Set the ground rules
As a company that emphasizes science, Isis has a business model that is academic in nature. While your business might not be heavy on science or academics, there are still some lessons that are applicable in any innovation-focused environment.
In short, you need to accept people but interrogate ideas. That means you let employees formulate ideas and bring them to the company’s decision-makers, and you go over those ideas on a microscopic level, but you don’t pick apart the person who came up with the idea.
“When you build an organization that accepts creative personalities, it needs to start at the top,” Crooke says. “Set only the definitive rules that are required. Have as few rules as possible.”
It’s a reactive form of leadership that allows employees to form ideas without fear of having them immediately shot down but still allows leadership to weed out the ideas that don’t fit with the direction of the company.
If you’re a leader who is used to being proactive, it’s an adjustment to back off and give your people freedom to come up with ideas and respond to the material they give you. But it’s the only way that you can clear a path for stimulating innovation.
“Every idea is fair game to turn upside down and see whether you believe it,” Crooke says. “That’s whether it comes from me at the top or somebody else. With every idea, it is appropriate to be aggressive and really interrogate it. But again, you have to make sure that you’re interrogating the idea and not abusing the person.
“When we fail in this organization, it’s always the same set of characteristics: intemperance, intolerance and impatience. When I go home at night and feel like we haven’t achieved what we need to, we’ve been inappropriately impatient or our behavior hasn’t been as clearly supportive for the individual while we’re interrogating an idea. So the challenge is to be sure that people know that the only way you succeed is to nurture and support people while mercilessly beating up and interrogating ideas.”
At Isis, Crooke has helped establish multiple forums in which the company’s leaders walk the line between supporting people and rigorously examining ideas. Isis’ management team routinely holds specialized meetings open to everyone in the company, in which employees can ask questions about a specific idea or initiative. The company also holds scientific meetings for the company’s innovators to interact in a group setting. Those meetings are ongoing every week.
“The key is that people feel like they’re getting the truth, both when things are going great and when there are problems,” Crooke says. “People need to feel like they know they’re going to get the truth from management, which is why, especially in an innovative environment, communication has to be constant and forthright about issues, successes and disappointments.”