Starting with communication
Chappell says if you want employees to innovate, you have to start by asking for innovation, then you have to keep reinforcing it.
“We say, ‘We want you to innovate,’” he says. “Then it goes through some trial and error. It’s not a once-and-done, here’s the speech, let’s do it. It takes time to keep reinforcing it.”
It starts with the written and spoken word, but that only takes the message so far. What employees truly respond to is action.
Communicating through action means constructing a corporate culture that values what employees have to say and allows managers to consider and implement ideas that come from below.
“You have to have people in leadership roles who are responsive to suggestions,” he says. “You have to have people below working across the organization who are comfortable making
those kinds of suggestions, so you have to have an environment where it’s safe to suggest something new.”
Chappell says that doesn’t happen naturally in a corporate setting. To help turn ideas into action, he has put in place interdepartmental organizations that are able to cross boundary lines
within the company. The organizations are made up of people from different departments, and their goal is to get the various departments to pool their resources on projects.
“It helps more than just saying, ‘We’d like you to do this,’” he says. “It really helps show them that we mean what we mean, and as a management team, we’re fine with those kinds of [inter-departmental] conversations.”
With innovation come mistakes. Ideas will fall flat, miscalculations will be made and potential contingencies will be overlooked. The key is how you respond when a mistake is made.
“When you think about what a mistake is, a mistake is when you go off the standard,” Chappell says. “Then you have to think about the consequences if I go off the standard.”
If employees get off track, then get back on track without doing damage to themselves or to the company, you should look at it as “no harm, no foul.”
“It’s not the end of the world,” he says. “People aren’t trying to make mistakes. They’re trying to make things better.”
Sometimes a project encounters a speed bump, or even an all-out roadblock. Sometimes it’s beyond the control of the people working on the project. Regardless of the cause, if you bring
the hammer down on your employees when something stalls out or fails, it sends a bad message to the rest of the company.
“If you come down on them and have severe consequences, you send word to the atmosphere of the company that making an idea where there is a potential for a mistake is a bad thing,”
Chappell says. “It sends a message that the negative consequences are so severe, you don’t want to pursue the idea in the first place.”
The key is developing an attitude of positive encouragement. There must be consequences for major mistakes or repeat offenders, but when possible, accentuate the rewards for doing a
job right as opposed to the potential punishment for doing something wrong.
Chappell makes successes well-known throughout the ranks at Penn Mutual, using them as a benchmark to get his associates to achieve to higher standards.
“You have to give your associates recognition,” he says. “Once a month, we have associates nominate other associates for going above and beyond the call of duty. Most of the time, it’s innovation they’ve done that gets them recognized.
“Then we meet in the atrium of our building monthly, and recognize the associates that have been nominated.”
The monthly atrium gatherings are as much for the benefit of the audience as for the honorees.
“It’s important for the people being recognized; it tells them that what they’re doing is the right thing,” Chappell says. “It’s important for their associates because it shows them that this is
something that is considered of value within the company, so then they want to emulate that kind of behavior.”
Sometimes the honorees receive monetary rewards, but Chappell says that isn’t necessarily the point.
“It’s being recognized by their associates,” he says. “That’s what you’re doing to create the culture of innovation because money doesn’t change the culture as much as recognition.”