Courtesy Lighthouse Advisors
by Michael Cruz
The worst words we ever hear in business are – “That’s the way we have always done it.” Hearing it makes my skin crawl. That unflinching, unapologetic sentence covers up a very serious problem in your business.
It shows that you have a culture of complacency. Your people are not thinking. They are not looking for better ways to accomplish tasks. For businesses to grow, we need to find new and better ways to do things. This is called efficiency. It is how we generate profits to pay better, hire more people and produce more.
More often than not, the issue lies with management. First, we don’t hire well. We need to hire people that look for ways to improve their job. During the hiring process, you should look for people who have innovated in the past. The simple question you should ask is, “Can you give me an example when you improved the process at your last job?”.
The second way management fails is by creating a culture of ‘no mistakes are tolerated’. Think about the last time an employee confessed to a mistake. Was your initial response ‘Why did you do that’? Often, I see companies driving toward a mistake-free workplace. Innovation requires us to fail occasionally. Of course, we don’t want to make mistakes. But trying new ways will inevitably lead to trying some things that do not work. If we punish people for trying new things, they simply will not try to improve.
