CIO Brett Lansing’s five-point approach to building followership

Lansing suggests a couple of strategies to get people sharing. The first and most important is this: Live up to your promise. If you say you’re open to ideas but ignore them when they’re offered, those doing the offering won’t bother again. Solicit ideas repeatedly. And when they are given, make the time to evaluate them carefully and honestly, offering constructive feedback wherever you can.

Establish a quarterly ideas forum

Lansing also suggests creating a space for employees to pitch ideas or identify problems they want to solve — and do so in a way that ideas don’t need to be fully developed or packaged in a PowerPoint. “You need to lower barriers to brainstorming and innovation,” he says.

The true power of these forums is in their ability to create momentum, Lansing says. “You just get people to throw out ideas, then soon enough, everyone’s building on them, talking about ROI and value-creation models and all this stuff,” he adds. “Suddenly, you have something on the roadmap you never expected.” Lansing learned this not long after starting these meetings, about ten years ago at a previous employer, where the forums regularly drew 30 to 45 attendees.

At AccentCare, Lansing has extended the promise of these forums through what he calls “Happiness Hours,” a part of his perennial effort to minimize attrition. In these meetings, teams are encouraged to identify the activities or features of their work they most enjoy, or the enhancements to those activities and features that, if made, would most improve employees’ work lives. “Don’t overlook the correlation between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction,” he says.

Empower your team to lead

One of the best ways to empower your teams is to encourage them to “find opportunities in the chaos,” Lansing says.

By “chaos” Lansing means something that is out of order — a process, department, tool, or the like — that if put in order presents an opportunity to build a competitive advantage. For example, reorienting your operating model around products or adopting an emerging technology such as AI. Don’t let the chaos depress your teams, Lansing says. Let it exhilarate them.