How To Encourage Innovative Behaviour In Your Team
No matter what type of innovation your business undertakes, you need to ensure that every member of your team has the opportunity and tools to generate creative and innovative ideas. As business leaders, you need to nurture innovative behaviour and help your employees feel confident enough to share their thoughts and give them the freedom to develop and research these ideas. Introducing some simple techniques into team meetings and everyday activity is a good starting point.
Who knows? Someone may have an idea that completely changes your business for the better.
Listen
This may sound like obvious advice, but you would be surprised how many leadership teams believe they know better and can ignore people they do not deem as creative or innovative (especially if it doesn’t traditionally fall within their job description). You need to broaden their voices, so you have much more diverse and challenging ideas to choose from.
Listening to your team can help leaders understand and adapt to new ways of working and be open to embracing their ideas might just be the thing to push you ahead of your competition.
Reward
If your team are struggling to be innovative, or avoiding putting forward their ideas, this could be down to a lack of confidence in their abilities and creativity. You, as a leader, are responsible for fostering innovation. Encourage employees to come forward with their ideas. Provide an incentive. Not all incentives are financial, be creative in attracting their input.
Rewarding innovative thinking – even ideas that you decide not to pursue - can inspire your team to come forward, motivating them to be creative and come up with new, interesting, out of the box developments that could help improve your current way of working.
Inspire
Your team look to you as their leader. Words of encouragement can do a lot to help challenge your people, so they are more productive. In a team meeting show that you appreciate them and thank them for their hard work. Be positive and show your staff that you believe in them.
Push your team to go further and emphasise that they are valuable assets to your company. A positive workplace is a safe place for people and makes them want to come up with new, innovative processes that can improve the business and make things more efficient for everyone.
BEANs
At hgkc, we encourage our clients to use BEANs with their teams. BEANs is a process that supports innovative behaviour. It stands for:
- Behaviour Enablers
- Artifacts
- Nudges
BEANs will help your team to overcome their blockers and start to think more innovatively. By using tailored BEANs for your team they become more comfortable with trying new things without even thinking about it.
For more information on innovative behaviour and fostering innovation in your business read our Innovation page.
