Todd Henry talks about the three things a great team leader must provide on the Accidental Creative:

Focus

Ensure that your team’s attention is allocated to the right problems at the right time.

1. What are we doing? Ensure that every member of you team has a crystal clear understanding of what a successful outcome looks like on every level of their work.
2. What are we not doing? Strategic pruning of priorities is necessary to your team’s ability to focus.
3. When are we doing it? Expectations around timing effect the choices a team member makes throughout the day. Understand the priorities is critical.

Function

Ensure that your team has the resources and processes in place that it needs to do its work.

1. How will we do it? Ensuring that there is a clearly defined and articulated path to accomplishing your objectives. Clear obstacles out of their way.
2. What do we need in order to do it? Is there anything your team lacks? Materials? Information? Buy-in from superiors? You have to go to bat for your team.

Fire

Keep the team motivated to do the work. You have to diligently tie the work the team is doing to why it is doing it.

1. Why are we doing it? What difference will it make to the team, company or the world?
2. What will it mean if we actually do this work? What is the change that is this going to make and how does it relate to my personal productive passion? Learn to speak the motivational language of your employees.

[Overcast® Link]

Todd Henry talks about keeping a Commonplace Book on the Accidental Creative:

A Commonplace Book is single place where you keep ideas, quotes, inspiring thoughts and other potential useful information for regular review and potential repurposing.

Principles for keeping a Commonplace Book:

1. Keep only one and make it single purpose
2. Review it regularly
3. Use it to generate ideas
4. Don’t be too selective [on what you add to the book]

[Overcast® Link]

A great episode of the accidental creative by Todd Henry. My summary follows:

Spoiler. Its thought. It’s taking "time to think deeply about the problems you are facing, the relationships that you are you’re dealing with at work or personally. Taking the time think about the problems that you’ve been handed by you manager… Taking the time that is absolutely necessary to distill the noise we encounter on a daily basis into something actionable, something meaningful something that will have help us progress toward our ambitions."

It is about turning knowledge and noise into wisdom. We need to stop reacting to everything and step back and think deeply about it.

I guarantee you that if you walk into a meeting and you say, here is what we should do… and here is are the reasons why we should do it… and here is what I think the potential outcomes are… If you are able to give that kind of a response in a meeting because you have have actually spent time thinking and developing your thoughts and really exploring. Then your manager will say, who are you and where can I get four more like you? Because that well reasoned response is very rare.

So how do we build thought time into our lives? Mr. Henry offers four ways:

1. Plan it. Try to do it during the hours most likely to be interrupted.
2. Be consistent. Rituals can be important.
3. Keep yourself in the dark room and play. Staying in a place of uncertainty that is uncomfortable. Don’t gravitate to the first answer. Deal with ambiguity and uncertainty. Train yourself to look for deeper answers.
4. Synthesize thoughts. Look for bigger patterns. Connect domains.

"The goal is to develop responsiveness not reactivity. We want to be able to respond meaningfully with wisdom to problems, not just react to them. "

Overcast® Link