Making Room for Initiative
Felix Meyer and Samuel Erny want to share responsibility more effectively and draw more fully on their team’s ideas and experience.
Making Room for Initiative
Since 2013, me.architektur has been designing and delivering building projects across Zurich’s Weinland region. Based in Unterstammheim, the architectural practice guides its clients through every stage of a project, from the initial sketch and design development to detailed planning and on-site construction management. Its work ranges from smaller renovations to complex conversions and new-build projects.
As the number of projects grew, so did the company. Today, me.architektur employs a team of around ten people. For its two managing directors, Felix Meyer and Samuel Erny, this growth raised new questions: How should processes and communication evolve? How can responsibility be shared more effectively? And what needs to be in place for team members to make decisions independently and contribute more of their own observations and ideas?
“We didn’t simply want to redistribute tasks. We wanted to give people more scope to take initiative while also creating greater clarity around how we work together.”
Innovation Starts with the Way You Work
Innovation is not limited to new products or technologies. In SMEs in particular, it often emerges when established processes are questioned, insights from day-to-day work are put to use and new solutions are developed collaboratively.
In an architectural practice, numerous tasks and decisions need to be managed at the same time. Deadlines must be met, projects coordinated and a wide range of stakeholders brought together. Amid the pressures of day-to-day project work, many decisions therefore continued to fall to the managing directors.
Felix Meyer and Samuel Erny wanted to take a deliberate look at these established patterns. They turned to Ahead Zürich’s innovation consulting team for support with questions relating to processes, communication, employee motivation and delegation.
“In the course of a busy working day, you often make decisions yourself, quickly and out of habit. It is easy to overlook where team members could take on more responsibility and develop solutions of their own.”
Over the course of the consultation, it became clear that these issues could not be considered in isolation. A team’s ability to take initiative depends not only on the employees themselves, but also on leadership style, the culture of collaboration and the scope they are given to make decisions.
An Outside Perspective
At the start of the process, the two managing directors completed two questionnaires designed to help them reflect on their own ways of working and on collaboration within the company. They then reviewed their responses with a coach from the Ahead network and explored what these insights meant in the context of day-to-day work at me.architektur.
This outside perspective helped them avoid jumping straight to ready-made solutions and encouraged them to begin by asking the right questions.
“The consultation held up a mirror to us. We realised that if we wanted our team to take more initiative, we as managing directors had to make a conscious effort to create the space for it.”
The focus was not on abstract concepts or sweeping organisational change. Instead, Felix Meyer and Samuel Erny identified small, practical changes and incorporated them directly into their plans.
Making Room for Responsibility and Innovation
Since the consultation, Felix Meyer and Samuel Erny have been taking a more deliberate look at which decisions genuinely need to remain with the managing directors and which could increasingly be entrusted to the wider team. This is not simply about reducing the directors’ workload. When team members take on more responsibility, they can contribute more of their project knowledge, develop their own solutions and identify opportunities for improvement at an earlier stage.
Communication and collaboration are also being developed step by step. This includes responding constructively to mistakes, making appreciation part of everyday working life and creating an environment in which team members feel able to raise questions and openly share their observations and ideas.
“We now have a much clearer understanding of what we can do as managing directors to enable team members to take on more responsibility and contribute their own ideas.”
me.architektur has already put some of the initial ideas from the consultation into practice, while others will be tested gradually. Working with Ahead Zürich gave the two managing directors an opportunity to step back from the demands of day-to-day project work and view their organisation from a fresh perspective. In doing so, me.architektur is not only evolving its approach to leadership and collaboration, but also creating better conditions for innovation to grow out of the knowledge and experience of the entire team.
me.architektur ag