How Leaders Can Foster Innovation in a Stagnant Organization

Being a leader can be rather frustrating. You want a building full of motivated all-stars who are driven by personal pride and the pursuit of success. People who are bold and won’t keep their mouths shut because they’re so full of good ideas.

If you’re worried that you are dealing with a stagnant organization that is not growing and is in danger of moving backward — remember, William S. Burroughs said when you stop growing, you start dying — then you need to give your bold idea-spouters some more responsibility and a bigger voice in how the company operates.

Be bold about giving those people responsibility; encourage them to speak up and share their ideas.

Pop Quiz
You need to increase your productivity by 20%. Things are looking bad, and if you don’t increase productivity in six months, you’re going to have to lay off 20% of your staff. How do you find a workable solution?

a) Ask your managers to come up with a solution.
b) Come up with a solution yourself; after all, you’re the leader.
c) Attend a CEO roundtable and ask for advice.
d) Ask your entire workforce for their ideas and tell them, “No idea is too crazy.”

If you’ve read this far, you already know the answer is D.

A and B are the worst advice, C is not bad, but D is where you’re going to find success.

Because 90% of the people in your company are going to sit with their mouths shut, and 10% will come up with various ideas.

So unless you were to put your whole business in jeopardy with one of those ideas, I would try what the 10% suggested. In fact, I have been in that position where we did get a lot of great ideas from a very small amount of the workforce.

Sometimes the ideas worked, and sometimes they didn’t. When they didn’t, I said, “Well, we sure as hell won’t do that again.” But that also means we knew that one approach wouldn’t work, and we wouldn’t be tempted to try it later.

There is some value in failure, as long as you’re prepared to try new things.

You also have to make sure you don’t punish people for trying something new. Only the weak-brained would fire a person who tried a new idea and failed.

However, if you have a solution that’s not working, kill it fast. There’s no point in throwing good money after bad. Even if it’s an expensive solution, kill it quickly. Otherwise, it could become an unrecoverable mistake.

Help Grow Your A-Team
A great way to foster innovation is to increase training and education in your staff. You’re teaching them new ways of looking at a situation.

For example, in nearly every manufacturing business, there are always hazardous materials. You either create them, buy them, or produce them as waste by-products.

I would always ensure we had three or four people in the company who knew how to handle hazardous materials and how to receive them. Every year, I would send three or four people to a 14-day course given by OSHA about handling and receiving hazardous materials.

It paid off in a strange way because it actually increased the quality of our output products.

That is, the things we made were better because we learned how to receive hazardous materials.

That’s because our associates learned to ask, “If we’re receiving a material, what are we actually approving?” They started to ask whether they were receiving high-quality material or a load of shit.

We often received low-quality products in our warehouse that vendors would try to dump off on us and hope we wouldn’t notice. But when we started catching it at the receiving door and refused to accept it, we never brought the problem onto our property.

For example, in one of our processes, we used an oakite solution for cleaning metal, but it had to be a certain pH. We often went through trial and error in the product to get the right blend and achieve the right level of cleanliness, and we found that we could get the best use of the material if we got the pH just right. Otherwise, we would have to throw it away after the first use, and the metal still wasn’t cleaned properly.

So, our OSHA-trained associates started testing the pH of the product before they would even approve receiving the shipment. What we found was that the vendor, to make his product go further, was diluting it.

As a result, we wouldn’t get the full usage out of it. It would still clean, but we had to use a lot more product to achieve that result.

We kicked that vendor to the curb and found a different one that would sell us the proper — undiluted — product, and everything was all right again. That one correction saved us over $150,000 per year. All for the cost of sending three or four people to OSHA hazmat training.

My philosophy has been that that kind of thing paid off, and the people you had did a more diligent job. So find the people in your organization who want to do a good job and come up with a lot of ideas, even if they’re not great ones. Because they’re the ones who could benefit from some guidance and training.

Once you get them thinking along the right lines, those are the people who are going to help your company skyrocket its growth, rather than depending on management to bail them out of every little hiccup.

(Besides, management are the ones who probably caused the hiccups in the first place!)

I’ve been a manufacturing executive, as well as a sales and marketing professional, for a few decades. Now, I help companies turn around their own business, including pivoting within their industry. If you would like more information, please visit my website and connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.