By Matthew Pearson, PhD
April 2, 2023
Me Too Shuffle
Understand how innovation affects the Psycology of your initiaitive
In a healthy work environment, selecting internal members for innovation projects can be a percieved as an organizational investment in growth oppertunities for its employees. However, in a toxic work environment, emotions like eveny and fear play a large role securing in buy-in from employees and other stakeholders.
Understanding some the psycology surrounding the propect of an innovative effort can help better innovators successfully navigate through their next improvement effort. Provided in this section is a short list of common impediments that working with others in a new venture can expirence. Each impediment is accompanied by some practical tips for midigatings potential negitive effects to the improvement effort.
Me Too Shuffle
In many organizations the "in" group forms around those in management and leadership positions. This is a normal occurance in most social structures. Bosses use this dynamic to emphize their proiorities, employees are rewarded with increased oppertunies for projects and promotions. In a healthly environment membership of the in group is based on merits and results. Competent employees are kept in the loop to ensure that they can respond quickly to requests from leadership.
However, in a toxic environment membership to the in group is based on enforcing the status quo of the existing power structure. Most organizations likely exprience a reality inbetween these two dynamics. Although the effectiveness of the in group deminishes when its members must navigate between maintaining existing powerstructures and responding to new threats and oppertunities. An in group maintaining the current heirarcy may appear homogenious in at least one regard that supports the status quo (Simular backgrounds, education, temperment, etc.). Collectively, these traits may not be suffiencent to respond to the requirements of the innovation process. If true, then the in group will extend the innovation process to include others better suited to innovate, while rotating members of the in group as the process begins to produce results. Conversely members of the in group may rotate out productive members of the innovation initiative to diffuse any claims to credit that doesn't support the existing heiracry. Unfortunately this poor behavoir can't be entirely eliminated, but it can be managed.
The use of Project charters helps to document who was selected for each role and why. The charters also serves as a log to document what desions where made and which actions where asigned to whom. Some innovations projects fail because the wrong people were selected for the project, if the idea is sound then it is possible that another manager or leader will try the initiaive again with a group better able to achieve the desired results.