How can you balance innovation with company values?

1 Assess your company values

Before you can balance innovation with company values, you need to have a clear understanding of what your company values are and how they guide your decision making and actions. To assess your company values, ask yourself and your team questions such as what core beliefs and principles define your culture and identity, how you communicate and demonstrate those values to customers, partners, and stakeholders, how performance and behavior is measured and rewarded based on those values, and how conflicts or dilemmas that arise from competing or conflicting values are handled. Through this assessment, you can identify which areas require reinforcement, clarification, or updates to reflect the current and future needs of your organization and industry.

2 Encourage your team to innovate

Once you have a solid grasp of your company values, you can encourage your team to innovate within those boundaries by creating a safe and supportive environment. This will enable them to share their ideas, feedback, and opinions without fear of judgment or rejection. Additionally, it is important to provide your team with the resources, tools, and time they need to explore, experiment, and test their ideas. Setting clear and realistic expectations and goals for innovation projects and initiatives is also essential. Finally, it is important to celebrate your team's successes and failures and learn from them together. By encouraging your team to innovate, you can unleash their potential and creativity and foster a culture of continuous improvement and learning.

3 Align innovation with company values

The final step in balancing innovation with company values is to align your team's efforts with your organization's vision, mission, and goals. This can be achieved by communicating and reinforcing your values throughout the innovation process, evaluating and validating ideas based on how well they fit with your values, seeking feedback from other departments, functions, and levels within the organization, and sharing and showcasing innovation achievements that reflect and support company values. Aligning innovation with company values guarantees that your team's innovation is relevant, meaningful, and impactful for your organization and industry.

4 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?