Creating a Culture of Innovation at Work
Ideas are the currency of success in any business. But for ideas to flourish and thrive, you need to intentionally create a culture of innovation and a culture that values creativity. And you need to embrace the power of small ideas making a huge difference in your workplace.
Partial Transcript of the Video, taken from Michael’s Culture Leadership Academy Online Course
Ideas are the currency of success. Never underestimate, never undervalue the potential of a seemingly small, simple idea to make a profound difference in your organization. For example, simple felt marker has ended up saving lives of patients all over the world. Dr. Rob Hackett, an anesthetist from Great Britain, showed up at the operating room one day with his surgical cap on – probably a good practice to do that! But there was something a little different about Rob’s cap today. He had written with a felt marker, his name and his job title on the cap. The first few times he showed up for operations with this cap his colleagues laughed at him.
They mocked him until the idea caught on, until they realized they were saving lives, you see seconds in an operation can be the difference between life and death. This simple act was cutting down on miscommunication and the misidentifying of roles and names. Patients loved it because they found it more reassuring to see everybody’s names on the surgical caps. And it was more environmentally friendly because medical staff started reusing their own surgical caps. It ended up saving thousands of dollars, and so they issued a challenge that went around the world for all medical staff to take up this very simple idea. It went viral under the hashtag #theatercapchallenge. Talk about a simple, low-cost, low-tech idea that made a huge difference. Maybe even saving lives.
When we talk about ideas being the currency of success, let’s keep the perspective that we’re not just talking about those huge, massive breakthrough paradigm-shifting, transformative, game-changing, world- changing ideas that are going to shake up your entire industry.
We’re talking about just those simple, small ideas that make a difference. We’re talking about those ideas based on a continuous improvement mindset, those 1% ideas to improve your culture, those 1% ideas to grow your business, those 1% ideas to cut your costs. An idea may seem like a small cost saving, but when you multiply it across all of your offices those small ideas can transform into tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions of dollars in savings. Or conversely, it might be a simple idea that earns you a little bit more revenue but when applied across your entire organization, adds up to enormous,
I’m talking about ideas to streamline processes and improve bureaucracy in just simple, small ways. So do not, as I said, underestimate the value and the importance of small, simple ideas, inspiring workplace cultures. Remember that ideas are the currency of success and you need as a culture leader to create an environment on your team in your organization. So, here are six reasons why you as a culture leader and why your organization needs to be intentional about building an environment that is conducive to creativity that promotes innovation in your organization.
#1. I’m going to say it again: Ideas are the currency of success. You need them to survive. You simply cannot grow your business or manage the day to day challenges and problems that you confront unless you have a steady stream of ideas. We all need ideas at an individual level, at a team level, at an organization level, they truly are the currency of success.
#2. Small ideas matter because it’s easier for one of your main competitors to copy those big breakthrough ideas. They can adapt a big idea or even steal that idea outright and implement it in their business. But it’s a lot harder to replicate a whole whack of small ideas that are making a difference in your customer service or small ideas that are giving you a slight competitive edge.
#3. Creativity is becoming a more and more sought after skill and characteristic of employees when organizations are looking to hire or promote employees. All the research shows that you aren’t just born creative. You don’t just have it or not have it. You can learn to be more creative. You can grow that muscle of creativity, which is why it’s important to provide training on creativity to your team, to your employees, and to your entire organization. In fact, a massive survey of 1500 CEOs from 60 different countries and 33 different industries found that the top trait CEOs said they wanted in their employees was creativity. It outranked management skills, discipline, and even integrity! They wanted creativity above anything else from their employees.
#4. Explicitly giving your employees permission to be creative and asking your employees for ideas and asking them to be creative drives curiosity about your business. And you want to drive curiosity about your organization because that’s how employees develop a sense of ownership and a sense of accountability. If they become more curious about your business chances are they will start to ask more questions and they will generate more ideas. And conversely, the more you ask them to be creative, the more curious they will become. So curiosity and creativity feed off one another.
#5. It’s highly motivating to be creative. There’s been experiments done where people get paid to be more creative on all sorts of different projects. And some of the experiments show that paying people to be creative backfires because there is such an intrinsic, internal motivator in most people that drives our desire to be creative, so putting an external motivator on it like money or pressure will backfire.
#6. It is fun to be creative! Yes, Ha + Ha = AHA, but the reverse is also true. When employees are freed up to be creative, they tend to be happier and they find it fun!
Michael Kerr is a Canadian hall of Fame speaker and the author of 8 books including The Humor Advantage and The Jerk-Free Workplace!
