Every leader I meet with really and truly wants to create more innovation and wants to embrace people’s ideas. Sometimes it gets locked down and knocked down in so much of the bureaucracy and the processes that exist within organizations. Here is what I see that is most effective.
A client brought me in and said, “Lorraine we are really trying to create a culture of innovation, but people aren’t bringing forward their ideas. And when they are, we’re not quite sure what to do with them and how to bring them to life.”
What we discovered when we spoke with the employees was there was a multitude of ideas, of things that could be improved upon but what had happened was that virtually every time they submitted an idea, maybe one in three or one in ten of those ideas was actually followed through upon. Over time employees just stopped giving their ideas and stopped giving their suggestions.
What my most successful clients do is they recognize that they should not just wait for the big wins or just wait for the million dollar innovation – that idea that’s going to be groundbreaking.
Instead, they grab onto the ideas and the suggestions along the way that are going to make an incremental difference. Because they’re easier to implement and you can implement them promptly. By doing this, our people, see and know, “I made a suggestion, the idea was grabbed on to and we made the change.”
Doing this will lead to bigger and bigger changes and it prevents you from getting bogged down trying to figure out how to actually implement that great big thing. Along the way, you will have made tons of progress through multiple small changes.
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© 2018 Lorraine A. Moore. All rights reserved. Permission granted to excerpt or reprint with attribution.