Innovation Culture: Creating the Ideal Environment with Aya Caldwell from Novartis

I think one of the things that we haven't touched upon is actually how do you create a team that's really focused on innovation? Right. Because I think Alex and Tenday, even Shamir, talked a lot about some of the technical pieces around the evidence, business model canvas, the legal compliance. But the three things that I think are really important that often we don't discuss is the first is really how do you create that psychological safety in a team so that you're actually able to innovate, not in a vacuum where people are able to challenge each other. Right? Because if you're just thinking, oh, I have a fantastic idea and everyone's just saying, yes, yes, yes, you're not going to be really thinking about is this really the best idea? So I think that's just something from a coaching perspective. How do you make sure you're looking at the team? Do they have the psychological safety to have the ability to challenge, to question, to make sure you're pushing each other for the right solution? And tied to that, I think is the second thing is like, how do you really have that common vision and customer obsession? Right. I think Alex mentioned the Amazon example, the empathy piece of the customer. One of the things that I love to do when I'm sort of coaching teams is everyone thinks they have the same idea of who the customer is, but then you ask them and you get about 30 different post it notes of who the customer is. And there's very oftentimes, especially in corporations, a confusion between what is a customer versus a stakeholder. Right. Because I think oftentimes, as Tendaya was mentioning, you know, leadership may have a certain idea and that's what what teams end up focusing on. But is that the customer or is that really the leadership as a stakeholder? So I think having that crystal clear understanding of who your customer is, who you're trying to serve, what's the evidence that you need from them? If you don't have that as a team again, you're going to be going on six different directions. And the last thing that I want to just say is like you have to be razor focused on what you're trying to achieve and you're constantly ruthlessly prioritizing for it. And I think part of that is that idea generation, I think Alex said this too, is like, that's the fun part, right? Like we all love thinking of ideas and hackathons and like, let's get these teams together and rah, rah, rah. But then when it actually comes to like doing the work, it is hard. And so make sure you're prioritizing the right ones and that you're focusing on. Is that actually going to get the evidence and the outcome that I'm going to want to see? Because it's really easy to do activity metrics, right? To say, oh, I did this many experiments, I did this many trainings, I did X xyz, but so what? What does that actually achieve? So I think those are just the three things that are at least really important for me to drive when I'm thinking about coaching. So I'll turn it back to you, Tenday.

Thank you. I just want to focus on one of the things that you spoke about, which is the psychological safety piece.

Right.

And Alex and I have had long conversations about this, which is a lot of people think coaching is about being obsequious and being nice to the people that you're coaching and agreeing with everything they say and encouraging them. There's no such thing as a bad idea. And, you know, those kinds of. To what extent do you think that it's important to drop what Alex called diplomatic hand grenades to make sure that people really get better and improve the ideas they're working on?

I think they're really important. But my whole thing is if you don't have psychological safety, you could drop a hand grenade and no one's going to notice or they're not going to take you seriously.