What is killing innovation in your company?
Innovation is a buzzword in corporate corridors, and millions of dollars are being spent to find the holy grail of innovation. If the culture in your company is not conducive to innovation, appointing consultants or rebranding will not yield tangible results. Here are the few things that kill innovation.
You are living in a capsule
Exposure to cutting-edge ideas and best practices within their industries allows teams to explore their limits and test new ways of working. Unfortunately, some organisations suffer from a silo mindset that insulates them from ideas and individuals that are not from their coterie. The most isolated teams are the ones with the greatest deficits in creative thinking. Not only are they cut off from the flow of new ideas; they also don’t have access to informational networks that can keep them apprised of new ways of working.
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When such teams try to innovate, they end up reinventing the wheel, because they are not aware of the new solutions that have been already applied, tested and, improved by their peers or competitors.
You suffer from not invented here syndrome
The company and its incumbents may be valuing experience over creative thinking. In this type of work culture, ideas are often killed before receiving a fair hearing and team members are routinely criticised for suggesting solutions that represent a departure from status quo.
You punish taking risks
If your company has a trophy wall with headgears of people who made a mistake, you have successfully created a group whose members dread making a mistake. As a result, most of them will be checking and double-checking their actions, because errors are fatal and may lead to annihilation. With consequences of this sort in place, team members quickly learn that they are likely to suffer criticism for proposing new and untested approaches to problems. On the other hand, if they adopt or support solutions suggested by their team members, they avoid the risk of failure. As a result, they will always wait for others to march.
In your company Managers call the shots
Newbies and less experienced team members tend to be influenced by the opinions and ideas of their senior and more experienced counterparts. These seniors censor and restrict the innovative ideas coming from juniors or fresher’s on the team. One of the most common tactics used by the seniors is to throw an aggressively timed challenge to the team members to come up with a complete solution when they are just beginning to formulate new ideas. Another commonly used approach is to take the team problem-solving discussion offline to influence the originator of the idea to get off the boat and tow the company line. As a result, the newcomers are reluctant to express new ideas and have great difficulty obtaining a fair hearing for their ideas.
Your company lacks drive
Innovation requires a work climate that compels teams to leap beyond barriers and explore new ways of solving the problem. If your business has little expectation from the team, which in turn discourages team members from testing and strengthening their abilities, innovation may be a distant dream. Lack of pressure puts the team at ease and complacency tends to set in such circumstances, which further erodes the drive.
Your company has limited or no interaction between teams
Innovation is a synergistic process that thrives in a work culture where team members learn from and build on each other’s ideas. This type of symbiotic learning may take many forms, from team members who exchange ideas on a particular project, to the team leader who shares an exciting research with the group. Innovation gets severely handicapped when team members lack ready access to one another or if team norms and practices discourage them from freely discussing their ideas without any humiliation.
Sr?an Mahmutovi?
