Creating a Culture of Innovation

Innovative leaders are oftentimes glamourised by the media and the public perception usually fixates on a few, famous names like Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, or Jobs. They make the headlines not just because of their work, but also because they are controversial and people like to either hate or love them. But there is more to innovators and innovation leaders than what you get in the headlines.

In this last newsletter of 2022 we're picking the brain of John Saunders, CIMA® an experienced leader who worked hard to create a culture of innovation in an industry where it hasn’t always been business as usual.

We interviewed John for our Innovation Room podcast, where he shared his story and some of the many lessons he's picked up along the way. We covered topics such as what innovation really looks like, how leaders can create a culture of innovation, and how to build trust as a leader.

Background

I've spent my entire life just being a very curious person. Why I wrote this book, The Optimizer, quite frankly, is that I just love to learn. I look for learning all around me, in formal degrees, reading, designations, and I think curiosity has helped me publish this book, and it certainly helped my career.

It's hard to believe I spent over two decades working on Wall Street. I'll never forget arriving there as an assistant. I was sending faxes and making copies as a 22-year-old after going to college and thought: “Where could this ever end up? Did I really go to college to send faxes?”

20 something years later, I was running a $4 billion a year business as a Senior Vice President. Now I've had the chance to really follow my passion and move on to starting my own coaching and consulting business. So, it's been a great run, and I'm happy to be where I am.

The Optimizer: Building and Leading a Team of Serial Innovators

The book is really about delivering results through creating a culture of innovation – or what I like to call a culture of serial innovators or optimizers.

But more so, it's about building a mindset. This isn't something that just happens by chance. It's about building this mindset of trying to get people to think about how we can constantly improve things in line with the company goals and with what you’re trying to accomplish as a leader.

But what's been really fun about developing this mindset over a number of years is, I found it can really become contagious, and build upon itself, which has been a lot of fun to watch happen, and to see people elevate their game.

But the reason I wrote this book is because all these years I've spent in the workforce, I found so many people are afraid to embrace change for a variety of reasons, and they never really fulfil or deliver all their gifts to the world.

I think it's really driven by an emotional barrier because fear towards innovation and change can create hiccups. It's a risk. It doesn't work every time.

You need to have an environment where people can feel comfortable taking risk and knowing that it's not going to work every time.

What I've tried to do is create an environment where people feel that freedom and aren’t afraid to fail, which I think is really important.

Why people usually fail to understand the incremental nature of innovation

So many times, we see the headlines and think: “Oh, this person came up with this big idea”, but we never see all the hard work done behind the scenes that really got them there. We just see the headlines and think this person was an overnight success. That couldn't be further from the truth.

History has proven this again and again. Innovation rarely changes the world on its first try. Going way back thousands of years, innovations were usually born out of necessity. We needed fire to stay warm and cook food, we needed vehicles to move ourselves and our goods around. And my favorite, we needed iPhone filters to make selfies post-worthy, which was a big, big necessity that came out of the last decade or so.

One of my favorite stories to talk about is to ask people who invented the lightbulb. I have yet to find a person that doesn't say Thomas Edison. Very few people know that he invented the lightbulb 77 years after Humphrey Davy, an English scientist, first came up with the electric lamp. John Deere, same story. Elon Musk, same story. A lot of people think Elon Musk started Tesla, but he joined a year after the fact.

What all of these gentlemen have in common is that they didn't invent what made them famous. What they did was to take the time and go through all the stages of making it awesome and accessible to a lot of people.

After Edison invented the lightbulb, he was in this interview and somebody asked him: “How does it feel to fail 10,000 times?” His response was great. He said: “I didn't fail 10,000 times; the light bulb was an invention that had 10,000 steps to it”.

It's fascinating to me that the three guys that are so well-known with these particular products and not one of them invented them originally. They went through these steps, step after step after step to make the products viable and useful to thousands and thousands of people, and then went on to create tremendous success with them.

One of the things I learned through researching this book, that I didn't know about Thomas Edison, was that he was actually the father of the research and development lab as we know it today. One of his greatest innovations to the world was actually creating a lab for innovation. He had scientists and fabricators working side by side. As they came up with new ideas, they could go right to work on building it. And that is essentially the model that modern R&D follows today.

But when I think about Edison, his real superpower, if you will, was to see failure as learning, and to continue to push onward. Getting back to your earlier question, when we try something and it doesn't work, we think: “Oh, man, I've got to walk away from this because it's just never going to work.” Talk about resilience, taking thousands of attempts to make the lightbulb.

A very interesting story about Elon Musk, that you might have actually shared with me at some point, is that Tesla is not only increasing the rate of improving their products, they're increasing the rate of change, or rate of innovation that they've delivered, which is just extraordinary. So, they're actually iterating at a faster pace, which is really fascinating to me.

What makes the culture of a team or a company innovative

I think it's about the mindset and I absolutely believe it can be developed. That’s one of the reasons for the subtitle of the book being Lifting the Curve. I inherited my team, and I’m going to be making up numbers here, but maybe they all ranked, let’s say, 40 to 80 on the bell curve, if you will. Going through this process over a number of years, I would argue that at the end of it, maybe we ranked 50-60 to 90-95 at the end.

So, it wasn't just about helping the people at the wrong end of the curve innovate or get more impactful on how they operate, but you can help everybody improve. That’s often missed. I've seen managers over the years think: “Oh, my best people don't need any help. They can figure it out on their own.” I would argue that they want to be challenged.

It’s of course harder to do it, as it’s difficult to find ways for them to improve, because they're already working at such a high level. But I found that they do want to be challenged. If you can find a way to challenge them and then showcase that for your team, that can be very powerful.

If someone’s struggling with innovation, to me a big part of addressing this was finding a way to do it in a very non-threatening way. And I use that phrase very intentionally because that was the feedback my team gave me: “You challenge me in a non-threatening way to get better.”

As everyone on the bell curve found new ways to get things done, I would share it with the team: “Hey, everybody, this person found a better way to get this done. How could we all benefit from this now – and not take the three or six or 12 months it took that person to get there. Let's all leapfrog to where they already are.”

I would make sure that as they shared their story, they would talk about the challenges along the way so people could see that again, this didn't just happen overnight. They spent months trying it this way, tweaked it, and so on. So, I believe if you set up this mindset for the team, this culture where everyone is thinking about trying new things, and feel safe taking these risks, it can be very powerful.

Practical tips

I'll share one of my favorite examples with you. One of the big elements of the book is creating a feedback loop on how you operate, and it just really doesn't happen without communication and building trust.

When you first go to your team to try create that feedback loop, they aren't always used to that. Asking them: “Hey, what's it like working with me? How can we improve our relationship?” is an incredibly powerful exercise.

Back in 2011 or 2012, I wasn't a manager yet. I was a salesperson and my business had taken off in the first number of years, but then it had kind of plateaued. I remember sitting at our awards ceremony one year, and when they were calling the award I remember thinking anxiously “Oh, is it me this year?” But, as soon as they said the person's name, I realized I wasn't even in the running, and I was deluding myself in thinking that I was, which was a painful lesson.

Afterwards, I went right up to the gentleman that had won the top award the company gave out and I congratulated him and asked if there's something he did differently this year that drove the results. He said: “Yeah, I surveyed my top clients on what it's like working with me”.

That just blew my mind. Nobody in the industry was thinking this way, at least not what I was coming across.

So, I asked him to share the survey, tweaked it marginally and set out to do this myself. It was probably the single greatest thing I did in terms of helping my career evolve.

As I went to set up all these meetings with clients and said: “Hey, I'd love to get your feedback on what it's like working with me. I'm so impressed with how you operate your business and I'd love to get your feedback on how I could improve what I do.”

I'll never forget sitting down with this one gentleman top client of mine. I'd worked with him for years, and I'll never forget this moment. I asked him what the best part about working with my company was, and I was thinking that this is where he tells me how great our partnership is.

He never mentioned my name. Not once. I'll never forget that moment. I'm still feeling the sting of it right now 10 years after the fact. As I drove out of his office that afternoon, I remember thinking: “Man, this is what brand management is all about, here I’ve done all these things to help him and his team grow their business, operate more effectively, and he never even considered it in answering that question, which I thought was fascinating.

So, taking that little analogy right there, I took that exact same approach as a leader. So instead of asking clients now at this point, what it’s like working with me, I applied that same lesson to my team, and it's an incredibly impactful exercise.

You can't ask all these questions at once, but maybe over the course of a couple of quarters:

• What's it like working with me?
• How could I improve our relationship?
• How could our team work together more effectively?

The first time you ask these questions, you will quickly see how comfortable people feel with your relationship, or with their career or their spot in the company, because if they feel comfortable, they'll give you more honest answers. If they don't, they'll say something like: “It's nice to work with you, and I really enjoy it”.

I found that exercise I learned as a salesperson and applied as a leader as incredibly impactful to build trust and engage the team.

What holds innovation back, and how to get past these challenges

From my own life experience, and of those of my family and friends, change isn’t always good for you right now: your job being cut, pay cut, loss of power… So, change doesn't only comes with risk, but also with very negative consequences. And many of us have been conditioned to think that way.

There are these huge emotional barriers, and I think the Big Four are:

• Fear
• Loss
• Uncertainty
• Shame

I found some really interesting research on shame as I was researching for the book that said that we fear shame so much that we will do anything we can to avoid it, including not trying something new.

We are not trying to be creative or innovative because we're afraid that if we try and it doesn't work, then we have to go to our spouse, our partner, our friend, our co-workers and say, I tried and it didn't work. I've now suddenly tarnished this perfect image that I thought you had of me. This is a huge problem. We need change to happen to evolve as a company, and as a business. We can't stand still, as standing still is really going backwards.

As leaders, we often don't have the tools, the training, or the time to create this environment that gets us past these emotional hurdles. I would argue we need to make the time, and that a part of our job is to make people feel engaged and empowered in what they do.

If you can get it even close to right, you're going to not only find employees more engaged in the journey, but they're also going to be more passionate about their work.

We spend most of your waking hours at work, so people really want to have a great environment and be engaged and feel like they're making progress, and I think that's just really important.

But, back to this concept of trust: if people trust you, chances are good that someone on your team sees the flaws, the holes in your business plan, and client concerns. And if they don't feel open to share that feedback with you, you're going to find it out the hard way later on: “We just lost all of these clients because we had this problem. Why didn't anybody tell me?” Well, that’s because they're afraid. They feel like if they come forward with that information, you're going to be upset with them.

A few years ago, I had a gentleman leave my team and he had one of the smaller sales regions in the company, so I had to make a decision. Should I replace him, or should I maybe merge the territory away and give part of it to the people adjacent to him?

I did a lot of analysis on it and realized that I could actually get rid of this region. This would reduce the headcount on my team, which as a manager is hard to do. Many times, we're sort of conditioned to think that if we have more people reporting to us, we’re more important, and therefore our jobs are more secure, and so on. Still, I decided that it didn’t make sense to keep this role and was going to get rid of it.

But before I announced that decision, there was one gentleman on my team, Dave, a very tenured person that I went to have a chat with about the change. At this point, I wasn't completely convinced of doing it, but I was pretty close. I said: “Dave, you've worked in this area for years. You've covered much of this region that this other guy that left covered. I'm thinking about not replacing him. I'd love to get your take on what this region should look like if we don't have another person working in it.”

He was blown away. He'd been with the firm for 20 something years and had never been asked for this kind of feedback on a meaningful change. He asked to have a few days to think about it.

Three or four days later, we met a Starbucks and sat down. He came back to me with all this very thoughtful work. He even had specific suggestions like adding more resources for his team and things like this. Lo and behold, his analysis overlapped 75-80% with mine. But now that he did the work and brought me the ideas, this change effort was largely his.

How to get started

Start small. Begin with a simple feedback loop.

But, before you do it, before you start asking your team for feedback, I would encourage you to take an idea from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, who wrote a book a while ago that had a very interesting exercise. To get a sense of how your team thinks about not just you but leadership in general, go to Google and type in “my manager is” and see what pops up.

Spoiler alert, not one of them are going to be positive. So, before you begin this feedback loop, just go through that exercise to get a little bit more perspective on where your team maybe coming from.

So, when you think about preparing for asking feedback, and I list a number of questions for this in the book like: How could I be more helpful, how could our teamwork be better, and a bunch of others.

But the most important thing with this exercise is to be prepared for answers you don't want to hear. Because it might turn out that maybe you're not as perfect as you thought. This is where vulnerability plays such a key part.

If your focus is ultimately on trying to help your clients and grow the business, it makes the whole process a lot easier, because if you just take it personally, then it's just me against this person.

But if you think about it more from the perspective of, “if we can have a better relationship, we can deliver better for our clients.” That’s where this thing really gets powerful. When you hear these feedback insights that you don't feel comfortable with and don't think are true about yourself, reflect on them. This is how you grow. I believe great leaders do this all the time, and it gets easier over time for sure.

When you go through these questions, be thoughtful. Don't force a square peg in a round hole. If you're uncomfortable with it, start with an anonymous survey so people can really feel free to speak their minds to get people to feel like you are listening and do care. Take that information and report back to the team what you’ll do, just like I did with the conference call schedule. I mean, how simple was it for me to do that? And that was such a big change.

I would argue that without trust, none of this is happening without a doubt.

And the bar, I believe, is lower than you think. People want to have a good relationship with their manager, and I believe it's incumbent upon the leader to put out the olive branch and begin this process because most employees aren't going to take it upon themselves to come to you and say: “Hey, let's have a conversation about us not working together as well as we could“.

How many employees are going to have that conversation? Its's you as the leader that has to begin that conversation and empower your team to do it. People want to see progress in how they operate, and if they could be a part of it, that's when they're really going to be passionate with their work and be more engaged in it.

And when that happens, that's when they start to deliver more results because they start to think about how do we make this place better all the time? And then it becomes this beautiful waterfall effect where everyone gets involved and positive things begin to happen.

Full interview, first published on The Innovation Room podcast: