Guard against innovation killers

Innovation is a buzzword in corporate corridors, and millions of dollars are being spent to find the holy grail of innovation. If the culture in your company is not conducive to innovation, appointing consultants or rebranding will not yield tangible results. Here are a few things that kill innovation.

Living in a capsule

Exposure to cutting-edge ideas and best practices within their industries allows teams to explore their limits and test new ways of working. Unfortunately, some organisations suffer from a silo mindset that insulates them from ideas and individuals that are not from their coterie.  The most isolated teams are the ones with the greatest deficits in creative thinking.  Not only are they cut off from the flow of new ideas; they also don’t have access to informational networks that can keep them apprised of new ways of working.

When such teams try to innovate, they end up reinventing the wheel, because they are not aware of the new solutions that have been already applied, tested and, improved by their peers or competitors.

Discouraging risk taking

If your company has a trophy wall with headgears of people who made a mistake, you have successfully created a group whose members dread making a mistake. As a result, most of them will be checking and double-checking their actions, because errors are fatal and may lead to annihilation. With consequences of this sort in place, team members quickly learn that they are likely to suffer criticism for proposing new and untested approaches to problems. On the other hand, if they adopt or support solutions suggested by their team members, they avoid the risk of failure. As a result, they will always wait for others to march.

Where managers call the shots

Newbies and less experienced team members tend to be influenced by the opinions and ideas of their senior and more experienced counterparts. These seniors censor and restrict the innovative ideas coming from juniors or freshers on the team. One of the most common tactics used by the seniors is to throw an aggressively timed challenge to the team members to come up with a complete solution when they are just beginning to formulate new ideas. Another commonly used approach is to take the team problem-solving discussion offline to influence the originator of the idea to get off the boat and tow the company line.  As a result, the newcomers are reluctant to express new ideas and have great difficulty obtaining a fair hearing for their ideas.

Limited or no interaction between teams

Innovation is a synergistic process that thrives in a work culture where team members learn from and build on each other’s ideas. Innovation gets severely handicapped when team members lack ready access to one another or if team norms and practices discourage them from freely discussing their ideas without any humiliation.

(This article is part of the series from Yostartups.com)