The space in-between

We tend to focus on projects, events, and meetings, but what would happen if we were more intentional about the space in-between? How many conferences have you been to where the speakers are accomplished and polished, the schedule is packed with breakout sessions and vendor presentations, but the best collaboration happens by chance, at the breaks?

While attending the PopTech conference a few weeks ago, I found my mind wandering mostly about creating more space. How could I leverage my skills around building community, motivation, and facilitation to help others think and innovate?

I met with a client, and when I asked what they wanted to see differently six months from now, the leaders said that they wanted to see staff take more initiative, experiment with new ideas, and focus on continuous improvement. After interviewing the team members, it was clear what was going on. They didn’t need a workshop on innovation, they needed their senior leadership to get a handle on their workload and priorities. Once they could handle the workload and feel that they could keep their heads above water, they magically became more innovative. They were able to carve out time to think, imagine, and dream up new ideas.

If you don’t have the space, your team will eventually burnout. So, how do you, as a leader, intentionally create the space your team needs?

Here are a few ideas to get you started, but I would love to hear what you do as well.

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Establish a Strong Foundation

As in the example above, examine your team’s workload and priorities. As we know from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a team needs to manage the foundational pieces before moving to higher level activities like collaboration and innovation. The three key foundational areas that I always address are 1) Goals (i.e., having a realistic number of goals that are clearly defined, 2) Roles (i.e., each team member knows how they contribute) and 3) Expectations (i.e., all team members know how to work together and what is expected of them in their role). Once you have these foundational team elements in place, you can build from there.

Build in Small Pauses

​Sometimes, you need to schedule the downtime or intentionally embed it into other activities. For example, before your weekly team meetings, take a “moment of pause.” You can rotate responsibility for this each week and you can leave the parameters open. In one of my teams, we had a variety of pause activities such as visual meditation, a song, a poem, a funny video, and interesting research. It only needs to take three minutes at the most, but it will help everyone get present for the meeting and sets a tone of innovation and openness.

Take Time to Think

In addition to team meetings, think about how often you carve out time for reflection and strategic thinking. Imagine sitting in the office (yes, back in the days where people went into the building) and your manager walks by, and you’re sitting back in your chair staring at the ceiling. Would they think you’re working? Of course not! But in fact, allowing time to sit back and think is exactly what you need to propel you and your team forward.

Now if you work from home, you have no excuse not to do it.  If you don’t intentionally schedule strategic time to think, you will likely fill that time addressing the emergency of the week or anything that feels more urgent. Some leaders have good intentions and create a recurring meeting for themselves to reflect and think once a week. However, if you’re like me, I always seemed to have something more urgent pop up and rarely honor that time for myself.

One way to mitigate this is to schedule your strategy meetings with at least one other person. Maybe it’s a colleague who is in the same department, maybe it’s with your senior leaders if you manage a larger team, or maybe it’s with your executive assistant. Whoever it’s with, you’ll be more likely to honor that meeting if you invite others and will benefit from other perspectives, too.

​What would you add to the list?