203 Innovation : Finding Our Champions & Best People

Imagine if each and every person in our business arrived at work believing they could influence the destiny of our company through their ideas and innovations. Then imagine we could do this without creating major chaos. Can we delight our customers with radical, rule breaking concepts for brand new services, cutting-edge products, redesigned strategies, and virgin business models? Does that seem like a bit much? Maybe. Maybe not: we can do a lot more than we think we can. Every company, at its own scale, can build a deep, enduring capability for innovation. Do we know we can have innovation as a core competence? The word innovation stems from the Latin word "innovare" which means to renew. Innovation champions help bring about corporate renewal which is so crucial to ongoing success in our industry.

We need to mobilize (and monetize) the imagination of our staff, customers, suppliers and business partners every day, everywhere. That takes an "innovation champion" to inspire people both outside and inside our organization. And of course, the CEO must be the greatest champion of all. Building an innovative company is not something that can be delegated. Leading entrepreneurial innovation takes a fully committed leader who walks the talk at every level and in every detail. The boss needs to put every resource behind the innovation superstructure.

"Without a champion of innovation, it doesn't matter how much time or money you throw at an innovation initiative – – it won't go anywhere" (Paul R Williams at Fortune 500 company Thrivent Financial).

So the CEO must be the CIO, the Chief Innovation Officer in function and heart, if not in title. Further, and critically, the chief champion must recruit many dedicated lieutenants. It is impossible to have too many innovation champions.

Our People, Our Heart

"Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have .... It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how your led, and how much you 'get it' " (Steven Jobs, 1981).

People are at the heart of any creative enterprise. If we are going to be truly innovative, we have to believe that our people at every level of the company have the ability to identify and then fix complex problems. Extraordinary things can be achieved when we harness a group of people with differing skills, disciplines, cultures and perspectives. Innovation is not about the lone inventor. Rather, it's about teams of enthusiastic (and often overlooked) people who combine energy and creative insight to design and carry forward new concepts. Success comes from people working together in "high performance" teams. So if we want to turn our firm into an innovative leader, then we must invest our time, knowledge and resources into developing and empowering our people. More than anything else they are our biggest asset, assets that can't be seen on financial statements and reports. Breakthrough innovation is found between people's ears. Innovation gives competitive advantage like nothing else can.

"There is no other source of competitive advantage! Others can copy our investment, technology and scale - - but NOT the quality of our people" (Managing Director, British Chrome and Steel).

Management studies have repeatedly shown that companies who have a track record of investing in their employees and developing the kind of organizational systems and support in which those people can utilize their creativity have performed demonstrably better than the average business. For example, by pouring heart and soul into his human assets and allies, Sam Walton built the little retailer Walmart into a world-class giant. This may not seem obvious to everyone, but business success is as simple as that.

Investing in our best assets means people continually become a higher priority. Training is thought of as critical and gets linked to business plans. Team structures are developed. Team leaders are formally trained. Employees are taught to work in teams in a structured way. Training in innovation can make a huge difference.

It is tempting to view labor as a cost to be minimized. Let's be very clear: an effective engaged workforce is the one component of innovation that competitors cannot imitate or reengineer. People management, or what we would we call leadership, is a better predictor of company performance than strategy, high-quality technology, or money spent on R&D. Greater staff involvement, satisfaction, and commitment escalate productivity and ultimately financial performance. Further, patterns of corporate wide "high involvement" can be guaranteed to continuously spread throughout our business. We need our staff fully engaged if we are to overcome the difficulties of innovation required to stay competitive.

Becoming Innovation Champions

Innovation Champions are the ones with the determination to overcome the status quo and the inertia of the past. Champions who can lead and implement change, both upfront and more importantly, behind the scenes, breathe life and energy into the most tired parts of any business. Almost every company has been doing the same things, in the same ways, and for the same reasons, for so very long that they nearly always struggle with making changes. This is not only true in the lower levels of the corporation but is especially true at the highest levels. Senior managers find every excuse to not implement change. The pursuit of the perfect plan, analysis paralysis, self-deception about the past being more important than the future, and every other delaying “put-off” sidetracks change. But in today's fast-moving world we can't allow that anymore. What used to take 12 to 18 months now needs to be done in 90 days; 90 day business cycles are starting to reduce down to 10 days. The new normal is that moving quickly is necessary. Champions help us with speed.

“Innovation is essentially about learning and change and is often disruptive, risky and costly.... It is not surprising that individuals and organizations develop many different cognitive, behavioral and structural ways of reinforcing the status quo. Innovation requires energy to overcome this inertia and the determination to change the order of things. We see this in the case of individual inventors who champion their ideas against the odds, in entrepreneurs who build businesses through risk-taking behavior and in organizations which manage to challenge the accepted rules of the game” (Joe Tidd & John Bessant, 2009, Managing Innovation)

So we need to be champions ourselves and we can recruit champions in deliberate ways. However, the practical reality is that champions usually are individuals who emerge informally to actively promote their deep interests. They adopt some innovative project as their own and become extremely committed to it. They communicate through both formal and informal networks not only with other fellow workers but also with colleagues, stakeholders and customers in order to gain support for the innovation. In order to avoid resistance they often use low visibility methods although what they're doing is hardly a secret. What they do is win over “one person at a time” ... with the hope that each new supporter in turn becomes a low-key evangelist. Engaged enthusiasts have enormous force.... and they have a tendency to create infectious enthusiasm for whatever they touch.

Resisters Make It Hard

Individual decision-makers and other senior people often find it very difficult to risk supporting an innovation project that might eventually fail. As a consequence, they lower commitment, engagement, and trust. They make it hard to get help and acquire resources; this can totally inhibit progress. Too often, such becomes a self-defeating, self-fulfilling prophecy.

Often resisters feel there is not enough time in the corporate day to commit to the development of innovation. They might think there are inadequate people to devote to creativity. Inside themselves, they don't see the relevance of going to unexplored areas. The advocates of new ideas often appear to them as not very credible. They make waves and don’t seem to respect the company’s culture. Further, they are often not open to whether the new innovations will support their own personal values and aims. From a management perspective they may not be comfortable with the discussions that raise difficult issues, or, contrary opinions that may lead to strife or combat. They also worry that results won't be as good as everyone hopes, and at the same time, the new innovation may create negative side effects. Further, they worry about the potential fights between the innovation teams and the establishment that wants to hoard its resources.

The good news is, in our experience, enthusiasm and passion will eventually overcome the gaps between the resistors and the innovators if properly supported by the champion. The champions will have to display industrial strength persistence and courage to succeed.

Enthusiasm Is Key

Enthusiasm basically goes through three cycles:

  1. Committing to the development project and investing in acquiring the capabilities that leads to results in terms of both personal achievement and the advancement of the project; these results make it easier to accomplish things in the future, as it generates feelings of self-worth and project importance.
  2. Greater involvement with other people leads to networking and the contagious spreading of the excitement and hope.
  3. The acquired capabilities from the first cycle lead to improved business performance and those results boost organizational confidence in the innovation initiative; progress on the project receives greater recognition. Additional key people keep climbing aboard.

The Nature of Champions

Innovation champions display a number of common characteristics and tendencies:

  1. They're socially independent and politically clever with some degree of charisma.
  2. They are self-confident risk-takers who are persistent and flexible.
  3. They are full of energy and enthusiasm,
  4. They have the ability to inspire, to stimulate intellectually, and to assess individuals in their abilities to help or resist.
  5. They are socially, professionally and managerially skilled. In terms of networking they usually have strong ties both inside and outside the company.
  6. They are gifted in bridging structural holes and gaps that could block progress.
  7. They tend to have long and varied experience in the same company.
  8. Often, although not necessarily, they have high-ranking jobs
  9. They always have a deep knowledge of the particular trade surrounding the innovation.

Other characteristics include; being highly communicative, fostering analysis, evaluation and collaboration:

  1. They know how to bring about high involvement.
  2. With senior people they can make rational presentations of vision, strategies and financial analysis along with payback estimates as they promote the innovative project;
  3. They are able to integrate the innovation concepts into a solid business plan in which others can see the benefits.
  4. They sell the ideas first to top management, and then, to other staffers.
  5. They are good at giving recognition and developing others potential to be great.
  6. They are good at negotiating and bargaining;
  7. They also know how to use sanctioned methods.

In short what they really do is build coalitions and partnerships.

Bootleggers

Especially in the early stages of an innovation project, champions often resort to "doing what's necessary" to keep the project going. This is known as Bootlegging. Here rules are set aside, bureaucracy bypassed, and new alliances built. Expectations are disrupted. Change opportunities are looked at creatively. Resistant forces are redirected in ways that are preferred. They work for the collective good while very few suspect anything. The bootlegging of the 1930s created enormous wealth while fulfilling rather strong desires. Innovation bootlegging accomplishes the same.

While most innovation champions act unselfishly and in the best interest of the company, the firm and its leadership do not always understand this; thus they often resist the changes necessary to innovate. These are when the characteristics above become essential.

Easy Methods & Hard Work

So what do innovation champions do?

  1. They realize that selling ideas is their job one. Selling is a constant need and never-ending requirement of their work all day, every day.
  2. They get people focused on benefits, not features. For example, they show how someone can improve his or her social standing and corporate influence.
  3. They see themselves in the role of a persuader who needs to "win friends and influence people" both internally and externally. Essentially they turn into an idea evangelist who crafts messages in a way that people pay attention.

The innovation champion's methodology starts by trying out ideas on skeptical thinkers first. They present the innovation concepts to people who are potentially the ideas’ toughest critics. They humbly invite them to find all the weaknesses. So the champions need patience and tolerance as well as a fire in their belly to see their projects through. They are also learning the language of the people that they're selling to. It's an emotionally driven language but also provides justifying numbers. Further, they develop excellent stories that help convey their message. The story helps others visualize everything about the innovation. Stories make things easier to envisage as well as exciting.

Innovation champions inspire and build coalition teams. They show how progress is being made towards the goal and they spell out what it takes to reach it. As leaders, they create the motivation and the can-do attitude to push for successful innovation program. Above all they provide emotional support to go through uncharted territories.

Becoming a champion is not easy; it takes real work. However, neither is it complicated or mysterious. It’s a simple matter of doing the little things well, very well: Build our people. Be Humble. Work behind the scenes for every one’s benefit. That’s all there really is to becoming an Innovation Champion.

How can we practice these “little things”? Consider the recommendations below. Let’s see how we can apply these ideas in our own company and everywhere else we go - - remember practice makes perfect, so we have to practice everywhere all the time if we are to master our trade.

Do these “little things”:

  1. Keep the focus off our self. Let’s see if we can make those around us shine. We can celebrate with them and praise their efforts (more important than their accomplishments). Build up everyone’s confidence individually and collectively. Leaders at their highest level center everyone on towering purposes. When our “why” becomes clear everyone will start to make personal sacrifices in support of the team’s dream.
  2. Define superstar as someone who helps others succeed. If we can get everyone believing and acting like this, we will build a very powerful team that almost no one can imitate. Set a pattern of cooperation and that everyone owns the successes - the whole, not the individual parts, collectively produce the best innovative stuff. Have the team filled with superstars.
  3. Change what defines success. Success means we make progress towards the big goal. Progress means testing ideas and making models or prototypes. Finding out what doesn’t work (and why) is really important but we often label that as failure. It certainly feels like failure. The reality is that we keep “failing” until we succeed. So we need to teach everyone the inevitability and necessity of failed ideas and projects; further, we need to “buffer” the pain by creating good mechanisms for filtering ideas and killing dead-end projects. Creating psychological safety to maximize learning from zealous effort is what defines our leadership. If everyone can recognize the different kinds of “failure” and how critically useful such experimentation can be, we will soon have excited, happy campers.
  4. Don’t push our own ideas. We are certainly not the sole fountain of ideas; in fact, imposing our ideas can actually stifle creativity, exploration and the whole innovative process. We need to learn how to allow ideas to bubble up from our workforce. If we can get people with different backgrounds and expertise working together, we will be amazed with what they come up with. Also we can encourage our people to gain unusual and novel experiences that will increase their creativity. The other thing we can do is open up our organization to outside inspired contributors who can co-create with our thought leaders. Rather than pushing our guesses, our actual job is to keep everyone trained on our company’s values, on our why’s and wherefores - - the big picture of where we are going together. Often that means using stories to help our teams imagine a new future for our customers and clients. We need to understand that in our smallness our teams can produce really big ideas.
  5. Motivate with emotional connections and intellectual challenges. The biggest deal for us is to be continuously showing the higher purpose of the key projects everyone is working on. That will connect heart to head. Once we have done that, our challenge is to clear the way for our worker bees, big and small, to carry out this commission. We keep busy clearing paths through the bureaucracy for creative ideas to be developed. We protect them from the front-end from commercial pressure to produce a profit right now. In so doing we grant our coworkers as much independence as possible. We try very hard to provide sufficient time and resources for our people to explore what we have activated in their head and heart.

Our push then is most simple: to just “let people do good work".


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