The following is a guest piece by Louisa Garcia Moreno.
Innovation is not something that happens overnight: It must be cultivated and nurtured, and more and more evidence points to learning and development as the key. But if L&D is necessary for innovation in the workplace, then leaders who are invested in it are imperative.
Findcourses.com’s 2019 L&D Report agrees, stating that companies with executives who were highly engaged in L&D are three times more likely to say their company has a culture of innovation. The report features exclusive interviews with L&D professionals at Bayer, EY, Bonobos, CyberCoders and Wyndham.
Forge Trust
The ability to take risks without the fear of repercussions is essential to develop employee confidence and set the foundation for an innovative environment, and this cannot happen without trust.
“Focusing on strengths creates trust; it creates a safe space to try something and possibly fail, have a conversation about it, and move forward” says Tiffany Poppa, the Director of Employee Experience at Bonobos, where the nurturing of individual strengths is more important than developing hard skills.
“Our strengths-based approach has effectively fostered a culture of collaboration and open communication because it celebrates the individual,” says Poppa.
Trust and relationship-building are at the core of Bonobos work culture, and their success in fostering an innovative and employee-centric work environment is the outcome.
Embrace Idea Sharing
Understanding the importance of open, cross level communication and idea sharing when developing an L&D strategy is essential if the goal is to develop an innovative workplace.
CyberCoders’ Associate Recruiter Incubator Program is an attempt to encourage this by taking untrained employees and, in an 8-week program that combines intensive education with mentoring, teaching them the skills they need to be successful in the tech industry.
Dani Chang, the company’s Training Manager, explains how their program has greatly contributed to “a culture of idea-sharing and cohesiveness”, and the bonding that came from the experience resulted in “all prior generations of Associate Recruiters coming together to foster a culture of support and innovation.”
As described by Chang, the formation of a culture of innovation is a direct product of the open communication and trust that come from training programs such as CyberCoders’.
Be Flexible
For big corporations such as Wyndham Destinations with a workforce of 25,000 employees worldwide, an agile L&D program could be the key to cultivating innovation.
This is the opinion of Anthony Sandonato, Wyndham’s Vice President of Learning and Development, who explains that their corporate academy, Destination U, must be able to “adjust to continuous organizational changes without compromising either the speed or quality or our talent development strategies.”
EY’s Audit Academy is another L&D institution that’s designed to be nimble by tailoring their training programs to the individualized present and future needs of their employees.
“That personalization can come either from our professionals accessing required content at the right time for them, or from choosing specific content relevant for their role and the clients they’re working on,” says Martin Hayter, Global Assurance Learning Leader for EY.
But it’s not enough to be agile. At the heart of an organization’s ability to adapt lies something else: constant learning.
The habit of re-examining and recalibrating the practices within an organization is at the core of any innovative culture and is precisely what sets these companies apart and lets them remain at the forefront of innovation in their respective industries.
Push The Limits
Pushing the limits and taking risks is what innovation is all about, and this is common practice for pharmaceutical giant Bayer, as is made evident by Karen Bicking, their Head of US Learning & Talent Development, who piloted an action learning program in 2018, which had almost immediate effects.
“We took some leaders and they delivered some work on some projects that were outside of their normal space,” says Bicking. “They gained experience beyond their regular role and gained exposure to senior leaders. We’ve seen a great outcome from that with a number of them being promoted already even though the program has just concluded.”
In findcourses.co.uk’s 2019 L&D Report, leadership and management development were rated the most popular areas of employee development, especially in companies that grew in the last financial year. This hints not only at the importance of leaders within organizations, but at their power to drive L&D programs to boost innovation.
Bayer’s program should serve as a reminder of the importance of including leaders in L&D projects to drive innovation, for leaders are meant to be the harbingers of the future within their companies.
The takeaway? Creating agile and creative L&D practices that revolve around individual employees and foster trust and idea sharing in the workplace is the baseline to establishing a culture of innovation, and this cannot happen without innovative leaders pushing the limits.
Louisa Garcia Moreno is the Content Editor for Findcourses.com, part of the Education Media Group in the UK.