[ANNOUNCER]:

Breaking down everyday workplace issues and diagnosing the hidden sickness, not just the obvious symptom. Our hosts, James and Coby.

[COBY]:

Did we lose a patient?

[JAMES]:

No, that’s just my lunch.

[COBY]:

Hey, thanks for joining us. I’m Coby. He’s James. So let’s get started with a question. How do we create a culture of innovation?

[JAMES]:

Well, the cheap answer is with intent. When we’re working with organizations, the first thing that we tend to do with them is to identify their priorities. What are they focused on? What does success look like for them? And typically it falls into one of the five successes that we identify at the fifth stage of our workplace culture hierarchy, which we call strive. Are they striving for innovation, collaboration, change management, internal growth or customer acquisition? The two most common things that our clients tend to strive for are usually around internal growth and change management. So is their goal to become an employer of choice? Then we’re going to focus on internal growth. Do they have an emphasis as part of their strategy on merger and acquisition? Then a culture of change management and adaptability is going to be our focus point. The one that we get asked about most frequently tends to be that culture of innovation. So to answer the actual question, finally, after a roundabout ramblings, how do you create a culture of innovation? Well, again, it comes down to intent. And being able to diagnose the root cause of the barriers that are holding you back from a culture of innovation. And a climate of complacency is one of the most common barriers that we see to creating a culture of innovation. So we have to investigate the structural aspects of our business that are reinforcing this idea of complacency.

[COBY]:

Yeah, the thing that’s really helpful for us, and this might be a good thing for us just to kind of mention in general. So we talk about a lot of different ideas and we kind of show how they kind of all tend to kind of fall back to the workforce culture hierarchy. But a lot of that is, again, so when we’re working with organizations, do we implement all of that various stuff all at once? We’re like, well, no. How we actually kind of figure out the best path forward is usually on what is it they want to strive for. So when they hit the top of the hierarchy, where is it that they want to go? And it tends to be they’ve got a major sign of success. Again, often it’s around kind of adaptability and change management, or it’s around kind of like their employer brand and kind of internal growth. But one thing that we have been hearing more especially recently, is around innovation. And innovation doesn’t just mean kind of the one thing in the tech sector. Innovation can mean internal innovations like improvements or efficiencies, or moving towards a strength based approach to work. Like if you listen to our last episode about our spectrum program, we talked about kind of the six roles in the strength based teams. That movement towards that is innovation. It could also be about external innovation. So things like capturing new markets, developing new products, building new strategies, and all of this stuff requires a lot of the same infrastructure, a lot of the same indicators, a lot of the same components and kind of elements of your culture that enable this level of innovation and accepting this of kind of a continuous improvement mindset. And really it’s about, are you able to dedicate your actual time to looking for ways to be a little better today than you were yesterday? And you’re right. One of the things that we tend to say is, well, if you want to know what the big barrier or the sickness is holding you back from innovation, it tends to be if you have a climate of complacency. We say that even if your workplace culture is good and you’re working towards a lot of the good infrastructural pieces, you’re walking up the hierarchy, you’ve removed dissatisfaction, you’re creating psychological safety. Belongings is coming along. You can still have a climate of complacency even in those great workplaces, oftentimes.

[JAMES]:

Where we see the difference. And if you’ve been tracking with us at all, you’ve heard us. Well, me most more so, probably ranting about the difference between making people happy is not what we’re actually trying to do.

[COBY]:

Right.

[JAMES]:

That is a nice side effect of creating a productive, inclusive, profitable culture, but it’s not the outcome. And oftentimes you can have very low job dissatisfaction, you can have psychological safety, people can feel like they belong, and you can still have high levels of complacency in the workplace. People can be very happy doing very little, pay them a good salary, let them do very little, let them be complacent. And yeah, you will have happy, not everybody, but you will have happy employees. What we want, rather than happiness, is we want people to be engaged in the work. And this is the fundamental difference between creating engaged employees and merely engaging with people. If your focus of your employee engagement strategy is to make people happy, you probably are not striving towards a culture of innovation.

[COBY]:

Yeah, if happiness is kind of where you think the end goal is, then you could be creating a climate of complacency because you’re right, we are happy, we are comfortable. We feel accepted. When we are complacent. That tends to be kind of one of those things. Like all this stuff, it’s important to realize that there’s no simple answers and every answer requires a lot of work. So that’s just kind of general standard. But it’s the fact that if we’re not really creating engagement in employees, again, we did a previous episode, a couple of episodes back about should we do employee engagement? And a lot of the crux of that was we shouldn’t be trying to do engagement. We should be creating the conditions for engagement. And if you’re not doing that, and then the side effect of having, like James said, low dissatisfaction, high psychological safety, a good amount of belonging without creating engagement in people is that you can start to see the signs of the warning signs of complacency kind of seeping in. So why don’t I just talk about what the warning signs for culture or sorry, climate of complacency looks like and we can kind of break them down individually. But sure, the four warning signs of a climate of complacency are comfortable and traditional methods. Phrases like, this is how we’ve always done it. Rigid thinking, a lack of awareness of what is happening outside their environment, and always looking at the extremes, finding the no being problem focused rather than solution focused, and having unconfident or low profile leadership, where the don’t rock the boat mentality is kind of the law of the land. So those four warning signs really are what you need to look for to see if you actually do have a climate of complacency.

[JAMES]:

Yeah, I think you just listed four of my pet peeves. Well, okay, let’s look at them one at a time. The idea of comfortable and traditional methods, this whole idea that we do it this way because we’ve done it this way because were told to do it this way 20 years ago. The person who trained me to do it this way. So the person I train is going to be trained the exact same way. It’s such a frustrating attitude for if you are bringing in, especially bringing in new people into a role, you want people who are hungry, who are going to come in with new ideas, who are going to look at their job and the way things are done with a new perspective, and this mentality will shut them down faster than just about anything else. Having people ask the question of, well, why do we do things this way? Is an excellent thing. That’s something that you want, and you should be able to defend that with more than. Well, because we’ve always done it this way.

[COBY]:

And I mean, the idea of. So one of the kind of psychological impacts that kind of give this idea of comfortable and traditional methods kind of makes it more prominent is the implicit bias to convention where we have an overly favorable opinion of what has worked before or what has been the normal status quo. And, I mean, it’s something where we tend to look at, again, convention and kind of traditional methods with road colored glasses. We only tend to see the uncomplicated results of it rather than looking at it objectively with kind of a critical reflection. And it’s something that we’re all guilty of an implicit bias to convention. That’s why we kind of all sit in the same chairs in the meeting room and why we kind of tend to drive the same way to work every day. So part of that’s built into us. But when it comes to our jobs, it’s important for us to think critically. Often when we do a lot of organizational kind of change and organizational kind of improvements, one of the first things we always go to is we go to critical thinking is going to be the first thing we have to really kind of infuse into your workplace. And challenging comfortable and traditional methods for their merit is an excellent way to start at shaking kind of away from the climate of complacency.

[JAMES]:

Yeah, this one is huge. If you are not able to articulate the why behind your processes and you default to. I don’t know, it’s just the way that we’ve done things that in my mind is a red flag. That’s something that you should be. Does it automatically mean that everybody in your workplace is complacent? No, but it is a pretty good indication that you are not striving towards something greater than.

[COBY]:

So the next one is rigid thinking. So this really is kind of about not fully being aware of the kind of complexities that happen kind of outside of our workplace or not being kind of up to date. A lot of the value of new strategies or new programs and kind of having this polarized view of everything is either black or white, good or bad. There’s no kind of almost like appreciation of the gray.

[JAMES]:

Yeah, I see it in the rigid thinking. I see it as very much when presented with a new idea, it’s an inability to look at things through others perspectives.

[COBY]:

Right.

[JAMES]:

And that is a significant limiting factor. You’re never going to be able to innovate or grow or try new things. If you cannot take a step back from your own current understanding and at least recognize that there’s value in other people’s perspectives, that there could be value in doing things slightly differently. This rigid thinking, it ends up with tunnel vision. People put up blinders and they only see what’s directly in front of them and they won’t turn their head to the left or right to get a larger, broader perspective.

[COBY]:

Yeah. And almost like the default thinking is if it’s not an absolute yes, then it has to be an absolute no. Or if it’s not an absolute good, then it has to be an absolute bad. And it’s one of those things where the willingness to actually, you know what it is? It’s really about being kind of closed minded. If you’re not open to possibilities, open to embracing the complexities of a new venture or something new, and you’re only ever stuck in kind of the kind of clear box you’ve laid out for yourself and this whole black or white piece of it, then it’s really hard to again be thinking critically about how right now could be good, but maybe the new thing could better.

[JAMES]:

And it relates very closely and ties in really nicely with the next point around finding the no. Right. We often see these two things go hand in hand with people who are rigid thinkers who will not expand that perspective or see things as all good, all bad also tend to find the problems with every new idea. Every new idea is not a perspective of, oh, that’s an interesting idea. Let’s explore it for why and look at how it could be accomplished. It’s a. Well, that’s not going to work here because we don’t do things that way. Or no, that will never work because we tried something similar 20 years ago and it failed. Always finding a reason to say no will kill any opportunity for innovation.

[COBY]:

Yeah, and like you say, it’s the idea of being problem focused when something comes your way. It’s like, well, trying to find the problems so you can be justified in shutting it down. I’m sure everybody can think of a time they got excited about the possibility of something new or something kind of innovative and brought it to a superior. And you could tell they were really struggling to find a way to shut it down. You know what I mean? And that really is the kind of finding the no when you’re preferring that finding the problem and a reason to say no over finding. Well, that would trade one problem for another. But that other problem might actually be easier to solve and trying to figure out ways that you could, at least theoretically see the improvement or see the value of, which is again, more of a solution-focus. Finding the no is one thing that people tend to really kind of grab onto like, oh yeah, that’s what that’s called. When they are looking for a reason to shut me down, they’re trying to find the no. And you’re right, it does kind of go hand in hand with the rigid thinking.

[JAMES]:

Yeah. All of these, obviously we’re talking about interrelated concepts because they all relate back to. Have you inadvertently created this climate of complacency and the problem focused rigid thinking? All of them are great indicators. Those are two in my mind that are just very few times am I willing to say something is just blatantly bad. I usually like to hedge my bets and talk about there’s context for rigid thinking and always finding having a problem focus to new ideas or to your job, that’s bad. It is limiting you, it is limiting your company. And these are behaviors that can be addressed, but it’s going to require a lot of coaching and support.

[COBY]:

Which kind of brings us to the last one, which is around unconfident, unprepared or low profile leadership. And one of the things that we see the most is when it comes to this, doesn’t tend to be that the leader is very much trying to keep everything super traditional. It’s still the 90s, so we can act like it. That’s never the case. It’s more they’re unprepared or they’re not confident in their ability to usher in this new innovation. So sometimes it looks like, well, let’s not rock the boat, let’s not put our nexus out there because largely, and this again, is usually kind of when stuff kind of bubbles from up to middle management. And middle management tends to be where this tends to tend to happen the most because they’re the least prepared, the least trained, the least empowered to bring something like this to fruition. So it’s often more of we don’t have the infrastructure role in place with our leadership to allow for innovation. So the complacency kind of is stopped by leadership because leaders are not empowered to bring stuff, make stuff happen.

[JAMES]:

And this has a direct, like one of the biggest influencers on this is whether or not there’s psychological safety in the workplace, because if people, especially if you bring an idea to your manager and they have to try to sell it up to somebody else, it’s on them. Are they worried about wearing that? Are they worried that if they present this idea and their boss doesn’t like it, that they are going to be penalized in some way for that, either formally or informally. If they do actually go for it and it doesn’t work out. Is failure an option or is failure? You fail, you’re gone. There are a lot of environments where innovation is stifled because people don’t feel that they can try something new and it not work out and it not negatively affect their job. Now, I’m not talking about trying something like completely mishandling a situation and it being your fault and gross negligence and these types of things. I’m talking can people try doing things a different way and fail and not lose their job?

[COBY]:

Well, one thing that is kind of a bit ironic is the fact that where we see a lot of the warning signs of a climate of complacency tend to be industries that are the most competitive, that require innovation to get ahead. And it’s a weird duality when there’s this kind of idea of, well, if you put your neck out there and you try something and you fail, you’re out of here. Because we are too competitive of a workplace or too competitive of an industry to take a step back. That is such a almost counterintuitive way of thinking. Yeah, but it tends to be a common way of thinking. It’s like, well, we’re too competitive to make any mistakes, so we’re not going to try anything that might not work out.

[JAMES]:

Whether our margins are too tight or there’s too many competitors in our industry, we’re going head to head with another company for market share. Whatever the circumstances around that competitive nature of the industry, if you’re not willing to take any risks, how can you get ahead anyways? Yeah, but it’s usually not a mentality of the senior leaders who understand that risks need to be taken to get ahead. It tends to be, as you said, kind of in that mid level manager role where they don’t feel that they are supported to try new things. Other people may be supported to try new things, the company may be supported to try new things. But me in my role as a manager, as a team leader, no, I need to just keep my head down and do what I’m told.

[COBY]:

Yeah, exactly. And that really does tend to be, again, what we mean by the unconfident, unprepared or low profile leadership is just that we need to make sure that, again, this is why we kind of say that you have to have the infrastructural pieces of the hierarchy of our workplace culture hierarchy. Because if you want to kind of, again, make sure that these things are consistently applied, that they’re ingrained into your workplace, into your everyday, then the systematic approach of using the hierarchy is a good way to kind of know what foundations you have to build in order to kind of build off of. But the idea of if you want to have the kind of leadership that will be able to overcome complacency and try new things and be innovative, then you have to make sure that the freedom to fail and autonomy and psychological safety is available to everybody, not just some leaders, not just some employees, but to all people. Because you never know where the opportunities for innovation is going to come from. Because like we say, innovation isn’t just external, it’s also internal about internal improvements, creating efficiencies, the strength based approach to work. So there has to be, again, this idea of identifying the signs of the climate of complacency. But part of it is if you take the systematic approach of a workplace culture hierarchy, then you’re creating the conditions that will make sure that these things aren’t reinforced. There is an opportunity to kind of move past these as maybe old behaviors need to be revised as opposed to being how everyone survives in their workplace. Because if survival mode is all that you have, then innovation is off the table.

[JAMES]:

Yeah, well, if everybody’s in survival mode, you will never achieve that culture of innovation. And again, we are talking about this from what is your outcome that you’re trying to strive towards? What is that success that you’re trying to strive towards? And if it is striving towards having a culture of innovation where everybody is kind of moving forward, trying to better in their role, making the company better than it was yesterday, bringing improvements and suggestions for how we can be more efficient, be more profitable, maybe bring in new ideas and concepts for products, whatever that looks like. That success needs to be stated from the beginning. And then everything that you do through each of the stages of the hierarchy needs to be with intent through that lens. And I mean, we’re kind of giving you a peek behind the screen of how we approach our own consulting work because you have to have an end in mind before you start or else you’re just going to be going everywhere. I mean, if you’ve been tracking with us for any period of time, you’ve heard us talk about a lot of different concepts, a lot of different ideas within each stage of the hierarchy. Well, how do you know which ideas to implement its investigation and the outcome that you’re trying to achieve.

[COBY]:

Absolutely. So we’re giving away kind of some trade secrets here, but I’m sure that nobody listening is minding that. So we talked about the signs of a climate of complacency. Let’s move into what are the indicators of innovation. You want to know the signs of the climate of complacency so you can resolve them. But once they’re resolved, you also have to now start to create the indicators. The innovation is not just what you’re striving for, but is actually accepted and is actually part of the environment that you’re trying to create. The culture that you’re trying to build prioritizes innovation.

[JAMES]:

Well, and it’s defining it. Right. It’s taking innovation from a buzzword to what are we actually striving towards?

[COBY]:

Yeah. All right, I’ll break down the four indicators of innovation and then I think we’ll quickly kind of talk about each of them individually.

[JAMES]:

Sure.

[COBY]:

So the first one is making failing a part of the plan. This is about dedicating some resources, some time, some effort into things that may fail and being okay with that outcome. It’s about mitigating risk. Are you doing your homework? Are you looking for ways to collaborate? Are you finding a maximum utility of your efforts to allow for the mitigation of any type of effort that might fail? Accepting number three, accepting that unfinished is the new normal. So sometimes about being action focused is about jumping off with something and doing the best that you can, but realizing that it’s not about check the box, move on to the next piece. It’s about things need to evolve and to be adapt and to be constantly modified. Like continuous improvement doesn’t happen, they move on to the next thing. It’s about looking for little improvement opportunities kind of all the way. And then number four is to have confident leadership, someone that owns mistakes, people who share success, and it being expected that teams will be empowered to do work and to innovate. So those are the four indicators of innovation.

[JAMES]:

And what I like about those. So starting, like making failing part of the plan, it sounds od to say we plan to fail, but if you understand that anything new inherently has risk associated with it, and we want to make allowance for, we want people to try something new. If you want people to try something new, then you have to account for the possibility of failure. If failure is not an option, then you cannot try something new. And it’s really that simple. It’s a simple concept that can be very difficult to embody.

[COBY]:

Well, I think here is a good way to think about it. So either failing is a, you know that failing is an option and is something that we need to plan for, or complacency is an option and something that we need to plan for. You’re kind of accepting one or the other, you’re accepting the possibility of failure, or you’re accepting the inevitability of complacency. If you don’t choose one, you’re choosing complacency, really.

[JAMES]:

A lack of choice is still choosing. Avoiding the choice is still choosing.

[COBY]:

Yeah, exactly. So it’s one of those things where it has to just be the fact that we are going to prepare, and this is why we move on to this number two, which is mitigating risk. So if we accept the failing as part of the plan, but then number two is we have to make sure that we’re mitigating the risk of that failure. And there are lots of great different ways to mitigate. There’s ideas of trying to use the concept of maximum utility, making sure that you’ve done your due diligence. One of the things that we often, again, going back to a past episode about Chaos solutions, is chaos solutions are what happens when you do something and you fail and you didn’t do your. Homework, trying to implement something new without creating the structural boundaries for it to. Be successful or fully understanding the complexity of what you’re doing. So there’s that part, but then there’s also look for ways to collaborate. Are there ways that you might not have to eat all of the costs or hire a whole new team or whatever it is. Can collaboration be utilized in a way to kind of leverage that? So there are different things that we can do to kind of mitigate risk. We subscribe to a project management approach that we call the dream method that allows you to kind of have this process of instituting something that is going to be a bit unfinished, but with intention and allowing for constant modifications and adaptation. So you’re getting the most out of all your steps before you’re. And you’re not stuck in analysis paralysis and waiting to kind of everything to be perfect conditions before you do anything. So there are strategies and approaches that do really help, but part of it too is are you intentionally trying to mitigate that risk?

[JAMES]:

And I think that leads perfectly into the, like one thing that you said there leads perfectly into the third point around unfinished is the new normal.

[COBY]:

Right.

[JAMES]:

You mentioned one thing that’s going to hold you back from doing anything new is analysis paralysis. This idea that there’s always more research that can be done, there’s always more data that you can collect. But at some point, you need to accept that you will never have the perfect plan. It doesn’t matter how much you try to prepare. The moment you implement a plan, something is going to happen that you did not account for and being able to adjust. Understanding that your plan is unfinished when you start implementing it, and that you need to adapt, that you need to be willing to not rigidly adhere to what you thought was the perfect solution, that you can respond to conditions as they come to new ideas, as you start to develop or implement this new idea, this is essential to having doing anything new. I’m sure if you’re listening to this in your workplace, you’ve tried some sort of, you’ve pitched an idea, you’ve tried something new, you’ve developed a plan, and you’ve started to implement it. I have never asked this question and gotten a response where people have said, yes, when I start it and implement it, things absolutely went exactly as I planned them to at every stage of my plan went off without a hitch. If we’re being honest, that doesn’t happen.

[COBY]:

No, that’s a fairytale.

[JAMES]:

That’s a fairytale. And this idea that perfectionism will kill innovation.

[COBY]:

And one of the other things, too, that I like to kind of also kind of put into this idea of unfinished as a new normal is sometimes it’s also about temporary talent. Right. So one of the things when we’re talking about what this actually looks like when we’re implementing this stuff in real life, one of the ideas around interim leadership or fractional expertise, these are things that can be very helpful because traditional HR people don’t always love this idea of interim executive and fractional help because things aren’t finished, boxes aren’t checked. So this idea of having access to people who, for a limited time or for a limited capacity, can bring in what you need for the time that you have them, or be able to have access to people in emergent conversations and have emergent efforts. So the idea of boxes being checked and moving on to the next thing is kind of one of the things that runs counter to innovation. If you’re a box checker, we do one thing before we move on to the next thing. That approach is very counterintuitive to have.

[JAMES]:

An innovative solution in that type of structured, rigid environment.

[COBY]:

Yeah, absolutely. Which brings us to kind of the last idea, which is around confident leadership and this is really about the idea of you need to, again, have the psychological safety and you need to have kind of the support behind you to own the mistakes that you make, to be able to articulate how success wasn’t created by a solo person. They need to share in that level of success and that you’re giving the teams what they need. You’re empowering them to be successful and you’re powering them to think creatively and to think critically. And you really are accepting that unfinished as a new normal. You are trying to look at different ways to mitigate risk and you are trying to allow for failure just to be part of the plan. And this comes from someone that’s confident in themselves, in how they lead, confident in how they manage others and how they make stuff happen with their employees, and also that they know that they’re next on the chopping block every single time they try something even remotely outside the traditional norm.

[JAMES]:

Leadership is such a linchpin for culture.

[COBY]:

Yeah.

[JAMES]:

The way that leaders in your organization approach some of these key factors is really going to have a significant influence over the success or failure of new initiatives. And if you are not the final authority on these decision maker, on trying anything new, being able to, if you are a manager, part of your job is also empowering your team and protecting them. Yes. That ends up, you end up being the shield and you may end up taking some of the brunt of this if the higher ups do not necessarily subscribe to. This idea of failure is something that’s not inherently bad. But it’s important for you to understand that if you want your teams to innovate, if you want your employees to look at their jobs as a way of improving themselves as well as the company, these are fundamental pieces that need to be in place.

[COBY]:

And it’s important to really understand that these indicators of innovation are things that can be in your workplace right now. I mean, it doesn’t have to be as formal as the language we are using. And sometimes it’s a matter of, again, thinking critically about kind of your everyday, do you have kind of this unspoken mentality of, well, we’ll try this out for a little while and we’ll see how it’s working and then we’ll adapt it if we need it or we’ll abandon it if we realize that it’s not worth the effort. So sometimes it is a matter of just knowing that what this stuff kind of looks like. Because the idea of unfinished is a new normal. Sometimes seeing that in your workplace as things like, are a lot of draft copies of ideas or reports shared before they’re submitted? Is the term like working document a common presence in your workplace or temporary schedules? So sometimes it’s a matter of just kind of looking at your workplace kind of through this little bit of a lens. Do you see some of these things? Whether they’re warning signs for the climate of complacency or they’re the indicators of innovation, but being aware of them, knowing kind of what these little things might mean, could give you a good perspective of your workplace. But I think that we also have to reinforce the fact that these signs are very helpful. But if your workplace is not kind of following through on the stages of the workplace culture of hierarchy, then Innovation may not have the impact that you want, and the complacency may be potentially worse than it might look. Because, again, you want to make sure that you’re removing job dissatisfaction. You’re creating psychological safety, that people feel accepted and that they belong, and that employees are engaged, creating engagement. Sorry. In motivation and enthusiasm in employees while you’re striving for innovation. Because if you are in a workplace or in an industry that is competitive, that is emergent, that is trying to bring something new to stand above your competitors, then all of this stuff is relevant to you. And honestly, I can’t think of too many industries that don’t fall in at least one of those categories.

[JAMES]:

Yeah. And I think we’ve done an excellent job of describing a culture of innovation and a climate of complacency. I think we still have an opportunity to answer the question, how do we actually build it? And we’ve touched on it a few times, and it’s probably not going to come as a surprise to you that we’re going to say that you need to approach your workplace culture through the framework of the hierarchy. It starts with that foundational compliance level where we’re trying to remove job dissatisfaction. Because if people are actively upset with the factors of the workplace, nothing else really matters. Right? If wages are terrible, if there’s no safety provisions, if employees feel that the company doesn’t care about their wellness or that there’s no job security, it doesn’t matter what else you do. Everything lives and dies on those factors of the workplace. So you need to be competitive, sufficient, and equitable in those areas. First, remove job dissatisfaction, and then you can start to work towards psychological safety, which one of those key fundamental components of psychological safety is that people feel that they can fail, that they can raise a new idea, speak up about opportunities without fear of reprisal, and then they can try something new without failure being the grounds for dismissal. Or if they try something new and it doesn’t work out perfectly, that it’s not going to hamper their career opportunities from there. Yes, we need the inclusion stage where people actually feel like they belong. But if we’re looking specifically at the lens of a culture of innovation, where we want to go next is around.

[JAMES]:

There has to be a level of autonomy in the workplace, and it’s one of the fundamental components to creating engagement in people is providing them with limited freedoms within operational requirements, creating the fence around what people can do, because that’s how new ideas are formed. If people know that they are free to explore within whatever parameters you give them, then they will be able to come to you with new ideas. So how do you create a culture of innovation? It starts with the workplace culture hierarchy and starting with compliance, making sure that you’re not actively creating job dissatisfaction and then focusing on psychological safety and engagement.

[COBY]:

Yeah, and the idea of when you’re working on kind of inclusion, you want to ensure that you’re providing the diversity of perspective. When you’re looking at engagement, you’re right, it’s autonomy. But also the idea of strength based teams, which we talked about in our last episode, that can be a powerful way to really to show innovation is by allowing people to kind of do more of what they’re good at. You’ll see stuff kind of. Kind of bubble to the top. There are pieces, again, these are things we focus on specifically when the goal is to work towards a culture of innovation. This is kind of the lens that we view our work through. But all this stuff needs to be present. You need to create the foundations so that way the indicators of innovation will actually take off. All right, so I think this has been a good conversation. I think I’ll do a bit of a summary.

[JAMES]:

Sure.

[COBY]:

So the question was, how do we create a culture of innovation? Well, whether that innovation is internal things like improvement efficiencies or strength based work, or whether they’re external innovations like new markets or new products or even new strategies, we have to have this continual improvement mindset where we try and be a little bit better today than were yesterday. But the things to look out for about how your organization is doing in terms of innovation is you need to understand the warning signs of a climate of complacency, which is a comfortable and traditional methods are prioritized. Rigid thinking is kind of the law of the land. The way that we handle suggestions and ideas is we try to find the no and we tend to have unconfident, ill prepared or low profile leadership with a don’t rock the boat mentality. If we find that we can either avoid those or resolve those we want to move towards the indicators of innovation, then those are making failing part of the plan, where we need to prepare to try something new, but accept that failure may be an outcome and be okay with that. We need to mitigate risks by doing our homework and looking for ways to try and get the most use of our efforts using maximum utility. We need to recognize that unfinished should be the new normal where we are action focused, but we’re open to adaptation and modification, and that we need to have confident leaders who will own mistakes, who will share successes, and who will empower their teams. But for all this stuff to pan out, we need to have built a strong foundation by trying to climb the workplace culture hierarchy, by incorporating things like the freedom to fail, encouraging autonomy, looking at diversity of perspective, and allowing for strength based teams to kind of be a way that we can get more out of the people that we’re working with. A culture of innovation is an excellent concept for or addition to strive for in pretty much almost every industry. But it’s not something that you can do simply, and it’s not something you can do with a checkbox mentality. Okay, so that about does it for us. For a full archive of our podcast and access to the video versions hosted on our YouTube channel, visit www.roman3.ca/podcast thanks for joining us.

[ANNOUNCER]:

For more information on topics like these, don’t forget to visit us at www.roman3.ca. Side effects of this podcast may include improved retention, high productivity, increased market share, employees breaking out in spontaneous dance dry mouth, a version of the sound of James’s voice desire to find a better podcast…