The business landscape is rapidly evolving and it’s no longer advisable to rely on existing strategies, hence entrepreneurs are encouraged to foster innovation through the use of emerging technologies and intrapreneurship amongst their team.
We’ve seen and heard the benefits of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in business. However, as entrepreneurs, we need to learn how to use this technology to stand out and not settle into a cookie-cutter mould of sounding like other businesses.
When we empower our employees to think like entrepreneurs and explore new ideas, it unlocks tremendous opportunities for business growth.
Moreover, business cultures that facilitate continuous learning and experimentation are paramount to an organisation’s ability to stand out and navigate challenges effectively.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:
- The importance of fostering innovation and intrapreneurship in business (05:50)
- The positive outcomes of giving your team free rein (08:00)
- Known pitfalls of micromanaging and how to encourage taking initiative (09:10)
- The opportunities that innovation brings (10:55)
- How to get better outcomes from the team (14:05)
- The best way to foster intrapreneurship in teams (15:48)
QUOTES
- “My employees will make mistakes, and how I respond to those mistakes will define whether I foster intrapreneurship and innovation or not.” -Tim Hyde
- “It’s not my job to tell you how to do your role. It’s my job to show you what success looks like, give you the tools that you need to succeed, and get the hell out of your way.” -Tim Hyde
- “The more we give our team free rein or the space to be able to try new things, the more they do try new things.” -Samantha Riley
- “We need to be empowering our team to be able to take our vision and build something.” -Samantha Riley
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WHERE TO FIND TIM HYDE
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TRANSCRIPTION
Tim Hyde Snippet (00:00):
We’re bringing people on to give us leverage and do things that we cannot do ourselves. You cannot be better than everybody in your business at everything on every single thing that the company does. Or literally, you’re a team of one.
Samantha Riley Snippet (00:14):
I think there’s beauty in that though, because that’s where the innovation happens because they do think differently to you, they are going to see things differently, and they are going to see things through different eyes because of the tasks that they’re doing. As small businesses, that’s an opportunity for us to be able to try different things to make it better.
Samantha Riley Intro (00:38):
Welcome to the Influence By Design Podcast. I’m Samantha Riley, authority positioning strategist for coaches and experts. If you’re ready to build a business that gives you more than just a caffeine addiction, and you dream of making more money, having more time, and having the freedom to be living your best life, then you’re in the right place, it’s time to level up.
Welcome to today’s episode of Influence By Design, I’m your co host Samantha Riley and joined this week with the lovely Tim Hyde. How are you today, Tim?
Tim Hyde (01:10):
Sam, I’m looking to your moments of unbridled genius on today’s show. And we’re good, I’m good. I was actually great to see you in person. Or in ages over the weekend,
Samantha Riley (01:23):
really long time, it was great to catch up with you and your lovely wife, Penny and have a lovely meal and has some great chats. And I think that this is kind of coming off the back of or what we’re talking about today is coming off the back of your short trip up to our lovely area of Australia, where you had a situation at a service station do want to just share that story. Because I love that you sent it straight through to me and I was like, Oh wow, that’s so cool.
Tim Hyde (01:53):
I don’t know what’s going on with me because I’ve sort of become acutely aware of of customer service lately. So, for example, the breakfast we went out, you know, Penny ordered a side of a side of our calorie back often avocado for $7
Samantha Riley (02:11):
was the dearest avocado in Noosa.
Tim Hyde (02:15):
But on them on the way back a couple of things happen. I got a I got a message on Facebook to inquiry I’d made a restaurant in December last year. Now, you know, as we record this winner in June, as I said, I think the message that restaurant was you know, are you big byo wine, because I was taking him out from New Zealand for dinner. And they didn’t reply and I didn’t think much of it. We didn’t go to dinner anyway. And we just dealt with it. Six months later, so I literally infected six and a half months later, I got a message. I think that’s that same day that we had breakfast and saying oh no, we’re not like Sorry, we are not who we are. No, it wasn’t even that it was we are not sorry.
Samantha Riley (03:02):
Yeah, without punctuation sorry. Yes, I had to read it a few times he showed me that message and I did have to read it a few times.
Tim Hyde (03:13):
And my reply to him was was you don’t check this very often. So you know looking example of you know, if someone’s an idiot when they open their mouth and they confirm they are and this was one of those cases you know, the customer service is really bad when they open their mouth and confirm the case. But we were dropping it high come back to the airport. And you know when you pull the cart before you take the bait in the high place right? Otherwise, they’re charging absurd amounts of money for it and get out of the car and literally there’s a guy standing there opening up our thing opening up our petrol filling and filling it up for us. I’m gone. And I’m like I was I was absolutely dumbfounded for a moment because I think the last time I went to a service station and had actual service would have been 30 years ago 35 years ago when I first started driving and even then it wasn’t a very common thing that you went to a service station and attendant actually filled your car up for you. Absolutely, absolutely just become I kind of lost that and I was actually really surprised he was he was happy and bubbly. And you know, he actually went and cleaned the windscreen as well and
Samantha Riley (04:27):
like full on 70s and 80s service whatever your
Tim Hyde (04:32):
60s 70s like service and actually he said you know just jumping in and you know, you’re on, you know, Bowser number four and where you go and I’m like, wow, this is actually super impressive. But you know as this this, you know, this polar opposites in customer experience, one completely unresponsive. And the other one so far out of my normal range of, you know, expected experience that I just had to get on social and late right This is a story. Yeah, share the story now sure is sure shit that that that attendant was not told exactly what to do, right he wasn’t told to smile at us he wasn’t told what scripted down to this is how you greet customers. Now it was given the opportunity to say, hey, we want to create a really awesome customer experience, your role is to do that as, as the station attendant, go for it. Within that, that’s what you need to create.
Samantha Riley (05:29):
Yeah, because you can’t force someone to show up like that. That is that is the way that that employee shows up, you can certainly create a culture that fosters that, but you can’t force someone to be like that. And I think that when you told me this story, it it brought up a conversation that you and I had around innovation, and how we can innovate in our business to really stand out. Because in a world that we’re going into where there’s a lot of AI coming out, there is, you know, like you were saying before, there’s this time where we all need to adopt this, because it’s the way that it’s going to go. But at the other end of the spectrum, it could make all of these businesses, I don’t know be cookie cutter, or very vanilla, or all sorts of look and sound and feel the same. So what do we need to do in our businesses to innovate, and in the story, that you’re just sharing, also bringing, or foster a culture of intrapreneurship in our business with our team, so that we can really stand out and innovate? Yeah,
Tim Hyde (06:44):
I think that’s the the idea of intrapreneurship itself. And if you’re not familiar with it, the concept of intrapreneurship it’s basically someone who kind of runs a business within your business. And you’re given the authority to kind of create and innovate in the same way that we as entrepreneurs, create and innovate to solve a problem for our customers. an intrapreneur is someone who works within your business to solve and, you know, problems that you the entrepreneur has in your business. And I think it’s a really interesting idea to kind of foster culturally, in your business, because you suddenly get this, you know, this opportunity to, I guess, do things differently and do things more effectively, and increase your productivity ultimately, your profits?
Samantha Riley (07:37):
Absolutely. I think for a lot of business owners, there’s a lot of people that come to me, and they say that, you know, they do things better than other people. And this is why they don’t want to delegate or they don’t want to give things to their team. There is a certain amount of I don’t know that courage is the right word, but you kind of need to be a little bit confident in yourself to be able to give your team free rein. But when you can. There’s, you know, a lot of innovation that can happen because they think differently to you. I know this is something that we say we me, and I’ve had a couple of business partners, I’ve been lucky enough that all of my business partners have always been okay with this. And I know that in our business right now that we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing if our team didn’t take ownership of their roles and really bring forward Hey, you know, we’re seeing that, that we’ve got a big opportunity here, can we try this? And we do allow them to do it. And they’re amazing, because the more we give them free rein or the space to be able to try new things, the more they do try new things. But you shared a story just earlier, Tim of a company that isn’t allowing their team to try new things, and it fosters this fear within the business.
Tim Hyde (09:10):
Yeah, I think that it’s really an interesting thing to look at. Right. And if you’re a micromanager, just embrace it and go with it. First off, okay. Yeah, like if you are a micromanager, I don’t expect your team to show initiative and getting things that need to be done. Right, because they will literally be sitting there waiting for you to instruct them what to do and how to do it. And then they’ll be like a light switch, right? You turn it on and turn off. Okay? And if that’s what you want from your employees, turn on the thing turn off, right, great. If you’re, if you don’t want that for your business, if you want your employees to come to work and take initiative, right and make your life potentially easier for you to ultimately get out of it. It’s a very different business that you’re creating in terms of The culture, okay, and you can look at. And I think it’s important to think my employees will make mistakes, how I respond to this, those mistakes will define whether I foster that intrapreneurship and innovation or not. Because if you sort of shut someone down the culture is well, I won’t try again,
Samantha Riley (10:23):
if you don’t want to get in trouble,
Tim Hyde (10:25):
because I don’t want to get in trouble, I don’t want to get it wrong. But if you allow, and potentially almost encourage mistakes, within constraints, obviously, but if you allow people and say, Okay, well, you know, we didn’t get the outcome we were looking for, how else could we do that differently next time and actually kind of work with your team, I think you’ll find that they become better at getting you the outcome you want, that is might go for a different path.
Samantha Riley (10:55):
I think there’s beauty in that, though, because that’s where the innovation happens, because they do think differently to you. And our team are normally, you know, at the coalface and so they are going to see things differently, and they are going to see things through different eyes because of the tasks that they’re doing. And I think that as small businesses, that’s an opportunity for us, because you know, you’ve got a big business and something will happen at boardroom level, and it will filter down through all the different management and all of a sudden, it gets down to the bottom, and it’s like, Oh, my goodness, you can tell that, you know, the the management have never been in this position or in front of the customers, because this is impossible to do. You know, that’s that’s generally how big business works. But as a smaller business, we don’t have that situation. So we’ve got so much more opportunity to be able to try different things to make it better.
Tim Hyde (11:53):
Yeah, I am one of my early mentors in project management used to describe it as wearing the shirt umbrella. Okay, your job, your job is to wear the shirt umbrella between your team. And then the customer may expect things to go wrong, and not necessarily your planned why it might be a deliverable that wasn’t done, or an email that wasn’t sent or, you know, someone had another priority for the day. And maybe we just didn’t communicate it. But my job is to stand between the customer and my team doing the work for that client, not just to get out the way and point fingers at them and say, well, it was their fault. And, and we do see that right? You know, when, when it happens, you know, you see that in, in all sorts of other businesses. If you sort of start to pay attention and go, well, so and so did that, and it was their fault, right? Or I will take responsibility for this. Even though it’s not my issue, and I’ll endeavor to get that resolved for you, dear customer. And it’s a very different culture. And I think it actually fosters that innovation, it doesn’t mean you you won’t go back into your team and say, Kayla, we didn’t get the outcome we were looking for their you know, we need to look at, we need to look at how we do this better next time because it will come up next time. And I was literally having a conversation with one of my team members this week, who’s relatively new to the team. And quite clearly the environment that they came from previously, was an environment of blame and finger pointing. Because we had an issue go a little bit off track with a with a client this week, we just didn’t communicate that, you know, there’s timeframes that they were expecting, we had to shift for a number of different reasons. And, you know, they come back and said, I’m not going to I still have a job, am I going to be fired? Alright. I don’t even know what you’re thinking like, we work. Alright, we’re going to take a look at what went wrong. We’re going to review that. And we’re going to make sure that our procedures are in place that we don’t have that same issue again, yes. How do you How to Not how and really, how do you suggest that we get a better outcome next time.
Samantha Riley (14:05):
There is so much gold in there that I just want to go back and touch on it ever so slightly, because there was a lot of value there. Number one, you want the team member to be able to come back and openly have that conversation of what they think should or shouldn’t be happening. Number two, giving them the space to know that it’s okay to make mistakes. But number three, what procedures need to be put in play so it doesn’t happen again? Like there’s just so much there?
Tim Hyde (14:34):
Yeah, I think the probably the most powerful one is like how do you think we should get a better outcome? It’s not how do I do it? Right? The reason we bring team on into our business, whether it’s your first employee, whether it’s still 50 1500 employee, we’re bringing people on to give us leverage and do things that we cannot do ourselves. And at a certain point sitting by your 503 employee you probably doing stuff that you’ve got no idea how to do that absolutely better at the thing that they do than you are, you can be better than everybody in your business at everything on every single thing that, you know, the company does, or literally, you’re a team of one. And they’ll always come back to you, right, we need to kind of if we’re going to grow and scale our business and achieve some of the lifestyle goals that we’re trying to wrap our business around to kind of create, we need to trust other people to deliver an outcome that we can’t do. And we need to create a culture that fosters them to be able to do so whether it’s an innovation or whatever, whether it’s something as simple as, how do you greet people when they pull their car up, for you to put petrol in?
Samantha Riley (15:47):
Tim, what’s an example of a way that you’ve fostered intrapreneurship within your team, it may be some way that they’ve innovated no matter how big or seemingly small it is, what’s an example that you can give us?
Tim Hyde (16:03):
I think some of the stuff that I that I really tried to and, you know, this is a combination of a lifetime of working, you know, for other people, I’ve had sort of been fortunate to work for good bosses and some absolutely horrible ones. And I think if you’re just as good, another rabbit hole here, I think if you’re a parent who’s got a kid interested in working in your business, you should absolutely send them out to work for other people. 100% They’re gonna they’re gonna learn what it’s like, what a good boss is like, and what a bad boss is like. But I think the the is coming back to your question, Sam, I think there’s some of the things that I like to encourage people is is like, you know, this is the outcome I’m looking for. Let’s have a conversation about how you think we can get that you come up with a plan, and how we do this, right? So what am I almost creating micro CEOs have their role, right? And a CEO isn’t just, you know, usually when you’re a CEO of a big company, you have a board, a board, set some objectives, the CEO goes away and works with their leadership team to come up with a plan. And they go back to the board and say, board is our plan, do you ratify this? Yes. And then you go and manage the plan? Yeah, we must need to do the same thing with our team members as well and go, I am the board. In this case, I’m gonna go to my team members and say team member, I need to be able to do this outcome, come up with a plan about how you were going to achieve that outcome in your role. And I will approve that, and then you’re gonna go and do and execute it. And I think something just as simple as that. Going, it’s not my job to tell you how to do your role. It’s my job to show you what success looks like. Give you the tools that you need to succeed, and then love to get the hell out of your way.
Samantha Riley (17:54):
Yeah, do you know what I love about this so much is that the way you describe that is very similar to the way I would have described it. Which Surprise, surprise, that’s obviously why you and I get along so well. But a specific example of this in our business is that we were using a project management software, when we only had a team of me, Leon and one other person. What was coming up a couple of years later, as we had more and more team members that they weren’t, they were struggling to use this project management system, it wasn’t working for a bigger team. So rather than me go and research everything, I throw it to them, and when will you guys find something and they work together and they found something that would work for them. Now what was great about that is a I didn’t have to do it. But be they’re the ones that are using it, why should I step in and give them something that works for me, it doesn’t need to work for me, it needs to work for them. So I allowed them to go and find something that would work for the way that they want it to work means that they use it properly. But they’re also empowered as a team. So that’s definitely a way that that we use, I guess entre intrapreneurship Yeah, hobbies.
Tim Hyde (19:11):
It’s just those little things. And if you didn’t, if you keep reinforcing and encouraging your team to do that, they feel emboldened to be able to do things, right and take initiative within their scope of what we ask them to do. Yeah, and often we can actually get a better outcome. Then we would if we did it ourselves.
Samantha Riley (19:35):
I would say 9.9 times out of 10 Because we are the drivers of the vision you know we’ve got specific things in our business. I know that Dean Jackson says really the the place or the the thing that we should be doing in our business is talking. That’s the only thing that we do that is different that no one else can do. You know, talking on podcasts talking with with kids clients, but anything out of that someone else can do. And we need to be empowering other people to be able to take our vision, and you know and build something.
Tim Hyde (20:12):
This is this is ultimately what makes you a great leader. And makes creates an environment that your employees want to come to work. Alright, and give that little bit extra each time when they do. Yeah, rather than coming to a plate, you know, coming to a workplace where they really don’t want to go to work to do I’m going to do the bare minimum, the quiet quitting, required quitting?
Samantha Riley (20:39):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I so for me, I think that there’s two takeaways from this conversation that we’ve had today. Number one, you do need to innovate in your business, because you do need to have some sort of point of difference that that makes you different from your competitors, or just other people in your industry. And number two, to foster this, this idea of intrapreneurship in your business so that your team takes ownership in moving that business forward.
Tim Hyde (21:13):
Yeah, I think that’s the same for me. And I’ve certainly noticed, yeah, in practice, the positive results that you get for that, you know, that you get from fostering that culture.
Samantha Riley (21:27):
Mm hmm. In saying that, it doesn’t always come easily. So if you’re someone that’s just new to having a team, it can require a lot of courage to actually let go and allow mistakes to happen. But 100% do that just allow the mistakes to happen? Yes, some people might get a bit annoyed along the way. But in the long term, it will work for your business much better. Damn, thanks for this conversation today. I think it’s a really important conversation, because these are the things that that give us our point of difference. And that’s what we’re here to do.
Tim Hyde (22:08):
Yeah, absolutely. Sam, it’s been a great pleasure to be back again and love sharing this kind of conversation.
Samantha Riley (22:21):
Awesome. Thanks for listening today, and we will catch you next Tuesday for another episode of influence by design. Ciao.
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Influence By Design podcast. If you want more head over to influencebydesignpodcast.com for the show notes and links to today’s gifts and sponsors. And if you’re looking to connect with other experts who are growing and scaling their business to join us in the coaches, thought leaders, and changemakers community on Facebook, the links are waiting for you over at influencebydesignpodcast.com
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