Innovation: It’s About Your People

f you are not free to be unique, you are not free to innovate.

Innovation. It happens all around us, in large ways and small, every day.

And while creativity – coming up with something new – is a necessary component of innovation, innovation is more than “just” creativity.  Innovation is what my colleague Bob Rosenfeld calls a quantifiable gain for the organization that solves a problem.  These days especially, change due to innovation is becoming an increasingly dominant, even demanding fact of life.

Why does this matter?

Because coming up with ideas for something new is only part of the challenge. Actualizing that creativity, solidifying it into a product or service, then implementing the new systems and structures necessary to replicate that product or service consistently with quality and rigor, is quite a large step (or ten) beyond.

Diversity of Perspective Fosters Innovation

It takes many different types of people to shepherd an idea, product, or service through the many stages necessary before the process is complete, and they will be innovating throughout. Different types of people with different combinations of skills, strengths, talents, abilities, creating different pieces of the puzzle.  Sometimes different types of people who might struggle to understand or respect each other, because they see the world so differently. Yet it is within that very difference that their strength lies.

So let’s think further about the people. What are characteristics of someone who comes up with lots of new ideas? Visionary? Curious? Pulls lots of ideas and information from unexpected sources and/or puts it together in weird and wonderful ways? Divergent thinkers? Risk-taking?

Then, what about the sort of person who can take a bunch of new ideas and pull out the one that can actually be turned into a successful new product? Focused, convergent thinkers?

There are the sort of people who develop that new product, then the sort of people who are best at testing it out, compiling the results of that test, then wrapping those results back into the original.

Then, once that new product or service is tested and proven to be reliable, you need people who can find other people who need or want to buy it, who can communicate what the benefits are, sell it, track those sales, determine what the profit on those sales is, and whether there is a way to maximize that profit, and whether all expenses are covered.

And you need people to manage your administration, making sure everyone gets paid, that the money that comes in is greater than the money that goes out, that all the minute details – dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s – of running a company, large or small, are attended to.

Each of these roles I’ve mentioned take different characteristics – where one role requires relationship-building to get difficult stuff done quickly, another will benefit from a measure of control; a third requires analytical skills, another intense belief and passion…

Whether you are in a large company or a small one, the challenge is identifying what kind of people you have and what kind of people you need for whichever stage(s) of innovation (expansionary, evolutionary, or revolutionary) your project or your company is at.

Learning to See Value in Opposites

There is then the challenge of helping those people to understand the value each other brings, particularly if their skills are opposite each other.

Because the risk-taking, idea-generating visionaries are likely to find it hard to understand the detail-oriented, risk-averse, step-by-step administrators, yet both are necessary at different times and in different parts of an organization of any kind. It also helps to have people who are flexible, who can see the value in both visionary and administrative approaches, even if they lean toward one or the other – who can translate, if you will, what the other side is thinking, saying, or feeling for the other side.

What I am talking about is another form of diversity – subtler than, say, male/female, racial, cultural. It is a diversity of perspective, of thought, of ways of relating, of behavioral and cognitive approach. How many ideas you like to come up with before deciding you have a solution. Whether you will act from emotion or from facts. Whether your energy comes from being alone or from being with people.  All of it is valuable, at different times and in different situations.  There is no one right way of being.

Some people prefer to hide their diversity, because the fact that it makes them different or unique is uncomfortable. They’d rather try to fit in – which seldom works smoothly if it is inauthentic. For some people it takes courage to step out of invisibility, to stand out, be different from their peers, to rock the boat. And yet, if we are each fully the unique people we are capable of being, then we will be different.  We will also be more innovative.

Here’s an example from my own experience.  My career started with a part-time temporary summer job in a start-up, doing bookkeeping.  I was hired by the accounting department, and reported to a young accountant and his CFO boss.  Hooked by the energy of working in a start-up, when it came time for a 6-month appraisal I asked what options there were for advancement. They both said none, unless I went back to school for a degree in accounting.  I felt discouraged, shut down, with no good options, because I wanted to stay, but couldn’t stand the idea of doing what they did all day, every day.

Then I spoke to the founder of the company, for whom I had done some special projects.  When I asked him about opportunities, he asked me what I thought, so I started listing all the things I saw him doing that I thought I could just as easily do, that would free him up to focus on other things.  He smiled…and I became his executive assistant, then later did marketing as well.  The focused accountants could only see their own pieces of the puzzle that is a growing company (and they were, it must be said, continually refining existing processes); however, the visionary founder could see there was much more needed, and that he had an enthusiastic, trainable young person who could learn on the job.  I would have quit if I had had to keep doing the detailed work I started with, and the accountants and I never really felt comfortable with each other, as I was constantly provoking and challenging them, usually unintentionally (I tried to fit in; honestly I did!).  Whereas I thrived working with the founder, he and I did many, much-needed projects together, and in fact he later became one of my first coaching clients.

What’s Invisible?

Too often what has been invisible in us governs how innovative we can be.

So if you are responsible for bringing more innovation into (or out of) your organization, you might want to consider these questions:

• Do your people have organizational tape over their mouths?
• Does your culture encourage speaking out?
• Does your organization (or your piece of it) have gate-keepers; authoritarians; rules, regulations and people stopping other people from doing anything new out of prejudice and fear?
• Is your organization in the midst of change, even chaos?
• What is the impact of the leadership of your organization? Is it a “take no prisoners” culture that sends people into hiding, or a “bring all of you, and we’ll find a way to use you that works for all of us” approach?

Because if there’s too much rigidity, chaos, or dysfunction at the top, that’s confusing, scary, and/or just too much hard work, so people are more likely to hide. And if they are hiding, it is because they are more comfortable there. You will need to make it more comfortable for them to come out, if you want them to bring their abilities to bear on the problems at hand.

So, Entice Them

It’s a given that you and people around you are innovative – I would argue that everyone is in one way or another. So you don’t need to change the whole culture. What you need is to entice your innovators out.

Here are some ways to do so:

• Understand, name, and embrace the differences
• Make space for them; in general, and specifically to partner or team up with others who are like-minded
• Make it cool to innovate, and ok to ask for help
• Name any dysfunction and address it

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If you are solving problems or helping people solve problems, you are in innovation. And innovation is not one person’s job – everyone is involved.

Innovation is the stuff of business; and business impacts most if not all aspects of life on this planet. Meaning that taking great ideas and making something tangible that benefits people in whatever their “organization” – within a company, within a community, within a country, on a planet – affects all of us.  Given the way things are headed on our planet, it may one day save  us.

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ISPI and Innovation Strengths Preference Indicator are trademarks of Idea Connection Systems. All rights reserved.