Posts Tagged ‘empowerment’

Allocate Time for Innovation

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

One of the commonest barriers to innovation is lack of time. People are just too busy doing their day job to spend time trying new things. The common assumption is that working hard and working long hours are good things and sufficient for success. The mantra is – ‘Focus on delivering this quarter’s results.’

It is as though we are so busy building rafts to cross the river that we never look up to consider building a bridge, or a tunnel or a dam or fording the river or building boats or planes or all the other things we could do. We just focus on producing those rafts.

If you want people to be creative then set the goal (e.g. crossing the river) and then challenge them to come up with ideas. Give them time and some resources to test their ideas – to build prototypes, or to investigate what people elsewhere are doing.

Google allows its people to spend one day a week on innovative ideas. Is this a wasteful luxury? No. It has led to remarkable innovations such as Google Earth, Froogle and Gmail. Genentech has a similar provision for its people. Most organizations could not afford to give up as much time as Google or Genentech but the same principle still applies – you have to create some slack time in which people can experiment. You do not get innovation for free – you have to allocate time, money and people.

For many years 3M has allowed its scientists and engineers to spend up to 15% of their time on any project that interests them. They do not have to ask their manager’s permission but they do have to keep them informed of what it is they are doing. This permission to be free has resulted in countless ideas and innovations for 3M which is regularly rated as one of the most innovative companies.

The message is clear. The leader has to free time for innovation in order to empower people to come with great ideas and to explore them. Whether it is one day a week or one day a quarter, time for innovation is critical.

Paul Sloane

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Empowering for Innovation

Monday, September 28th, 2009

P Sloane 054A great leader can turn people into entrepreneurs who are hungrily looking for new opportunities.  The key is empowerment.  By empowering people you enable them to achieve goals through their own ideas and efforts.  The leader sets the destination but the team chooses the route.

People need clear objectives so that they know what is expected of them.  They need to develop the skills for the task.  They need to work in cross-departmental teams so that they can create and implement solutions that will work.  They need freedom to succeed.  And when you give someone freedom to succeed you also give them freedom to fail.  Above all, empowerment means trusting people.  It is by giving them trust, support and belief that you will empower them to achieve great things.

Empowerment is more than managers setting objectives and then leaving people alone.  It is about encouraging and enabling people to solve problems, meet customer needs and seize market opportunities on their own initiatives – either individually or in groups from different disciplines.

The goal is to have everyone think of themselves as an entrepreneur who has the right and the duty to solve problems and seize opportunities – not to offload them to others.  In many organizations problems are passed up and down a long chain of command.  They are postponed, delegated, transferred, ignored and eventually handled by some remote manager who cannot avoid the issue any longer.  In the empowered organization they are handled by the first employee who encounters the problem.  They have the authority to solve problems and take initiatives fast.  They do not do this in isolation – they communicate.  The senior team knows what is going on – but because they trust people to do the right things they find out later – after the fact in most cases.  This involves risks but it pays back in a much more agile, effective, creative and dynamic mode of operation.

The leader strives to change the business from a routine group of people who are doing a job to a highly energized team of entrepreneurs who are constantly searching for new and better ways of making the vision a reality.   We want to use creative techniques to drive innovative solutions to reach the goal.  But just encouraging innovation is not enough.  You need to initiate programs that show people how they can use creative techniques to come up with new solutions.

Paul Sloane

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How to Counter Resistance to Change

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

Peter Bregman on the Harvard Business site writes an interesting article on how to handle resistance to change

He says, ‘People resist being controlled. And so 70% of all corporate change efforts fail.

Here’s what’s interesting: people freely choose to make major life changes every day.  We move, get married, start families, face challenges, learn new technologies, change jobs, and develop new skills.  Not all of these changes are smooth.  But most of the time we seek those changes ourselves and make them successfully.

So why are people willing to change in one situation and resistant to it in another?  Because people don’t resist change, they resist being changed.’

He advises three steps to overcome this issue:

  1. Define the outcome you want.
  2. Suggest a path to achieve it.
  3. Allow people to reject your path as long as they choose an alternate route to the same destination.

In other words,  set the destination but empower people to choose how they get there.

Paul Sloane

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