Often leaders can get caught up trying to solve business challenges themselves. But as the wise Samantha Gadd once told me, ‘the answers you seek are in the people you serve’… Here I dig into how you can go about crowd sourcing to create better, more relevant, solutions. Collaboration and insights go a long way to building a stronger business, and a stronger brand.
Morning. I’m Jodie, I’m the MD of Tiny Hunter, and today I’m wondering if you are facing a business challenge because let’s face it, many of you probably are because that’s business, right? That’s our jobs as leaders to be overcoming challenges, creating new opportunities, growing businesses, keeping things running efficiently.
A wise woman once said to me that the answers that you seek are in the audience or the people that you serve. Thanks, Samantha Gadd. And it is a really powerful and important statement because too often leaders or leadership teams can be sitting away and doing a lot of thinking, trying to get to the right answer. But the magic happens when you actually involve a broader group of people. Depending on what challenge you’re facing, you might involve employees, you might involve customers, you might involve partners. It could be a mix. And there’s lots of different ways that you can generate insights. You could be having one on one conversations, you could do surveys, you could get a group of people into a room and do activities and have flurries of post-it notes or do a similar thing online these days, with the collaborative tools that we have. What you will find is, you will get really interesting insights and very relevant insights, because you are actually asking the people that are involved who have quite a different perspective to you as the leader. The thing is, we’re not talking about running a democracy, where we need everyone to have consensus on the solution, and that will be the right solution moving forward because nothing great ever happened that way either and people can be resistant to change. But what you’re looking for is really rich inputs, so that then when you are making the decisions about the path forward, you have all that insight and you’re going to come up with a much better solution. But not only that, everyone’s going to have much more buy in because it’s going to feel really relevant, and you’ve involved some of the people in the process who are then going to be champions as well.
My challenge to you today is, what challenge are you facing that you can crowdsource ideas and solutions. It’s going to make your job easier. It’s going to be funner and it’s going to get you to where you need to be.
That’s it from me, it’s time for brekkie.