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As a teamlead innovation at work I notice that lot's of my collegues are still having the wrong mindset. And it is hard to change this!

Innovation?

2 days ago when I had the presentation about innovation, I already noticed that people don't even understand that some are doing innovative work. They only see the big innovations like RPA, Blockchain, Agile contracting and so on. But they are blind for the small daily innovation changes which they are implementing or even bringing up! Regardless of how small the change is, if it does change the game it is innovative!
It is not that they don't want to take credit for it, they just don't see it and if they do see it they don't do the marketining around it! We are consultants, so it is important that our clients do know that we are activily innovating at the customer site, but if our own employees don't inform their manager or the managers of the client, than it is hard for our managers to make a statement to the client that we are innovative! And this is why we don't get great score on being innovative! It is all in the mind!

Another example

Currently I am trying to set an RPA core team and today we had our first meeting. Ther first plans were drafted and the first decisions were made. So we do have a start. At the end of the meeting a 28 year old collegue had some questions about what this would mean for her bilability score and what consequences this would have if we would fail to make a success out of it!

This really shows how different a mindset can be on different continents. In the states faillure is not always an issue, you tried, stood up for your ideas and if it failed you probably will have learned a lot of valuable lessons. The mistakes you have made, won't happen to you again when you do start a next project. Here in Europe and for sure in Belgium and The Netherland, you are burned when you tried something and failed. It could haunt you during your complete professional carreer! Strange isn't.
You do try to make something out of nothing and if you fail, it would be consider a faillure. If it would succeed you will have to protect yourself and make sure that you will get the credits for it, because for sure some manager will try to steal those. But it is this kind of manager that will stab you in the back when it doesn't succeed!
The lesson learned for this person is that if it will have repurcusions for you in your company, it should be an eye opener and you will have to decide if the company is the right company for you!

But we are not stupid! We installed our direct managers as a steering commitee! So if we will succeed they will get some credits and if we will fail it is up to them to take a part of blame of consequences!

Sometimes aging, does give you another perspective on your business carreer! :)

Have a nice weekend,
Peter