4 Guiding Questions for an Innovation Culture

BCG has identified four aspects of innovation culture on which companies often focus: what successes you celebrate, how you create, how you lead, and how you team. Importantly, these aspects either add—or destroy—value, depending on how your teams work together. Each aspect, when framed as a question, can help you determine what route to pursue to bolster your company’s innovation culture.

  1. What do you celebrate? What

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3 Corporate Values Questions

Ask yourself these questions about your organization:

  1. Do your values have relevance for your customers?
  2. Do your customers experience your values in some way?
  3. Do your values differentiate you within your industry?

15 Key Transformation Questions

Bring the Future to Life

  1. Case for Change. Have we convinced the organization that the status quo is unacceptable?
  2. Compelling Intent. Is our story of the future meaningful to our people and securing emotional buy-in at all levels?
  3. Credible Solutions. Are the proposed solutions appealing so the organization, and will they work in our culture?

 

Inspire Deep Commitment

  1. Aligned Top Team. Do we have the right top team? Is

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Strengths-Based Questions

If you’re involved in activities that you’re already naturally inclined to do well, your attitude toward work is different and you contribute more to your workplace compared with someone who may have similar skills but less natural ability. Doing what you do best is essential to being a star performer at work. As an employee, you should ask yourself these questions:

  • Do I know what I

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Collaboration Assessment Questions

As organizations consider candidates for collaborative leadership roles, they should ask the following six questions:

  1. Can this leader achieve results by influencing rather than directing?
  2. Can this leader share ownership, even if it means sharing credit and rewards?
  3. Can this leader delegate and let others deliver results?
  4. Has this leader demonstrated the ability to motivate groups of diverse individuals who may not share her viewpoints or perspectives?
  5. Has this leader

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Organization Design and Operating Model Questions

  • What should our business model look like in three to five years as the implications of our business strategy play out?
  • What balance do we need on the spectrum of centralization vs. a distributed network of business entities? How should we be structured to best support our business strategy: by geography, product, function, customer-or a hybrid arrangement?
  • Do we have the right organization design in place to

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Measuring Trust in an Organization

Schoorman and Ballinger developed seven “trust items” that were tested with notable validity. For leaders interested in testing the trust waters in their organization, these seven questions provide a useful framework or litmus test to determine whether there is a need for further examination of the extent to which trust is present or absent in an organization. On a scale of one to five, with … [ Read more ]

Values Questions

  • Do we pay attention to each stakeholder as an individual?
  • Do we respect each person’s views and interests?
  • Are we honest?
  • Do we keep promises?
  • Do we seek to “do good while doing well?”
  • Do we create innovative solutions to important, unmet human needs?
  • Do we look for validation of ideas in customer and end-user acceptance?
  • Do we put the interests of all stakeholders on a par with each other?
  • Do we

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Organization Performance

  1. How do your customers view your organization?
  2. How do your suppliers view your organization?
  3. How do your employees view your organization?
  4. Has your organization’s strategy been articulated and communicated?
  5. Does this strategy make sense given the current and anticipated external threats and opportunities?
  6. Where are the gaps in terms of internal strengths and capabilities?
  7. Have the desired outputs of the firm and the level of

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Diagnosing the Strengths and Weaknesses of Your Organization

  • What are our unifying values? What have we stood for over time? The ability to provide context and meaning for the work people do is key.
  • How do you organize your time? Is it spent on what you say is important? If you want to know if you’re really adding value, look at your calendar.
  • Whom do you depend on? Your real work team

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Assessing What Is and Is Not Working

  • What about the current structure helps or hinders the organization in achieving its strategy?
  • What roles and responsibilities are clear or not clear?
  • Are the organizational goals clear or is there confusion?
  • Which customer needs are being satisfied or not met?
  • Which people skills exist or are missing?
  • Which work flows are efficient and effective? Or not?
  • Which informal processes support organizational goals? Or work against them?
  • What aspects of

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A Culture of Entitlement

Dave Anderson, author of “No-Nonsense Leadership: Real World Strategies to Maximize Personal & Corporate Potential” (Learn to Lead Press, 2001), offers an eight-point reality check to help you determine whether entitlement is still alive and well in your organization:

  1. You base promotions and job retention on tenure, not performance.
  2. You give bonuses, whether or not people have earned them.
  3. Employees get raises regardless of

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10 Conversations That Can Transform Your Workplace

  1. Mind-engaging work
    When was the last time you got so caught up in interesting work that you lost track of time? What were you doing? What was it — about the work itself, how you were going about it, its connection to a greater good — that made this such a wonderfully consuming activity?
  2. Seeing the fruits of your labor
    When you want to see the

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Ten Conversations That Can Transform Your Workplace

  1. Mind-engaging work
    When was the last time you got so caught up in interesting work that you lost track of time? What were you doing? What was it — about the work itself, how you were going about it, its connection to a greater good — that made this such a wonderfully consuming activity?
  2. Seeing the fruits of your labor
    When you want to see the results of

… [ Read more ]