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    You are here Home » innovation

    How Leaders can Ignite Innovation

    Last updated on Jun 27, 2016 by Dan McCarthy · This post may contain affiliate links

    An executive at
    a company I work with recently told me:

    “We have very creative employees who want to
    be innovative but find many obstacles created by the cultural opposition to it.
    We have to find a way to hold a mirror up to leaders so they can recognize the
    issue and then give them tools to overcome or at least neutralize the cultural barriers.”


    He’s so right! We spend a lot of time training
    and encouraging employees at all levels how to be more creative and innovation.
    They leave our programs all fired up ready to change the world, then go back to
    a workplace that crushes their innovative ideas and enthusiasm. It’s usually
    the organization’s leaders, with good intentions that unknowingly putting up
    barriers to innovation.

    According to research from creativity researcher
    Goran Ekvall, leaders who seek innovation but are unsure how to make it happen
    can easily undermine innovation goals. In fact, leadership behavior contributes
    from 20% to 67% of the climate for creativity in organizations (from CCL
    whitepaper “Innovation,
    How Leadership Makes the Difference
    ”).

    Becoming a leader that drives innovation doesn’t always require
    learning new skills – it often means stopping innovative-killing behaviors or practices.

    Here are 10
    things a leader can do to create an environment where employees are encouraged
    to be innovative:

    1. Be a
    connector.
    Facilitate constructive cooperation (not competition!) between groups
    working on similar opportunities).  

    2. Allow employees
    time to innovate.
     Engineering
    organizations are notorious for making sure 100% of their engineer’s time is
    billed to a program. Leaders need to give employees a few hours a week to
    experiment, work on projects that are outside of their jobs, to read, or to
    solve problems. Google is well known for the
    practice of allowing their employees to spend 20% of their time
    on things
    not related to their immediate jobs or projects.

    3. Encourage
    your employee to hang out with “PNLUs”
     (people
    not like you). People that are different bring a different perspective and
    fresh ideas. Some teams invite PNLUs to be a part of their project teams.

    4. Replace “yeah but” with “what if”. Instead of saying, “It won’t work,” or, “We already tried that,” say “Well, up until now it
    hasn’t worked,” or, “What if…?”

    5. Set a
    realistic expectation for innovation success.
     Innovative ideas, by their very nature, probably
    won’t be readily accepted or they will fail. What’s a good batting average for
    innovation? Some would say around 200, or one out of five ideas. Don’t let your
    employees get frustrated about the four rejections – instead, reward the effort
    and encourage them to come back swinging until they get a hit.

    6. Take an
    Edison approach to “failure”:
     “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000
    ways that won't work.”

    7. Provide
    as much autonomy and ownership for jobs, projects, or tasks
    . According to Daniel Pink,
    employees are motivated the most by autonomy – the freedom to do things their
    own way. The challenge for many managers to allow employees to do things
    differently than they would do them, as long as they are getting good results.
    Who knows, they may come up with a better way!

    8. Provide
    training.
     Innovation
    is not something a person is born with (DNA) – innovation can be learned.
    Provide training
    in how to be more innovative
    .

    9. Allow
    your employees to attend conferences and networking events
    . Again, in order to get them exposed to
    PNLUs and new ideas.

    10.
    Encourage employees to observe their customers or users. 
    This is central to the concept of
    “design thinking,” pioneered by the innovative design company IDEO. This isn’t
    about reading market research reports or user surveys – it’s about actually
    going out and observing the users of whatever it is you make or provide.
    « Defining Corporate Culture–Why Is It Critical?
    The Leader within Us – Developing Our Self-Leader »
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