Building a Culture of Innovation

In the previous Innovation Weekly article, we discussed the importance of purpose in driving innovation within an organization. That same purpose would shape organizational culture, by providing the ethical and commercial compass that guides important decisions by implying the values sought after in potential employees, and by providing common direction among teams to ensure the appropriate mindset is applied to formal meetings, ongoing collaboration and day-to-day co-worker engagement.

Why is culture important?

It is regularly stated that people don’t leave companies but rather that they leave poor managers. While poor management can occur in isolation, widespread occurrence hints to poor organizational culture. Either the wrong people are being hired, the wrong people are doing the hiring, role expectations are out of sync with no willingness to adapt, or there is no real passion or dedication to what the business aims to do. Poor organizational culture can destroy a business, often slowly over time, by causing high staff turnover (especially among new joiners), by chipping away at the souls of the loyal until they realize they too should leave, and by continuously harming the reputation of the brand through negative customer experiences or negative sentiment from employees to external stakeholders. A negative culture is toxic. A positive culture, on the other hand, is invigorating.

What does positive organizational culture look like?

Positive culture accommodates feedback (positive or constructive) during any co-worker situation. In new product development methodologies, feedback through quality gates, market research, focus test groups and other channels is considered normal but, for some reason, it is often dismissed in other business contexts. The key to overcome this is to remove any stigma associated with ‘negative’ or constructive feedback. Managers should be able to give and receive feedback without repercussions. Peers too.

Matthew Syed, in his book “Black Box Thinking” describes how closed loop networks work well within organizations to build a positive culture. That is, a culture that expects change and accommodates the feedback necessary to identify opportunities for change and the willingness to adapt to implement that change, and then repeats that cycle. It means overcoming the politics found in many companies, along with the ‘old boys clubs’, the biases caused by role or seniority, race or beliefs, and a general lack of willingness to evolve. Only by doing so can you build a culture that is set to thrive from innovation.

How ambitious should the culture be?

This depends on the appetite for risk and the perceived reward. Rapid growth companies are having to tweak processes on the fly at times. Service companies have to adjust their offering at times. Disruptive companies are creating new markets by finding a gap in one and bridging it with a solution from another. Many people in these companies are visionaries, looking at trends and making educated guesses as to where their industry, technology sets and target markets are going to be and going to want in the next 5 to 50 years. A lot more people in these companies will focus purely on what’s happening in the next 6 to 12 months. You need both types of people to succeed, and they’ll be working on their respective time horizons but it is the role of leadership to know when and how to introduce the two groups and to share what they are each focused on. A jump too far into the future for the wrong audience risks alienating them and causing doubt in their alignment with the company vision. Too much detail on the status quo and you risk boring the futurists, who may feel the company is not progressive enough for them.

Both perspectives are critical, and both should be respected. The culture needs to accommodate this, and leadership should make it clear that a culture of driving efficiency in business-as-normal is as important as the culture that supports long-term strategy.

In Summary...

Building a culture of innovation starts with allowing people to be ok with giving and receiving feedback, at all levels of the organization. Without this, there are many biases and prejudices that risk jeopardizing great ideas and killing innovation before any real traction has been gained.

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This #InnovationWeekly series covers topics on innovation concepts, strategy, methodologies and implementation. New articles are released on a Tuesday. Follow the author and/or the hashtag to receive these updates in your feed.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for the next article, where we discuss how to measure success in innovation.