Employee Innovation - The Key To Business Competitiveness?

 Hand up please, if you think that the state of the economy, inflation rates, interest rates, cost and availability of labour are all factors which determine your business competitiveness.

If global research on this subject is to be believed then you are not alone if you think this too!

 The one thing that determines your competitiveness?

Innovation.

Your ability to Innovate new products/services or improve your existing offering irrespective of the nature of your business.

What is innovation?

1.      It is a process

2.     of taking a new idea of how to do something, or improving on an existing idea possibly using new technology which results in

3.     useful value for the end-user. Be this a time saving, cost saving or improved performance.

Many people think creativity is innovation and use the words interchangeably. Creativity is the idea-manifestation component. Until an idea is combined with action, it is just a seed.

Call creativity innovation if you like, but only if it includes the ‘action’ component.

 Because Innovation is idea + action

 Now that we have that out of the way.

The demands of innovation are multi-faceted.

💡 1. Innovation requires an investment of skill, time (lots of time!), information and knowledge.

Just with regards to information, we have the benefit these days of enormous amounts of information at our fingertips. This requires critical thinking. The ability to sift and sort through what’s relevant for a particular subject and what’s not.

 💡 2. It also needs people with the right mindset!

 Entrepreneurs are significant contributors to employment opportunities, economic growth and technological progress in every country. So much so that there is an Entrepreneurial Index which measures the ‘best countries for entrepreneurs.’

Australia has languished outside of the top 10 for more than a decade.

The imperative for companies to equally employ ‘Enterprising’ talent i.e, those who share some of the traits of Entrepreneurial talent in their businesses but now are based within organisations, is the key competitive advantage for any business.

 What are the differences between Entrepreneurs and Enterprising Talent?

 How do Entrepreneurs use their strengths to make them influential?

🚀 In their pursuit of innovative products and services they can take to market, entrepreneurs compete with established industry players who are often monopolies. 

 🚀 They create new employment opportunities which attract top performers and thereby increase the salaries being paid through competition.

 🚀 They encourage people to change jobs and thereby acquire new skills and ways of doing their job. 

🚀 They get to interact with different mindsets of people they may not otherwise have been exposed to. 

🚀 The products offered to create variety and choice for consumers and can put downward pressure on prices again due to competition.

How does Enterprising Talent use its strengths to help innovate?

 🧠   Exhibit behaviour which helps a business grow by recognising/being ‘alert’ to opportunities available

 🧠 They have the initiative and ability to exploit and drive those opportunities internally and externally

 🧠 Understand the value add needed by the end user/consumer to build loyalty and increase revenue

 🧠 They share knowledge internally to build a competitive advantage and respond to the changing needs of the market and

   🧠 Help a business cushion the shock of market, economic and political changes by having a diversified and leading-edge toolkit which is in demand notwithstanding the external constraints.

Businesses compete through innovation.

 If you are an employee this gives you a point of differentiation and the ability to command roles and salaries commensurate with the value you bring.

Naturally, this only applies if your strengths are ‘tightly bonded’ for innovation.

 Research has extensively shown that Personality is a valid predictor of job performance and how well people work together. This is a requirement for successful outcomes, particularly in the pursuit of innovation.

 Therefore, it’s important to know your Strengths, particularly regarding an Enterprising mindset or if you are an employer, the strengths of Talent particularly those with an innovation mindset vs someone without this.

Purpose of focusing on Strengths

‘’A Strength is the ability to provide consistent, near-perfect performance in a specific task using a set of individual talents’’ (Hodge and Clifton 2004)

 Awareness of your strengths increases your sense of personal identity and helps propel your motion forward including determining the direction you take. 

 Understanding your colleagues' strengths increases your understanding of them and also engenders greater cooperation.

 However, having a Strength doesn’t mean an individual will use it.

 The focus on an individual’s strengths is based on the premise underlying Self-efficacy which says that the more competent a person is in a particular ‘domain’ ie work, relationships, health etc then the more significant the self-efficacy in that domain.

 We’ll look at the impact of this in a moment but allow me to add yet one more facet to the mix impacting Innovation.

💡 3. Change.

Change and innovation are cup and saucer. You can’t have one without the other.

Yet most businesses and individuals want to protect the status quo. They perceive security in the status quo. This may be so but it only lasts for so long.

 Thanks to entropy!

 Entropy is based on thermodynamic principles and it’s a law of the universe.

Whoa! Wait, don’t go…we are not going into the physics of it!

 What you do need to know is that everything in the universe including the universe itself is subject to entropy. Which is the principle that says everything is moving from order to disorder. Entropy measures that change.

No matter how much you try to hold onto the status quo, disorder will arise in the form of new products or new competitors to your market.

Or pandemics and wars and… the list goes on.

Where nothing is exchanged with the external world, entropy increases.

 How cool and scary is that!

Currently one of the perceived solutions to low rates of unemployment and high rates of job vacancies (Australia) is to increase the migrant intake.

 It’s a solution but it’s a lazy solution. For this is a time ripe for innovation and the opportunity to raise the bar in competitiveness as a business and as a country.

 Here is an example:

 Self-efficacy (SE) has been shown to determine:

📢 Our choice of study

📢 The careers we go into

📢 The tasks we apply ourselves to

📢 How long we persevere with them

📢 How satisfied we are with our job

📢 Our ability to cope with the stresses of the job and work-life balance and of course the cherry on top

📢 The level of engagement we have at work.      

According to the Qualtrics Employee Experience Trends Report, the local (Australia) employee engagement score is higher than the global average for the first time (68% vs 66%).

 Self-efficacy is the result of ‘Deliberate practice’ – Research reveals that whilst the average person may practice, ‘deliberate practice’ goes beyond this by practising one’s strengths, which produces a greater outcome than trying for example to build one’s weaknesses. 

 Using small incremental goals as stepping stones takes both deliberate practice and self-efficacy. It also creates ‘top performers.

 You can read more about this here.

 Innovation in this regard could be a process which measures the self-efficacy of your employees (Take the test here), training your Managers on how to build the self-efficacy of your employees for greater productivity and re-allocating your training budget to focus on your most self-efficacious employees since they will give you a greater ROI by using what they learn.

 This delivers value for your business in terms of competitive advantage but also value to your customers from your better-trained, more inspired and more engaged workforce.   

Sound good?

How do you know if someone has an Enterprising Mindset?

Let me explain it like this.

The only difference between a diamond and a lead pencil is how the carbon atoms are arranged.

Equally, the diamonds in your workforce and the lead pencils may both have the same ‘traits’ but what makes one predisposed to being Innovative or what I call ‘Enterprising Talent’ ie a diamond and the other lead pencils?

Diamonds are arranged tetrahedrally and are tightly bonded to 4 other carbon atoms.

While graphite is bonded to 3 atoms and arranged in layers with only weak bonds between them.

Diamonds have 8 atoms in a cell bonded to 4 other atoms.

 What are the 8 ‘atoms’ of Enterprising Talent?

Ingenuity

Curiosity

Initiative

Ambition

Achievement striving

Optimism

Emotional Stability and

Reflection.

They are bonded to 4 other ‘atoms’: Curiosity, Inquisitiveness, Intellectual Breadth and Critical Thinking.

Pretty hard to gauge all this using the standard interview method!

Agree?

You need a test and to date, the ability to test employees and recruits for an Enterprising Mindset has not existed in the public domain in this way. Until now!

You can find the test here: Enterprising Strengths Mindset Test (Free for a limited time)

Conclusion

Once you know if you have Enterprising Mindsets amongst your employees and how to test for it in your recruits, the process doesn’t stop there.

You can put pressure on your suppliers to innovate. Need more Enterprising Talent (ET’s)?

Influence your recruitment suppliers to change their process from the current skills match exercise alone to an active process of isolating ETs by using the Enterprising Mindset test + Personality test + Skills match to ensure you receive the most suitable talent referrals.

This will create more innovation possibilities within your business giving you that all-important competitive advantage.

It takes leadership to create the right innovative workplace environment. True leaders are Change agents.

Change comes with challenges therefore leaders must seek challenges through change.

Ideally, not when the chips are down but well ahead of time by making your current advantages obsolete whilst transitioning yourself to the new.

Instead of waiting until it’s forced upon you.

Enterprising talent may only constitute 5% of your employees but they create the opportunities that keep the other 95% in jobs!

From you, this requires bold, courageous action.

Are you bold enough to try this?

Will you shine bright like a diamond or stay in the box of lead pencils?

The enterprising strengths test and the subsequent 13-page report will also guide you on how to create a culture of innovation in your business - because it starts at the top.