There is a recognition that innovation in the UK isn’t just taking a nap, it’s in a winter hibernation bears would be jealous of, and the deep freeze shows no signs of a thaw.

The reasons are many and varied.  There is much in the news about government policy, lack of investment, regulatory barriers and fears of recession.

Whilst organisations can lobby government for a real economic plan for growth, they cannot afford to wait and hope.

If help isn’t coming from outside your organisation, where else might you look to generate much needed warmth and awaken innovation from its winter snooze?  The only other place is inside.

For innovation to occur, creative ideas need to be abundant. Whilst the reasons for low levels of creativity are many and varied, the overall culture will be a significant factor.

This is both logical and obvious; if your culture fostered innovation, you would already have it.

There is likely to be an underlying systemic issue; what happens when ideas are brought to the table?

Sadly, many organisations say they want innovation but have leadership behaviours that will kill creativity at its earliest green shoots because what they really want are fully formed solutions that are guaranteed to increase the bottom line of the organisation.  Innovation is not an outcome that can be manufactured with JIT supplier chains and LEAN principles.

How can coaching skills help?

Many of the behavioural changes that are needed can be learned by adopting and deploying the skills and behaviours that are used by coaches to deepen and expand an individual’s thinking, creativity and resourcefulness.

These attributes are many and varied but some foundational principles are a good place to start:

• Believe that the person in front of you is capable of creative and well-developed thinking:  if you believe that the people in your organisation can deliver their as-written job description and nothing more, then you are diminishing any creativity they have.  Your beliefs about the people that work for you leak out and they will either enhance or inhibit the performance of those around you, especially in the arena of creativity and innovation.
• Hold a non-judgemental space:  the real skill here isn’t so much the non-judgement, it is the self-management that this requires.  Learning to hear your thoughts and put them to one side, to feel an emotion, internally acknowledge it and not act on it takes self-awareness and practise.   But your responses, verbal and non-verbal, will be felt by the person that brings you an idea and will determine whether they mentally and emotionally feel valued for their thinking or not, which will in turn determine whether they keep thinking creatively or just do their job as required
• Meeting ideas with curiosity, even ‘bad’ ones:  not all ideas are workable, and they often arrive half-baked.  What will immediately shut down future ideation is the response we so often give – all the reasons the idea won’t work.  Instead, find a good time to explore the idea and, when you do that, you need to ask powerful questions that can develop the idea, develop the person or generate new thinking around the idea.  Then, even if the idea cannot go ahead and become a working project in the organisation, the thinker will be encouraged to keep thinking.
• Listening with true presence:  listening with your whole self is effortful, but the rewards are more than worth it.  When people have confidence that you will listen, without judgement and meet ideas with curiosity, they will want to speak, and their creativity will start to flourish.  Maybe not every single person in your organisation, but enough people for generative thinking to occur that creates future value.
• Space to think:  when you start showing curiosity, you will start asking more powerful questions that aren’t easily answered with trite, shallow responses.  You will engage the people around you in deep thinking, and deep thinking needs time and space.  A thinker will know if you have disengaged and mentally moved to something else, and they will feel discomfort.  Holding presence and silence for them is an act of co-creation, where your focus is calm and open, expectant but not impatient and they feel your support in their thinking and relax into that work.  Even writing this makes me smile, because it is the most rewarding experience and something truly special to be part of for both parties.  And, of course, it can lead to some remarkable results with previously inconceivable results.

Keeping creativity going

Together, these skills help to foster the kind of psychological safety that is required before creativity and ideation can become common place in your organisation.

Innovation can be elusive and is highly resistant to our attempts at manufacturing it. How you respond when people have ideas will determine whether they continue to engage creatively or simply do the job they are paid for.

Creating a culture of innovation takes effort, and the values, behaviours and systems of your business will need to change for this to happen.  It’s not a question of an announcement from senior leadership team that everyone needs to be innovative and then ideas will come flooding in.

This level of change can feel like a huge mountain to climb and can be completely overwhelming.  Beginning somewhere simple like learning and starting to use coaching skills as a leader will support your efforts and start to build the foundations needed for other changes to occur.