Innovation and performance management

Hat tip to Stefan Lindegard who quotes David Nordfors post speaking to the challenges of the corporate innovator:

“When someone tries to innovate within a traditional organization,

few will understand what he/she is doing,

but everybody will understand who is a trouble-maker.

After the innovation has been embraced by the organization,

few will remember who started it,

but everybody will remember who was a trouble-maker.

This is the dilemma encountered by many intrapreneurs -

they risk punishment for success.”

If you accept the above - and it's really hard not to if you've ever tried to drive innovation in a large organisation - it is possible to conclude that if noone remembers you as a troublemaker, then you haven't been innovating. 

And what follows is innovators will rarely, if ever, fit well with a traditional performance management system. 

I have to be honest with you and admit I've sat in performance review meetings and lowballed troublemakers. The reason? The trouble they caused wasn't actually helping me, regardless of whether it was helping someone else. The problem perhaps, is that the benefit coming from the trouble-maker isn't often visible. There is such a thing, after all, as  a troublemaker who is just a troublemaker.

Anyway, as a result, the innovator-troublemaker is pretty likely to miss out on promotions, financial rewards, and other forms of internal recognition. I have, often. My own experience tells me its nothing unusual for innovators, in fact, to be more recognised outside their organisations than inside for the work they do. 

This seems to be true regardless of how much support the innovator has from executive management. It is a direct result of the skew performance management systems have to rewarding those behaviours that keep a business running today.

If there is an answer, I think it must be that performance management systems need to be realigned to reinforce behaviours that keep the business runnning tomorrow. Not today. Today can take care of itself.

That's a leap of faith, of course, and one I think few managers, especially in command-and-control organisations will be comfortable with. Experience - probably an oxymoron with the rate of change in workplaces today - tells them they need to metricate and manage everything, and tomorrow is far, far too far away.

Comments

[Steph Gray]

Great post! Got me thinking: what's the difference between troublemaker-who's-just-a-troublemaker, and troublemaker-who's-an-innovator?

I guess motivation is the most reliable difference: hopefully an innovating troublemaker should be able to tell you why they're troublemaking and align it clearly with a corporately-beneficial cause. Some innovating troublemakers might be able to point to evaluation or measurement they've been keeping track of, to assess the impact of their troublemaking. And failing that, some at least will be able to point to nice things being said about their troublemaking from elsewhere inside or outside the organisation (which was always my salvation).

Maybe innovators need to be encouraged to make these kinds of arguments, and managers to check for them, before the low scores get written in those unpleasant little boxes...

[James Gardner]

Thanks Steph, and I agree with all your points. I think there's a potential problem, though, and that's getting a line manager to agree that good troublemaking elsewhere is actually worthy of recognition in their local area. I think it is a very, very good manager that is so altruistic. Perhaps it is rare enough that innovators need to luck out in getting one. What about the others?