Creating a Culture of Innovation

Innovation is a sexy topic today.

We admire innovative leaders and desire innovative cultures because we want the vitality, collaboration, and future-proofing they provide. Innovation has been deemed cool. Plus, research shows that it increases performance and keeps organizations moving forward in a rapidly changing world.

In reality, innovation is pretty difficult. Developing a culture of sustained, proactive innovation takes more than meets the eye, especially when you consider that most staff are paid to avoid risk rather than to embrace it.?

It’s easy to champion passion, creativity, and partnership. But to actually see fruit over an extended period of time requires behaviors that are much less sexy and fun such as high tolerance for failure, clear lines of accountability, rigorous discipline, and candid feedback.?

To build an innovative culture, you need to lead and manage through tension. This creates a paradox for many leaders. Tension is typically avoided, not encouraged. A willingness to fail is not intuitively aligned with building a thriving business. Same with brutal candor; it doesn’t normally create a safe and fun environment, especially if you’re on the receiving end. Navigating tension and innovating demands a new style of leadership and culture building.?

Much like making a soup or stew, when you bring counterintuitive ingredients together they combine to produce something greater than their individual elements. Through the tension of “sweet and heat” or “acid and cream,” we get new and adventurous flavors.?

Innovative cultures allow tension to create something new and profound. This only happens if your organization’s leaders are willing to create, model, and protect cultural guardrails that allow these tensions to exist.?

Cultural guardrails must be more than nice ideas. They need to be backed by appropriate authority and accountability—articulated, modeled, and protected by leadership. Otherwise, they dissolve at the first sign of tension.?

Below are five cultural guardrails we’ve helped develop for some of our most innovative and pioneering clients. They might be just what your organization needs to sustain a thriving culture of innovation.?

1) Keep the vision in focus.

Living, leading, and managing through tension isn’t easy. Without a clear vision that inspires and requires innovation, the path of least resistance will eventually sneak in, breaking down your organization’s capacity for tension and undermining innovation.?

Keep the vision and goal at the forefront. Connect the dots between the what and the why of the risk, so that every stakeholder understands the driving purpose that fuels the innovation.?

2) Foster trust and goodwill.

Without trust and goodwill, people wonder if they are safe, understood, or valued. When they don’t feel safe, understood, or valued, they won’t take risks or engage in candid and critical feedback. Trust and goodwill are the cornerstones of a proactive and sustaining culture of innovation.

3) Empower the right people.

Empowering the right people to take the right risks will always yield productive results. The key to success is ensuring you empower the right people. You can expect some risky ideas to fail. But if you allow sloppy performance, lack of discipline, poor management, and the empowerment of underskilled employees, you’ll end up eroding confidence and undermining the vision.?

4) Ruthlessly eliminate bureaucracy.

Needless process and redundant layers of decision-making choke out creativity and risk-taking. To empower innovation, ensure lines of authority and decision-making are clear and helpful to innovation. This often requires moving at a faster pace than the larger organization is able, or willing, to move.?

5) Resist the tyranny of the urgent.?

Proactive innovation never rises to the top of any leader’s “urgent list.” There will always be a myriad of good reasons to justify not taking risks. Smart leaders, however, know that important things must sometimes be given priority over urgent things. This is especially critical if your organization is cresting or decelerating and ready for new life.?

Like springs on a trampoline, healthy tension requires balance in order to add value and not throw your entire culture out of whack.?

There are times when counterbalance is necessary, when values such as “brutal candor” push too far and just become brutality. Or when “needless process” pushes too far and becomes “no process.”?

Remember – a willingness to experiment for the sake of innovation does not mean randomly empowering people to throw paint at a canvas.?

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