Managing The Innovators

Managing the innovators

This article first appeared in Personnel Today magazine.

All workplaces want to be creative, but managing 'ideas people' can be a challenge as well as a joy. Here are some tips for dealing with your innovators.

Innovation is a prime source of sustainable competitive advantage, and very often is the single most important factor separating the commercial success stories from the also-rans.

Businesses that ignore the need for innovation usually find they are unable to keep pace with rapidly changing technological developments and customer requirements. But look at high-profile brand companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon and Easyjet, and it's clear they all recognise that to develop products and services that offer value for customers, they must place innovation at the core of the business.

For this reason, business leaders, politicians and academics frequently stress that employers should do all they can to remove barriers to innovation and stimulate creativity within their organisations. These barriers can take the form of internal political wrangling, too much comfort with the existing status quo, inappropriate management measurement systems, and insufficient time being allowed for talented people to be creative.

Inspiring innovation

But knowing how to tackle such problems can be a real challenge for many businesses. So what can employers do to ensure that innovation becomes ingrained in the organisational DNA?
If innovation is to take root, organisations need to stimulate an environment that allows creativity to flourish, and then put in place processes to successfully harness the ideas and energy of their employees.

The most innovative organisations generally tend to:
• Allow a diversity of opinions to exist within their business
• Consider the value of ideas that arise outside of their business
• Tolerate certain degrees of failure (otherwise staff will stop putting ideas forward)
• Incentivise and reward employees for innovation
• Encourage knowledge-sharing and put in place systems to capture knowledge
• Regularly introduce new talent at senior management levels
• Ensure an appropriate mix of management styles
• Put in place checks and balances that screen out inappropriate ideas at an early stage before time and financial resource is invested.

These are all important factors that have to be addressed at a senior management level, and then cascaded down throughout an organisation by managers who are visibly committed to the nurturing of innovation in the organisation.

At the same time, employers must do all they can to ensure that they effectively channel efforts at an individual level, and for this reason, must not overlook the challenges that are inherent in managing innovative people.

Coping with creativity

In a study of more than 400 employers from across Europe, development consultancy Cubiks discovered that innovation is the competency that organisations find most difficult to develop in their staff, and one of the hardest competencies to assess at selection stage. Not surprisingly, genuine innovators are considered to be highly valuable resources.

However, dangers can arise if 'ideas people' are put on pedestals and treated as heroes.

If the innovators are allowed to overshadow those who are responsible for implementing their ideas, it can encourage the more creative staff to display working styles that are both difficult to channel and hugely detrimental to the wider team effort.

Innovators often have very strong abilities in the area of conceptual thinking, for example, but a strong aversion to the more detailed aspects of product development and project scoping. Such people often wish to be free to generate lots of ideas for follow-up by the wider team, and prefer to avoid the time-consuming research and analysis that is needed to establish whether a potential product or service is either commercially viable or capable of implementation.

Managing innovators can be challenging when those who are required to carry out the actual implementation of their ideas become disenchanted by the volume of follow-up work required of them. They will have their own existing workload to deal with, and poor planning and lack of consultation may mean they now have a further workload with an unrealistic deadline for completion.

When this happens, it is common for such team members to begin looking for reasons to throw out or undermine potentially lucrative ideas rather than exploring their viability in full.

One of the most common reasons why projects fail is because leaders fail to gain the buy-in of team members at the outset, and there is a lesson here for innovators. If they simply become recognised as generators of work rather than enablers or 'do-ers', they will quickly see their efforts thwarted by those around them. This is not good for the business or staff relations.

It is vital that creative individuals and those responsible for managing them are able to recognise how their behaviour affects team dynamics, acknowledge any development needs, and find a productive way to bridge the gap between idea generation and idea evaluation and implementation.

These issues aside, it is imperative that employers create a business culture that allows innovation to thrive, as by successfully harnessing the competencies of creative people, employers can achieve long-term competitive advantage. To ensure this happens, managers must work hard to ensure that the competencies of talented innovators are channelled for the benefit, and not the detriment, of team dynamics.