Reading an interesting article by Professor William A. Fischer at the IMD Institute on creating virtuoso teams, brought my mind back to innovation in corporations, something I wrote about last month ( here)

Professor Fischers article raised a question I have pondered many times –

“are corporate HR practices stifling innovation?”

Modern recruitment practices put candidate through a range of filters depending upon the organisations HR policies, the role and the hiring managers preferences and timescales. The evaluating filters can include; verbal and numeric reasoning, psychometric testing, structured interviews, informal interviews, role play, presentations etc.

Once in the role, the job holder is increasingly not only evaluated by their boss but also by their stakeholders.

Whilst this all sounds good and very commendable my concerns are two-fold:

1. The process of recruitment is inconsistent and outputs a corporate stereotype.
2. The job holders evaluation process rewards behaviors that don’t create waves, with job holders not wishing to rock the boat with stakeholders.

None of this is good for innovation and creative thinking which requires free thinking, the ability to challenge stakeholders, action and a certain amount of tension in teams. As Professor Fischer points out:

” polite teams get polite results”

In other words modest.

Given the pace of change corporations must cope with, it is becoming increasingly important to increase the rate of innovation.

In the procurement world, as competing firms all master their sourcing and category management tool box, the performance differentiators will increasingly come from the corporate culture and mind-set inside the firm. The question then becomes which culture will generate the necessary innovation – one that fosters harmony and consensus or one that actively supports free thinking, risk taking and rewards its people based upon outcomes?

Nuff said ….

Read Professor Fischers article here and let us have your views.