If you want to create a culture of innovation in your organization, you have to encourage innovation at every level.
Episode Transcript:
When you think of the companies that excel at innovation, they are often companies where innovative thought permeates all departments and employee levels. They’re always looking ahead to the next trend, following customer direction, and bravely disrupting the status quo—and your company can do this too by developing a culture of innovation.
Developing a culture of innovation is a powerful engagement tool for employees. It gives them skin in the game, and they feel increasingly valued, knowing that their opinions, ideas, and input matter. If you want to encourage innovation at every level of your organization, here are 5 steps any leader can take:
First, create space. Leaders who value progress give employees the space, time, and opportunity to dream and ideate. Then, compensate ideas and problem-finding with a reward system—whether it be financial or verbal—for identifying problems and opportunities, and generating ideas to tackle them. Offer a well-defined goal and create a sense of urgency behind it to encourage ideation and ask your employees to be the solution. Finally, take these ideas and test to learn. You want to assess ideas based on testing to learn and testing to succeed, versus testing to fail or testing to try.
Frequent outside-the-box ideation and problem-opportunity identification can reinvigorate the workplace, as teams start to invest in what the future might hold, creating an innovative culture at every level of your company.
Header Photo by Alexander Suhorucov via Pexels.
