Deliverable 6 - Leadership’s Role in Creating an Innovative Culture

Innovative Organizational Culture

Certain elements within an organization are required for innovative leadership to succeed. The first critical factor for innovation is the right organizational culture. Even the most innovative leaders will fail without a supportive environment. The organizational culture should include an innovative strategy, encouragement of creativity, autonomy, empowerment, and flexibility.

Organizational culture refers to an organization's structure, beliefs, and shared behavioral expectations. The organizational climate refers to the way that individuals perceive the extent to which the organizational culture impacts them. One way for assessing whether an environment can be conducive to innovation can be by measuring the following: encouragement of creativity, autonomy, flexibility, risk-taking, communication, and diversity and inclusion.

The first key to an environment of innovation is its employees’ ability to openly and confidently express their ideas. The acceptance of new ideas is essential for keeping an organization competitive, and is at the heart of building employee commitment and getting them to take ownership of both their own work and the organization’s objectives.

Autonomy is also required to foster creativity because research has revealed that individuals produce more original unique work and experience increased intrinsic motivation when they have a sense of control and ownership over their work. It is also important that that they have a choice in how their goals are accomplished.

In addition to that, the organization must become comfortable with their employees being risk-takers versus being risk adverse. This means that they have an understanding that failures are opportunities to learn. In most organizations, failure is seen as a punishable offense. The employee is either seen as incompetent will spend the rest of their time at the organization in hiding or they are overlooked for promotions (or laid off at the first dip in the economy). Failure is seen as part of the process for organizations that innovate. Celebrate failure and learn from it.

Communication, along with active listening skills, are more necessary than ever. People listen mostly to respond rather than to understand. However, innovation requires active listening in order to develop collaborative strategies. You need to focus on inter-company communication and keeping your employees up-to-date on what you’re doing and why. If you don’t communicate to your employees, they will fill in the gaps in understanding or information with their own assumptions, which are more than likely inaccurate and misleading. Even worse, they will assume what they’ve heard through the grapevine is correct and become disengaged knowing that they know more information about the organization from gossip than any formal communication.

In all successful organizations, communication is critical from start to finish. Employee communications must reinforce the importance of employee innovation to the company’s strategic direction. It’s critical to enhance key messages conveyed by executives and others at companywide meetings and events, in videos, articles and presentations.

When it comes to innovation, the makeup of the group, team, or organization is critical. Innovative teams must include diverse people and perspectives rather than the outdated approach of grouping like-minded individuals and having them follow strict guidelines with little perspective from the outside world. The most innovative organizations recognize that amazing ideas can come from anywhere and anyone, and they’re encouraging greater diversity and inclusion. Research shows that the most ethnically diverse companies in their industries were far more likely to outperform their peers.

To recap, innovative leaders and teams can only thrive in organizational cultures that are designed to allow them to do so. These cultures must provide autonomy, flexibility, empowerment, risk-taking, communication, and a focus on diversity and inclusion.

Encouragement of creativity

Creativity gives us the building blocks to innovate. If we are not encouraging people to take risks and go outside the box we will stop creativity. We must also be accepting failure for creativity and innovation to thrive. We use the failures as learning tools to do better and try again.

Autonomy

Autonomy is necessary to foster creativity. Individuals that have control over their work and how they do it produce more original work and experience increased intrinsic motivation.

Empowerment

Empowerment means trusting your employees to make decisions for the organization. If you don’t trust and empower your employees, they will be unsatisfied and unmotivated to take risk and be creative members of the organization.

Flexibility

Organizations that are rigid or only allow a specific process to take place will stifle creativity and innovation. Leaders must allow for flexibility will how they lead and treat their people, along with, flexibility in the processes and plan.

Communication

Innovation requires transparency about organizational plans and objectives, along with strong inter-company communication. Innovation also requires active listening in order to develop collaborative strategies.