Do you remember the old game of “telephone”? A group of kids would sit in a circle and one would come up with a statement and pass it to his neighbor by whispering in her ear. Then she would pass it to the next, who would pass it to the next, and so on. If the message made it around the circle at all, it would inevitably end up garbled and unrecognizable.
In today’s fast-paced world, a rigid business hierarchy can turn your internal communications into a game of telephone that deeply impacts both innovation and progress.
Traditional hierarchy-based business models grew in response to the need to scale a successful business. A leader or entrepreneur would found a company, create a product, and begin selling. As the product became more popular, the company would start to grow. One of two things would happen. In some cases, the leader would maintain a rigid control over all aspects of the company as it grew and, eventually, the company would collapse because control rested in one person stretched beyond their capacity.
In other cases, rules and procedures would fall into place to ensure efficiency and consistency of reporting, operations, and quality. Over time, these structures changed slowly, if at all. Once scaled, the central focus of the company would become managing processes. Conventional wisdom is that executives spent 90% of their time managing the enterprise and 10% leading it.
The speed of 21st century business and innovation requires that a new leadership style emerge, neither benevolent dictatorship nor rigid hierarchy. The hierarchies and systems developed to enhance efficiency do not, by design, handle speed or change well. In an entrenched hierarchical structure, something as seemingly simple as upgrading to a new version of an application can require multiple layers of approval and take months to complete.
Here are three ways you can use your presence to navigate growth and start to foster a culture of innovation at your company:
1. Support questions. Create a culture of inquiry, encouraging your team to challenge the status quo and ask questions yourself. Do more than pay lip service to the value of inquiry, truly invest time in considering the team’s questions. If someone asks why something is being done a certain way, it may be worth taking a hard look at the existing process and seeing if another approach may yield stronger results. Many leaders shy away from embracing inquiry as a core value because it may seem “inefficient” or “insubordinate.” But while encouraging questions may lead to longer meetings or frequent changes, the tradeoff is that it helps ensure that creativity, innovation, and critical, adaptive thinking flows at all levels of the organization. A culture of innovation begins with a culture of inquiry.
2. Share information. Traditional hierarchies can create silos of information where one team may not have access to information used by others. Today’s technology enables faster, more transparent communication and teamwork. Sharing information helps foster discussion, exchange, questions and interpretation of ideas that can lead to unexpected, innovative outcomes.
3. Embrace failure. A hierarchical structure may discourage innovation by incentivizing team members to do “business as usual” and punishing new ideas. Embracing failure needs to be made part of the process.
Innovation and rapid response require iterations. And inevitably, iterations mean that some of your efforts will meet with failure. Instead of seeing failure as a sign that something has gone awry, treat it as a learning opportunity. By working towards ongoing improvement instead of perfection, you can integrate failure and transparency around efforts that do not pan out into your learning process.
If your company’s dependency on a single leader or hierarchy, rules, and procedures is deeply ingrained, encouraging new ways of communication presents a particular challenge. Instead of dismantling your current systems, look for ways to create parallel structures designed to foster a culture of innovation and rapid response. Dr. John Kotter, Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School, has a brilliant book called Accelerate that lays out the argument and strategies for creating this type of parallel system.
And for inspiration around ways to encourage innovation, take a look at how Google has scaled to over 30,000 employees without sacrificing its emphasis on new ideas, innovation, and teamwork.