What a Leader Can Do to Analyze What’s Next?

A new managing director of a stagnant medium-sized European manufacturing company had been hired specifically to develop a breakthrough product and bring it to market. He had assembled a team that, in very little time, developed an exciting new product concept. However, the team had subsequently ground to a standstill. Members failed to attend meetings regularly and several felt that there was nothing important remaining to be done. The Creative Problem Solving Profile was administered to all team members.

The Profile showed that all the team members whom the managing director had intuitively selected were either generators or conceptualizers, resulting in a team that was strongly biased towards utilizing knowledge for ideation. The managing director realized that to bring the new product concept to market, he needed to bring optimizers and implementers onto the team to strengthen the orientation towards utilizing knowledge for evaluation.

To innovate more effectively, managers need to ensure skillful representation of all four innovation styles on their team. When this mix may be lacking, they can refer to our researched method, the “SMRT” framework, to figure out what they need to do next.

1. Structure: The leader invites new team members to get the desired mix of innovation styles.
2. Model: In their day-to-day behavior, the leader demonstrates the innovation styles desired.
3. Reward: The leader provides incentives to encourage the utilization of a particular style.
4. Train: The leader provides training workshops to increase skills in styles that may be lacking.

In this situation, the simplest choice was Structure; the managing director assigned implementers and optimizers to balance the team, enabling them to take their best ideas into successful action.