When an employee brings up the topic of doing innovative work, the management should try to provide supports and guidance to foster a innovative culture. Here are some examples of innovative conversations that have gone bad.
Employee : "I wanna work on project XXX because that will be an innovation."
Employer : "Are you not interested in your current work? Maybe you should consider a career out side of our team. "
Employee : "I wanna work on project XXX because that will be an innovation."
Employer : "You are currently working on YYY, how about let's do YYY +0.001 XXX. Will that be innovative enough?"
Employee : "I wanna work on project XXX because that will be an innovation."
Employer : "If you wanna work on XXX, you got to learn ZZZ, WWW, OOO techniques, after learning all those, we can talk. " (Those techniques are not essential, and complete mastering them are neither necessary nor sufficient for the projects.)
Comments like these can dishearten the motivated employees who wishes nothing but doing innovative work for the organization. Here, I prescribe a few conversation patterns that can be used to facilitate a healthy conversation with the employee. The basic pattern is called confirmation, encouragement and guidance(CEG).
"This sounds like a very interesting idea(Confirmation, Encouragement), how about let's build some prototype in your spare time. When you gets it ready to a certain stage that we can demo it, lets show it to other people in the team to see whether we can get it funded and move to the next level. (Guidance) "
"Wow, you mean you want to do XXX? (Confirmation). This is way cool! (Encouragement) I know a few folks in team aaa are also interested in it. Let me get you guys connected. Wait for my email tonight. (Guidance)"
When management are trained using CEG to manage innovation conversation, the innovation culture will grow gradually.
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