Building strong teams
With teams being distributed and working in new ways and in a new reality, your role as a leader, is critical. Your team needs to be more autonomous with the ability to make decisions and move quickly. Your role is to create the environment that allows your team to be empowered with the boldness to ship.
In their book Testing Business Ideas, David J. Bland and Alexander Osterwalder discuss the four areas leaders can focus on, to create strong teams:
Create an Enabling Environment
Give your team enough time and resources to test ideas iteratively by establishing appropriate testing processes and metrics that differ from execution processes and metrics. This will give your team the autonomy to make decisions and move fast.
Remove Obstacles and Open Doors
As a leaders you can remove obstacles when teams that are testing business ideas encounter internal roadblocks — such as lack of access to internal expertise or specialized resources.
Make Sure Evidence Trumps Opinion
As a leader your role is to push a team to make a compelling case for an idea based on evidence — not based on preferences.
Ask Questions Rather Than Provide Answers
Leaders need to up their questioning skills to push teams to develop better value propositions and business models. They need to relentlessly inquire about experiments, evidence, insights, and patterns on which teams build Value Propositions and business model ideas.
