5 Ways to Break your Status Quo Culture

When it comes to innovation and change, there will always be skeptics who feel a moral obligation to guard the current ways of doing things. They are famous for the line, “Not all change is positive.” Recently one of these skeptics told me that the problem with the younger workforce is they only know how to communicate through texting and email and have lost the art of communicating face-to-face. This skeptic–who, despite his disdain for change, brings significant gifts to his organization–is utilizing an “all or none” description of the younger workforce. He is wrong for several reasons:

First, not everyone in the younger generation lacks the skills to be highly effective communicating one-on-one.

Second, I make a portion of my living coaching people who are over 40 and cannot communicate.

Third, email and texting are two of the greatest innovations in providing timely communication. I’m willing to guess that this skeptical leader is missing out on some of today’s best technologies for connecting and communicating.

What all of us need to understand is that, although not all change is positive, improvements will not happen if leadership is afraid of change. Leading is about improving the current condition of your organization and your people: to do that, you need to embrace and passionately lead change and innovation.

Based on our work with leaders over the years, we’ve found five ways to build a culture that supports innovation and implementing positive change:

1. Make Innovation a Priority: There is one way in which every leader is identical: the amount of time they have each day. Where they begin to diverge starts in how they spend this time. Some leaders are good at delegating the day-to-day operations to their direct reports, freeing up their time to think strategically. Other leaders are better at fixing process, service and product issues quickly so the same problem doesn’t reoccur. It’s impossible to brainstorm great ideas if the only thing you think about is solving current operational issues.
   When was the last time you held a meeting in which the primary focus was on something ground breaking? When you value creating new things, and actually make doing that a priority, you will discover that you and the team have the capacity to be very innovative.
2. Get Focused: When you don’t place a high value on innovation, you won’t carve out the time to think innovatively or strategically. And, if you are not thinking innovatively or strategically, then you tend to focus your time and energy on the operational issues. Whatever the operational need is at the moment, that’s what you will be thinking about. Is that really what you want? Set aside time for recording next year’s game changing goals.
3. Involve Everyone: When the people at the top don’t hold everyone responsible for innovative ideas revolving around products and services as well as process improvements, it’s like the employees are lost luggage or items stored in the attic–they aren’t much use to anyone. When everyone is involved and feels responsible, innovation becomes a corporate way of life.
4. Create a Sense of Urgency: The world is changing rapidly. This means that organizations need to change rapidly also or be left in the dust by customers and competitors. In response to the following survey statement, “My company makes improvements to systems and products quickly,” the employees of clients in the Overall Benchmark responded 62.9 percent favorably, while clients in the Best-of-the-Best Benchmark responded 74.4 percent favorably. The data proves that even the Best-of-the-Best organizations struggle with making fast changes. If you move quickly to identify problems and opportunities, and take the necessary actions to address those problems, you will win more business.
5. Recognize and Reward Both Success and Failure: To come up with great ideas and put them into action, team members need to feel that the culture values their efforts in either improving the current procedures, products and services, or in developing something entirely new. Sometimes the ideas work and sometimes the ideas don’t work. What’s important is that people learn from what does not work and are willing to try again. When people perceive that the risks in trying something new are too high in your organization, the only people who are going to be moving forward are your customers and competitors. When our clients’ employees responded to the statement, “People at my company generally feel the risks associated with trying out new ideas are worth taking,” the Overall Benchmark scored a 66.7 percent favorable response and the Best-of-the-Best Benchmark scored 75.0 percent favorable. Here’s how you can measure your success here: can you name five to ten new ideas, systems, processes, products or services your company, division or department has implemented over the last two years? Can you identify positive recognition that has been shared throughout the organization regarding both the successes and the failures?

The data in #5 tells us that you will have a competitive advantage if you:

1. Make positive change a priority
2. Focus on process improvements
3. Create new products and services
4. Have an urgent bias for action
5. Positively recognize and reward innovative successes and failures

I have to admit that I do agree with the skeptics when they say that not all change is positive. But I do know that there will be no improvements in your organization without someone having the guts to change. Go for it.