Set the direction
To make initial idea-gathering easier — and more likely to reap success — your forum shouldn’t be a free-for-all. For innovation to propel your company in the right direction, that direction must be clear before ideas start flowing.
“First of all, I think it’s fair to say that everybody’s familiar with the company’s strategy,” Faulkner says. “If somebody said, ‘Let’s start making ice cream,’ it wouldn’t be approved — and, frankly, people wouldn’t come to the forum with the idea that we should start making ice cream.
“I don’t want to make it sound like there’s not any organization around this forum. … There’s a direction the ship is going, and to that end, people come to this forum with ideas on helping that ship continue down its course or go down it quicker. It is very much a controlled environment where we only want ideas that fit the guidelines of where the company is going.”
So how does Faulkner get 1,294 employees, headed the same way? He doesn’t — at least not by himself.
“You’re not going to have (1,300) people thinking the same way. You’re not going to get consensus around (1,300) people,” he says. “Certainly, my role and the (role of) people around me is to set strategy and set direction and make sure we’re following that. Thereafter, it’s communicating everybody’s role in that strategy, and I think it’s a case of turning that strategy into an execution plan. That’s where everybody really needs to buy in.”
In other words, the broad strategy you set may not be immediately relevant to each front-line employee. But it will click when employees see specific glimpses of their role in that strategy.
After the strategy leaves Faulkner’s desk, managers hone it into specific plans for their respective departments, tailoring each person’s responsibilities through a series of manager meetings, staff meetings and employee meetings.
“You can actually go to any department within Pelican today and people will tell you what the next three months are going to look like and the next nine months, what they’re expected to be working on, what they’re expected to deliver, the budget they’re expected to work within and what performance they’re expected to deliver on,” he says. “We may change that slightly against conditions, but for the most part, 90 percent of everybody’s job is well-planned.”
At the same time, the overall strategy stays forefront through posters, brochures and communication so employees can tie their zoomed-in view to the bigger picture.
“You know your role individually and collectively as a department and collectively as a team,” says Faulkner, who addresses the entire work force twice a year to reiterate the strategy and discuss future plans.
Here’s how that trickle-down process might look in action. Let’s say an employee tells the Blue Sky committee about a military tool case that’s failing in the field. Whether the idea ends up working or not, what’s important is that the employee understands the responsibility of success rests on the entire team, not one individual.
“We all buy in to a project,” Faulkner says. “So if it isn’t successful, we all are part of that decision. Therefore, nobody’s singled out as having made a mistake. It’s very much a team-recognized thing. That way, nobody’s really frightened to bring anything out there.
“If we’re successful, then everybody’s bought in to it and we all own it. And if we’re not successful, we all own it. So there’s not this culture of worrying about failure too much.”
If Pelican decides to design the military tool case, then the teams take over. The sales team puts together a plan to sell that case around the world. The manufacturing team lays out a strategy for making cases to satisfy the sales. The marketing department determines how to promote the product. Human resources designs a strategy for hiring people to match the expected growth.
“If you think about it, it fits like a jigsaw, really,” Faulkner says. “You take a picture of something and you cut it all down to where everybody’s got their part to play in the success of that product. Any one of them not doing their part would see the failure in that particular product launch.”
