If You Want Your Team To Innovate, Stop Shooting Yourself In The Foot

The top 2 business priorities in PwC’s 2017 annual CEO survey were innovation and human capital, but 77% of CEOs find it difficult to get the creativity and innovation skills they need in today’s marketplace.

Why?

Perhaps it correlates with the findings of a 2016 Harvard Business Review survey of 3500 employees. Fewer than half said they had the resources they needed (including encouragement and time) to execute an idea, and many respondents indicated that supervisors aren’t receptive to new ideas and implementation.

So essentially — and excuse me while I try not to laugh at the self-sabotage — leaders understand they need innovation, but are shooting themselves in the foot by behaving in ways that suppress it. That’s like going to the store to get milk, but refusing to enter the dairy department. Listen, just because dad didn’t come back, doesn’t mean something negative is going to happen to you when you go for milk.

And that’s one of the major roadblocks to innovation: the fear of trying something new and different based on negative experiences of past mistakes and failures comes across in your responses when employees approach you with ideas. Even worse, that mentality spreads. After being told no enough times, pretty soon they’ll stop coming to you with ideas, start going to their coworkers with complaints, and start looking elsewhere for work.

Before you know it, you’ll be responding to a PwC survey saying your employees aren’t innovating enough.

How do you start unleashing your team’s innovation potential?

A 2020 study published in Frontiers In Psychology found that leader humor is critical to innovation for 2 main reasons:

1. Employees’ observation of your embracing of humor sends a powerful subconscious message to model encouraged innovative behaviors (like vulnerability and acceptance of the input of others).

Through these observations, employees will be more:

• Willing to break routines to try new things.
• Confident in their creative problem-solving ability.
• Flexible in the face of adversity.

2. Leaders with a sense of humor create a more relaxed, open-minded climate, relieving employee perception of risks and uncertainties related to innovation.

When leaders use humor to showcase their own vulnerabilities and mistakes more openly, it sends a message of confidence, creating a more relaxed, open-minded atmosphere, which:

• Relieves employee perception of innovation-related risks and uncertainties.
• Facilitates a set-point of support and trust.
• Forms and fosters high-quality relationships between employees and supervisors.

All employees want positive relationships with their teams and leaders — it’s a basic human desire. In order to maintain these relationships, employees will be intrinsically motivated to work harder at:

• Solving problems
• Actively creating new ideas
• Innovating work processes, never settling for the status quo.

This is why humor is vital in the building of innovative cultures, and it starts at the top.

But leaders must be careful, because the type of humor a leader models is reflected back in employee behaviors.

Negative leader humor styles to avoid

• Aggressive: Includes sarcasm, teasing, and ridicule. Leaders who use this style are often punching down on others in a misguided subconscious attempt to feel better about their own flaws.
• Self-defeating: Leaves others feeling bad for the user of this humor style. This involves punching down on oneself to serve as a distraction from taking actual steps to learn and grow.

Positive leader humor styles to embrace

• Affiliative: Harmless humor used to reduce interpersonal tension or witty banter meant to uplift. Often involves making connections between dissimilar things, like the above buying milk comparison.
• Self-enhancing: Laughing in order to see the bright side of difficult situations and embracing flaws on the path to growth. Often includes self-deprecating humor told through an “I’m learning from this” lens, vs. the self-defeating style discussed above.

As a CEO, manager, or supervisor of any kind, putting the responsibility of innovation on someone else without first embracing the innovation-inspiring benefits of humor will demotivate your people into quiet quitting and right into the arms of your more open-minded competition. Without YOUR buying into the right mindset first, your people’s great ideas will die on the vine or worse: flourish on somebody else’s.