When was the last time your team came up with a groundbreaking idea? If it wasn’t recently, it might be time to reevaluate your approach to innovation. Fostering an environment where everyone feels valued and included creates a safe space for new perspectives and collaborative thought. Innovation is essential in every industry, not just tech startups and creative agencies.
By creating a trusting and diverse environment, you can empower your team to share ideas and maximise creativity.
Here are 6 ways you can foster growth, productivity, and engagement.
1. Strong and Effective Leadership
If you’re someone in a position of power, leading by example is incredibly important. Your employees look to you as the standard for expectations of behaviour and work output. Communicating effectively, asking for feedback, and being transparent about your expectations for yourself and others makes you seem more approachable: a beacon to be guided by.
You want to encourage dialogue and actively seek out new ideas. In meetings you should aim to ensure the conversation is directed towards an objective and encourage all voices to be heard. You’re a leader because you bring the expertise, show them how leadership supports growth. Effective leadership should also allow space for individuals to grow, without the fear of judgment.
2. Positive Outlook on Failure
Nobody likes to mess up, it’s an attack on our own ego. The craft we dedicate our lives to is something we want to be good at. Treating failure as an opportunity for growth ensures that when a mistake is made (because it will happen at some point) the person responsible feels safe and comfortable enough to take accountability and learn from it. If you want an ideas-driven culture, then no idea is a bad idea—it is simply a springboard.
3. Celebrating Success
The same goes for success! Celebrate achievements, big and small. You want to recognise the effort your team puts in, and reward excellence. Everybody likes being told they did a good job, but try to home in on the specifics. For example, “I really liked the questions you asked in today’s pitch, your engagement is appreciated”. After this compliment the individual is likely to make it their mission to prepare some questions in advance for the next pitch, and then their contribution will likely inspire others too. Snowball effect.
4. Allocate Resources
To foster an environment for an ideas-driven culture, you need to ensure your team has the tools and technology needed to thrive. This doesn’t necessarily mean having the most high-spec gadgets, just machinery that is intuitive enough to make the job easier.
This can look like an online chat space, an ideas development platform, such as Sideways 6, or even sharing details about an online course or learning opportunity. If you’re in house, then you could also consider creating spaces allocated for brainstorming and team building. Learning about your team and their different ways of working allows you to create spaces for each of those personalities to exist and excel.
5. Establish Core Values
Your enterprise needs to live by its core values—they should be the foundation of everything you do. Core values are not just there to tick boxes, they influence many things such as decision making, employee behaviour, how obstacles are approached: creating a repeatable and scalable system. They also establish the identity of your business within the marketplace. Having core values is important for a number of reasons, but especially for fostering growth and ideas-driven culture.
6. Promote Diversity
Having a range of diverse backgrounds naturally encourages a greater scope of perspectives. If your staff are homogenous and have similar backgrounds, they are likely to have similar ideas. Diversification encourages collaboration of ideas. You should still hire candidates based on merit, but perhaps lean towards giving the opportunity to someone who historically hasn’t been offered the same experience. A diverse workforce looks great to future clients and employees, too.
Conclusion
Founder of IKEA, Ingvar Kamprad, said that the biggest roadblock to innovation is ourselves. Employers need to ‘make it safe to innovate’. When was the last time you encouraged your team to run with an idea? People will not be able to think outside the box if they are trapped in it.
Leaders should encourage learning and explore all avenues of thought to maximise creativity and productivity. Hold yourself to the same standards as you do other people. When was the last time you asked for feedback? Most importantly, innovation takes time, don’t expect organic ideas to be churned out at the drop of a hat. So, when was the last time you made it safe to innovate? Take one of these actionable steps today, and start building a ideas-driven culture where your team is empowered and great ideas can thrive.
