Innovation is Everyone’s Business
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Leading Change, Management Education, Management Innovation, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Professional Growth, Quality Systems Management, Talent Management
Take a poll in your firm on whether people feel responsible for innovation in their jobs or in their departments, and I’ll offer an educated guess on the outcome. Those involved in engineering, design, marketing and product management will feel a strong sense of responsibility to innovate. For others in supporting or operations-focused roles, the need or ability to innovate will be rated towards the low end of perceived priorities or even capabilities.
That’s a shame. A good innovator and good innovations are terrible things to waste, regardless of functional role.
This “I” word has been a hot topic for several years now, giving rise to entire shelves of books and legions of consultants, and yet the majority of people that I connect with in organizations from small to large, tend to view innovation as someone else’s job. This view ensures that some of the best ideas and solutions to vexing problems for internal and external customers are left behind in the pursuit of the urgent day-to-day work of many employees.
It’s time to alter organizational and leadership thinking about the concept of innovation and get more leaders and people doing the right things to push out of their transactional modes in search of new ways to create value.
First, A Working Definition of Innovation for All of Us:
In interviewing individuals inside of a number of small and large firms that have successfully fostered cultures where innovation is viewed as everyone’s business, the definition that emerged was:
Innovation is solving vexing problems in unique and reproducible ways
While the continuous improvement group might be quick to claim some of that real estate, the intent of the “innovators” offering up that definition was to look beyond incremental operational improvements to solving significant problems that adversely impacted an internal or external customer group.
The adoption of the definition helped create awareness that everyone was responsible for recognizing upstream or downstream problems and pulling together the people and resources to find solutions. Solutions include process changes, technology adoption, new products and new approaches.
8 Suggestions for Jump-Starting an Innovation Focused Culture:
1. Challenge leadership to stand-up and own this one. Leaders at all levels own the responsibility for fostering an atmosphere or working environment that encourages innovation in all corners of an organization. While there’s no simple formula for building a successful innovation culture, it starts with the simple, but significant leap of faith for leaders to say, “Yes, we want all of our people thinking beyond tasks and looking for problems to solve and new ways to better serve their customers.”
2. Promote situations that jump-start the right thinking. People don’t innovate on command, so, it’s imperative that leaders and managers create situations where typically transaction-focused individuals can step back and look at the bigger picture of their work. Choose simple but important questions and conduct ideation sessions around the topic, such as:
- What gets in the way of serving our (internal/external) customers?
- What in our working environment frustrates you?
- What are our customers telling you that they wish we could do for them?
- If you could fix one thing about how we do our work, what would that be?
4. Create an outside-in view. Move beyond the functional four walls and invite customers in your value chain to sit down and share their insights, observations and needs. An example might be the order-processing group engaging with sales, shipping and manufacturing to gain a better understanding of how things flow and where the opportunities are to change and improve.
5. Go beyond process and promote innovation as a way to compete. The most innovative teams that I’ve worked around include a few marketing communications groups and professionals that found ways to out-promote, out-maneuver and out-perform much better heeled competitors, while operating on a shoestring budget. The push to innovate, adopt new technologies and to put a spin on traditional activities to shake up the customers was a core part of this organization’s success.
6. Celebrate innovation victories. It’s fun and easy to celebrate the blockbuster new products, but the type of innovation we’re describing is much less visible to the outside world. People are people, and the recognition that their work is making a difference in someone’s job or life reinforces positive innovation behaviors. Don’t skimp on the opportunity to celebrate.
7. Incorporate innovation activities and challenges into professional development activities. Making this part of the PD plan reinforces the cultural imperative to innovate.
8. More work for leadership. Once started, the innovation machine needs care and attention. Your role transitions from getting things going to providing on-going support and enabling capabilities. You need to challenge yourself to step-up and recognize the need to both channel the innovation as well as to let it run on occasion. And remember, your job is to knock down barriers.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Critics of this proliferation of innovation thinking typically suggest that too much distracts from the business of execution. And while I’ll agree that a culture of the “undisciplined pursuit of more,” is a problem, it’s up to leadership to ensure that the intent and approach here stays true to the mission of getting more people focused on solving the right problems for the right customers. Difficult, but not impossible, and well worth the investment in leadership capital.
Team Conflict? As Long as It’s Not Personal, Run With It
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Making Decisions, Management Education, Performance, Professional Growth, Project Management
I’m leery of happy teams. Don’t get me wrong. I like positive situations and working with happy people, however, in my experience, the happy teams are the ones that produce mediocre results or, they don’t produce at all.
Give me a group of people that show up to do battle on the issues versus the team that strives for peace and harmony, any day.
Just as “being liked” isn’t required to be effective as a leader, neither is maintaining peace and harmony on the team required for success. What is required is the ability to push the envelope on creativity, talk openly and freely about problems and shortcomings, and to cry foul when someone violates the group’s norms for performance, behavior and accountability.
For many people, conflict in the team environment feels wrong. It’s uncomfortable. Conflict breeds personal stress and group tension, and sometimes creates a hue and cry for “getting along.” While an aversion to conflict is understandable if it is personal in nature, task and process conflict are important factors in propelling high-performance teams forward.
5 Reasons a Dose of Conflict Might Be Healthy For Your Team:
1. Elephants aren’t allowed to hide in the room. The big issues and tough topics are uncovered quickly and dispatched without worrying about personal interests and political boundaries.
2. Social loafing is squashed. Hanging out and working at less than full tilt becomes painfully obvious in environments where the group is challenging itself to move together through the jungle. People pull their weight or they are left behind.
3. Decisions are held to a higher standard. While the potential pitfalls of group decision-making are well known, teams that challenge themselves and each other in pursuit of achievement tend to have higher standards for the quality of their decisions. Instead of a rush-to-decide or a drive-to-consensus culture found on more collegial teams, task-focused groups search for answers that pass the filters for both quality and speed. In my experience, they challenge assumptions, seek the right or at least better data and assess risks and implications much more effectively than the “let’s all get along” teams.
4. Leadership skills are challenged and strengthened. High task conflict teams are leadership laboratories. One of the “elephants in the room” of my argument here is that leading these teams is not for the faint of heart. Team leaders must learn to manage the flow and energy of the conflict to ensure that it doesn’t move into personal territory. They also need to be adept at helping maneuver the team from the heat of robust dialogue to a decision and implementation. These are clearly non-trivial leadership challenges and remarkable learning opportunities for all involved.
5. Standards for performance are enhanced. Participants refuse to settle for anything other than success, and success is often defined as either exceeding or obliterating targets or, innovating in some meaningful fashion. The task conflict pushes people higher and harder. Along the way, these high performance teams raise the bar for everyone in the organization.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
I suspect that I’m skating on the thin-ice of a great number of people that find conflict distressing and destructive. Keep in mind that my context is task or process conflict, and not anything personal in nature. It takes an emotionally intelligent group to pull this off and not let good and tough discussion over the right issues reduce to squabbling and paralysis. It’s hard work to find and foster this type of a team and environment. But who said that producing high performance was easy work? It’s most definitely not.
The July Management Excellence Newsletter & Free Books
Filed under: Career, Current Affairs, Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Management Education, Performance, Professional Growth
The July issue of The Management Excellence e-Newsletter is out, with subscriber-only content.
The current issue includes content on:
- Improving Ideation & Creativity with Your Team
- Surviving and Thriving at the Dreaded Annual Strategy Off-Site
- Ideas for Jump-Starting Your Personal/Professional Development Program
- New Suggestions for the Management Excellence Reading List
- A tasteful promotion at the bottom of the newsletter outlining new beta test opportunities for upcoming Building Better Leaders programs and other services. (Hey, I am in business here!)
If you’re not a subscriber, please consider signing on and gaining access to content and opportunities not covered on my blogs. As always, I will guard your e-mail information with amazing ferocity!
As an incentive, I will send a free, signed copy of Practical Lessons in Leadership to the 1st, 10th and 25th new subscribers (and every 25th after that, until 500) after this post publishes today. This offer is good for 24 hours…and you must have a U.S. mailing address to participate.
You can subscribe at Management Excellence (http://artpetty.com) or Building Better Leaders (http://buildingbetterleaders.com) on the far right column under E-Newsletter Mailing List. And of course, new subscribers will receive a copy of the newsletter and very soon, access to all newsletter archives as well!
I look forward to sharing ideas for development and performance with you in our e-newsletter format!
Happy Reading!
-Art
What If? Why Not? And Other Incredible Business Adventures
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Innovation, Leadership, Leading Change, Strategy
While we celebrate companies that pursue and succeed in radically changing the rules of the game, let’s face it, most organizations run on inertia.
For every company that redefines their little part of the world and changes our culture just a bit, there are plenty of firms that run on autopilot until the fuel runs out and the plane needs to be ditched in the ocean. The forces of globalization and digitization create storms and headwinds for some that are just too strong to overcome.
From Apple and Best Buy to Netflix, Starbucks, Zappos and Zipcar, there are firms and leaders that produce cultures and armies of people that thrive on redefining the rules in their own vision and along the way, they change our lives, habits, vocabulary and our view on the world.
These firms have dared to ask, What If? and Why Not?, and then they had the audacity to move forward and change the rules.
For the rest, there’s frustration, shock and amazement as their business models disappear. The CEO of Blockbuster describing how he likes how his moribund firm matches up with the competition is shocking, laughable and sad all at the same time. His $36 million or so in market capitalization versus the billion-plus of his disruptive competitor is all of the scoreboard that any of us need to see to know that there is no match.
I hear frequently from managers and owners about how their firms can no longer make money in their traditional businesses. In some cases, since they don’t know what to do, they’ve settled on trying to just lose less money. That’s equivalent to allowing yourself to bleed out slowly. The outcome is still the same, but the pain lasts a lot longer.
When I ask why they aren’t rethinking their businesses…whom they serve, what problems they are capable of solving and how they can position themselves in arenas where there are profits to be cultivated, the answers are shoulder shrugs mixed with looks of resignation and acceptance. If looks could talk, theirs would say, “Who is John Galt?”
I’ve noticed that no one in these firms is asking What If? and Why Not? Instead, they are filled with leaders and managers doggedly defending the status quo as if their lives hung on perpetuating what they know. Ironically, their business lives hang on what they don’t know but should be seeking.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
There’s no silver bullet, quick fix or sure-fire method to rethink and reinvent a business. In fact, many cannot be reinvented and the highest and best use of capital may well be to fold.
For some however, there’s a process that combines the speculative questions of What If? and Why Not? with the courage to ask and answer How Can We? and then to say, Let’s Try It!
If your plane is running low on fuel and the storm clouds look ominous, it may be too late. But before you decide to pull the ripcord and let the business plummet into the abyss, try asking and answering some simple but profoundly tough questions.
Leadership Caffeine-The Leader as Explorer
Filed under: Career, Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leading Change, Leading the Generations, Professional Growth
Something funny happens as we age and gain experience. Many of us expect the world to continue conforming to our view of things, which of course, it rarely does.
For those that stubbornly stick to the perspective that I’m right and everyone else is wrong, the world quickly spins away and they become leadership and management relics from a bygone era. For those that have the courage to recognize that they are the ones that need to change and keep pace, everyday is a true adventure.
I see this a great deal with experienced leaders that seem to reach a point where they no longer relate effectively to many of the people that they are supposed to be leading. This problem is particularly visible in the workplace today as the fascinating blending of the generations gains speed.
Ask ten baby boomer managers about their experiences dealing with the latest entrants into the workforce, and I’ll wager at least 6 will roll their eyes and then launch into a narrative filled with generalizations about work ethic, initiative, respect and so forth. What these diatribes tell me is that many managers have crossed-over to the side of the bridge where “they need to be more like me” thinking dominates.
The Leader as Explorer:
The macro-forces in our world, including changes brought on by globalization, the seemingly unending and accelerating march of technology and this constant sense of time-compression all are contributors to professional obsolescence. It’s hard work keeping current and it’s even harder work to constantly be processing on a world that is changing so fast that long-standing, tried and true rules no longer apply.
Yesterday’s leader provided guidance based on wisdom. In part, today’s leader guides exploration into the unknown.
Our fascination with innovative companies and our unceasing consumption of content and ideas on how to innovate are in-part, responses to the macro-forces that dominate our world. This need to understand how to help people and teams innovate shows that facilitating exploration is increasingly part of a leader’s role.
While I’m loathe to discount the value of wisdom, age and experience don’t give you the right or privilege to ignore the emerging realities of our world.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Instead of viewing your experience as the roadmap for how things should be, draw upon your experience to support your own and your team’s exploration of the future. While the road forward and the view to the horizon might appear alien in nature, the journey with an open-mind is much more interesting than the journey of someone frustrated that nothing looks the same. It’s your turn for change.
–
Check out the “Leadership Tip of the Day” at Building Better Leaders. Today’s tip: 5 Suggestions to Help You Create Time to Think
My Book
The desktop reference to leadership success whether you are starting out or starting over.
Art Petty
Welcome to Management Excellence where the focus is on building better leaders and creating high performance organizations.Building Better Leaders
Art Petty's Building Better Leaders programs in Leadership, Management and Developing as a Senior Contributor offer powerful and practical guidance for motivated professionals.
All programs available on-site in group format and select programs available in a distance learning PLUS personalized mentoring format.
Visit Building Better Leaders to find a program to help you or your team move forward. And don't forget to subscribe to the Building Better Leaders Leadership Tip of the Day.
Management Excellence Tools
Download the Management Excellence Guide to Effective Trade Show Marketing. What's Your Strategy & Execution (STREX) Quotient? Download and use the survey to help you gauge your organization's Strategy & Execution effectiveness and identify areas for improvement.e-book-Leadership and the Project Manager - Developing the Skills that Fuel High Performance Download the pdf or go to the e-book pages on this site and contribute to the conversation
Blog Subscriptions
Connect With Me On
E-Newsletter Mailing List
Join my e-newsletter mailing list and receive the latest in best-practices content for leadership, sales & marketing and strategy.