Part 3 of 3: Starting a BRG as a strategic innovation engine!
Copyright by Stephan Klaschka 2010-2024
From my series on how to build a successful BRG.1
Context
This three-part mini-series started with looking at the innovation process that IDEO perfected in Part 1 of 3: What does it take to keep innovating? and then explored what is involved in becoming the Innovation Leader in your organization in Part 2 of 3: How to become the strategic innovation leader?
While many companies demand creativity and innovation from their staff few companies seem to know how to make it work. – Is your organization among those hiring new staff all the time to innovate? The hire-to-innovate practice alone is not a sustainable strategy and backfires easily.
In this third and final installation, we discuss an alternative and sustainable way to tap deep into your employees’ creative potential and turn it into solid business value by forming a business resource group (BRG). A well-crafted BRG serves as a powerful, strategic, and sustainable innovation engine for your organization!
Losing the innovative edge?
It is the large companies that seem to struggle with innovation the most. When companies grow they tend to become less innovative. When this happens we see great talent turning into under-performing employees.
– Why is that and is there a way out?
Stuck in mental models of the past?
Remember the heavy dinosaurs that ultimately got stuck in the pre-history tar pits and starved, too heavy to move themselves out of the calamity? Mental models are the tar pits that companies grow to get stuck in – unless they find a way to shed (mental) weight and think nimble again to survive and to thrive.
The mental models often originate from days past when the business started and flourished with initial success. The models worked when the company grew back then but models can outdate themselves easily over time. At some point the company began to work harder to standardize its processes to ensure the output is delivered reliably and predictably and costs are driven down: the focus shifted from innovation to efficiency. Specialized and refined business functions create increasingly complex and bureaucratic processes, and ‘standard operating procedures’ rule the course of action. Things tend not to move fast here anymore. Improvement ideas from employees on the floor hardly make it to the top executives and starve somewhere in between - most likely in the famous ‘idea box’…
This focus on incremental efficiency also traps R&D departments to a point where true creativity and innovation get stifled, and the innovative output drops. In short, the larger a company the less it innovates. Sounds familiar?
Don’t rely on ‘buying’ innovators from outside
Many companies chose the dangerous and seemingly easy way out in buying new ideas from the outside through acquisitions and hiring ‘new talent’. The danger lies in applying this practice too broadly and becoming reliant on this practice, i.e. getting trapped in a vicious and reinforcing cycle.
This practice also alienates and frustrates the more tenured and high-performing employees who feel underutilized and –quite rightly so- see their career opportunities dwindling by the freshly hired new talent. Soon enough the sour side of the hire-for-innovation practice for employees becomes transparent also to the new hires and drives them away in frustration of their likely limited trajectory. - This organization just found the perfect recipe to turn top talent into poor performers!
Don’t waste your human capital
Bringing in fresh brains and expertise into an organization may justify mergers, acquisitions, or strategic hiring at times – but not as a strategy for continuous innovation and without also at least trying to tap into the innovative capacity that lays dormant within the organization.
Don’t write your staff off easily by following blindly the common yet wrong assumption that an employee loses the creative spirit after a few years and that new hires would be more innovative than those we already have working for us. Haven’t we hired the best and brightest consistently in the past? Well, then this logic doesn’t add up, right?
Ask yourself: have you lost your innovative edge? Will you personally be more innovative once you change to another employer? – I don’t think so either. The good news is that even if you don’t believe it, chances are that managers and human resource experts of your new employer do, at least the ones who follow the outdated mental model! – But then, how long can you expect to last there before you get written off? It’s like getting on a train to nowhere.
Derailing the train to nowhere
But seriously, the seasoned employees’ intimate knowledge of the organization and its people can hold enormous potential for innovation not only under financial considerations but also as a morale booster for staff. Getting personally involved more and engaging them in driving change again actively leads the way to measurable and favorable results for the organization. These employees are the people who know your business, your markets, your customers, and where to find resources and shortcuts if needed to get things done! Some may remember the “Radar” character in the classic TV show M*A*S*H who creatively procured whatever his unit needed by knowing ‘the system’ and how to play it while navigating the cliffs of bureaucracy on unconventional routes.
So, how can you motivate and (re-)activate your employees to come forward with brilliant ideas and get them implemented to boost the organization’s profitability? How can you spread new hope and direct the enthusiasm to practical and meaningful outcomes for the company and the individual employee alike?
Facing organizational barriers
There is no shortage of good ideas in the heads of employees. Too few of them, however, actually get picked up and implemented since organizational barriers have many dimensions that need to be overcome first. Here are some examples:
A vertical barrier effectively disconnects employees from the executive level which holds the (financial and other) resources to make things happen. Penetrating this barrier means connecting the people within the organization closely and effectively again.
Readers of my previous post Part 1 of 3: What does it take to keep innovating? will recognize that an executive champion is needed who brings together the technical and business champions. If you feel intrapreneurial and are considering becoming an executive champion, check out this post: Part 2 of 3: How to become the strategic innovation leader?
The horizontal barrier separates business functions and operating units that evolved to become silos or manager’s ‘fiefdoms’ of sub-optimized local productivity often with lesser concern for the overall performance of the organization. What you are up against here is often enough beyond specialized deep expertise but also defensive egos and managerial status thinking that led to a comfortable and change-adverse local equilibrium. As an intrapreneur, you bring a much-needed yet disruptive element to the organization. Since you are rocking the boat you can get caught up in ‘politics’ easily. Functional managers and their staff may perceive you as throwing a wrench into their well-oiled and fine-tuned machine that could jeopardize not only their unit’s efficiency but also their personal incentives for keeping operations running smoothly. > For more insight on the tension field of management vs. leadership check out Leadership vs Management? What is wrong with middle management?
Another barrier relates to the perceived value that your work creates for the organization, so let’s call it the value barrier: When you start acting intrapreneurial, you may be seen as someone wasting resources, incurring additional cost or generating questionable value (if any value at all) in the eyes of executives and other managers.
Therefore it is of critical importance to clearly demonstrate the business value your work adds to the organization. Based on unambiguous success metrics the value proposition needs to be communicated clearly and frequently, especially to executive management to gain their buy-in and active support.
These and possibly more barriers are a tough challenge. Now, I assume you are not bearing the almighty job title of ‘Vice President of Really Cool Stuff’ (that would have been my favorite future job title!) but hold a somewhat lower rank. Perhaps you got stuck in the wrong department (the one without the Really Cool Stuff).
So, where do you start to innovate and ‘rescue’ your organization from a looming train-wreck scenario?
Breaking down barriers by innovating from within using BRGs
A vehicle I tried out quite successfully over the past years was forming a business resource group (BRG). This grassroots approach has the power to crash right through the vertical, horizontal, and value barriers while driving change effectively and sustainably through the organization as a strategic innovation engine. - In case you missed it, my previous post discusses the business model behind the BRG approach in more detail: Build ERGs as an innovative business resource!
Here are the first steps on the way to founding a BRG:
Identify a business need and build a business case, i.e. a clear value proposition aimed at executive management convincing them of the need and benefits of forming a BRG within the limits of company policies. Attracting an influential executive sponsor to gain buy-in is a key requirement for instituting a BRG successfully. The sponsor serves as a political and resourceful ally, an experienced advisor, and an advocate but also ensures strategic alignment of the BRG’s activities with the broader goals of the company.
Since executives value their time more than yours, keep it short and to the point. Think executive summary style and offer details separately for those who chose to dig deeper and demonstrate that you thought this whole thing through. If your organization already has a distinguished officer or departments with a vested interest in employee engagement for example then connect, collaborate, and leverage your joint forces. > More on how to build a case study for a BRG at: Q&A – Case study for founding a business-focused ERG (content requires subscription)
Get organized! Seek voluntary members and reach out to future constituencies of the BRG. Active members are needed as the driving force and source of ideas that the then BRG turns into business projects aimed to innovate and energize the organization.
The first BRG I founded was “NxGen”, which stands for the “Next Generation at the Workplace”. The NxGen BRG has a generational orientation but is open to all employees regardless of their age or workplace generation. Nonetheless, from the start mostly the youngest employees (Generation Y) drove NxGen. In many cases, they did not know of each other as the GenY-ers were spread thin across the various business functions of the company. The GenY-ers, in particular, found a forum in the NxGen BRG to get to know each other in the first place. We then focused on goals based on shared values or needs to build a strong support network within the company. At all times we kept the BRG open and inclusive to interested employees from other workplace generations.
Read more about the virtues of and my experiences with Generation Y at NxGen in a previous post: Generation Y for managers – better than their reputation?The BRG offers its members a safe environment to discuss issues and ideas. It also serves as an informal forum to find coaches and mentors for personal development or specific projects and initiatives. Active BRG membership allows less experienced employees to quickly acquire new skills and test them in real life by running a project hands-on even in areas outside of their job description or business function to address needs close to their heart with tangible business value. Here, the BRG serves as a very practical leadership development pipeline and safe ground for experimentation within the organization.
Get active by launching business-focused projects. Again, you are targeting management and executives in particular to build credibility and gain support, and thereby become more effective over time. Start with feasible projects of high visibility and short duration that address a significant business need with clear and quantifiable success metrics. For each project, seek executive sponsorship at the highest level you can attain from the business area that the project affects. Make sure to communicate your successes broadly and frequently to kick-start the BRG. Stick to clear, specific, and unambiguous metrics for your success; if you can tie it to a monetary return of investment (ROI) the better, as this is the language of business. > More on establishing a success metric under: Driving the ROI – where to start your projects metrics?
Showcasing and celebrating your successes as a BRG motivates the already active members, keeps attracting new members, and builds credibility among executives to keep the BRG wheels turning as a strategic innovation engine for your organization.
On a personal note
My example of the NxGen BRG is very real: NxGen was nationally recognized as best-practices BRG within 5 months (!) of its founding and became a valued and frequent sounding board for C-level executives within one year. The BRG had no funds of its own yet ran projects and initiatives nationally and internationally that shifted the company culture and opened it more for change. The term “intrapreneuring”, driven by NxGen, was even adopted by the highest leadership as one of the three ‘Guiding Principles’ for the global enterprise with more than 40,000 employees.
Stay tuned for my next post: Difference affords opportunity – social media leverage by an BRG
From my series on how to build a successful BRG (=Business Resource Group) group, i.e. a business-focused ERG (=Employee Resource Group) first published on OrgChanger.com.