Want More Innovation In the Workplace? Make It Safe to Tell the Truth

Want More Innovation In the Workplace? Make It Safe to Tell the Truth

You’ve likely either seen the video or heard about the group think that happened before NASA’s rocket the Challenger exploded in 1986. One engineer felt strongly that there was a defect in the Challenger’s design. He spoke up, others disagreed. He continued to speak up, until it became too uncomfortable to do so.

Most employees don’t get that far. Many employees are afraid to speak up at all, feeling that it’s not ok to have a counter-point-of-view, and that those who disagree with ‘management’ are eventually fired. I honestly am not sure where this comes from. It hasn’t been my experience, and yet the fear of speaking up is pervasive. I hear it in almost every organization with which I work.

If it’s not ok to express different opinions, your organization will deliver the same-old products and services you always have. If staying the same works in your industry, great. But stagnation is detrimental to most organizations.

If you want more innovation in the workplace, you have to make it safe to speak up and offer a different point of view. Saying new, different, and even controversial things must be encourage and rewarded.

Five Ways to Encourage Innovation in the Workplace:

1. Ask for new ideas and different points of view often and wait until you get both.
2. Don’t allow a meeting or discussion to move on until you get new, opposing, and different points of view.
3. Positively acknowledge people who risk by saying something new or different from the norm.
4. Ensure people with new ideas and different points of view are allowed to finish speaking before they’re interrupted or before someone else tries to negate their ideas.
5. Create a few awards for speaking up in your organization and announce winners publicly and with great fanfare. You get what you reward.

Create Awards to Encourage Innovation in the Workplace:

1. Acknowledge the person who fails massively trying something new.
2. Award the person who brings new ideas to the table, regardless of what happens to those ideas.
3. Celebrate the person who willingly gives you the worst news.

The fear of speaking up and saying something new or different will destroy your innovation efforts. It will also squelch your employees’ ambition and ability to be creative. Make it safe to tell the truth, even when the truth is hard to understand or unpopular, and see what happens to innovation, creativity, and employee productivity and morale.

Tags: how to be more innovative, how to say anything to anyone, Innovation In the Workplace, more innovation at work, safe to speak up