Managing Creative PeopleInnovation: How Well Do You Support and Manage Creative People?
There are ten key areas that you need to consider when assessing how well your organisation manages and encourages innovation. These areas include: your people, the culture of the organisation, rewards and recognition, performance management and competencies. Of these, the fundamental area is people. Unless you are supporting and managing creative and innovative people in your organisation effectively, none of the other areas will make any significant difference. Here are the six “Must-Ask” questions which will enable you to determine how well your organisation is doing in this area. Depending on your job role and the size of your business, you will probably need to get the answers to at least some of these questions from HR staff, line managers and others. In each case, the follow-up questions that are suggested beneath the main question should be used for verification. This is not to suggest that people will deliberately answer dishonestly. However, when we are asked a question that looks for the answer “Yes”, it is human nature to give that answer if we possibly can. The follow-up questions challenge vague and potentially unreliable answers by looking for detail, examples and specific data.
Some of these questions touch on other areas of organisational innovation management like performance management and the organisational culture. However, they will all serve to give a very clear indication of your organisation’s overall approach to creativity and innovation. And if the answer to two or more of these questions is “No” or “Don’t know”, then your organisation will be falling behind in the innovation race. These questions are derived from The Business Innovation Audit - a fully scoreable, self-assessment audit from Cambridge Strategy Publications. |
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