Challenge 1: Do you communicate openly within your organisation?

Diagnosis

As a leader supporting innovation, you will need to feel your employees engaged in the company overall development and actively participating to the competitiveness and profit increase. The less you feel their involvement, the more probable is that your employees are not openly expressing their own ideas and thoughts to one another, are not sharing inputs, and exchanging knowledge and information during daily operations. Also, your team most probably is lacking trust, inclusion, motivation, and team spirit which sit at the basis of an open communication leadership style facing innovation.

To try to understand how open the communication is within your team(s), please analyse the aspects presented in the table below.

Positive aspects	Negative aspects
The employees are collaborating with each other, exchanging information about daily operations	The employees are working independently and trying to find out necessary information on their own
The employees are presenting their ideas in front of their colleagues when the team is searching for an outside the box solution to a standard problem	The employees are keeping their own ideas for themselves as long as they are not asked and rewarded for them
The employees are seeking feed-back from their colleagues so that they improve their knowledge and better organize their work	The employees consider that as long as they work according to standard procedures, the other colleagues do not have the expertise and knowledge to tell them how to improve their job
The employees are openly discussing creative ideas that could help improve the administrative area, distribution, and sales channels in the company	The employees do not consider that creativity has anything to do with standard procedures. If the old ways worked somehow until present moment, why bother?
The employees are actively listening to each other, asking questions to avoid misunderstandings, help each other find the best way to tailor their message, showing empathy	The employees are trying to present their message as load as possible, to impose their point of view over the others’, to look better in front of the leader
The employees are choosing the face-to-face discussions to debate on a certain subject of online meetings when not everyone in the office, so that they interact better.	The employees prefer to write endless emails, including in the conversation more people than necessary, direct manager and/or General manager
The employees are open to constructive criticism, they embrace the others’ opinions and try to learn as much as possible from the experience	The employees do not like being criticized, their reactions are very strong, both emotionally and behaviourally
The employees embrace diversity and are open to include in the team people from different cultures, genders, religions	The employees are reluctant to people coming from different countries, social classes, religions, and different sexual orientations
The employees are aware of their assumptions, stereotypes, and biases, respecting and encouraging communication	The employees are not aware of their assumptions, stereotypes, and biases, and they block communication with people they consider outsiders
The employees are paying attention to the way they present ideas to their colleagues – clear structure, vivid language, meaningful metaphors – so that the message is communicated in a meaningful way	The employees are not paying attention to the way the message is presented to others. In their opinion, the message is meant only to send information. If the message is understood or not, it is not their concern.

1. Fill in the table with your initial assessment regarding each aspect and the way it is reflected in your company.

2. Take between 2 and 4 weeks to intentionally observe your team and their way of behaving and communicating with each other in every area stated in the table.

3. Go around your company’s departments and observe each team behaves. Participate to daily meetings no matter the subject and pay attention to the way the team members interact, communicate ideas, find solution, implement procedures, take into consideration feed-back and react to criticism.

4. At the end of the selected period, organize a meeting with your managers and discuss the conclusions of what you have identify as weak and strong points in your organisation from the open communication point of view.

Actions for implementation

If you observe that negative aspects are common in your company, while positive aspects are barely present, you must take seriously implementing and improving open communication within your company.

Your objective should be to analyse your own communication style and start implementing the change on yourself, being the role model, everyone should follow and learn from. You should behave the same way you want your employees to act showing them respect for their ideas, encourage them to share theirs’ thoughts and find creative ideas, give them constructive feed-back and appreciate their involvement in the company’s business.

Communicating and welcoming ideas between team members allows them to become more creative, encourage them to find new out of the box solutions for different problems occurring in their daily activity, be more enthusiastic and motivated to produce new creative outcomes.

Actions to be implemented to reach your goal to implement open communication within your organisation can include:

1. Organise regular 1-to-1 meetings with your employees. Set a dedicated time in your schedule for individual discussions with your employees and make a formal announcement about this decision so that your employees know about this initiative and prepare subjects to discuss and questions to ask. Depending on the size of your company, these meetings can be weekly or monthly, but keeping the frequency is vital to improve communication. You can discuss within these sessions about different difficulties the employees encounter in their jobs, but also how satisfied are with their professional activity.
2. Plan weekly team meetings. Organise meetings with all employees on a regularly basis to present and discuss managerial decisions and strategies and ask for inputs across your company. Look over the projects in development, analyse possible blockages and solutions to overcome them. These types of discussions improve team efficiency and the opportunity to faster solve any encountered issue. It is also a great moment to acknowledge people bringing new ideas, welcome and take into consideration these ideas, so that the employees feel encouraged to contribute next time also.
3. Offer constructive feed-back. Not only during team meetings, but also in 1-to-1 discussions or any other moment of interacting with your employees, you should provide feed-back to others and ask for feed-back from them. It is an extremely important exercise that regulates expectations, results, improves efficacy, both personal and professional.