Managers Aren’t Managing for Innovation: That’s a Problem

Process matters. In fact, any start-up is searching not only in the modern phrase for “product market fit” – a proven solution to a problem that people will pay to fix – but a process for achieving this repeatedly and at scale.

Corporate and even start-up managers are implicitly or explicitly charged with managing these processes: ensuring that whatever has been designed is followed and executed on. Managers manage people, yes, but what they are rewarded and measured on isn’t a bunch of happy direct reports: it’s the execution of process within their departmental and team area. The expectation and reality is often that bigger-picture thinking, strategy, direction comes from higher up the org chart.

But inherent in managers “managing the process” above all else are hidden dangers. In today’s fast moving economy, with the lifespan of companies plummeting and disruption endemic, even successful start-ups quickly need what several business leaders have termed their “second curve”: new product-market fit cycles, as markets evolve, and as earlier instances plateau or are hit by disruption or changing consumer needs.

Without naming names, it’s easy to see from the outside in where some household name start-ups have struggled with this over the past decade. I have also seen in my own career instances of the same dynamic close up, in businesses where sales begin to flatline, and panicky executives respond by cutting people to maintain cosmetic profitability (and/or sizeable investments in R&D) in lieu of being in a position to unfurl new initiatives, products or services with quicker “second curve” potential.

This is happening because all too often what we can term here “managing the process” has left too little room for creativity, for ideas, and for opportunities to allow varying perspectives to identify and/or build new solutions on an ongoing basis. Innovation, of course, is about ideas built on top of ideas, space and safety to experiment and be wrong, and opportunities to pursue what appear to be potentially valuable insights. And yet such dynamics are far from the reality for many teams.

Strikingly, a whopping 46% of ALL workers say their employer or manager doesn’t value their ideas and creative contributions, while (and related) only around a quarter of teams are actually psychologically safe in reality. No wonder, then, that ideas are stymied, processes are worked to death, and the company that began as the Disruptor can so quickly become the Disrupted.

We see these dynamics up close in our work at Uptimize. More than half (52%) of neurodivergent professionals describe having unusual creative strengths: one, who I interviewed for my book “A Hidden Force”, described without any hint of immodesty how he believes he has “80-99” ideas for every idea one of his colleagues has. Not every idea is workable, of course, but he and others continue to find managers and teams uninterested in their suggestions: instead, they are told “this is how we do it”, and opportunities at either a micro or macro level are too often marginalized, and their benefits missed.

We have found through our research at Uptimize that despite a typical focus on processes and near-term performance, managers are in fact very conscious of the importance of “Diversity of Thought” – how to build it, and how to leverage it. Many, though, charged with “managing the process”, are unsure how to achieve this, and this leads us to the vital concept of “managing for innovation”.

“Managing for innovation”, indeed, needs to be central to every manager’s remit. It doesn’t need to replace managing performance against existing processes – this of course must remain – but it must have a central place in management expectations and conduct, driven and encouraged by the leaders who in turn set (middle) management expectations and objectives.

Managing for innovation starts, not surprisingly, with Psychological Safety; proven as the bedrock of successful teams. Managers must not assume this just magically exists in their team, and should instead envision it more as a flower to be constantly watered, one that will wilt without regular and conscious attention.

Action steps, then, include openly and directly welcoming ideas from your team, big and small, never dismissing ideas that may not be practical, and making an effort to celebrate those that do deserve further traction. Creating an environment where people even feel willing or able to share ideas in the first place, too, requires understanding that people communicate and problem-solve differently, and providing the channels and spaces for all direct reports to be able to share their own suggestions and thoughts in a way that best suits them. Ideas should be welcomed at different levels, too, with time and opportunities to suggest both micro adjustments and to explore, in an open and inclusive fashion, “what might come next”.

These steps, creating safety, must be complemented with other facets – ensuring the team has appropriate visibility and inputs to be able to contribute most effectively (remembering some people are linear thinkers, others more insight-based pattern recognizers) and ensuring team members are not so overwhelmed managing the process that there is no space to take a moment to step back and consider how they are working and what might work better in the future. 

Managing for innovation also relates to hiring, and to the conscious attempt to create teams with strongly different perspectives and ways of thinking. Here, positive steps include being open to very different types of presentation amongst candidates (for the best candidate may well not fit your preconceived ‘mental picture’) and welcoming different thinking styles even more actively: for example, commending rather than penalising a candidate who, in an interview, gets to the right answer via a very different path from what the interviewer expects.

Note, again, that this is not either or. Processes must be managed, with a constant view too to improvement, future states, and change big and small. Only by ensuring both ‘managing the process’ and ‘managing for innovation’ are core parts of their operating system will managers achieve BOTH performance within the existing framework, and innovation that helps improve it and set their team and organization up for sustained success.

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