Work Culture (and probably, more specifically, middle management) Is Killing Innovation

Work Culture(and probably, more specifically, middle management)Is Killing Innovation
No really, it’s true.
It seems like every company is trying to figure out how to work better, how to produce more, and how to move at the speed that is necessary to support true innovation. They look at technology, they consider funding, and assess all sorts of internal issues and systems — all to determine exactly what obstacles are getting in the way of innovation. And they’re failing.
In fact, all the chatter about innovation is so inescapable that’s it’s becoming a cliche. It’s one of those words that I don’t even like to hear, let alone use. It’s like “strategy” or “synergy” or “disruption” — can we even agree on what they mean anymore?
Regardless of the word or how they use it, at the end of the day what they’re really talking about is change and evolution, and the necessary speed at which those things must happen — and the new thinking that must be adopted as a result of change and evolution — in order to compete in this globally connected business climate.
All that seems clear. We know we must innovate in order to compete, grow, and be a well-respected company in the digital age. Innovation means thinking ahead of the masses and being the conversation starters. It means being proactive, not reactive, and knowing what it means to be connected. It means being product developers, pushing the envelope and anticipating consumer needs.
But more than anything, innovation means taking risks.
Leadership Seems To Get It
Leaders inside of companies say the right things about innovation. They recognize the importance of adopting new thinking, new ways of working, and new technologies. They’re adopting new ways of producing: they’re starting to understand that nothing has to be finished anymore and that much of what we do from now on out is a work in progress. Let’s be honest, in the digital space, every time we launch something, it’s barely a beta anymore because most of the things we create will never be done. Perfect doesn’t happen anymore; it doesn’t have to happen.
The hope is that these same leaders are trained to take risks. They are trained to think quickly, move quickly, and trust their guts. They know how to hire well and to surround themselves with a small army of people who can support and enable their quick thinking and acting. They’ve had to do all this or else they wouldn’t be successful. They, and the companies they lead, have risen to success because of innovation.
Companies that move, change, and grasp new thinking, new ideas, and new products are successful. Apple is a great example of that. Every 6–8 months they generate new products that get people thinking in new ways. They are innovators. And the rest of us look to them as if they’ve somehow discovered the holy grail; they get it.
If Leaders Get It, What’s Wrong?
Most organizations believe that they have the right processes in place for innovation. They believe they are moving in ways that support new thinking. They believe they are encouraging progress. I’ve seen it in small companies, and in big companies, and everywhere across the board. They believe they are doing what is necessary by creating the space and identifying the support mechanisms around what innovation looks like and then telling people to go out and innovate.
But something is broken: Their work culture makes it impossible to truly embrace the spirit of innovation, of taking risks.
Innovation can’t be an initiative, it isn’t a set of rules or a special, prescribed office space. It has to be a value. It has to be something that we continually remind each other that we are responsible for and continually make space for.
Innovation as a Core Value, and What That Really Means
Innovation has to be a core value. What’s more, if innovation is actually a core value, we also have to value failure.
People don’t want to fail because work culture has been established on the idea that we want the best from people — that we will stand on their successes and detach ourselves from their failures. People want to be rewarded for success and success doesn’t look like most of what innovation is: 90% failure.
Some of the best ideas come from some of the biggest failures. That’s an insight that we all sort of recognize and people say it out loud. There are high-level pontifications about failure everywhere — TED talks, NYT Magazine articles, and Fast Company issues — and yet most companies have no idea how to actually incorporate and learn from failure. Internally and externally, they push it under the rug. That part of innovation isn’t part of any process or set of rules. But if innovation becomes a core value, not just a goal or another performance metric, then all of its facets will be integrated into the culture.
What Needs to Change: Middle Management
When leaders look to add innovation as a value, they have to think carefully about the middle layers of the organization. The middle layers of organizations are probably the biggest obstacle toward progress. They are trapped between leadership, those people that might be good at taking risks and have asked very clearly for innovation, and everybody else. They are hoping, more than anything, to remain secure and to not do something that negatively impacts how their competence is perceived.
Day-to-day they are tasked with managing, not leading. The easiest way to manage is to not rock the boat. Even if they’re hearing pleas for innovation and know that leadership would like to see progress, they’re scared to take risks because they’re responsible for so much. They have to keep everything moving and on track. To do this, they do things the way they’ve always been done because that they can prove. They can point to results from what has always worked. If something’s always worked, they don’t want to create change that then needs to be corralled, adopted, and assessed. Taking a risk on something that is unknown is counter to everything that they do know.
Hierarchy is a heavy weight to live and work under and most companies can’t get beyond what they have always been if they keep it in place. The discrepancies between what the middle layers are asked to do in a big picture and what’s expected of them, between what they understand in theory and what they’re willing to take on in practice, is a culture killer, an innovation killer.
What Also Needs to Change: Communication
It’s interesting to me that we think process within organizations is the thing that will cultivate innovative cultures. When in fact, better communication and more transparency within organizations will actually help navigate the the way forward. Despite all the chatter about innovation, there aren’t real enough conversations within workplaces and organizations about what happens when we fail and how companies can support mistakes.
The thing we know about organizations is that you can give people permission to think differently, but that has to be a repeated message. It has to be the pledge of allegiance that people hear every single day and it has to be folded into their daily experience. Because nobody believes that you want them to do anything different than their job unless it’s something that is truly lived.
The support mechanisms for innovation — and failure — have to be put into play inside organizations and they have to be open to everyone. We have a tendency to believe that innovation is restricted to people who work with technology and who understand the digital age, but the best ideas don’t necessarily come from the people who live in the tech space. The best ideas could quite possibly come from the people who are impacted by the hardest, most tedious, and most invisible aspects of the work every single day. That’s where innovation might actually happen, but people have to feel safe to say the things that middle management doesn’t necessarily have the time to hear and and that leadership is too far away to hear. People have to have permission, they have to be given room, they need safety, and they have to know they’ll be heard.
As it stands now, HR has gotten far away from supporting people; it mostly supports the organization and keeps the organization from trouble and protects them from litigious concerns. But if HR actually supported people, it might be a critical innovation or step toward innovation that most companies could consider. If people feel like there are channels through which they can communicate some of their best ideas without them getting lost on risk-adverse middle management, companies might actually see the change they want to see in this age of the internet of things .
The world is demanding of new thinking, so work culture has to change. Moving quickly and staying technologically relevant is becoming a baseline for successful companies. All of that requires drastic change to the thing that is at the heart of most organizations: work culture. Yes, culture is hard to change — it’s engrained, it’s habit, it’s comfortable. But it’s possible. The entire organization must change; they must embrace the true whole definition, the pragmatic implications, and the necessary systems associated with innovation (and failure).