Yesterday I talked about creating a culture of new ideas and creating an openness to well-managed risk. But what good is a culture of innovation if nobody knows about it?
When communicating about changing organizational behavior – it’s really all about leadership behavior. It’s key that leaders connect what they say with what they do. For, despite what leaders say, employees look at their bosses’ behavior and think “I do what my bosses do and that’s how I get ahead.”
According to Charles W. Prather, Ph.D., of the Triz-Journal, “Creating a self-sustaining organizational climate for innovation means transforming the group’s value system by making and supporting ‘innovation’ as a real value. This means that leadership must ‘walk the talk’ if innovation is to become a self-sustaining value.” And that means accurately communicating and demonstrating the value-added for the organization by innovation.
Once leadership is behaving as the innovators they are encouraging their employees to become, they need to use springboard stories to activate their staff around their innovation efforts. According to writer and cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, “storytelling is fundamental to the human search for meaning.”
Leadership and storytelling expert Stephen Denning said on his Web site, that storytelling is great for “motivating others to action, building trust in you or in your company (branding), transmitting your values, getting others working together, sharing knowledge, taming the grapevine, sharing your vision, solving the paradox of innovation, and using narrative to transform your organization.”
Use stories to demonstrate how innovation has made a positive impact on the success of your company. As Gary Klein said, “We value stories because they are like reports of research projects, only easier to understand, remember, and use.”
And Prather agrees. “When we experience a particular value-preference and see that it ‘works,’ we tend to embrace that value as a priority of our own,” he said. “Values are adopted as a result of experiences, not by verbal instruction, and such experiences always happen in groups. Finally, the group proclaims its value-preferences through stories and legends and through the body language of gesture and ritual.”
Denning said in his book “The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling,” that “the effective use of storytelling in organizations involves crafting and performing a well-made story with a hero or heroine, a plot, a turning point, and a resolution.”
Tell your innovation stories in surround sound. Use the multiple intelligences to communicate in tangible, visual, auditory, and statistical ways. Rich texture and consistency will bolster support for the change.
In 1983, Dr. Howard Gardner, an education professor at Harvard University, developed the theory of multiple intelligences, which “suggests that the traditional notion of intelligence, based on I.Q. testing, is far too limited.” Instead, he said, there are eight different intelligences that account for a broader range of human potential.
The theory of multiple intelligences has strong implications for how we learn, share information, and inspire teams. The intelligences are:
- Linguistic (”word smart”)
- Mathematics (”number/reasoning smart”)
- Visual/Spatial (”picture smart”)
- Bodily-Kinesthetic (”body smart”)
- Musical (”music smart”)
- Interpersonal (”people smart”)
- Intrapersonal (”self smart”)
- Naturalist (”nature smart”)
Because people understand and learn in different ways, when communicating you need to incorporate these approaches to learning or teaching in order to have the messages stick.
As leaders communicating, we need to leverage these different intelligences in order to transmit messages in a way that everyone can embrace.
Understanding that your teammates learn differently and making sure that as you share info about innovation, you’re communicating it in multiple ways, will help your innovation priorities resonate with your team. To enhance communication with visual and musical learning, run a high energy, interactive video describing your innovation initiatives on continuous loop in your offices. Include statistics demonstrating the benefits of the initiatives for the mathematical learners. And bodily-kinesthetic learners would probably benefit from a tangible, metaphorical object or toy with a themed message for their desk.Â
So create interesting, relatable stories that staff can learn from, make their own, eagerly pass along to their colleagues, and use to effect change. And then, when you see them adopting your new culture, reward them for their efforts.
Join me tomorrow for more about appropriately rewarding innovators.
– Kathie
How do you learn best? Take the multiple intelligences quiz!
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