At Growth By Design, we believe intentional choices lead to impactful growth, whether you're shaping a thriving organization or a meaningful life. Here, we provide the practical information, tools, and frameworks to get you there. Today's post highlights the key components of creating a culture of innovation by using Kindred Consulting Group’s proprietary framework, C.L.I.P., to help leaders like you affect meaningful change for your team and organization, starting today. 

---

Innovate or Die

Every leader wants to nurture an environment of innovation. From Toyota’s implementation of the Kaizen model to Facebook’s notorious “move fast and break things” mantra – being able to innovate at scale is a complex and multifaceted issue that is more crucial now than ever in the age of AI.

The innovation ideal is not without merit. Diverse teams with the freedom to be creative directly output better solutions at a faster pace. Creating an innovation culture comes with significant benefits:

• Diverse teams that are intentionally brought together to innovate make 87% more effective decisions and reach decisions twice as fast compared to teams that are myopic and process-oriented.
• Companies that allocate over 25% of their R&D budget to breakthrough innovation see a 30% higher success rate in their innovation initiatives.

The Innovation Impediment

Despite the universal importance placed on innovation, innovation can often feel like a lofty ideal, or a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence. With so many organizations operating without an operationalized framework for innovation, it’s no wonder that 70% of executives believe their innovation efforts are falling short, and only about 10% of corporate innovation efforts deliver actual long-term value.

The problem isn’t a lack of good ideas or incompetent team members. Rather, far too many leaders treat innovation as an outcome instead of an intentionally designed operating system. Lack of innovation is less about poor idea quality and more about systemic issues: lack of sustained commitment, misaligned strategy, slow and risk-averse processes, and failure to integrate innovation into the company’s core operation. When done well, innovation is the foundation of a company’s culture that ensures innovation is the bedrock and not ad hoc. While hackathons are great, systemizing innovation in the every-day operations is better.

Innovation as a Way of Being

If you want consistent innovation at your organization, you must facilitate innovation by empowering your team’s way of thinking, behaving, and working to be bold, creative, and collaborative. Kindred Consulting Group created the C.L.I.P. model to assist leaders with operationalizing innovation at the individual and team level.  

Connect

We can get so caught up in our day-to-day that we forget at the root of all business are people. The first step in creating an innovative environment is to connect with the very people that need to innovate. Start every interaction by connecting. I am talking about true connection, not superficial high-level pleasantries. 

• At the group level, this can be connecting about shared goals, the current environment, or cultivating a unique team culture. 
• At the individual level, this is about connecting to the unique human who is dynamic and has a multitude of interests, concerns, and desires that drive their behavior. 

Learn

As leaders, we can forget that first and foremost you need to lead with learning. You aren’t in the details, and so you must listen to your team to help uncover risks and opportunities you otherwise will not encounter.

• At the team level, enable your team to teach you. It is a sign of strength to lead your team into change by asking questions like “What am I missing?”, or “What do you see in your day-to-day that I don’t?”. By taking a learner role, this signals to your team that you are open to ideas and feedback, all in service to the organization and its betterment. 
• At the individual level, learn about what their concerns are, what excites them, what else is going on in their life that would impact their ability to be fully present while working. This will help you take that connection to the next level, and learn how you can best lead each individual team member toward creative outputs.

Inspire

It is inherent to your job as a leader to paint the picture of the future and inspire actions that will lead you collectively to that desired outcome. 

• Inspire your team to think differently. Encourage your team members to spread outside of their daily activities to see how their work contributes to the bigger company picture. Have your team routinely shadow a colleague to explore another part of the business. Most importantly, show your vulnerable, creative, strategic risk-taking side of yourself. Your team won’t take risks if they don’t see you doing so. So, in big and small ways, show your team that you also put your neck on the line to pursue innovative solutions. 
• At the individual level, show genuine interest in your direct reports’ passions. Inspire them to think about a problem differently. Inspire them to take creative space. Encourage your team members to utilize their unique talents to contribute to the greater mission of the organization.

Praise

The quickest way to stifle innovation is to punish it. It is your job as the leader to praise the behavior, not the outcome. 

• At the team level, praise publicly. Praise the creativity, the open-mindedness, the collaborative problem solving. Everyone will see the outcomes, so it is your job to praise the effort – the positive behavior you want to ensure everyone knows is rewarded under your leadership. 
• At the individual level, praise the smaller signals of innovation and creativity. In your 1:1’s create space for reflection on wins where the individual thought differently about a problem. This individualized praise will reinforce that creative problem solving behavior that then leads to better performance.

Ready to Plant the Seeds of Innovation?

Ultimately, innovation is about creating an environment rich in innovation oxygen so that when one innovative idea sparks, it can catch flame. By distilling the nebulous innovation culture ideal into the four simple steps of the CLIP model which you can implement daily, you will create the team environment necessary to compete in this rapidly innovative economy.

Onward and upward!
Katie