You are the owner and manager of your small but growing consultancy firm or construction company. It has always relied on you to innovate. You are the brains of the company of course and you can still remember how you started from scratch to get where you are today. But like all old hands you can’t help but feel that today things are not the same as the used to be. Technology has moved fast and doing business has changed and keeps changing.
You know you need to constantly innovate how you market and service clients and how you do the work. You need a good dose of innovation otherwise you risk being left behind and then become extinct like the dinosaurs.
But how can you get these ideas from the staff? It seems every time you ask for ideas you may as well be talking to a brick wall. The problem is you may be shooting down ideas without even knowing it. You may actually be the problem. Here’s how.
Do you tell your staff we don’t do things that ay here? This comment has been applied consistently for eons and works wonders to kill any ideas that would have taken your firm to the next level. The very fact that the idea is different means that it opens you up to a new way of doing things and the opportunities become endless more like a farmer finding a new fertile and untilled field to plant. Just think, many of the world’s greatest ideas were the very antithesis of how things were done.
The other killer of ideas is fear. The fear of failure will shoot down ideas faster than a scalded dog. Bear in mind that encouraging innovation means that you will face a lot of failure but you will need to keep going. The path to success passes through risk and failure. Do you have the stomach for it?
We are all good at rallying our team when there is a crisis and most idea come fast and furious as everyone fights for survival. This however is not sustainable in the long term however because innovation by demand is both costly and can sometimes be too little too late!
Start a culture of innovation and reward new ideas, find a way to process the ideas and pick out the best ones. It may be the thing your company needs at this time