Ability: Performance Versus Growth
Implement: Communicate and Structure for Success - Managing an Innovation Culture
Learning Objectives:
- Define the growth mindset and reflect on how to cultivate and model the correct understanding of ability on innovation teams
Culture and motivation both make room for the processes that will guide innovation at your organization. The final element you can control is employees' ability to perform as a design team.
Influencing ability is a matter of leadership. Leaders can do the following things to increase their team's ability to innovate:
Maintain disciplined attention. This means encouraging others to grapple with divisive issues as opposed to denying them. Remember Shani Sandy's advice from her experience leading teams at IBM. Conflict can be productive when it transcends the personal and focuses on ideas.
The next leadership action follows from the first: Deepen the debate to uncover insights. This goes back to the case of Freemark Abbey Winery and the botrytis. Is the team really addressing the most interesting aspects of the problem?
Next, demonstrate collaboration to solve problems. It is your job to model collaborative behavior by reaching out to others for help, advice, and additional perspectives. When this behavior is modeled and rewarded, it catches on quickly.
Instill self-confidence. As you encourage risk-taking and responsibility, be sure to back up employees if they stumble. Help them recognize that they have the solutions. This also builds trust.
Finally, protect creative deviants to allow fresh thinking. Creative deviants are irreverent, persistent, and willing to experiment. These qualities can cause problems. You must step in to make each side appreciate the other.
You have encountered much of this advice earlier. But I want to emphasize it all in one place so that you remember to adopt it with intention. It is difficult to manage innovation. But leaders who support their teams and provide both focus and accountability will maximize employees' ability to be creative.
The imperatives described are all direct actions that managers can take to give innovation teams space to find insights and explore them to the fullest:
- Maintain disciplined attention
- Deepen the debate to uncover insights
- Demonstrate collaboration to solve problems
- Instill self-confidence
- Protect creative deviants to allow fresh thinking
You can also increase ability by directly modeling a growth mindset.
What words do you associate with a growth mindset?
The growth mindset was introduced by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck. In her 2006 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck identified two mindsets—the fixed mindset and the growth mindset—and described how these mindsets affect our understanding of ability.
For those with a fixed mindset, ability is based on talent, and failure reveals a lack of ability. For those with a growth mindset, ability is something to develop through challenges and overcoming failure.
| People in a Fixed Mindset | People in a Growth Mindset |
|---|---|
| Need to prove themselves | Desire to learn and improve |
| Are careful about what they say | Openly communicate |
| Avoid challenges | Embrace challenges |
| Get defensive when faced with obstacles | Persevere in the face of setbacks |
| Believe in talent over effort | See effort as a path to mastery and success |
| Ignore useful negative feedback | Learn and grow from criticism |
| Feel threatened by the success of others | Find lessons and inspiration in the success of others |
In a business environment, where failure is risky, we often revert to a fixed mindset. However, the growth mindset is invaluable for every phase of design thinking. Managers can increase their teams’ ability by modeling the growth mindset and demonstrating that failures are learning opportunities.
Linda Hill, and others, wrote a book on leadership in innovative organizations called Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation. After researching more than a dozen of the world's most inspiring executives, Dr. Hill and her co-authors discovered that the necessary foundation for innovation was not a single visionary, the Steve Jobs type. What was needed instead were executives who could harness the collective genius of an organization.
According to the authors, collective genius can be harnessed when organizations create the environment for these three aspects of creativity:
Creative abrasion – This means fostering a marketplace of ideas through debate and discourse. You must amplify discourse through structured initiatives. As you have learned, focused debate can take full advantage of conflict to sharpen ideas.
Creative agility – The most innovative organizations embrace testing and refining the ideas they generate, and do so rapidly. They put emphasis on action. As you learned in the develop phase of design thinking, this means numerous experiments instead of one final test pilot. Creative agility is about learning, not about being right.
Creative resolution – Abrasion and agility are unproductive if they are not complemented with strong decision-making. As you combine ideas into solutions and make key decisions, ensure that no single person is dominating the process. In successfully innovative organizations, gaining consensus whenever possible is key to sustaining the right combination of culture, motivation, and ability.
In their book Collective Genius, Linda Hill and her co-authors explain that managing an innovative environment often requires stepping out of the way:
Innovation leaders should not see their role as the visionary—instead, they should see themselves as the creator of a context in which others are willing and able to innovate.
Note how the emphasis on “willing and able” reflects what we have learned about behavior change being rooted in motivation and ability. Innovation leaders are managers of a specific behavior: They guide collaboration. They encourage respectful conflict but ensure that it resolves. They make suggestions, but they want to learn where their diverse teams will take those ideas.
As you have learned in the many case studies here, innovation often involves difficult decisions and big risks for strategy. The further we look ahead from the present moment, the more unknowns we face.
In the following video transcript, Mike Sievert of T-Mobile explains how the pressure to innovate lessens when you focus on its ultimate purpose, which is improving outcomes for users.
One of the innovator's dilemmas is, how do you round trip yourself. One could ask, doesn't that create enormous pressure to keep outdoing yourself and so on. And ultimately, I don't think so. I actually think all of our ongoing innovation is just a byproduct of what's really important at T-Mobile.
And it's so important for me as a leader to make sure this is very plain to our team, which is if we just keep putting customers first, listen to them, solve their pain points, stay ahead of our competitors at doing that, the rest will take care of itself. That's ultimately the bet we're making.
It's not a bet on our own capability to innovate. It's not a bet on ourselves at all. Ultimately, it's a bet on customers. It's a bet that if we put them first and treat them right and change the rules of this industry in their favor on an ongoing basis, and patiently listen to them and solve their pain points, that they'll in turn invest in us.
Organizations will adopt a process like design thinking and work toward becoming more user focused in their own way. In the video transcript that follows, Shani Sandy of IBM defines her leadership process using three words: observe, reflect, make. Yours may be different. However, you approach innovation, the tools and frameworks discussed here, provide you with a strong foundation for user-focused, innovative problem-solving.