Latest / New Manager Conversations with Fexingo: First 90 Days, Managing Former Peers, and Leadership Basics / How to Run Your First Team Brainstorm as a New Manager
Transcript
- Lucas: You are six weeks into your first management role. You have inherited a team of five people — three of them senior individual contributors who have been at the company longer than you have. Luna: Already feeling the pressure. Lucas: Right. And now your boss says, 'I need you to run next week's brainstorming session on the Q3 product roadmap.' So you book a conference room, you buy bagels, you put 'there are no bad ideas' on the whiteboard — and forty-five minutes later, the two loudest people have dominated the conversation, three people haven't spoken at all, and the ideas you captured are basically what you already knew. Luna: I have been in that room. It is so frustrating because you know your team has better ideas than what surfaced. Lucas: Exactly. So today I want to give you a specific structure for your first team brainstorm that actually surfaces the best thinking from every single person on the team — not just the people who talk first or talk loudest. It is called the brainwriting pre-write, and I first saw it used at a company called IDEO about fifteen years ago. Luna: Brainwriting pre-write — I have heard the term but I do not think I have ever actually done it. Lucas: Here is how it works. You start the meeting by giving everyone a sheet of paper or a shared digital document — and you give them exactly five minutes to write down as many ideas as they can, silently, individually. No talking. No looking at what other people are writing. Luna: So you are removing the social pressure right from the start. Lucas: Exactly. Then after five minutes, you collect the sheets — or you have everyone paste their ideas into an anonymous poll — and you do a quick dot-vote. Each person gets three stickers or three votes, and they put them on the ideas they think are most promising, still silently. Luna: And only after that do you open the floor for discussion. Lucas: Correct. Now you are discussing the ideas that have already been surfaced and ranked — not the people who proposed them. The conversation is about the idea, not the status of the person who said it. Luna: I can see how that helps when you have senior ICs who might intimidate newer team members. But does it kill the spontaneous energy that makes brainstorming fun? Lucas: That is the pushback I get a lot. And I think the answer is: you can preserve the spontaneous energy in the discussion phase. Once you have the top three or four ideas from the dot-vote, you can spend twenty minutes riffing on those — 'What would it take to make this work?', 'Who has seen something like this before?' — that is where the energy lives. The silent phase just ensures that you are riffing on the best raw material, not the first thing someone blurted out. Luna: So you are front-loading the divergence and then converging after the vote. That makes a lot of sense. Lucas: Let me give you a real example. I worked with a new engineering manager at a mid-size SaaS company — let us call her Priya. She had been promoted from senior engineer six weeks earlier, and she inherited a team of five: three senior engineers who had been there for years, one mid-level, one junior. Her boss asked her to run a brainstorm on how to reduce customer onboarding time. Luna: Classic high-stakes first test. Lucas: Priya had read about brainwriting, so she tried it. She came into the meeting, handed out index cards, gave everyone five minutes to write down ideas. One of the senior engineers — let us call him Marcus — was visibly skeptical. He said, 'Are we seriously writing on index cards like kindergarteners?' Luna: Oh wow. That is exactly the kind of pushback a new manager fears. Lucas: Right. But Priya just said, 'Humor me for five minutes. If it does not work, we will do it your way next time.' So they did the silent write. Then they did the dot-vote. And the idea that got the most votes — by a clear margin — came from the junior engineer, a woman named Sarah. Her idea was to let new customers skip the guided tutorial and jump straight into a sandbox environment. Luna: Interesting. So the junior person had a fresh perspective that the seniors might not have thought of. Lucas: Exactly. And because the vote was anonymous, Sarah did not have to pitch her idea against Marcus's skepticism. The idea stood on its own. When the results were revealed, Marcus looked at the idea and said, 'Actually, that is really smart. We should prototype that.' Priya told me later that if she had done a traditional brainstorm, Sarah would probably never have spoken up, and that idea would have stayed in her head. Luna: That is a powerful story. And it is a concrete win that Priya could show her boss. Lucas: Exactly. That is the thing about the brainwriting pre-write — it is not just about fairness or inclusion. It produces better ideas. A 2020 study in the Journal of Creative Behavior found that brainwriting groups generated twenty to thirty percent more ideas than brainstorming groups, and the ideas were rated as more novel and feasible. Luna: And I bet it also helps with the dynamic of managing former peers. Because you are not asking senior team members to defer to you as the manager — you are asking them to defer to the process. Lucas: That is a really important point, Luna. The process becomes the authority, not you. And that is huge for a new manager who might feel insecure about their own ideas. You do not have to be the smartest person in the room — you just have to be the best facilitator. Luna: So let us talk about the logistics. What does this look like in practice for a remote or hybrid team? Lucas: Great question. For remote teams, you can use a shared Google Doc with a table — each person has their own column. You give everyone five minutes to type ideas into their column. Then you use a tool like Mentimeter or even a simple Google Form for the anonymous vote. The key is that everyone is writing at the same time, not watching other people's ideas appear in real time. Luna: So you need to enforce that. No peeking at the doc until the timer goes off. Lucas: Exactly. And it works surprisingly well. The other thing I recommend is that you, as the manager, also write your own ideas in the silent phase — but do not vote. You want the team's ideas to rise or fall on their own merit, not because you, the manager, put your vote behind one of them. Luna: That is a nice touch. It shows you are participating but not dominating. Lucas: Right. And if you are worried about the team feeling like they are being micromanaged, you can frame it exactly that way: 'I am going to write my ideas too, but I am not going to vote because I want to see what emerges from the group.' That builds trust. Luna: I want to push back on one thing though. There is something to be said for the energy of a live brainstorm — the way one idea sparks another. Do you lose that with the silent pre-write? Lucas: You do lose some of the cross-pollination in the divergent phase. But you can get it back in the convergent phase. Once you have the top ideas, you can do a 'round-robin build' where each person takes one idea and adds one thing to it. You can do 'What if we combined idea A and idea C?' That is where the sparks happen. And it is more focused because you are building on ideas that already have some consensus. Luna: So you are trading volume of associations for depth of development. That seems like a smart trade-off for a team that needs actionable outcomes. Lucas: Yes. And if you really want the cross-pollination, you can do a second round of brainwriting. Take the top three ideas, give everyone another five minutes to write down how they would improve each one. That is a technique called 'brainwriting with building' and it is really effective. Luna: I want to ask about the skeptical senior person. What do you do when you have a Marcus who is visibly resistant to the process? Do you address it head-on? Lucas: I think you handle it in the moment with a light touch — like Priya did — and then you follow up one-on-one. After the meeting, you say, 'I noticed you were skeptical about the brainwriting. I would love to hear your honest feedback. What did you think of the outcome?' Usually, when the results speak for themselves, the skeptic comes around. And if they do not, you can ask, 'What would make you more comfortable with this format next time?' Luna: You are giving them agency instead of forcing compliance. Lucas: Exactly. And honestly, having one or two skeptics in the room can be useful because they test the process. If the process holds up, it is stronger for it. Luna: So let us say I am a new manager and I want to run my first brainwriting session next week. Give me the exact agenda, minute by minute. Lucas: Okay. Total time: thirty minutes. Minute zero to three: you explain the process and set the norm. 'We are going to do five minutes of silent idea generation. Write down as many ideas as you can. Quantity over quality. No talking.' Minute three to eight: silent writing. If someone finishes early, tell them to keep writing or refine their ideas. Minute eight to ten: collect the ideas — either physically on index cards or paste into a shared poll. Minute ten to fifteen: silent dot-voting. Each person gets three votes. Minute fifteen to twenty-five: facilitated discussion of the top three ideas. 'What would it take to make this work?', 'What are the risks?', 'Who else needs to be involved?' Minute twenty-five to thirty: decide on next steps. 'We are going to prototype idea A. Sarah, can you lead that? Marcus, can you provide technical input?' Luna: That is clean and repeatable. And the whole thing is half an hour, which is way better than a rambling hour-long brainstorm. Lucas: Exactly. And you can do it in a stand-up meeting, you can do it in a workshop, you can do it in a quarterly planning session. I have used this exact structure for product roadmaps, process improvements, even naming a new feature. Luna: I think one of the reasons this works so well for new managers is that it solves the 'I do not want to look stupid' problem. Both for you and for your team. Lucas: That is right. And I think that is actually the deeper value of this technique. It is not just a productivity hack — it is a psychological safety tool. When you remove the social risk of proposing an idea in front of colleagues, you get more ideas, and you get more honest ideas. And for a new manager, creating that safety is one of the most important things you can do. Luna: And by the way, if you are listening and thinking, 'I do not have a team yet, I am still an individual contributor' — you can use this technique with your peers too. Propose it for your next cross-functional meeting. Lucas: Great point. Okay, let us talk about a common pitfall. A listener wrote in and said, 'I tried brainwriting, but the ideas were mostly incremental and safe. Nobody proposed anything bold.' What went wrong? Luna: I bet the prompt was too narrow or too safe. Lucas: Bingo. The prompt is everything. If you ask 'How can we improve the login page?', you are going to get incremental ideas. If you ask 'How might we eliminate the need for passwords entirely?', you get more radical ideas. Brainwriting surfaces the ideas that are already in people's heads — it does not create new ones. So you need a prompt that stretches people. Luna: What is the best prompt you have seen for a first-time manager? Lucas: I like: 'If we had unlimited resources for the next quarter, what is one thing we would do that we are not doing now?' That prompt removes the 'but we do not have budget' filter and lets people think big. Then after the vote, you can ask, 'What would it take to do a scaled-down version of this?' Luna: That is clever. You separate the dreaming from the reality-checking. Lucas: Right. And as the manager, you can decide which ideas are worth protecting through the reality-check phase. That is part of your role — to be the advocate for the ideas that have potential but are still fragile. Luna: I want to circle back to what you said about not voting as the manager. What if the team's top idea is something you know is a non-starter for political or technical reasons? Lucas: That is a tough one. I think you handle it transparently. You say, 'I see this idea got a lot of votes. I want to be honest with you — there are constraints I am aware of that make this difficult to execute right now. Let me share what those are, and then I want to ask the group: given those constraints, how might we adapt this idea?' You do not kill the idea — you invite the team to help you solve the constraints. Luna: That maintains trust. Because the worst thing you can do is let the team vote and then quietly ignore the winner. Lucas: Exactly. That destroys the process for next time. So if you are going to use brainwriting, you have to commit to taking the top ideas seriously — or at least explaining why you cannot. Luna: I think that is a good note to end on. Let us do a quick recap for anyone who is going to try this next week. Lucas: Sure. Step one: prepare a bold, open-ended prompt. Step two: five minutes of silent individual writing. Step three: anonymous dot-vote. Step four: facilitated discussion of the top ideas. Step five: assign next steps. And as the manager, write but do not vote, and commit to taking the results seriously. Luna: And if you mess it up the first time, that is okay. Priya did not get it perfect either. But she learned, and her team learned, and the second time was smoother. Lucas: That is the real lesson. Your first brainstorm as a manager is not going to be perfect. But if you use a structure that respects every voice, you will earn your team's trust, and you will get better ideas. And that is a pretty good outcome for thirty minutes.