Recruiting and Retaining Builders

How to get the right people for innovation into your company and keep them there. This is a continuation of my previous post: Where Have All the Builders Gone?

Photo by Caleb George on Unsplash

In my previous blog post, I discussed how many companies’ innovation programs are not delivering expected results not because the efforts are lacking in themselves, but rather the right people are not participating in those programs. Furthermore, those “right people”, whom I title as “builders”, are simply no longer working in companies at all.

Thus, the challenge for large companies is not necessarily to design and launch new innovation programs, but rather to recruit and retain the right people to take advantage of those programs. On this note, I have seven suggestions for companies for how to adjust the organization and culture to help builders thrive and empower them to push the company forward.

1. Push management to regularly discuss and vision for the future
2. Create a separate set of hiring criteria for a builder role
3. Adjust your management style and KPI scorecards for builder teams
4. Focus on small wins and fast iterations
5. Eliminate waste in standard operational and reporting procedures
6. Encourage a culture of diversity and freedom of opinions
7. Design a framework to transition projects from builders to operators

1) Push Management to Regularly Discuss and Vision for the Future

Decision makers throughout the organization need to be kept abreast of societal trends and technological developments happening in their sector, then be given the brain & discussion space to deliberate how those changes will affect the business in the future and thus how they need to be positioning the company going forward. Getting people to regularly, at least once a year, to look beyond the next quarter’s financial results will instill a sense of urgency across the organization to support the development of builder-oriented projects that stretch the current business and operating model.

2) Create a Separate Set of Hiring Criteria for a Builder Role

Create specific roles and HR hiring guidelines to pull builders into the organization. Builders shouldn’t be judged by interview questions or CV frameworks, but on things that they’ve built, shortcuts they’ve created and things that they’ve changed. For example, at the Defense Digital Service (DDS), the pirate innovation team at the US Department of Defense, one of the interview questions is: “did you cheat as a kid in video games?” This question helps them identify people who work around systems and not just assume the rules and status quo are given.

3) Adjust your Management Style and KPI Scorecards for Builder Teams

With the right builders on board, they should be formed into small, self-functioning and self-managing builder teams, tasked to solve complex problems or far-reaching ideas with less oversight and more autonomy than operator-based teams. To accomplish their task, they need to be given the freedom to explore different avenues and possibilities where wrong choices and failure are more common and acceptable. Thus, rather than financial or efficiency metrics, they should be evaluated against the rate of learning and test outputs. This will require a certain level of protection and support to insulate them against operator teams evaluated against traditional metrics.

4) Focus on Small Wins and Fast Iterations

As you are trying to shift the organization’s culture to better nurture builders and builder teams, create opportunities to highlight and share their small wins with the entire organization. It is critical to reward risks taken, lessons learned and the speed of each iteration in order to arrive at better solutions. Focusing on small wins will encourage both the builder teams and help operators to understand how progress and success is measured for builders. Moreover, this will help create a standard of iterative pivoting to the right solutions, based on learning and small wins, rather than blindly trying to execute on the initial plan pitched to management.

5) Eliminate Waste in Standard Operating and Reporting Procedures

Don’t burden your builder teams with regular written reports, polished presentations to demonstrate progress and detailed feasibility analyses for every small decision. While tracking standard business operations in such a manner is logical, builders are working on non-linear problems that don’t fit within expected standards. Progress is also non-linear and all teams will not achieve progress at the same rate. Regular reporting frameworks will not give an accurate representation of the work being done, and only distract builder teams from the task at hand. Rather, schedule regular (bi-weekly or monthly) update meetings with stakeholders, but without polished presentations, so builder teams can describe their work, lessons learned, and next steps.

6) Encourage a Culture of Diversity and Freedom of Opinion

One of the key challenges for organizations looking to incorporate builders, is figuring out how to integrate them into a operator-dominant organizational culture. This will require a top-down embrace of different people, different perspectives, different approaches and different opinions, from both builders and operators alike. Management needs to demonstrate that such differences are not only tolerated, but encouraged in order to create a healthy, sustainable organization. This also means that management often times need to relax their hold on the decision making process and allow for increased participation from all levels.

7) Design a Framework to Transition Projects from Builders to Operators

Builders are great at coming up with new ideas and getting them moving, but at some point those projects move from search to execution, and operators need to take over in order to maximize their quality and profitability. If the stages of an innovative project can be summarized as follows:

1. Discovery
2. Validation
3. Efficiency
4. Scale
5. Sustain
6. Maintain
7. Decline

I believe that this transition should start with dialogue between builders and operators in Stage 3: Efficiency, then the handover should happen at Stage 4: Scale. Have a plan for how this transition happens, how decision are made for each stage, and the responsibilities assigned to builders and operators. After the transition, the builder team can be tasked with a new innovation project to explore.

Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash

In summary, we know that people drive innovation forward, not creative programs or initiatives, but unfortunately most organizations have not created a work environment that supports and empowers the specific type of people that drive innovation. Organizations are failing in the innovation race against startups not due to the lack of trying, but because they are focusing on improving the wrong areas.

It is time for organizations to revamp their approach to its people and create cultures that support builders and operators alike to excel in their respective roles and help the organization truly compete in what’s next.

Make Innovation Work

Core Strateji is a strategy consulting firm that specializes in supporting leading companies to transform into ambidextrous organizations. Are you ready to move your innovation activities forward?

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