Some of the best outcomes arise through the intellectual friction of different perspectives being respectfully challenged. The critic is a great way of finding what's next for how the team will get it's work done.
Most importantly, both the critic and the thief encourage engagement with ideas. The type of engagement that teams need if they are to produce better work together than they could independently. Engagement definitely does not mean that everyone agrees with everyone else's ideas. That's groupthink and not great if you want high performance.
The critic and the thief - adapting and adopting the ideas of others. Feel free to steal these ideas if you think they will work - or adapt them and apply other approaches that are better suited to your context.
Here are a couple of questions for you to consider this week for your teams:
Do we share enough of what is working?
Could we better challenge each others' ideas to make them better?