Engaging Your Employees in Innovation

Everyone can be involved in innovation:

Not all improvements are world-historical acts of bravery and genius. You can start at any level. Get your employees to start where they are. Start them with whatever they are ready, willing, and able to do. And then work up the chain to bigger and better improvements.

Levels of improvement:

Improvements range from petite to strategic. Knowing this helps you be more nuanced and flexible in helping people get started and also in helping them work up to their maximum potential. Three core levels of innovation:

1. Small improvements
2. Continuous improvement
3. Strategic improvements / innovation

Small improvements can target anything in a person’s job: improving a result, lowering a cost, making a process more efficient, improving a skill, or thinking of a better way to work together as a team. You can also challenge your employees to come up with better ways to implement & live your core values. Everyone on your team can be encouraged, engaged, empowered, and coached to make these kinds of small improvements.

Continuous improvement is all about making small improvements in succession. Regular improvements should be part of the job.

Strategic improvements are innovations that generate huge results or contribute directly to the execution of strategy. All businesses need people working on innovations that improve their competitive positioning in the marketplace.

It is part of your job as a leader to engage your employees in the challenges and opportunities of your business. Make your employees part of the solution.

Every stage of the planning cycle:

There are lots of opportunities to engage your employees in innovation in everyday work. Engage them in innovation throughout the project life-cycle, i.e., in identifying opportunities for improvement, discovery, planning, execution, and project maintenance or sustainability.

Each stage of a project can benefit from employee input. And in each stage you can foster innovation and drive continuous improvement.

Lots of ways to contribute:

Thinking about the project life-cycle reminds us that innovation requires many different kinds of contributions. This gives you many different ways to engage each member of your team, e.g.,

• Identifying and assessing gaps, needs, and new ideas
• Bringing good process to improvement projects
• Lending a hand on improvement projects
• Questioning the status quo and playing devil’s advocate
• Creating solutions and inventing new ways to do things
• Helping with execution, etc.

Make your employees part of the solution by engaging them in the challenges and opportunities of the business. Foster innovation and continuous improvement by helping employees start where they are and draw on their strengths.

This blog was published in full at Incrementa Consulting.

Joel is an executive coach, consultant, and leadership educator. As a new member of the team at Incrementa Consulting (Incrementa is Latin for change), his focus is on building leadership capacity, improving collaborative practice, and aligning culture with strategy to create a competitive advantage for his clients. Follow Joel on the Incrementa website and on Twitter.

Copyright ? 2015 Joel Shapiro, Ph.D., all rights reserved.