The Unmanagement of Innovation

Part 3 in Our Series Looking At HR’s Impact on Innovation

When a company begins a serious innovation effort, HR can provide one of the most important contributions to ensure its success: hiring the right innovation managers. It takes what can sometimes seem like a superhuman effort to break from the status quo and find managers who, according to traditional hiring practices, might not seem like managers at all.

The innovation manager you identify has to be able to not only operate within a crazy new set of parameters, but must be able to thrive there — and lead others to success in an environment that can seem counterintuitive to everything your company has worked toward in the past.

As Jason Lauritsen, Director of Client Success at Quantum Workplace, puts it in a position paper titled “The Inconvenient Truth About Innovation,” management of innovation is, in fact, so different from what you and others may be used to that it is sometimes called “unmanagement.”

What exactly should you look for? In general, innovation managers must be:

• Flexible
• Collaborative
• Risk-taking
• Forward thinking
• Creative
• Long-term thinkers
• Resilient and perseverant
• Fast movers
• Experimenters

This translates to a different type of management activity. Innovation managers must:

• Train in a different way
• Work well with disruptors
• Foster collaboration
• Push teams to move fast
• Create environments that inspire experimentation
• Protect the innovation team’s right to operate differently

This all means innovation managers are evaluated differently, too. Generally, their work will be judged more qualitatively than quantitatively, because innovation is all about trying new things and failing as much as necessary to find the diamond in the rough. Success is found in the one surviving, surprising idea, rather than in consistent production of many standard ideas.

It’s not unusual to find effective innovation managers right within your own company. You can teach some skills, such as fostering collaboration, organizing teams, and reporting results. So, focus first on finding employees who already have the natural qualities you can’t teach. The best candidates probably have a reputation for thinking creatively — or a willingness to buck the status quo and little sensitivity to what people think.

As an HR leader in your company, you have an opportunity to impact innovation in a big way simply by helping your company uncover the unique people who can unmanage their way to innovation success.