If you are looking to innovate in your business, start by listening

Urban Graffiti found in Lavapiés (Picture by author)

Do we have employees in our companies bright, intelligent, industrious and sociable? What managers are also good equipment, good knowledge of your area, who are satisfied with their pay and those who like their work in our company? If our answer is yes we put all our efforts on those people to stay as long as possible in our organization. Demanding professionals looking for their working environment is as complete as possible, that suits the most to his more personal side, not just to his role as employee. And for that we hear more, much more.

In creative territory we are clear that we will not get awaken the passion of our team for their work if we are not a social enterprise : more open, more links between its members, more transparent, more agile. It co-leading the change with the help of the entire team. We turn our organization into a connected community, and for this, the first rule is to listen actively as a key to success.

We have spoken many times that connected firms are more productive. The advantages that social media, for example, when selecting equipment, to create networking or to position ourselves as thought leaders are clear, as stated on page 62 from the Study on the Internet Social Networks developed by the ONTSI . In addition, the connection between our team members will help us greatly to create a company where we all want to work, loyalty in the most talented people.

To create a social enterprise with a corporate culture shared the first step is active listening. To do this we must:

1. Be humble. Jim Collins and his team showed that companies led by sticking during transition years were humble leaders with a clear determination to improve the position of your company. In the study that supports companies that excel data showed that higher-level leaders, who had led their companies to the top, "themselves away from the needs to satisfy his own ego and focus on the goal of making your company great [...] They are incredibly ambitious, but his ambition is mainly to the institution, not themselves. " Having the humility to know that we should trust our team to help create change in our companies is key to start actively listening.

2. Build confidence. As we had Juan Carlos Cubeiro in his book The Feeling of Fluency , trust is closely related to listening. "The most important way to show respect for a person is listening." When we consider the opinions of our team create a bond of trust among all. The team feels freer to express their opinions, positive or negative, which will help the information flow better. Listen, we prove to be trustworthy and thus we foster productive contributions of our team.

3. Be permeable. Out of our mental framework helps us to open to the perspectives of others. Listening is useless if it permeates us the message of the other. We have to be really open to new ideas from the computer and experimenting with them. The contributions of our team should not fall on deaf ears. With input from all reach greater achievements.

These small bases will be the MUST for building a people-centered organization, where connectivity is the next step to achieve excellence. If we are willing to listen to our equipment, what is the best way to do this? We can not close ourselves to a single channel. Face to face conversations are essential to make the best of our teams, as well exposed Alorda Alvaro Gonzalez in his book The Talking Manager . But in our opinion you have to enable conversational multimedia.

As you pointed Gary Hamel , everyone likes to talk and businesses must encourage this trend to share. In the Territory we have created reliable and open channels for information to flow faster between us. Simple things like having a list on Twitter with our team to easily track all colleagues and interacting decreases the distance between the members of our company.

Using a social network internally and Socialcast to treat openly all issues involving the firm increases team bonding. Create a hashtag like # tecerianoseverywhere under which we provide photos of where we are, nourishes our personal relationships. Thanks to this culture of collaboration encourage the exchange of knowledge throughout the team.

We all want our company as a whole more intelligent, more updated and informed, more innovative in the end. These multiple channels open we allow social media to listen and exchange views is easy. Listening to our team is the best way to innovate. And innovation is the lever that allows companies to exit the crisis.

Highlight the invaluable assistance of Juan Luis Polo for this post has come to light blogging.