A few years ago, I had so many requests from business leaders and owners to work with their teams to ‘teach them how to innovate’ that I wrote a template response called, “How to Get Out of Your Own Way” in which I positioned the services my company at the time offered: vision and strategy clarification, strategy execution, and executive/leadership team coaching.
My point was that, before you invest one dime in enabling a mindset and values system, you need to make sure that effort aligns with what you’re trying to accomplish and how. What I was too polite to say was that you don’t train people to be innovative; rather, you create the environment in which they can take chances and support them as they do. It feels like that theme of requests is coming back again. I’m a few years wiser, so let me say preemptively: we can’t train your people to think creatively, but we can support your efforts to unleash them to do so.
Now, there are institutions, programs, and people who offer ideation and innovation education and forums. They can be very technical or involve stage acting. They all have value. What I’m talking about is the application of an innovative spirit and process in the workplace. For innovation to occur, leadership has to frame risk-taking, hassle-mapping, flat-out disruptive thinking as part of the organization’s mission and provide much more than a pool table and casual seating to have this mindset take root and flourish.
It’s essential that leaders and their managers get comfortable with being uncomfortable. They can establish parameters from budget to getting a heads-up, and they need to actively stimulate and facilitate the idea development process to help connect heads-down creators with organizational politics, resources, and more. First and foremost, organizations need to be honest with themselves. Not every company is innovative or should be. In fact, most are best served by doing whatever they do really well.
Often called the strategic anchor, well-run businesses focus their approach to success predicated on a principal emphasis. They compete on levers like value (Walmart), marketing (Nike), service (Nordstrom), or innovation (Apple). There’s little that’s more frustrating or less productive than the company fooling itself about its strategic anchor. Know what yours is, own it, and leverage the living heck out of it.
If you do hitch your wagon to innovation—and I love innovation of all sorts and believe there’s huge opportunity for it and through it—you need to be ready to live with and by the following:
• Released hounds can’t be unreleased—To paraphrase sports broadcaster Dan Patrick, once sanctioned, you can’t stop innovation, you can only hope to contain it. In fact, you don’t want to contain it at all. You can channel it, but the genie is never going back into the bottle.
• Collaborate to avoid surprises—When helping to split the atom of innovation, I always have tried to guide team members to work hard to share information with their managers, because few people truly like surprises. Managers need to own this as well. Part of the path to success here for managers is two-fold:
• Be curious, don’t judge – people are much more willing to share information when they’re talking to someone who’s interested in what they’re doing, not judging them
• Bring value – your perspective, your network, your experience, and the resources you can make available all are tools you can use to be an asset more than a nag
• Navigate opportunity by using vision as the beacon and values as the stars—Innovation needs to be relevant and the best framing for relevance is the vision you’re hoping to fulfill. Individuals need to be reminded to frame their thinking in terms of how their idea helps promote the vision and managers add value by reinforcing this. How people do their work individually and as part of a team needs to be informed by the values of the organization. Knowing your destination, being able to see it, and steering a course towards it with intent greatly increase the likelihood that what’s created makes sense for the organization and its customers and is created in a manner that raises the organization up rather than tearing it down.
Innovation is powerful, cool, and potentially scary. Establishing and supporting the proper mindset as an organization, through your leaders, and in your people can ignite significant possibilities. Framing innovation in terms of what supports your vision directs the power of the process appropriately. Living the values that define your organization especially when disrupting through thinking and acting differently is essential to feed off of the energy of innovation versus being burned by it. Powerful stuff, indeed.
Curated effectively, it’s a winner—and you will be too!
