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Leaders often fill teams with rule-followers called stabilizers, but too many kill innovation. When every idea gets filtered through policies and approvals, the risks that drive real change never happen. You need rule-breakers on the team.
Leaders often fill teams with rule-followers called stabilizers, but too many kill innovation. When every idea gets filtered through policies and approvals, the risks that drive real change never happen. You need rule-breakers on the team.
Don't let rule followers kill your team's creativity. Every team needs people who love process and planning and checklists and making sure things don't fall through the cracks. In Team Players, I call them stabilizers, and they're incredibly valuable. But put too many of them on one team and every new idea starts sounding like, well, we've never done it that way. That seems risky. We'd need to get another approval. Let's create a process for that. Eventually, the team gets really good at protecting the way things already work. And very bad at changing them. That matters because most real innovation requires some risk and some willingness to break an existing rule or process. So when every new idea immediately gets buried under policies and procedures, pay attention. Your rules may be protecting the business from exactly the change it needs.
