NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: This is a guest post submitted by Lindsay Krueger. She currently works for UTC Aerospace with a focus on executing large scale Special Missions Programs in the Aerospace and Defense Industry. She holds multiple patents and earned her MBA with a focus on Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Every company wants to be considered a great, innovative, adaptable company. Unfortunately, the reality is that many senior leaders in organizations look around and wonder how they can even find the time to have a discussion about innovation with their employees, let alone be the next great innovator. The culture of “fighting fires” is a result of a variety of problems, most of which require monumental organizational change to resolve, but these problems do not prevent innovation from taking place. In busy organizations where employees are constantly encountering the next unexpected obstacle, fostering innovation is not as simple as saying “just make time for it,” “restructure,” or “dedicate a few resources to coming up with new ideas.” In these companies, innovation isn’t as as survival. Yet in the long term, survival may actually depend on the ability to innovate.
Psychologists Explain the Trouble
A 2015 study conducted by Feifei Ren and Jinghuan Zhang , professors of psychology at Chinese universities, showed that different types of stressors either inhibit or enhance an employee’s ability to think innovatively. The authors name hindrance stressors as those which prevent an employee from thinking creatively. These are stresses such as bureaucracy, overwork, office politics, and job insecurity. Stress itself, though, is not always a negative driver. These are the opposite of “challenge stressors,” or stresses like a new role, challenging but not overbearing workload (lack of boredom at work), or opportunity to engage in growth opportunities actually foster an employee’s creativity and makes them more likely to contribute innovative ideas to the organization. When employees are tackling manageable stressors and leveraging their skill sets to succeed against manageable problems, they are able to learn and often innovate.
Inevitably, a company constantly fighting fires has more employees suffering from hindrance stressors than challenge stressors, but if a leader can find a way to make small shifts from one stress type to the other for individuals, they may not have to overhaul their organization to turn fighting fires into moments of innovation. Leaders can make this shift by altering the environment, fostering mentor-mentee relationships, and focusing on creativity around critical business needs.
Change the Environment by Rewarding the Wins
In most articles discussing innovation in high-stress environments, most solutions seem to just say “just make time for it somehow.” Most organizational leaders understand how crucial innovative ideas can be for their competitive advantage, but priority number one is keeping the doors open another quarter. To “just do it” doesn’t provide a solution to both problems, so the leader must figure out a way to shift the environment slightly. Altering the work environment to change hindrance stressors to challenge stressors is not impossible. To do this, the leader of the organization has to find ways to both reward the work being done and re-frame the purpose of the work.
For example, a leader can celebrate every milestone along the way with the team instead of just the final product, or give performance recognition to the “I got it” employee who is always finding ways to execute the tasks no one else wants to do. Or, quarterly, the leader can find someone who used the company’s product whose life was impacted because they made that purchase. Even in industries where the product doesn’t necessarily save someone’s life, if it’s on the market, it means someone bought it for a reason – and there are people out there who find value in what they bought. Find those people and let them talk to your employees once in a while – it will repurpose their daily mission and shift the type of stress they experience at work.
Mentors and Mentees Learn From Each Other to Make Small Wins
Building upon the Ren and Zhang study, Francesco Montani, a professor of human research management and organizational behavior at Montpellier Business School and a Doctor of Organizational Psychology, determined that leader-member exchange in an organization helps shift those stressors. Defining that exchange, though, goes down to every level of the organization, and is more than just leaders communicating the priority of taking time to innovate. A mentor-mentee relationship is crucial to enabling everyone in the organization to think differently about their task, role in the organization, and potential output. A young engineer straight out of school may come to the organization full of ideas, tenable through the lens of academia, but a seasoned engineer may believe those ideas to be too complicated for product introduction. Pairing the green rookie and the seasoned veteran one-on-one in a focused project meeting may generate new ideas between both of them – generating value that can be brought to the table and potentially introduced into the company’s Stage Gate process.
Altering the work environment to change hindrance stressors to challenge stressors is not impossible. To do this, the leader of the organization has to find ways to both reward the work being done and re-frame the purpose of the work.
In this situation, innovative thought is a natural outcome of the meeting, not a focused directive that the employees may not feel they have time to complete due to the nature of their projects. The job of the organizational leader in this situation is to make the pairings, and shepherd any ideas through Gates 0 and 1. This creates no change to the way business is done, and excites employees as they see small ideas potentially turn into new products. The shift in thinking changes the stressor type, too. Finding value in the mentor-mentee relationship has multiple benefits for the organization and the individual, and the culture that fosters these relationships will find that this relationship helps to shift the way the individuals think about the problems at hand: working these projects is a challenge, not a burden
There’s Nothing Wrong with a Sign on a Bathroom Door
Finally, focusing employees’ thoughts onto critical business needs will generate innovative thought. The concern of most organizations is that their employees don’t have time to think about anything other than the task at hand. Leaders oftentimes avoid the employee who is too bogged down in running their daily to-do list because they may feel guilt for overburdening that employee with one additional request. However, people don’t stay at jobs because they want to feel like they are in a never-ending pile of work – they stay because they want to contribute.
Leaders have to find ways to ask for those contributions, and it can be as simple as posting a signs focused on a key product or customer need. “How can we deliver extra battery life?” “What can we change about our product make our customers carry it in their hand instead of their pocket?” “What is an alternative to the windshield wiper?” Pointed questions will get employees thinking, talking, and brainstorming without asking them for another meeting, another task, or another deliverable. It is a simple way to pose another challenge to them – a challenge, not a hindrance.
Moving the Needle Slightly Clears the Way for Big Jumps Forward
So many of our teams feel like they don’t have time. They feel overworked, underappreciated, stressed, and in environment where the morale seems low, one more request for a deliverable feels like it could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Innovative thought does not have to be that request. Using these strategies can help shift the types of stress that our coworkers are under to enable them to think creatively and collaboratively. It is not enough for organizational leaders to say “just do it” when it comes to innovation. Leaders must understand what creates innovative cultures and thought, foster the environment, and drive the output through our own processes to see ideas come to reality.