Are you suffocating ideas?
Are you suffocating ideas?
When was the last time someone in your team came up with a great idea and implemented it with little impediment? If you are lucky your organisation values ideas and creativity and has an infrastructure that allows good ideas to bubble up from all levels in the organisation and reach the top.
But more likely, your organisation has a spasmodic approach to generating and implementing ideas that come from all four corners of the company.
That’s not to say change isn’t a feature of your business. But it is to say that those ideas for change – the ideas that actually make it in to implementation – probably come from specific “hot spots” e.g. a team that is particularly innovative or a group of senior people who have the influence to get their ideas passed.
Does it matter?
Ideas are the life blood of business. Without ideas, business stagnates. What if the best ideas for the future of your business are being smothered by your actions or by the structure of the organisation?
At one company I worked in, a new policy was announced and all staff were encouraged to contribute ideas to an intranet site. We were told these ideas would be considered by an innovation team and that many would make it to implementation.
At first the site was thick with ideas – people who had felt they had no voice discovered an opportunity to download all the transformational thoughts they had been brewing for years.
But over the following weeks and months we realised that nothing was actually happening with all this creative capital. The organisation had unwittingly opened a can of worms and quickly shut the lid. Slowly people stopped contributing and the site ceased to function.
No matter where you sit in the company hierarchy, you have some influence over what happens with ideas. Here are some of the basics:
1. Remove hassles – what are the infrastructure blockades that inhibit creativity? Are meetings an opportunity to create or a distraction? Is there a lot of red tape? Can people with ideas get in touch with you or book time with you or do they need to go on a waiting list? Ask the creative people on your team what prevents them effortlessly developing and implementing ideas and remove as many of these obstacles as possible.
2. Give people the facts to be able to create – when you keep people in the dark they cannot create…or the ideas they come up with will be inappropriate because they aren’t based on the complete picture. Tell people what you know, tell people what you don’t know and tell people when you’ll know what you currently don’t know.
3. Be a sponsor for ideas - use your influence and contacts at a higher level to promote the work of your people. And give credit where it is due. Name and proclaim your creative talent rather than sharing credit. Instead of saying “We’ve been working on this idea” or “I’ve been encouraging my team to be creative” say “John had a great idea this morning. I’d like to see how we can make it work”.
4. Get connected – if you don’t have the influence to promote your team’s innovations, get it. It is your responsibility to be known in the organisation so you can influence on behalf of your team. Get a mentor…or a few mentors and get networking.
5. Reward and value ideas, not just results – most ideas aren’t workable. They have flaws, they are too radical or they are a bit old. It doesn’t matter. Creative people don’t always have good ideas every time but they need encouragement to keep firing them out uncensored in order to get to the real gem. And reward doesn’t have to mean financial bonuses. Creative people love problem solving. If some of your team members show a talent for this, reward them by giving them more creative work to do.
6. Make small changes if small changes is all you can make - when your team see the results of their creativity, even in a small way, it will feed their motivation to continue being creative. You may not be able to change the world…or even your department. But you can change something.
7. Above all, take action – by doing nothing you are actually choosing to suffocate ideas. Without your help, the company structure itself will act against creativity. It takes you and people like you to encourage, promote, influence, campaign and reward creativity for the organisation to become or remain innovative.
