Enhancing Innovation
Challenge: A medium-sized media company was in the midst of a major 3-year effort to reduce development time in the introduction of new products. It was a cross-departmental effort, and after 14 months, it was clear new ideas and more efficient ways of working were not being implemented fast enough.
Solution: During their Aligning Culture with Business Session, department leaders came to realize that some of the governance characteristics of their organizational culture were working against the innovative thinking needed to meet their aggressive timelines. In their company, it was difficult to challenge other people’s opinions and employees were expected to avoid conflict through overly polite manners. These behaviors were supported by a collaborative decision-making style where maintaining harmonious relations was highly valued.
The department leaders’ response on how to more effectively manage their culture was two-fold. First, they focused on the decision-making bottlenecks in their effort, and identified the bottlenecks where a collaborative approach was not necessary and assigned a department leader as the final decision-maker. Next, realizing that they were addressing a fundamental culture shift, they worked with experts in developing an OK to Disagree training program where specific skills on how and when to challenge the status quo were presented and practiced.
Results: The company met their three year product development goals, due to leaders following through in their final decision-making responsibilities. Employees also were practicing their OK to Disagree skills, and since all levels of employees were involved, they began supporting each other in challenging the status quo. To further support this cultural change to support innovation, they developed a follow-up coaching program and started rating employee on these skills in their performance evaluations.