Innovation relies on pushing boundaries and exploring the unknown, which businesses need to embrace in order to continuously evolve and succeed. It’s up to leaders to set the tone so employees feel free to test, take chances and try new things.
Mary Rothlisberger employs this mindset as a starting point for her meetings and interactions with direct reports at Trupanion. Now VP of growth insights at the pet insurance provider, she’s led numerous teams over her decade-long career at the company, and recognizes that her actions and attitudes play an important role in encouraging employees to experiment.
“During discussions, I like to point out when there's something we could do differently so they understand it's not always one direct path forward, but we can move forward in a lot of directions,” she told Built In Seattle.
Leading with humility and open mindedness creates a sense of security so employees aren’t held back by a fear of failure.
This is empowering for individuals, but also has positive repercussions for the company. In researching the business case for experimentation, Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke found that for organizations, running a large number of experiments is actually less risky than running only a few.
Read on for Rothlisberger’s strategies for encouraging employees to chase their curiosity and take initiative.
Trupanion offers comprehensive pet insurance for dog and cat owners in the United States, Canada, Australia and Puerto Rico.
How do you signal to your team members that it's OK to take risks, experiment with their craft — and be OK with potential failure in the process?
For me, the most important thing is not to condemn them if they fail. As a leader, you have to create a safe environment since team members are only going to be okay with taking risks if they know that they can come out the other side and still be okay.
Team members are only going to be okay with taking risks if they know that they can come out the other side and still be okay.”
Another thing I'm intentional about is encouraging feedback; just because I'm the leader of the team doesn't mean I know everything. In team syncs, I take time to ask for feedback and listen when people are outspoken. I also try to be really intentional about thanking them for that feedback so they can see that the goal isn't to be right every time.
Tell us about a time that you took a risk with your work and it did or did not work out. What was the outcome? How did you or the team benefit in the process?
Using my role as an example, I was leading a 20-person analytics department for four years as a VP. We decided to take the team in a few different directions, and I took a bit of a risk for my role professionally in creating a new team instead of the safe option, which I had already been doing in a prior role. My leader had a vision for this customer insights team that we didn't have previously at Trupanion, and we worked together to come up with a mission for it.
I went from managing 20 people and having a bigger title to managing a team of three, so professionally it was a bit of a risk, but we had so much fun, and I learned a lot from the experience and it ended up being one of my favorite roles I've had at Trupanion.
How does encouraging team members to experiment with their craft allow them to learn, grow and develop?
I was encouraging one of my team members to try something new andI reached out to him and said, ‘Hey, let's make a more visually appealing version of a report.’ I'm a very visual learner and encouraged him with this very open-ended prompt without sharing more of my vision. There were a million different ways he could have gone about it.
When encouraging people to experiment, I think it's important to be thoughtful about the kind of critique you’re giving as a manager. I gave him some good constructive feedback, but I also kept my feedback in line with the direction that he was taking the project rather than imposing my own vision, and we ended up publishing that version. It was live for a few months, and we got great feedback on it, but the cool part of this project was that my team member came back to me because he created another version of it, which was even better. On his own, he was motivated to go through yet another iteration of the project, and experiment with this craft, because he was given that kind of creative freedom and encouragement along the way.
