Which of the following is not a serious pitfall to avoid when evaluating applicants?

Gonzalo Shoobridge, Ph.D.

Gonzalo Shoobridge, Ph.D.

I enable people and organisations exceed their potential: HR Strategy, People Engagement, Assessment & Succession Planning, Talent Acquisition…

Published May 9, 2017

Summary: This article highlights some of the most recurrent organisational obstacles and pitfalls when it comes to promoting a culture of innovation among employees.

“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas”

While in an innovation workshop I came across this provocative quote: "If humans can live for 100 years, why do companies die so young?" (Sukant Ratnakar). Taking into account the turbulent and constantly changing business environments where we all operate, this thought provoking question generated some reflexion and good debate. The answer in short was organisations ceased to exist due to their lack of organisational abilities to encourage a culture of innovation and creativity among their own employees.

This debate got me thinking, from my own consulting experience, most of the organisations that I talk to either don’t have effective innovation strategies or don’t effectively seek opportunities to innovate. In this respect I guess each company is destined to get the results they deserve: second-rate performance, poor work organisation and a lack of an energetic and sustainable innovative workforce. In the long term, the latter will inevitably lead to trouble, such as a potential takeover by a more innovative organisation, or even worse, bankruptcy and organisational death in the worst case scenario.

(Note: The average life span of today’s multinational (Fortune 500-size corporation) is around 50 years. Nearly 50% of the Fortune 500 from 1999 had already disappeared just ten years later - several of these failed organisations were acquired, merged or split up into smaller companies).

Every employee is capable of having a good idea, but not every organisation is capable of making the most of those ideas. If the culture in your company is not conducive to innovation, then promoting fancy values and behaviours, organising endless innovation related meetings, appointing specialised consultants on the subject or re-branding will not yield any tangible results. The reason for this is that there are frequently well ingrained organisational barriers between individuals, bureaucracies and other unhelpful structures that prevent ideas form being effectively developed, analysed, debated, communicated, nurtured and implemented.

When I consider all the public and private organisations that I have worked with over the past 15 years, there can be no doubt that creativity is unintentionally undermined more frequently than we think. It definitely gets silently crushed much more often than it gets encouraged. The reason for this is that organisations have been established to maximise business imperatives such as coordination, productivity, control, and of course, profits.

Yes, innovation is normally stifled by the overwhelming need to demonstrate ROI. Despite the fact that business imperatives are sometimes perceived as incompatible with creativity and innovation, it is still a buzzword in all corporate corridors and big money is being spent to find the ‘holy grail’ of innovation, but if you do not get the basics right, the probabilities of being successful on this front are slim.

This article aims to highlight the most recurrent organisational obstacles and pitfalls when it comes to promoting a culture of innovation among employees. If you happen to witness any of the following 25 creativity and innovation blockers in your organisation, you are simply witnessing systematic corporate eradication of original thought.

1. Inaccurate definition of innovation: One of the biggest problems with the stimulation of innovation is its core definition within the organisation. It is simple, most organisations don’t encourage employees to think beyond the development of new products. In these ‘product-centric organisations’ employees with non-external client-facing roles are not in a good position to contribute and participate. They are either not taken into account at all or forced to brainstorm new product ideas in spite of a lack of familiarity with current customer needs. The potential for innovation is simply restricted.
2. Unsuitable organisation structure: Another challenge, especially in organisations that have large employee populations, could be those extremely defined and inflexible reporting lines, while this structure may provide a number of benefits for some organisations, it can also become a significant obstacle when it comes to creating a culture of innovation. Unfortunately, most corporate structures are unwillingly designed to ensure that any decent idea never goes near the top where all decision makers sit. Organisational structures that support hierarchical decision making limit opportunities for people to have influence and innovate. An organisational structure that promotes horizontal communications is also central to the creation of a culture of innovation. It is hard to innovate when people work in silos, when business units are being kept disconnected from the rest of the organisation and when teams are split into isolated units, all these organisational structure faults limit the ability to become creative and innovative.
3. Rigid job descriptions: Don’t pigeonhole people by constraining their full attention solely on their exact job descriptions. This organisational attitude simply causes people to focus on ‘just doing the job’ and not on experimenting: ‘thinking outside the box’. Enforcing precise job descriptions by telling people exactly how to do their jobs cause organisational inertia and torpor. The moment employees are given specific tasks, organisations expect them to stand still, not allowing people to step beyond their immediate role boundaries. These companies give each employee as little decision-making power as possible, confining employees to the exact framework of his or her ‘job roles and description’ thus limiting their individual scope to contribute and grow.
4. Allocating the wrong jobs or projects: Another way of killing creativity is by giving a job or assignment to the wrong person. People do best at the work that they enjoy doing. Employees need to feel their abilities are stretched, but the assignment has to be within the employee’s grasp and in line with their own personal interests. All organisations talk about how difficult it is to find the right talent. They remark that talented people are a very scarce resource for which organisations need to compete and spend considerable resources, but the reality is, hiring talented people is only half part of the challenge. Organisations must find jobs where talented and creative people can be truly effective. If these individuals are given the wrong jobs, with the wrong things to do, they will simply become ‘fish trying to climb trees’. Managers need to be sensitive to the skills and interests of employees as they assign them to projects, by trying to put them into jobs that suit them: put the visionary in charge of creative tasks, put the detail-oriented individual on tasks with more structure… they will thank you for that.
5. Line-Management being heavily driven by wrong targets: Companies may preach the benefits of innovation, however middle-managers are still heavily tasked with ensuring optimal performance in the business’ core activities. Middle-managers have little desire or capacity to change core initiatives for new ways of doing things, they don’t want to miss their short-term performance targets, especially when these are linked to their bonus. In this sort of inflexible structures, employees are ‘not allowed to think’, when they come up with suggestions for improvement, they normally get an early ‘no’ from their line-managers / supervisors and are forced to return to their routine day jobs, into their cubicles, and put innovation out of their minds again... back into the box!!! Organisations need to change their line-managers’ objectives to include innovation, initiative and risk-taking, they need to be given targets for trying new approaches and these need to be included as a key measure in their performance appraisals.
6. Micro-managing people: Running daily checks on the progress of everyone’s work, policing your employees by every procedural means you can device and trying to control anything and everything on a given project down to the last detail isn’t going to help creativity one bit. Lack of empowerment and a controlling culture breeds frustration, wastes time, and ultimately kills engagement and innovation as employees feel that managers don’t trust them to get their jobs done right and on time.
7. Providing no feedback: Employees definitely need feedback about their ideas, so encourage them to keep sharing and selling their ideas to colleagues and encourage constructive feedback. As feedback is an essential part of the innovation process, managers need to let their creative employees know when something is a success or when something could be better. Without feedback, employees will start to feel lost, unappreciated, and perhaps even a little confused about the preferences and goals of the company, and what their potential contribution to achieving those goals is. Make sure your employees know that asking questions and being vulnerable is not a display of lack of knowledge or weakness.
8. Lack of recognition and rewards: Some individuals are more creative than others. They should be recognised for their creativity and / or innovation and should be supported in their initiatives. Poor reward or recognition schemes can make or kill innovation initiatives. Considering the amount of effort that goes into launching an idea, it is essential to get these right. Reward quantity and quality, offer rewards for the most innovative ideas, such approaches lead to a higher level of creative thinking. Also, make sure you do not implement the wrong promotions. Managers should confirm they don’t discourage innovation by simply promoting the least creative people.
9. Demanding immediate returns: Even if there are wonderful ideas in the organisation, creativity takes time and often won’t offer an immediate and obvious ROI to the company. Demanding creative people not only come up with good ideas but showcase exactly how and when they’ll benefit the company is unreasonable, and will make creative employees reluctant to share their thoughts.
10. Making things over complicated: Organisations should not try to be perfectionist when it comes to creativity and innovation. Most systems work best when they are kept simple rather than complicated. Managers should avoid sending lots of memos and copies to everyone in the organisation just to play it safe. They should not insist on arduous analysis of every change being contemplated regardless of complexity. They should avoid imposing strict business case processes that emphasize meticulous analysis rather than enabling fast and easy decision making.
11. Sticking to protocol & becoming institutionalised: Organisations should not try to assimilate all employees into their exact ways of doing things. They should not measure employees on how well they follow internal policies. If they solely manage performance and compensation on how well people conform to existing internal procedures they will unlikely advance necessary organisational changes required to keep pace with the dynamics of the external environment. Employees need freedom in how to achieve their own work related goals. Managers don’t need to set very specific and / or strict ways for employees to achieve their own goals. If you want to kill creativity, then simply restrict employee’s freedom in how they are to reach their job related goals. Managers don’t need to put every single idea through the appropriate channels or force everyone to work with the established system, to the contrary, be open to suggestions that may imply that your current system could be contributing to a problem.
12. Keeping the ‘Status Quo’: Don’t stay within your comfort zone. Don’t encourage employees to think the way they have always thought, nothing at work should be orderly and predictable, competitors and the external market aren’t, so employees need to be flexible to face change. Don’t only work on improving what exists, what you are familiar with. The key to innovation is to avoid logical or linear thinking which is knowing what to exclude from your mental space, trying to exclude everything that is dissimilar, unrelated or is in some other domain from your subject. Avoid the desire to keep things exactly as they are, basically don’t encourage employees to avoid changes at all costs.
13. Penalising people’s initiative: People should not be afraid of making mistakes, it is not a good idea to reprimand people for making errors in the pursuit of excellence, quality and perfection. One of the problems with new ideas is that often they don’t pan out. So to discourage further creativity, make sure you really punish people whose audacious ideas don’t work. Once people know they’re going to be endlessly interrogated about their new ideas and punished / discredited if they don’t work out, they will soon stop producing them. Organisations should not communicate examples of employees making mistakes to show what is not ok, or over emphasize the importance of ‘getting it right the first time’.
14. Never listening & lack of encouragement: Train your managers on how to be more open to ideas. Many times people come up with wonderful suggestions for improvement that are immediately brushed off or rejected by managers who just don’t want to listen to new ideas or already have a solution of their own in mind. Lacking action on new ideas is detrimental to creating a culture of innovation. Managers should not discourage or say ‘yes’ to new ideas and then do nothing about them. It is easier for managers to be critical than it is for them to be constructive. If you want managers to stifle creativity then allow them to meet new ideas with endless evaluation and criticism. Some managers kill ideas immediately as soon as they are offered with comments like: This is not the way we do things over here / It’ll never work / It is too dangerous / It is unsaleable / It costs too much / It’s been tried before / Get a committee to look into it / Your career is ‘on the line’ / etc. Most innovative ideas need time to be refined, so when organisations dismiss ideas right from the start with such comments, managers simply supress creativity and create an atmosphere where fear of rejection reigns supreme. In that kind of environment, employees simply don’t feel comfortable speaking up or sharing new and creative ideas. They’ll stick to what they see as safe and what’s less likely to get them reprimanded.
15. Restricting time and / or resources: Once employees are motivated to look for ways of changing products, processes and to adapting within an evolving organisational framework, organisations need to ensure that they commit suitable thinking time and resources specifically to innovation. Organisations cannot achieve their innovation objectives by setting impossibly short project deadlines or by restricting resources to a minimum. At an individual level all workers in some companies are given a weekly quotas of ‘innovation time’ in which to look for ways of improving their efficiency or the product / service that they provide internally and / or externally.
16. Providing unsuitable work environments: Managers should avoid structured meetings and allow and encourage people to loosen up in work related gatherings. They should not keep meetings too serious, when people are in relaxed environments, they start coming up with ideas. Organisations need to stop cultivating blandness by avoiding formal dress codes and work environments with symmetrical organizational charts. Managers tend to be obsessed with physical spaces, thinking that it is bean bags, table-tennis or pool tables or funky furniture that engenders creativity. Far more important, though, is mental space, resting spaces, time to think. People need enough time and resources to come up with good ideas. Put people under hideous time and resource pressure, though, and you’ll soon squeeze out all their creativity.
17. Interrupting communication channels: Openness with what is going on in the team and in the organisation is important to promote an innovative environment. Don’t erect the highest possible barrier between senior management / decision makers and the rest of your members of staff. Be accessible to your people, be certain to speak to employees on a personal level, and always keep your door open for new ideas. Don’t allow those great ideas to be taken elsewhere, don’t drive creative people away from your company, even if their idea requires changes to the current modus operandi of your business, listen to them, that is already a good start. If you don’t listen people will just learn to go along with whatever you want because it’s too much trouble to do otherwise.
18. Obstructing independent thinking and diversity of thought: It is not recommendable to force all your employees to work the same way. Employees think differently and use different methods to come up with ideas, so why should they have to work the same way? Encourage employees to spend time and energy exploring what people in unrelated areas do, to try things that they haven't done before, to do things differently, to allow some trial and error for them to learn and develop. Don’t encourage ‘Best Rule Followers’ in your organisation, recognize people for the way they relentlessly challenge the internal rules of the organization. Get the message across that doing what the rules say is not more important than the use of individual judgement and expression.
19. Never hiring ‘different’ people: Encourage diversity in your organisation, when all think alike, then no one is thinking. Don’t select candidates with similar education, family histories, religion, politics, principles and beliefs. The perfect applicant is not the one who makes good impressions and is most comfortable working within your ‘box’, to the contrary, try to hire people who are different to the majority. Managers should not turn down applicants with broad intellectual or artistic interests. Ensure your recruitment process targets the widest pool of available talent. This diversity is an important engine of creativeness.
20. Discouraging teamwork: Leaders must foster a commitment to working together in an effort to pull new ideas from multiple sources regardless of hierarchy or rank. Team building is designed to lead to more openness, greater trust and co-operation between business units or departments and / or the members of a team, and more effective working. Consensus decision-making is one of the most useful techniques of team-working, when people and their different points of view and business experiences come together, they create the types of innovations that individuals could not have done or found alone. Even in the past few years large companies have begun to launch ‘internal start-ups’, teams of employees who are sheltered from corporate rules and bureaucracy to stimulate entrepreneurship and creativity, and infuse agility. Employees within these agile teams would be free to focus on their goals, team spirit and collaboration would replace rigid organisational hierarchies.
21. Setting up homogeneous work-groups / teams: Homogeneous teams which are made up of people with very similar characteristics, rarely produce innovative results. If you want to make sure that creativity is kept to a minimum then reduce the diversity in groups because such teams are low in creativity. In contrast when teams are made up of people with different skills, abilities and viewpoints, their different approaches tend to combine to produce creative solutions. They may take longer and they may argue more but diverse groups breed creativity. Put people with different background and roles together, this is often done through the use of cross functional and seniority groups either 'brainstorming' or using specifically designed management tools.
22. Accepting ‘toxic employee’ behaviour: This toxic behaviour relates to lack of teamwork, lack of internal support and collaboration, infighting, politicking, gossiping, back stabbing, hiding information, unwillingness to share information, stiff internal competition (i.e. sales commissions), people trying to get promoted at all costs, etc. Employees that play by these rules are your organisational rotten apples, all your attempts to be creative will quickly vanish and employees will become demotivated and distrustful with these sorts of toxic workplace attitudes. If you want to keep creativity and employee engagement high, stand up for employees, offer the right example, don’t tolerate toxic behaviour such as gossip or infighting, don’t take sides or play favourites, and provide a fair, supportive and transparent environment for all employees to work in.
23. Never allowing intuition, gut feelings, or hunches: It always a good idea to ask your work team “what's your gut feel?” This question empowers people to explain concerns or opportunities that they might not otherwise have revealed. Creativity does its best work when it functions intuitively, unfortunately most organisations try to base all decisions solely on measurable quantifiable data. Intuitive thinking is an important skill for managers to have, it is their ability to grasp business opportunities, especially in those highly uncertain business situations, where there are no precedents on which to base decisions, where reliable facts are limited or completely unavailable, where time is limited, where there are several reasonable options to choose from, all equally well supported by reason and evidence. Innovative managers use intuition to sense when a problem exists and to bypass in-depth analysis and come up with a fast, reasonable solution. When properly used, intuition is a powerful tool for innovation, helping managers to navigate the inevitably complex and, most of the time, inadequate / incomplete business data. Intuition, gut feelings, or hunches will be the ultimate guide for your employees when confronted by the unexpected for which no rules exist.
24. Never encouraging self-development opportunities: Simply sticking to things that employees are used to limits their thinking process and innovation capabilities. Employees need to attend outside training courses and seminars that are designed to expand their minds, to change the way they think, to look at work scenarios in a different light. Encourage them to read any books about creative thinking. Innovators are often individuals who learn from different fields and merge them together into something new and extraordinary.
25. Relaying exclusively on external innovation consultants: Always listen to the experts but be sceptical, we know they spend their lives studying their subjects and know what is possible and what is not. Respect their expertise and follow their advice. However, whenever an idea is offered, analyse it, criticize it and judge it. Ask yourself, where is the data and validating research? Where's the evidence it can work? What's the history of the person who suggested the idea? Look for reasons why it can't work or can't be done. Always remember people equate scepticism with wisdom.

For innovative thinking to succeed as a corporate objective, the culture must change to accommodate the necessary empowerment, inherent risk and uncertainty that accompanies an innovation focus. All the innovation blockers mentioned in this article are normally done with subtlety. Organisations say they provide support, freedom, resources and so on, but tend to do it half-heartedly. This will give your organisation the appearance of a progressive institution but it won’t generate those truly creative solutions which mark out the most successful and innovative companies out there.

Many of the best ideas for enhanced products, services or processes come from individual breakthroughs. Organisations cannot force the generation of these ideas, but can do their best to create the right environment to incubate these. This is done by supporting and encouraging individuals to look at what they are doing in a more inquisitive and challenging way and by helping to develop and bringing forward their opinions and ideas.

The golden rule, the solution and right start for your innovation journey is simple: don’t discourage anything that might excite people about their work. What if innovation isn’t about doing more stuff but just simply removing innovation barriers? Perhaps by identifying and removing these obstacles your organisation could dramatically accelerate innovation simply by leveraging the capability that is already there.

If you are interested in measuring what cultural or organisational aspects are slowing down your current innovation potential, you may want to take into account some of the blockers presented in this article as part of your next ‘Culture of Innovation’ pulse survey. You can discuss with your current employee survey provider which are the best questions or survey items to measure each of these potential innovation blockers within your organisation. Such a survey will rapidly identify which are the areas in which you are lagging and it will allow you to focus your efforts and actions in a more effective way. 

So the next time you are squeezing your brains to come up with ‘the’ idea that will save the day, or ‘those’ most innovative solutions to your business challenges, or just ‘better’ ways to doing something, just put your efforts into measuring, fostering and promoting a ‘culture of innovation’ within your organisation among ‘all’ individuals and teams. A culture where innovation thrives among all different employee groups and at every organisational level is exponentially more valuable than a culture which concentrates on few senior people as ‘the innovative ones’. If you manage to create such a fully inclusive environment of innovation, the volume and quality of ideas and suggestions will dramatically increase… and who knows where your next groundbreaking idea may come from? … it is maybe 'this precise idea' that will secure the longevity of your organisation!!!

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Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of any other entity.