Before you ask employees for ideas, check whether they think you mean them.
Every time one leader talked about innovation, he used the word “technology” in the same sentence. Most of his employees worked in other functions, and whenever he talked about innovation, they started planning their day.
Harvard Business School’s Linda Hill has studied how leaders build organizations that innovate again and again. Splitting a company into innovators and executors, she says, is “the kiss of death” for that goal.
Her research points to four moves that bring every employee in: defining innovation as anything new and useful to the organization, building teams around each person’s strengths, showing people how their daily work connects to the company’s purpose, and explaining the rules along with the reasons behind them.
Why employees keep their ideas to themselves
When Linda interviewed the leader’s employees, most gave the same answer: they weren’t technologists, so they weren’t the innovators. They saw their role as executing ideas, not having them, and left the ideas to their colleagues in technology.
The leader hadn’t meant to send that message. He loved technology, and those examples were simply the ones he found most exciting. When Linda’s team showed him results from an instrument that measures culture and capabilities, he saw how his words had led people to think innovation wasn’t about them. So he told employees directly that innovation wasn’t about technology.
That change came at a useful moment, because the company was already running a contest for new and useful ideas. As soon as the message changed, employees came forward in large numbers with ideas they had always wanted to try, and the company went on to put many of those ideas into practice. The scale of the response surprised even Linda: “There’s clearly a pent-up desire to contribute.”
In a recent MIT Sloan Management Review article, Linda and her co-authors describe a large, traditional life sciences company trying to become more agile and innovative. There, employees held back for a different reason: hierarchy, in the company’s traditional way of working and in the wider culture of its region. In a culture like that, being asked to act with more autonomy can feel uncomfortable, because people assume a new idea might make the boss angry. Linda finds that these employees have ideas and want to use them, and they take the risk of speaking up once they can see how their daily work connects to the company’s purpose.
Four moves that bring every employee into innovation
Both cases point to the same underlying problem: employees with ideas who held back. In Linda’s research, the leaders who build innovative companies see their job differently: not to say “I have a vision, follow me,” but to create the environment in which people are willing and able to co-create that future with them. These leaders still make some decisions from the top, which one leader called brute force, but rely on employees for most of the innovation. They get employees involved through four moves:
Count everyone as an innovator. The leaders Linda studies use a simple definition of innovation, so more people see themselves in it: innovation is anything new and useful to the organization. A cheaper process counts, and so does a better way to organize work. Most innovation is small and gradual, and these leaders still go after big breakthroughs. They push people to think about what they could do, beyond what they should do.
Build innovation around teams. Most innovations come from people working together, so Linda sees the team as the basic building block. Good teams mix people with different views and skills. Different views bring conflict, so leaders pick people who can disagree in a useful way. The life sciences company built its teams with a strengths-based approach to performance management. That approach showed its leaders that every employee had talents, and they used that information to build teams by strength and across levels of the hierarchy. Linda sees a second benefit: people say they are open to colleagues who think differently, and they often act otherwise. Once they know a teammate’s strengths, they listen harder.
Link daily work to the purpose. Linda describes empowerment as giving people the chance to influence others, and at work the best source of that influence is expertise. A strengths-based approach helps people see what expertise they have to offer. Leaders first get people excited about the purpose, then show them how their work contributes to it. Once employees see that link, the risk of upsetting the boss feels worth taking, and they start using what Linda calls their “slices of genius,” their talents and passions.
Explain the rules and the reasons. In regulated industries, where Linda does much of her work, leaders tell people what they can do, where the limits are, and why each limit exists. When people hear the reason, most of them see the rule as a way to protect the customer and accept it as part of the job.
The leader who kept pairing innovation with technology didn’t need a new program to get ideas. The contest was already running. He needed to tell employees that innovation included them.
