Leading for Innovation

New products, new markets, new investors, and new ways of doing things are the lifeblood of growth. And while each innovation carries potential risk, businesses that don’t innovate will eventually diminish. 

—Adena Friedman

 

 

For example, technology companies produce a steady stream of new-and-improved mobile devices (and operating system updates), constantly working to develop features that they hope will help them increase their market shares. Similarly, fashion designers try to anticipate (or even shape) consumers’ interests by creating new collections for each season. And business leaders are constantly on the lookout for ways to get better at improving productivity, meeting their clients’ needs, and outpacing their competitors.

 

Once your organization comes up with a new product or service, you can’t just sit back and assume that people will keep lining up for it indefinitely. Your market is going to keep changing. Your competitors are going to keep coming up with their own stuff. New problems are going to keep popping up—and requiring new solutions. 

 

All of this means a successful team, department, or company can’t rest on its laurels. It needs to keep growing and moving forward. And to do that, it needs to innovate. That doesn’t just mean “come up with new stuff.” It means “come up with new stuff that aligns with the organization’s goals.”

 

That’s where you come in. One of your main roles as a leader is to inspire and push your people to reach for (and achieve) their full potential as individual employees and as members of a team. You want them to come up with new ideas that will drive the organization’s success. But you need to do more than just say, “Innovate!” You need to create the conditions that foster innovation and then actively encourage and empower your employees to pursue new ideas, challenge themselves, and think creatively.

 

Create Space for Failure

 

There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period. 

—Brené Brown

 

Innovation is often a bit of a leap of faith. By no means is it a reckless jump into an unknown void. Rather, it’s a venture into territory that isn’t always fully mapped out—an informed risk based on data and experience.

Innovation doesn’t always create a beeline to success. In fact, it frequently takes a detour (or several!) to Failure Town. And that’s totally normal: failure is a critical part of the innovation process. After all, how can people figure out which ideas work without also figuring out which ideas don’t work?

 

That’s why leaders need to be sure that there’s plenty of room in their organizations for failure. I’m not talking about failure in the sense of people not pulling their own weight or people who repeatedly make poor choices. (One bad decision might be a learning opportunity; multiple bad decisions could indicate someone who is not a good fit for the team or company.) I’m talking about failure in the sense of trying something new that ends up not working out. 

 

If you look at the history of any major innovation, you’ll find a timeline that’s riddled with wrong turns, experimentation, and lots of dead ends. No one gets things 100% right on the first go. The people who succeed at innovation are the ones who keep working on an idea or solution even after things go wrong. 

 

Support and Encourage

 

Innovation is serendipity, so you don’t know what people will make. 

—Tim Berners-Lee

 

In addition to giving your employees room to fail, you need to give them the tools they need to explore new ideas. For example, this could include certain resources, such as access to needed technology, funding, or opportunities to attend conferences or trainings to gain relevant knowledge. 

 

Many people consider their time to be their most valuable commodity. If someone is buried in their day-to-day tasks or focused working through the steps of a fully defined and laid-out project, it’s hard for them to find the time—and the mental energy—to devote to coming up with something new. Consider taking a page from the playbooks of companies that allow their employees to spend a certain amount of their work time on approved “side projects,” where they can experiment and test new ideas. (For example, AdSense and Google News are two products that emerged from Google’s “20% Project,” which famously encouraged employees to spend 20% of their on-the-clock time working on personal projects and pursuing innovation.)

 

Alongside resources and time to pursue innovation, employees benefit from encouragement as well. It’s well established that positive feedback, recognition, and supportive affirmations along the lines of “you got this!” can boost morale, spark engagement, and increase productivity. But when someone is weighing whether (or how) to take a risk or set off on a new course without a map, the uncertainty level is higher than normal—and sometimes can be high enough to dissuade them from taking that chance. Encouragement can carry extra weight in these situations, so don’t neglect it! 

 

Be sure that the work environment is in a place where employees who share their ideas can be assured of receiving support for them (without fear of criticism or repercussion). If they need help, you want them to feel comfortable asking for it. Because collaboration (and the diverse perspectives it brings) often drives successful innovation, make it possible for your employees to work across teams or departments when needed.

 

Provide Autonomy, But Don’t Abandon Accountability

 

Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow. 

—William Pollard

 

Once you’ve opened the door to experimentation (and a possibly circuitous route to success) and given your employees the resources they need to explore, the best thing you can do at this point is get out of their way. 

 

This doesn’t mean let them fall totally off your radar. But if you’ve ever had someone watching you like a hawk and questioning everything you do, you know how challenging it can be to get your assignments done under those circumstances. When you’re hoping for innovation, it’s especially critical to back off a bit and give people plenty of breathing room. If you are confident enough in your employees’ abilities and competencies to believe they will innovate something great, then trust them to do it. Give them the authority to lead their innovation projects and to make decisions about them on their own.

 

At the same time, though, you need to hold them accountable. After all, you’re still their boss—and it’s your job to ensure that they do their work. Goal-setting and expectations come into play here, even when the uncertainty of innovation means that the path forward isn’t necessarily well-defined. You still need them to be working toward a goal. Whether that goal is nebulous or you tell them exactly what their goal is (such as solving a particular problem), you increase their ability to innovate by giving them flexibility on how they get there.

 

Ideally, your employee will successfully innovate some new product or service that will help your organization. But when that doesn’t happen, think of their “deliverable” as what they’ve learned from this failure—and offer them guidance and encouragement to adjust their parameters so that their next foray into innovation yields better results. (And if repeated attempts are fruitless, then either the context or your employee—or both—aren’t well-suited for innovation, and you’ll need to make some changes.)

 

Lead by Example

 

The biggest part of leadership is that you lead by example with your performance first and foremost. 

—Jude Bellingham

 

Last but not least: show, don’t just tell. If you want your employees to do something, don’t command them to “do as I say” but instead invite them to “do as I do.” Show your commitment to innovation by actively participating in creative endeavors and sharing your own ideas. Not only does this approach demonstrate to them what you want, but it also strengthens your team, because you understand firsthand what they are doing and therefore know best how to support and inspire them.

 

Final Thoughts

 

Innovation is the calling card of the future.

—Anna Eshoo

 

Through innovation your employees can find new solutions to current problems—and sometimes even to problems that don’t yet exist. Whether those solutions lead to better products, lower costs, improved efficiencies, greater impacts, or other positive outcomes, they emerge when people have the autonomy, tools, and support they need to think creatively and take risks. When innovation has the potential to yield such significant gains, leaders who fail to cultivate it risk seeing their organizations fall behind. 

 

Do you have an especially effective strategy for fostering innovation among your employees? Please share it in the comments below!