Six Behaviours to Create a Culture of Innovation

Telling someone ‘Ok I want you to be innovative today’ is about as useful as telling someone to ‘be funny’. Not helpful. A comedian won’t tell you to be funny. They will suggest some behaviours and strategies that should make you funny. No goals are useful without tools to achieve them.

Virtually all companies have values, but not so many define ideal behaviours. Business values are useless without behaviours. Values are usually abstract notions of WHAT you want to be. Workplaces really need to ask HOW to foster their ideal values. Workers need to decide on sets of behaviours that people can practise each day, which will bring about their ideals in the workplace. Here are six behaviours that you can work on doing in order to cultivate innovation in your work culture.

Encourage Freedom of Expression

You are most likely to innovate when you feel comfortable and invested in your daily work rhythms. Comfort and investment comes from feeling that your true self is welcomed and appreciated. Make sure that people have agency over the office environment, from sometimes choosing the music, to decorating and filling the place with pictures or stress balls or standing desks or whatever. Give everyone input on the food at team meals and the structure of internal meetings. The ideal is for all to feel some ownership over the business, so that they feel comfortable, take pride in and care about their work. The greater the sense of comfort and investment, the more everyone will seek and seize opportunities to improve projects.

Consult and Share Often

In most creative workplaces, people are hired for unique skill-sets and knowledge areas. The most significant projects that businesses are built for require all of those people’s strengths to combine into one glorious solution for a problem. Very rarely does any one person in the office have the skills, knowledge, insight, inspiration, capacity and drive to complete projects on their own, let alone as well as the whole team. Consultation and sharing with each other throughout project development is crucial. There are so many moments where a small question could be answered better by a colleague, and that can streamline a process or remove an obstacle or save resources. Often, just sharing your work with those around you increases the potential for a moment of genuine inspiration from others who have fresh encounters with the work, different perspectives, and unique job histories with their own references for what works. Teams are smarter together.

Instil Creative Confidence

Having creative confidence means acting on ideas when they come, without fear of rejection or failure. People ought be allowed and encouraged to pursue random moments of inspiration, whether the likely product is grand or small, and even if the project is probably not feasible for the company at that time. Many ideas seem odd and fruitless at first, yet become extraordinary products. Talented workers can convert ideas even within company constraints. And often, ideas that are indulged in for a little while and then put away for a time become leading projects for businesses later, when the workforce gets capacity to complete them or technologies and markets catch up to the idea. If workers don’t have creative confidence, they won’t pursue inspirations that are unusual, and the office will have fewer ideas and less potential for innovation. It’s ok to fail.

Allow Times for Dreaming

The problem with innovation is it doesn’t always jive well with rapid productivity and deadlines. Exhausted minds have fewer interesting thoughts. Ultra-focused minds have fewer novel thoughts. Useful creativity for businesses is strengthened by work experience, but creativity is rejuvenated by times of idle drifting. Focused ideas on a project usually yield incremental improvement. Wild, untamed imagining yields market-changing innovation. Aim to create work rhythms that honour time pressure, but give freedom to dream.

Be Tough on Work, Gentle on Colleagues

Projects need to be driven to their absolute limit so that ideas become the best possible products. Ill-considered, poor or lazy work ought be rebuked and reworked to achieve excellence. But people should not be, and being harsh on colleagues damages relationships that need to be good for effective collaboration. It’s hard to be tough on work without causing the creators personal offence. Yet, if everyone knows what the expectation for effort and ways of working in an office is, no one can justify being personally affronted if they are called out for falling short of expectations. Even ideas that are ultimately without use are acceptable if workshopped properly.

Honour Need for Space

Collaboration is vital. So is space. Sometimes people are on a roll and want to be left alone. They might be on a deadline. They might just need quiet to collect themselves before a big meeting, or after a tough day. Good mental health is vital for people and for effective work. Innovation needs breathing room.