Entrepreneurs tend to love innovation. We love change. We love finding new and better ways to do things. I’m not sure if it’s in our blood, or if it just becomes ingrained because we have to innovate to survive.
It’s important to understand that our team members are not wired like an entrepreneur. They value consistency, stability, and a positive work environment. They want to do a good job. But they tend to measure how well they are doing based on performance of the tasks you have given them. They cross items off of a checklist. And you want them to do those checklist items. If not, they wouldn’t be a good team member.
But one of the complaints I hear from small business owners is that their team members are too task oriented. They aren’t focused on creating outcomes. And they wait until they are told what to do. In short, they don’t innovate.
That’s frustrating in small businesses because it puts too much pressure on the business owner to be the only person coming up with ideas. You want your team to innovate with you. You want a good flow of creative ideas. And for that to happen, you’ve got to build it into your culture.
Here’s 6 things you can do to get your team innovating more.
- Create a solution finder culture. Encourage your team members to find problems, breakdowns, and areas of inefficiency. And ask them to bring you two ideas for each problem they find. The ideas don’t have to be used, or they can be used exactly. But it will encourage your team to start looking at what’s not working and start thinking about how they can make it work.
- Hold genius sessions. This is a regularly scheduled brainstorming session. You can bring challenges to the table and everyone will brainstorm on new solutions and ideas. Having people from different departments discuss a common challenge will bring different perspectives and ideas that can be very helpful.
Reward ideas with encouraging words. If you shoot down creative ideas, I guarantee you will lack innovators. You’ll collect followers who are happy to do the checklist and get stressed whenever you ask them to do more. You don’t have to sign off on every idea that comes your way. But you DO need to praise, encourage, and positively recognize each person that brings you ideas.- When you get bad ideas, tell the team member the holes you see in their idea. They don’t have all the information you have. So give them more info and ask them to come back with a revised idea.
- Give your people permission to make mistakes. Innovation cannot exist without some mistakes. If your people are terrified to mess up, they will not step outside of what they do well in order to learn new skills.
- Give your team boundaries for their innovation. If you don’t, you can create a renegade culture where everyone is moving in their own direction and it is hard to reel them in to focus on what you need. Part of setting up this innovation culture, is giving them direction for how much they can innovate. This will keep it clean!