Building a Culture of Innovation

The following is republished with the permission of the Association of National Advertisers. Find this and similar articles on ANA Newsstand.
 

By Skyler Mattson

Organizations that consistently innovate are set up for success. The companies grabbing the headlines, market share, and investment are generally known for inventing new ways of doing business and driving change and innovation.

For marketers, innovation charts a path to new products, services, and audiences. So why doesn’t everyone do it? Because it’s difficult to build the culture and processes to encourage consistent innovation over time.

The following insights come from conversations with CIOs and CMOs across industries for the WONGDOODY webinar series View from the C-Suite. They reveal best practices for building the culture, processes, and teams to invite, encourage, and empower innovation.
Embrace Diversity, Build Trust, Encourage Failure

Successful leaders understand that a culture of innovation is built on strong teams. Great teams have three things in common,” says Aruna Ravichandran, CMO at Webex by Cisco. “No. 1 is intellectual diversity. No. 2 is psychological safety. And No. 3 is a purpose worth fighting for.”

Diverse teams require not just racial and gender diversity but intellectual diversity as well. “When people come from different backgrounds, cultural experiences, or technology experiences, they bring different perspectives across the board,” Ravichandran adds.

To foster team innovation, psychological safety is also critical. But Ravichandran cautions the phrase “psychological safety” can be misleading. “It’s not about people feeling safe,” she says. “It’s the ability for people — for teams — to express their opinions. When you have creative ideas, you shouldn’t fear expressing your opinions. It’s about being able to build a culture of risk-taking. That in turn fosters innovation and builds teams. It’s mostly about trust.”

Fumbi Chima, CIO at BECU, the Boeing Employee Credit Union, believes only a climate of trust can empower people to risk the occasional failure that can come with innovation and big changes. “Trust is a powerful thing,” Chima says. “For me, it’s okay to fail, it’s okay to make mistakes. But I’ve got to be there to support you because we are making that mistake together. It’s not ‘you fail,’ it’s ‘we fail,’ and then we’ll pick up and learn from there. My team knows I’ve got your back regardless. We’re in this together.”
Empower the Teams and Get Out of the Way

Diane Schwarz, CIO at Johnson Controls, has led numerous innovation initiatives throughout her career. She recommends creating a clear framework to guide integrated, cross-discipline teams who are empowered to make decisions. Then, she says, “Listen, get ideas, sponsor and provide resourcing, and decide when you do or when you don’t do something.”

Innovations can come from anywhere, and often the best insights emerge from the people closest to the customer or client, since they often are the first to hear about the problems, needs, and desired changes that users of a product or service are talking about. In a recent effort, Schwarz created meetings and online tools to get new ideas from the entire organization. But she learned something unexpected when attending those meetings: “What we found was, sometimes, just our presence or our title could actually be a little intimidating or overwhelming,” Schwarz says.

She realized teams expressed more ideas when executives were not in the room. “So, it was an interesting learning for us to step back, really empower the team, and get excited later and honor them and give them all the credit. Sometimes it’s not actually our role to be so close to where the action is,” Schwarz says. “Let the action happen at the edge, and it can maybe happen faster, as long as the teams are empowered and resourced.”

She also found that cross-discipline teams with clear frameworks and goals governed themselves quite effectively, further reducing the need for oversight.
Leverage Insights and Empathy

Lisa Davis, SVP and CIO at Blue Shield of California, started in her role two weeks before the pandemic required moving 7,000 employees to virtual work. Not only were employees and providers connecting remotely, so were their patients; the use of telehealth doubled in a short period of time. She used that dramatic shift to drive digital transformation by leveraging insights into what consumers want, while at the same time understanding how technology can drive innovation.

“Our consumers demand digital tools and ways to engage,” Davis says. “The beauty was digital transformation was kind of thrust to the forefront in the health care industry, which was fantastic. We accelerated efforts from a digital-transformation standpoint.”

Davis began by finding ways in which the customer experience could be enhanced by automating back-end processes to simplify workflows. “So that on the front end our customers, our members, our providers would have a more seamless and cohesive experience. We did many different pilots out in the market because we believe that a health care system is about being holistic, personalized, high tech, and high touch,” Davis says.

Testing creative, product, or content with the target audience is an established best practice in marketing. But some of the old methodologies, like focus groups, can’t get to the kind of actionable insights marketers need to innovate. Especially with digital experiences, watching how a human being actually interacts with a prototype in real life is the only way to get the critical data needed to understand what will work. Because the bar for experiences is high, set by consumer brands like Apple and Netflix, people expect that same level of experience in other arenas as well.

Miya Gray, VP of customer experience and engagement at Pfizer, understands that the digital experiences people have as consumers influence expectations of their experiences in the health care system. “We don’t have different expectations as patients, and all of us have or will be patients at some point in our lives,” Gray says. “We don’t have different expectations of health care or pharma because we are a patient and not a consumer. So, we’re working on developing experiences that parallel what they’re experiencing in their everyday life.”

Leading with empathy can also overcome the resistance that comes with any kind of change. Suma Nallapati, former chief digital officer at Dish, ran into resistance at a previous job when making upgrades to technology and process. “The amount of resistance that I met was quite intense and significant,” Nallapati says. “And the only way I could get to that kind of change was with empathy. Leaders need to ground themselves in empathy. You are convinced — awesome, great. But how do you convince the people that are impacted on a daily basis? You sit in the C-suite, you sign the contracts, and you say, ‘Go make it happen.’ That’s not how change is manifested in a proper way.”

Nallapati interviewed those most affected by the changes to understand their concerns. “It’s easy to deal with the cheerleaders and the people who are like, ‘Hey, let’s go do it!'” she says. “Right?” But she found that once the group resisting change was convinced, they became strong supporters. “They are the ones who go to the next group of investors and say, ‘Hey, actually, it works,'” Nallapati says. “So … leading with empathy, leading with understanding, and leading with curiosity are critical to innovate and change management.”

From health care to financial services to manufacturing, these marketing and technology leaders share similar recommendations to build a culture that encourages innovation: Build diverse teams and foster trust, show up with curiosity and empathy, listen to your team and your consumers, and, perhaps most importantly, know when to get out of the way.

About Author: Skyler Mattson is the president at WONGDOODY, the global experience design unit for Infosys and a partner in the ANA Thought Leadership Program.

 

Skip to content