Leadership Vacuums and Overcoming Barriers to Innovation
by Robert F. Brands with Jeff Zbar
You want to innovate. You want your company and people to embrace new ideas, get ahead of the curve - and competition. You want to be progressive, thoughtful and creative.
But you're stymied by barriers to innovation that get in the way. They bog down your team, repel creativity and leave the organization wanting for more. Projects can't get started. Initiatives don't leave the gate. There's a general failure to launch.
For some organizations, innovation is the much sought-after Holy Grail of thoughtful, productive creativity. Yet for those where innovation ceases to exist, the organization itself often is at a loss to identify the culprit.
In reality, the barriers to innovation often are the same barriers that prevent other progressive initiatives from taking root. In a recent survey, innovation blogger and consultant Braden Kelley asked readers, "What is your organization's biggest barrier to innovation?"
Tops among the 550 (and counting) responses, some 32 percent of respondents said 'organizational psychology' - as Kelley put it, "the way people think in the organization, the culture - fear of failure, risk aversion, etc."
Next, 26 percent of respondents said an absence of an innovative strategy.
The rest, in order, were Organizational Structure (15 percent), Level of Trust and Respect (13), and Information Sharing (11).
Yet in all my years, I've found one essential barrier not mentioned by respondents here but which supersedes them all, and if well placed and respected, can eliminate most if not all the barriers mentioned:
Leadership - thoughtful, progressive, inclusive leadership. A CEO who sets the vision for the company, establishes policies for innovation, and encourages his team to embrace all in kind.
Leaders of innovation embrace corporate entrepreneurship. They encourage people to step out of their cubes and beyond the safety of just "doing their day jobs." They expect workers - from the executive ranks to the reception desk - to push back and explore beyond the boundaries of their comfort zones.
They define innovation; after all, it can mean different things to different people. Let people retain their respective, personal definitions. But for purposes of the organization, innovation and the goals sought must be defined from the top. They then must be encouraged to welcome the challenge and inspired to rise to the occasion.
Research around "Most Innovative Companies" (Updated April 26, 2010 Edition) from BusinessWeek and Boston Consulting Group backed up this intuition.
When asked "Who is the biggest force driving innovation at your company?" some 44.5 percent of respondents said it was the CEO (see slide No. 9). Interestingly, only 3 percent answered the vice president of innovation.
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/04/in_bigpicture/index_01.htm
In order to blow through the myriad obstacles that thwart innovation - whether a lack of innovative strategy, structure, trust and respect, sharing of information, or even organizational psychology - the impetus starts in the C-Suite. To be sure, the structure has to be in place, and the organization - and its people - have to know who they are and what their mission is.
Only with the right leader, will the environment and enablers be in place, the resources be made available, and the roadblocks be dismantled. The barriers will be removed. Innovation, in the end, will have the fertile grounds to launch and take flight.
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Robert Brands is the founder of InnovationCoach.com, and the author of "Robert's Rules of Innovation: A 10-Step Program for Corporate Survival", with Martin Kleinman - to be published in March by Wiley (www.robertsrulesofinnovation.com).
You want to innovate. You want your company and people to embrace new ideas, get ahead of the curve - and competition. You want to be progressive, thoughtful and creative.But you're stymied by barriers to innovation that get in the way. They bog down your team, repel creativity and leave the organization wanting for more. Projects can't get started. Initiatives don't leave the gate. There's a general failure to launch.
For some organizations, innovation is the much sought-after Holy Grail of thoughtful, productive creativity. Yet for those where innovation ceases to exist, the organization itself often is at a loss to identify the culprit.
In reality, the barriers to innovation often are the same barriers that prevent other progressive initiatives from taking root. In a recent survey, innovation blogger and consultant Braden Kelley asked readers, "What is your organization's biggest barrier to innovation?"
Tops among the 550 (and counting) responses, some 32 percent of respondents said 'organizational psychology' - as Kelley put it, "the way people think in the organization, the culture - fear of failure, risk aversion, etc."
Next, 26 percent of respondents said an absence of an innovative strategy.
The rest, in order, were Organizational Structure (15 percent), Level of Trust and Respect (13), and Information Sharing (11).
Yet in all my years, I've found one essential barrier not mentioned by respondents here but which supersedes them all, and if well placed and respected, can eliminate most if not all the barriers mentioned:
Leadership - thoughtful, progressive, inclusive leadership. A CEO who sets the vision for the company, establishes policies for innovation, and encourages his team to embrace all in kind.
Leaders of innovation embrace corporate entrepreneurship. They encourage people to step out of their cubes and beyond the safety of just "doing their day jobs." They expect workers - from the executive ranks to the reception desk - to push back and explore beyond the boundaries of their comfort zones.
They define innovation; after all, it can mean different things to different people. Let people retain their respective, personal definitions. But for purposes of the organization, innovation and the goals sought must be defined from the top. They then must be encouraged to welcome the challenge and inspired to rise to the occasion.
Research around "Most Innovative Companies" (Updated April 26, 2010 Edition) from BusinessWeek and Boston Consulting Group backed up this intuition.
When asked "Who is the biggest force driving innovation at your company?" some 44.5 percent of respondents said it was the CEO (see slide No. 9). Interestingly, only 3 percent answered the vice president of innovation.
In order to blow through the myriad obstacles that thwart innovation - whether a lack of innovative strategy, structure, trust and respect, sharing of information, or even organizational psychology - the impetus starts in the C-Suite. To be sure, the structure has to be in place, and the organization - and its people - have to know who they are and what their mission is.
Only with the right leader, will the environment and enablers be in place, the resources be made available, and the roadblocks be dismantled. The barriers will be removed. Innovation, in the end, will have the fertile grounds to launch and take flight.
Don't miss an article - Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group!
Robert Brands is the founder of InnovationCoach.com, and the author of "Robert's Rules of Innovation: A 10-Step Program for Corporate Survival", with Martin Kleinman - to be published in March by Wiley (www.robertsrulesofinnovation.com).Labels: Innovation, Psychology, Robert F Brands
posted by Blogging Innovation at 12:05 AM
3 Comments:
I agree with a lot of what you stated. There are no lack of innovative ideas, it's whether or not the people in charge of funding the ideas see the value. This compliments a book I recently read by Adam Hartung, Create Marketplace Disruption, he calls this "lock-in" and gets in the way of a lot of innovations from taking off.
I see this often in the user experience design community: "if we could only get executive buy in, we'd be able to change the world." One problem with this type of thinking is that it takes innovation out of the hands of the employees and places it under forces beyond their control. It can also give innovators a pathological obsession to have more authority, or blame authority when things go wrong.
Where's the middle ground? Here are three ideas:
* Tie your innovation initiative to company objectives. Sell your innovations to execs with the same rigor that successful startups use to pitch to VCs. Be precise. Don't ask for a blank check.
*Spend time prototyping and showing people in the company the kinds of products they could have if more emphasis were given to innovation. Sketching User Experiences is a great book on quickly prototyping innovation.
* Find ways to innovate on everyday projects. If you can be trusted to produce great results on small projects, you are building credibility with which to do bigger things.
Other ideas?
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