How To Be Innovative – Day 26 – Reward Behaviours Rather Than Outcomes

How can you motivate and then reward innovation? The key is not to reward individual innovation but rather to reward the right behaviours that align with your business and long term productivity.
Due to the potentially risky nature of Innovation, companies have to look to alternative methods in order to reward employees. It is not possible to reward innovation the same way you would reward normal day to day activities. This is primarily because innovation requires failure at times to bring out the best innovations and therefore you can’t be directly rewarding a team for failure and not others who fail. Also, it is important to remember that in some team’s failure is seen as a negative but part of innovation is failure and learning from it.Companies that wish to become innovators at the highest level in their industries MUST begin by rewarding behaviours and not just rewarding results as is the standard practice.Take this example: in the past it was common to fixing mistakes at the end of the process with quality control. This would waste time and money. But what if you did this at the start by setting out detailed processes that reduce the problems at the end of a project, then you can save time and money and be more efficient as a resultRewarding the correct behaviours can have a really positive effect as it sets out standard operating procedures to help reduce waste (time and money) whilst reinforcing the right attitudes in the company. By doing this you will begin having employees who all work with the same positive behaviours whilst still having their own thoughts, opinions, and inputs.The key takeaway here is that companies must be able to accept calculated risks in order to grow and innovate. At the same individuals must be able to accept that failing is part of life and business and will only help them if they take on board the failing and learn from it.