Digital transformation, digital disruption, design thinking, artificial intelligence, machine learning… There’s no lack of trending topics to stimulate innovation in today’s corporate world. While innovation in an organization is as essential as wings on an airplane, nothing stifles innovation more than a management culture that isn’t geared to support innovation – even if it’s not on purpose. So how does an organization tune its management culture to better support innovation? Mary Mesaglio of Gartner says to begin by evaluating management practices in decision-making, communication, performance evaluation, strategic planning, and time management [1].

Mesaglio suggests applying management innovation, focusing on these five disciplines to achieve more innovation across the organization. In management innovation, managers evaluate and improve their decision-making competencies to help bring improved performance and innovation across the organization [1]. In this blog post, I review the five disciplines and provide insights from my experience.

Decision-Making

Have you ever played the “telephone” game? The game begins when the first person in a chain whispers a phrase into the next person’s ear. The second person whispers the exact phrase into the third person’s ear. This process continues until the phrase reaches the last person in the chain. The game’s goal is to see if the last person in the chain received the phrase precisely, as stated by the originating person. In most cases, the end phrase will be different than how it began; the more people in the chain, the higher the probability of the phrase changing.

Mesaglio says traditional organizational structures cause a similar effect with innovation. The innovative idea loses context for each level of management that an innovator must go through for approval. Mesaglio suggests two ways to better support decision-making. First, consider a decentralized decision-making culture, and second, create organizational shortcuts between innovative thinkers and decision-makers.

In my experience, either of Mesaglio’s suggestions is an excellent way to ensure innovative ideas reach a decision with its full context. In the past, I have worked for an influential leader that supported a decentralized decision-making culture. Based on my experience with this leader, I can confirm that decentralized decision-making fosters a culture of innovation. My team and I had the trust and authority to make decisions on innovative ideas that would improve our performance or the organization’s performance. This decision-making authority allowed my team to brainstorm innovations and execute the best ideas, leading to performance enhancements and process optimizations that saved hours of work effort across the department.

Communication

Communication is always critical in organizations; however, a manager’s approach to communication can make or break innovation. Innovation leaders should consider changing what and how they communicate. Mesaglio offers helpful tips to help innovation managers improve their communication style:

• communicate from your audience’s point of view;
• communicate in a way that inspires the audience, e.g., How will their participation improve their work and lives?;
• be transparent;
• share information that is usually held by just by management;
• listen more, talk less
• utilize bidirectional, not unidirectional, communication, i.e., have a conversation, don’t just talk at the audience;
• be open and accessible;

In my experience, all of Mesaglio’s tips have been extremely helpful. When leaders ask team members to innovate, they are typically asking for the team to go above and beyond their regular daily duties [1]. This will require an influential leader with excellent communication skills. I have found that explaining “why” in a way relatable to the audience is a powerful communication strategy. In addition, Mesaglio’s bidirectional communication tip carries a lot of weight. Innovation leaders should not communicate edicts on how to innovate or accomplish something; this communication style will stifle innovation. The more freedom team members are given, the more motivated they will become. As an innovation leader, stem a couple of topics of conversation but allow the team to lead the discussion. Soon, they will begin to collaborate and innovate like never before. As Mesaglio pointed out, listen more than you talk. I have found that listening and finding ways to enable team members to accomplish their goals is a surefire way of stimulating innovation through conversation.

Performance Evaluations and Rewards

According to Mesaglio, effective performance evaluations of a leader’s direct reports, the leader themselves, and often the leader’s peers are one of management’s central responsibilities. Adding an innovation section to an employee’s performance review is a simple but effective way to relay the importance of innovation within the organization [1]; however, employee evaluations alone aren’t enough to foster a culture of innovation. In his book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,” author Daniel Pink notes that the usual employee evaluation and reward systems used by organizations are counterproductive to innovation [2]. Management should complement traditional incentive techniques with intrinsic techniques that create an innovation environment of “don’t miss out on this.” [1].

After reflecting upon Mesaglio and Pink’s claims regarding the linkage between performance evaluations, rewards, and innovation, I believe that innovation would need to be a focal point of the organization, or a continuous bidirectional conversation, for a specific innovation section to be included in an employee’s performance evaluation. Without a regular focus on innovation, including a section in an employee’s evaluation may create more waves than value.

Suppose there is no focal point or continuous conversation regarding innovation, and a specific employee presents an innovative idea. In that case, the leader should find a way to incorporate the employee’s achievement in the performance evaluation. Without a continuous focus on innovation, innovation shouldn’t be a once-a-year conversation with an employee during their review.

I can confirm Pink’s claim that the usual reward systems aren’t enough to stimulate innovation. As a leader, I have worked with organizations undergoing innovation cycles. Everyone appreciates a pizza party, but it doesn’t motivate anyone to continuously go above and beyond to answer the call of innovation. When leading a team of innovators, I borrowed the pizza party idea but applied it with a twist at the micro-level. When attempting to stimulate innovation, I made a weekly offer to buy lunch for the top innovator of the week. The lead innovator got to choose where we went, and I paid for lunch out of my pocket. While it’s still a basic reward, it showed team members that I was invested in their ideas, and I personally supported and appreciated their hard work and dedication.

Strategic Planning

Traditionally an organization’s strategic planning is done by a group of senior leaders. They meet and decide on strategic objectives, investment priorities, and the resulting projects and timelines that often extend two years or more into the future [1]. While there is nothing wrong with this strategic planning methodology, it is often rigid and can inhibit innovation because it doesn’t easily allow for a quick change in direction. If an innovative idea comes along, the organization may have to put the idea on hold for a year or longer before the concept can even be planned or worked on. Mesaglio says the energy around new ideas is finite, bound by time. The more time that elapses, the less likely the idea will survive [1].

To help address the rigid nature of long-range strategic planning, Mesaglio suggests that organizations keep a slush fund to support innovation efforts and create short-term rolling plans that don’t extend past six months. In addition to Mesaglio’s suggestions, I believe organizations utilizing agile methodologies are more likely to succeed with innovation than traditional waterfall methodologies.

With agile methodologies, organizational leaders can still set the long-term strategic direction; however, agile methodologies enable product managers to pivot towards what delivers the most business value in a relatively short amount of time, typically between one and four weeks versus one or more years. When utilizing agile methodologies, business leaders can easily and quickly shift gears to focus on an innovative idea that will produce business value. Agile methods encourage organizations to fund products, not projects; if an innovative idea is born, funding is immediately available to support the initiative, and team members no longer have to jump through hoops to justify budgetary change requests.

Time Management

Time management can make or break innovation efforts. Team members can easily become immersed in unplanned work and critical emergencies, which creates a continuous backlog of technical debt. Between planned work, unplanned work, and technical emergencies, more time is needed for innovation.

With little time to spare, how can leadership enable team members to innovate? Managers need to get creative with time management. To help foster a culture of innovation, the CIO of a prominent travel company implemented a version of Google’s 70/20/10 (70% core initiatives, 20% adjacent projects, 10% transformational projects [3]) time management program that became known as “10% time” [1]. The CIO implemented four rules to go along with the “10% time” program [1]:

1. Employees must work on their idea with someone from outside their group (for example, a person working in application development should work with someone from outside the development team).
2. Employees must post their progress on the company’s internal innovation wiki built for the purpose.
3. Employees should not seek management approval for the idea they choose to work on. (Directly support Mesaglio’s first management practice: decision-making.)
4. If employees’ 10% time is being encroached on, they should apply directly to the CIO for help.

I have worked for a leader who similarly supported the innovation by declaring every Friday as “Innovation Friday.” Team members were asked to decline any meetings they were invited to on Fridays so they could focus on their innovation efforts. Innovation Fridays have led to many successful innovations that have improved how the team worked and increased system stability.

Conclusion

It is difficult for an innovative culture to exist within an organization without the support of the organization’s leadership team. While this blog post covered recommendations from Mesaglio’s five management innovation disciplines, there are many ways that an organization’s leadership team can help enable and support a culture of innovation. Innovation can live without a focused innovation initiative; however, innovation will flourish when it is supported by management innovation.

Works Cited

[1] M. Mesaglio, If you want to innovate more, start with management innovation, Gartner, Inc., 2011.

[2] D. H. Pink, Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us, Riverhead Books, 2011.

[3] K. Spiro, “How the 70:20:10 rule applies to business innovation,” [Online]. Available: https://www.easygenerator.com/en/blog/e-learning/70-20-10-business-innovation/. [Accessed 19 November 2022].