This week’s focus is on innovation.
It’s time to head back to work and jump-start your innovation-machine. While we all pursue creativity in different ways, mine always starts with a great cup of coffee.
Speaking of innovation, some of my best pots of coffee come from “custom blends” that are nothing more than the last few beans from several different varieties. While purists might cringe, I smile as I sip the always unique, often great but unfortunately unreproducible output. In your case, we are seeking similar results…something that surprises and delights customers, but of course, we want the output to be reproducible.
One of the great things about my view on innovation is that it’s not the sole domain of the engineers, researchers and technologists. My definition of innovation might invite a bit of controversy, but it allows me to extend it to everyone and every function in an organization. There are no boundaries that limit where innovation can take place.
An “Operational” Definition of Innovation and the 3 Leadership Conditions:
Innovation: creating incremental positive value for the firm by solving vexing problems with unique and reproducible approaches.
Easy to say, but the real issue is getting an entire team or organization thinking in those terms. This does not happen with the flip of a switch, but rather is the direct result of your leadership practices.
The Three Fundamental Leadership Conditions for Innovation.
1. You as a leader must have high personal credibility. If you lack credibility, no amount of cajoling, cheerleading, imploring or dictating will matter. People do not innovate on command.
2. An effective working environment is essential. The process of innovating requires people to expose radical and sometimes outlandish ideas. People will only put themselves at risk in an environment where they feel safe.
3. Good team chemistry and problem-solving experience enable innovation. Groups that enjoy working together and have experience in tackling and solving tough problems are capable of remarkable things. Getting a team to this level is of course your challenge.
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Take the three conditions, add in a good crisis or a unique set of opportunities and shake vigorously, and you’ve got the ideal situation for innovation to occur.
We are living in a target rich environment right now, and whether your firm is focusing on survival, sustaining or seizing opportunities, developing a spirit of innovation is critical. Use this concept to help drive fear out of the workplace
Some managers look at their more administrative or infrastructure focused teams and functions and discount their ability to innovate. I’ll push back on that self-limiting view of the world.
I’ve seen remarkable innovations come from marketing organizations, sales teams, IT groups and support departments. In all cases, these groups responded to a crisis or a challenge by working together to do things like cut costs, increase revenues, outflank competitors, improve service to customers, drive more leads etc.
If you’ve got conditions 1 and 2 covered (credibility and working environment), but your team is not used to thinking and acting on innovation, you may need to prime the pump.
- Find a common cause or vexing issue, ideally focused on serving internal or external customers. The more you can link the vexing issue to serving customers, beating competitors or enabling another team to deliver on those goals, the more interesting it will be for your team to pursue.
- Not all teams know how to problem-solve. Teach your team to brainstorm. You may not be the right person to facilitate, so bring in someone from another group or from outside and get out of the way so that people are not encumbered by your presence.
- Ensure that the team moves from brainstorming to selection and implementation planning in an orderly fashion. Some groups go into brainstorm mode and never come out.
- As leader, support the implementation of ideas by knocking down obstacles.
Not every innovation attempt succeeds. Foster a learning culture where failures are leveraged to identify improvements. When you do succeed, make certain to identify why things worked and encourage people to do more.
The Bottom-Line:
The faster you get people focused on problem-solving and in the mindset of “seizing opportunities,” the more effective you will be at pushing fear out the door in favor of value creating activities. It’s time to push the “GO” button on your innovation machine.
High personal credibility enables shepard leadership. People follow you, because they see it is in their best interest. When credibility is lacking, they will see the leader, rather than their self interest. When credibility is lacking, they have to manage you as a risk. Instead of jumping and getting it done, they will hedge, they will wonder, they will give half, rather than a whole. They will migrate to the credible leader.
Those are important conditions. One behavior that’s part of the environment you describe is that when people share an idea it isn’t immediately shot down. People are naturally creative and they’ll come up with good ideas and share them unless you demonstrate that you don’t want to hear it.
Thanks for describing this out so well, Another important ingredient to innovation is time. If we are always swimming head down against a continual flow of work we tend to just keeping doing what we have always done. We need to make time to lift our head occasionally so we can see where we are headed and think about other ways to add value or work smarter. While you can schedule time to think about innovation I don’t believes our minds really work best that way. Maybe some people can just throw a switch and go from processing a deluge of tasks to thinking about innovation but I’m not like that. My innovative Ideas usually come when I can quiet my mind a bit, bicycling, walking, driving, reading, listening to music or sitting watching nature work for me.
This could be why I’m not a big fan of brainstorming as an initial step in trying to innovate. It can assist in priming the pump but I don’t feel the quality of ideas are as good because people tend to focus on a few initial concepts that get brought up and not the underlying issue. I prefer to ask people to think about ways to innovate on their own before we brainstorm. Then we came together list the ideas discuss their merits ideas and build upon the best ones. The important thing in this approach is that everyone knows they don’t have to have a fully developed solution before sharing it with the group and that there are no bad ideas. The collaboration around the initial concepts usually leads to a truly innovative solution.
Art: don’t forget that if all this great leadership stuff actually motivates your team to become innovative and they end up solving the problem, then you need to make sure that you take the time and celebrate the success. Just a quick handshake or an “atta boy” won’t do it – make sure that everyone shares in the joy of a job well done.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
The Accidental PM Blog
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