How to help everyone find their role in creating innovation.
Does this innovation challenge sound familiar? Your team leaders and managers acknowledge the importance of innovation and even sing its praises— but if you ask them how they routinely champion innovation within their teams, you might get crickets.
The problem is that most people managers, while they recognize the need for innovation initiatives, don’t engage in these initiatives themselves. Innovation isn’t their job; their main concern is ensuring employees get the necessary day-to-day work done. People managers are good at directing and growing what already exists but often struggle to guide their teams to new ways of thinking and creating.
Imagine what would happen to them, to their teams, to the organization if the opposite were true.
Championing innovation can be difficult, but is achievable if you invest the time, no matter the size of your team or organization. Follow these five guidelines and foster the self-confidence and awareness to successfully take your team from simply good at innovation to out-innovating the competition.
Grow Your Self-Awareness
Many leaders report low self-awareness, which can impact how they lead and even the organization’s bottom line. Growing this essential leadership skill will help you be aware of other blind spots. It’s a baseline from which you can improve as an innovator and, in turn, help others become better innovators. Tools such as psychometric assessments, such as our Innovation Fitness™ Assessment, and feedback—both from self-evaluation and peer evaluation—are a great way to start.
Be Team Aware
You cannot create innovation champions if you don’t know who your team is. What are their talents, skills, and passions? What drives them? Use those same psychometric assessments to answer these questions. If there is a disconnect between the project and the person, your innovation results will not be what you hope for. You may have the right employee in a role intellectually, but they might not get much out of the project personally, and that will affect your initiatives.
Reward Your Team’s Drivers
When it comes to motivational recognition, many leaders take the easy route and reward their employees with money or promotions. Using your knowledge of their drivers is the better way. There are six key drivers: knowledge, resources, surroundings, power, interaction with others, and use of processes and methodologies. Find out what works for each individual, whether it’s publishing their work, granting intellectual property rights, gifting conference tickets or office supplies, or simple verbal recognition from you or a customer. Rewarding innovation is crucial for moving your team forward, and there is a right way to do it.
Celebrate Creativity Company-wide
While it’s important to reward individuals, you also cannot forget to celebrate as a whole. Recognizing when the organization makes creative gains for its customers or its industry should be a common occurrence. It builds your company’s innovation culture and becomes a testament to your team’s further commitment to successful innovation initiatives. Nothing energizes and engages a team more than seeing the impact on their customers from the value they created.
Start Small and Create Space
Innovation doesn’t start out as something big and life-altering—this is one of the most common innovation misconceptions. It starts with small changes day after day, with incremental changes on a product or a process, shifts in the way you talk to customers, even fluctuations in the mindset or culture of your organization. The key is to set aside time for your team to start somewhere—even 5% of their time will help move many small innovation ideas forward. You don’t need big innovations. You need small innovations that you can grow.
We practiced these guidelines with the largest outpatient healthcare organization in Canada. At each level, we asked leaders and team members: Do you know yourself? Do you know what activities you are best suited for and which you aren’t? Do you know what motivates you? While the company’s leaders were motivated to innovate and build better teams and a better company, they couldn’t organize themselves correctly without self-awareness and team awareness.
Once they took the Innovation Fitness™ Assessment and began celebrating what they learned and accomplished each week, they were able to repeat the process across the company. Employees became increasingly aware of their skills, behaviors, and motivators, and used that knowledge to influence their teammates. Leaders used the same tactics in recruiting and hiring the right people for the projects that needed to get done. It led to truly amazing cultural change—across clinics, regions, and Canada— because of the top-to-bottom awareness and collaboration throughout the company.
We never had to change job descriptions or what people did day-to-day in their work. We only had to make them think about their jobs differently.
Innovation should be a part of everyone’s job within the organization, and every leader is responsible for guiding the way. The result? Less time managing people and more time focusing on the results—and employees who see their manager as a motivator. Follow these guidelines and you’ll not only foster a company-wide innovation mindset, you’ll have a team of innovation champions.
Originally published by Leadership Excellence presented by HR.com. | Header Photo by Alexander Suhorucov from Pexels.
