Are you charged with bringing more innovation into your organization? Looking for a new approach, an edge that will keep you in the forefront? Then find your highly sensitive people.
This is a secret weapon that not a lot of people are aware of, that will give you an advantage in the innovation arena. Because people who are highly sensitive tend to notice subtleties, to think more deeply, to process things differently than other people. Freed and supported to do what comes naturally to them, they will find answers to your most pressing innovation problems that others won’t begin to notice.
The challenge for those of you who are tasked with raising the innovation quotient is to find these people, and to make it safe for them to take the risks that are necessary for any sort of innovative thinking, particularly the most revolutionary. The first part won’t be too hard, because roughly one out of every five people around you is likely to be highly sensitive. What will be harder is to coax them out of hiding from the comments of others who have told them (verbally or through their actions) You’re too sensitive. Why do you bother even thinking about that? You’re weird.
And you’ll have to counter the prevailing belief in most corporate cultures that toughness and competitiveness are virtues. While these folks may have learned to play that game to survive corporate life, that is not where their capacity for innovation lies. It lies in their ability to see and think differently, to sense more profoundly. It is intimately connected with their sensitivity.
These people are like the canaries in the mine shaft. They sense things that most people don’t notice or wouldn’t pay attention to if they did, often with serious consequences. However, they need to be recognized and valued for what makes them different – something a lot of large organizations (or even large groups of people) find challenging. Because while highly sensitive people (HSPs) are capable of doing greater things when properly nurtured, when misunderstood or alienated they will suffer more and therefore be more prone to demotivation and inertia.
A current client is a case in point. An HSP, she was blessed to have been able to forge a career out of doing what she loves, working with some of the most talented, creative, and innovative people on the planet. One of them, a household name, nurtured and encouraged the development of her gifts, encouraged her to think and see differently, taught her to trust her natural abilities when looking for solutions and approaches, understood that she could see what others couldn’t. After he died and she went to work with other people, she found the difference in those organizations profoundly demotivating, and, after she’d learned whatever there was for her to learn at each of them, ended up moving on. She reminded me of a highly talented executive I once met at Johnson & Johnson, who bemoaned the fact that they want the best and brightest, spend a lot of money to hire us, then they don’t know what to do with us. They squander their innovation potential.
My client was fortunate to have had a strong advocate and mentor in her formative years, who set her up to go with her strengths. So instead of thinking there was something wrong with her as she stepped into these new roles with people who couldn’t value her gifts, she instinctively recognized and guarded her abilities (even though she only recently discovered one of them was high sensitivity). She realized that the fault lay with the inability of her new establishments to understand or value her capacities.
This client is now a mature business woman with a mission to use the remaining years of her career and life to help address one of the fundamental issues on our planet – global access to water. Her approach is, not surprisingly, innovative, and given her track record, there is no reason to believe she won’t succeed. The only question is how successful she’ll be.
So, if you want to harness this secret weapon, look around you and see if you there’s someone who might be highly sensitive. Someone who has not been nurtured and supported. Who has perhaps spent a lot of time and effort trying not to be different. Of whom you’re tempted to say you’re too sensitive, (or who perhaps has pulled a 180 and made a point of being hard and untouchable). Someone who wonders why she doesn’t fit in, why he keeps bumping up against people uncomfortably, why she feels overwhelmed all the time. Then point them to the self-test at www.hsperson.com (you’d be wise to take it yourself) and see where they land on the scale. If they are highly sensitive (even if only in a few areas, because they may well have learned in childhood to manage their trait if it was challenged at home), then work with them to help both of you understand their sensitivity better, and how to free them to do the innovative work they are capable of doing.
And if you want more detail, I have written about both of these topics – innovation and high sensitivity – separately in my last two blog posts. For those additional resources, see my website.
We live in an increasingly complex world. We need to bring all our resources to bear on the challenges facing us, and those coming after us. Until now, high sensitivity has been a little-understood resource. Cultivated properly and consistently, it could yield profound results.