Experimental Mindset Part 2: Strategies for Building a Culture of Curiosity With Your Team
Episode 758: Show Notes
In this episode, we’re talking about what it means to have a culture of curiosity and how you can deliberately cultivate it within your organization. This can be one of your biggest assets and can help your team members take ownership of projects, tasks, ideas, and even strategies! It takes intentional building blocks to get there and we want to help you put those blocks together.
In our previous episode, Experimental Mindset Part 1, we talked about what it means to develop an experimental mindset, questions you need to ask yourself, things you need to let go of, and some of the different headspaces that we have been in throughout our business journey. Following on from that episode, this one delves into the strategic side of how you can actually go about fostering a culture of curiosity!
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The Value of Openness
Cultivating a culture of curiosity starts with the way you talk about your work with those in your support system. That includes the way you talk with the people on your actual team and the people who are supporting you in your day-to-day life. When it was just the two of us in our business, we could have any conversation at any time on any channel. But when we started growing our team, we learned to communicate our thoughts and feelings with everyone else. We felt that this was very important because it gave people a chance to see the evolution of our ideas, rather than seeing a “finished product,” and therefore they could understand our framework, feel like a part of the process, and start to develop their own ways of thinking in intellectually curious ways!
Focus on the Action Steps, Not the End-Game
Within and outside of our businesses, the only things we can control are our actions and reactions. No matter how many ambitious goals you set, you can’t guarantee that they will be achieved. All you can do is put measures in place and take action in the hope of achieving them. Our approach to goal setting is to make the atmosphere around them very lighthearted to decrease the pressure (because nobody actually performs better under pressure, and high degrees of stress aren’t good for anyone!).
What’s Your MVP?
The best thing you can do for your business is just to take action! Even if your actions are imperfect and you make lots of mistakes, the most effective way to learn is by doing and then iterating along the way. Your MVP is your Most Viable Product, or in other words, the best version of your product that you can get out right now under your current circumstances; this is what you should be focusing on!
How We Integrate New Team Members
To foster an experimental mindset amongst our team members from the get-go, we assign each new hire a “special project.” The intention behind giving them this project is to help them understand that our company is a safe space, it’s okay to ask questions, and we don’t expect them to be perfect! We have found that it’s a great way to get the creative juices flowing, help them get comfortable with receiving constructive criticism, and expose the rest of the team to alternative ideas!
The Green Light for 30 Days
We’ve got a challenge for you! When a new team member comes to you with a fresh idea, don’t just push it to the back burner because you feel like you don’t have the mental capacity to deal with it. Instead, we want you to set aside time to have a proper conversation with them and seriously consider giving them a green light to test out their idea for 30 days. After 30 days you can scrap the project if it isn’t working, but by giving a new team member the chance to experiment, you are showing them that you value their opinion, and this is the key to cultivating a culture of curiosity!
Quote This
You can have goals all day long but technically, the only thing you have control over are the steps and implementation along the way.
Highlights
The Value of Openness [0:07:45]
Focus on the Action Steps, Not the End-Game [0:13:17]
What’s Your MVP? [0:15:59]
How We Integrate New Team Members [0:19:54]
The Green Light for 30 Days [0:19:54]
Today’s Guest:
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
The Strategy Hour Podcast is a twice weekly show hosted by Abagail Pumphrey and Emylee Williams, the founders of Boss Project. Join us for semi-ranty biz conversations for service providers looking to ethically grow their agency businesses. Episodes cover everything from lead generation to leadership mindset to team culture and beyond.
Key Topics:
Curiosity, Company Culture, Take Action, Innovation, Creativity, Mindset
