- Now many organizational leaders will say
they want to foster culture of innovation
with workers embracing risk and creating breakthrough
results so the organization can be as agile as possible.
But many leaders aren't really willing to sign up
for what it really takes,
which is a high level of trust
and what seems like a potential loss of control.
So how can you create a culture that embraces risk?
Start with an understanding of how people respond
to risk as individuals.
According to Dick Bolles, author of
What Color Is Your Parachute, The Enduring Career Manual,
we each have a risk taking self and a safe keeping self.
Unless we have the right combination of opportunity
and incentives, most people normally don't take risks.
They operate in protection mode
and they don't venture outside their
comfort zone too easily.
Embracing risk means having the kind of organizational
culture that regularly rewards new ways
of thinking and acting and encourages people to move
out of their safe keeping self and into risk taking mode.
We could spend an entire course
on encouraging a culture of innovation.
But here are the three most important things
that workers and managers need to do
to accelerate the process of encouraging risk taking.
First, grant permission.
This is the single most valuable way
to encourage greater risk taking.
If workers think they're going to get whacked
for taking risks they're going to stay in those
safe keeping boxes.
Nobody is going to lift their head
above their cubicle and take a risk.
Coworkers need to regularly give permission to each other
and to get permission from their managers
to offer new ideas and to try new approaches,
and they'll often only do that
when they get encouragement from others.
Second, embrace failure.
If you give people permission to take risks
but you penalize them for not achieving
a specific goal in the process,
you send a pretty strong message that workers
should avoid risk talking at all costs.
Encourage workers who've taken risks
by celebrating their attempts
and then help them to understand their mistakes
and to ensure to work hard to avoid
repeating those same mistakes.
And third, focus on the problems that need to be solved
and the results to be generated
rather than telling workers the steps they need to follow.
Let them take necessary risks to accomplish those goals.
Focusing too much on the process is guaranteed
to force people back into the safe keeping box.
Remember, encouraging a culture of risk
is a journey, it's not a destination.
There will likely never be a perfect balance
between taking enough risks to foster innovation
and taking so many risks that the organization's
success is in question.
But if you encourage an environment of granting permission,
embracing failure, and focusing on results
you'll have laid the groundwork for a culture
that could continually work to optimize
its ability to innovate.