How to hire your way to a better business

When it comes to driving the innovation that is so vital to growing a business, there are three crucial challenges: finding the talent to spark it, ensuring the right capabilities to sustain it, and nurturing an organizational culture that will allow it to flourish.

These are challenges that Netflix took on before becoming known as one of the most innovative companies in the world. Renowned for its disruption of the TV industry, the streaming service undercut the established pricing model for pay television, changed how we consume TV, and proved that top-quality shows don’t need to go through the traditional development cycle. The cultural journey began with a now-famous presentation in 2009: it created a roadmap to a high-performing and innovative culture, which genuinely rewards people for results.

However, many companies find that while it’s one thing to claim an innovative culture, it’s quite another to deliver it. We often see a gap between the stated and the real culture. In these instances, a gap analysis reveals incongruity between the behaviours and results the company says it wants, and the behaviours and results that actually get rewarded.

The ferocious demand for talent in the industries of technology and new media means businesses have to be great places to work. Their cultures must support innovation and growth; they should attract talented people, reward them for innovation and give them the opportunity to develop – and that means embracing the freedom to fail.

Organizations seeking to drive innovation need three types of talent:

• Teams who solve problems, learn together and innovate
• Managers who nurture development, learning and innovation
• Senior leaders who set the strategy, communicate the vision, model the right behaviours, and ensure that all components of the organization are aligned behind the innovation vision.

Candidates with the most potential for innovation display the following characteristics: creativity, learning agility, flexibility, problem-solving, experimentation, persistence, collaboration and an external orientation.

How do you nurture these traits? By developing teams which can collaborate, problem-solve, diverge and then converge through robust dialogue and appropriate task-related conflict, interact with their environments and stakeholders, and engage in other team processes associated with learning and innovation.

We know that teams with different levels of expertise and professional experience are also generally better at problem-solving, learning and innovation. It helps if they have a background relevant to the role. For example, Google tries to hire people with diverse interests and skills, while also requiring basic skills in fields relevant to the business – that is, computer science and mathematics.

When it comes to spotting and nurturing talent, organizations need to ask themselves the following questions:

• What talent do we need in our business?
• How do we get the most out of our staff?
• How can we make the best use of teams and groups, separately and interdependently?
• How are we selecting, developing and promoting managers and leaders? What experiences do they need to have in order to be successful in our new reality?
• How can we develop and encourage non-rigid perspectives and behaviours? How can we promote the “discovery skills” that distinguish innovators from non-innovators – skills such as associating, questioning, observing, experimenting and networking?
• What training might senior staff need to make their teams more innovative?

Leaders need to lead the way on innovation and drive the cultural change that supports it. They must demonstrate that they can build strong teams and continue to learn. And throughout, they have to hold all the interdependent components of the organization together – those that contribute to the culture and those that support the business strategy – keeping everything aligned around the innovation vision.

Author: Dan Fisher, Director in Leadership and Organization Effectiveness Practice in AlixPartners.

Image: People walk on an overpass in a business district of Tokyo, March 17, 2015. REUTERS/Yuya Shino