Creating An Innovative Culture is a Competitive Advantage

Too often, companies fall victim to the derivative vs. innovative, incrementalization vs. leaps and bounds. We seek certainty of results and instant payoffs rather than risk and delayed gratification.  

Successful startups are built on disruption, innovation, and the big breakthroughs. Yet, as they scale, it’s easy to lose that energy, agility, and curiosity no matter how amazing the talent. 

Innovation is a way of operating, -- it’s your company culture.

How do you create an innovative culture? Push for creativity over comfortable?

Create Space & Opportunities to Share

Creativity requires space and time to think, to engage, and digest information.

You need to provide opportunities for your team to share ideas with you and with each other.

For example, Square required teams to share meeting notes with the whole company for any meeting with more than two people. An extreme example, but an interesting one. Software like Asana or Notion provide a good opportunity to share ideas and hurdles or challenges to execution.

By time and space, I do not mean the annual retreat.  Rather, make innovation a part of everyone’s job description and workday. An often-cited example from 3M, a large multinational conglomerate, is a 15% time allowance every day for constructive daydreaming.  Maybe a daily dose isn’t possible for your company, and you do weekly sessions, or set aside one day a month for creative thinking.

Make sure these sessions are cross-functional, allowing different business perspectives and opportunities for collaboration to take shape.

Maybe you use the equivalent of a digital suggestion box. Develop a process for peers to comments on each other’s ideas and to get behind the ideas that they believe in and interest them.

Create a Culture of Creativity

Encouraging out-of-the-box thinking and providing opportunities to share is foundational to an innovative culture.  

Now, don’t go undermining what you just created.

What happens when someone brings forward a new idea? Do you jump in and point out all the reasons it won’t work? Or, do you ask lots of open-ended questions?  

For example, “how does this impact the business in new ways?” or “what are the intended results from this new approach?” or “why do you think this works?

Are you, in fact, only turning to a few favorites or trusted team members that are in your “inner circle”? Remember that it is often the employees on the front lines interacting directly with customers or operating within existing company processes that see the inefficiencies and opportunities.

If you want innovation, you must create psychological safety. Specifically, reach stage four, Challenger Safety, as described by Dr. Timothy Clark in “The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation” Challenger safety is the point at which your team feels safe challenging the status quo. They believe you want them to weigh in and feel that they have personal standing, that you will provide cover for failures.

Reward & Recognize Successes & Failures

The “reward and recognize successes” part seems obvious. Failures maybe less so.

When a great idea goes south or sideways, how do you respond emotionally? How does your team? Do people close ranks and point the finger? Do you come together and debrief asking: what went wrong, was it our assumptions, our execution, or timing? What can we all learn?

Do you celebrate experiments that don’t turn out as planned? That includes you! As a leader do you talk about missteps, normalizing an experimental culture?

In an interview with Motley Fool, Seth Godin shared, “[i]f you are saying to all your employees, 'Innovate, innovate, innovate,’ but you give the Employee of the Month parking space to the person who never screwed up and you give the bonus and the vacation to the person who doesn't make mistakes, you are not serious about innovation, and your team knows it.”

As a founder and CEO, you need to create a culture that spurs, encourages, supports, and rewards innovative behaviors and experimental thinking.

Need to see some more sparks from your team? Not sure if you are killing that innovative vibe? Setup a 30-min, no commitment, strategy call.