How To Improve Managers' Innovation And Cognition

Here Need More innovation, we need employees to be more creative thinking, and more entrepreneurial spirit. I have been advocating this for the past few years, but things seem to have changed little. It is really frustrating.

This is a recent exclamation from a client who is an executive of a medium-sized professional service company. To his dismay, though his organization encourages employees to take every opportunity to try new ideas, employees who actually do so are extremely rare.

I further asked him what he meant by encouraging employees to take advantage of every opportunity. He explained that the need for innovation is a thread that runs through all communication in the near future. Executives have repeatedly stressed that they need to innovate, otherwise they will lose their foothold. They discussed some specific matters that missed the market opportunity and are catching up now. They worry that if there are more mistakes like this, the company will lose the leading position in the market. It is frustrating that most of the employees of the company understand "but" their behavior has not changed.

So I asked him how he treated him. organization Internal failure. He did not know how to answer the question. He had never seriously considered this matter before. His first immediate reaction was, "failure is something that should be avoided." With this remark, he immediately saw the inherent problem of the answer.

Unfortunately, this customer's story is very common in today's organization. It is very logical for companies to do more innovative efforts, but innovation does not appear over time. The reason is simple: it is a matter of emotion, not an illogical problem. Innovation efforts are risky and may fail in definition. And failure can sting people. So if you haven't figured out how to pull out a thorn from a failure, you won't be able to innovate.

First, we must define what is smart failure. Everyone in your organization knows what success is. That's what you will put on the calendar: increase revenue, reduce costs, launch a product, etc. It is much less intelligent to know what a failure is, and a wise failure is a failure that should be congratulated. Those are thoughtful and carefully planned projects that have not been done for some reason. Define them so that employees know the acceptable scope of failure. If you don't define failure, all failures seem dangerous, which will stifle creativity and innovation.

In defining the failure of intelligence, the question we need to consider is: what leads to intelligent failure in our organization? What leads to stupid failure? Specifically, what guidelines, practices or processes can describe the characteristics of smart risk? What are the obvious examples for employees to show intelligent failure? You want employees to clearly understand the correct and wrong way of failure.

The next step is not only to reward. Success We should also reward intelligent failure. Once you have defined the failure of intelligence, you should reward them, just as you reward smart success. This will send out a powerful message for employees to know what kind of behavior is encouraged in the organization. For example, the "Innovista" project of Tata in India, they not only award the best innovation award of the year, but also give the best trial Award; the latter is known as the "Dare to Try Award", which is the most thoughtful and well executed failure. When they first launched the project in 2008, few teams were awarded the award of "dare to try". Later, everyone saw the winners and other award winners get the CEO's praise. By 2011, 132 teams had won the award. The recognition of the Tata Group has changed employees' perception of the value of risk. The smart risk of employees has increased, and the number of innovative ideas has increased.

Finally, as a manager, you need to make your risk approach transparent; as a leader, you take a risk to get there. You have achieved fair results from success, and have had some unforgettable experience of failure. Share these things with your subordinates. Share with them how you deal with these two aspects, how you make mistakes, how to learn to mitigate risks, how to deal with uncertainty, and how you succeed. Let them see your decision-making process and how you weigh the pros and cons. Let them know that you will support them when you try and learn to take the risk of intelligence.