Why innovation is not the preserve of the leader

To vaccinate or not to vaccinate? That was the question on most people’s minds across the globe at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic a few weeks ago.

Opinions were varied: From the hardcore sceptics to the expert medical practitioners, from the traditionalists and the risk averse to the less calculative risk takers.

As I went through my own mental debate on the same my mind could not help but wonder 300 or so years back in time, to when and how the first trials in inoculation (the precursor to vaccination) were carried out in America.

The year was 1716. Smallpox had made a rather dramatic and uninvited entry into Boston, the port on the east coast of the USA which was a famous docking station for ships from overseas carrying cargos of slaves and other tradable items from their ventures abroad. The disease was causing havoc! Spreading through the town and killing hundreds in its wake with no cure in sight. The learned medical Doctors of the time were baffled and seemed to give up. Then a voice from a most unlikely source was heard. A one Onesimus, a slave recently brought into America from Africa through the ‘value chain’ of the infamous horrific slave trade and named as such by his ‘owner’, Cotton Mather, a minister in a local church, spoke up. Onesimus told Mather that he knew how to cure smallpox!

Needless to say, Mather was full of disbelief and suspicion having recently voiced his opinion of Onesimus in his diary as “thievish”, “wicked’ and “useless”. None the less he listened. Onesimus explained that if one drew pus from the blisters of a smallpox victim and rubbed it into a cut on an uninfected person, that would save the life of the latter.

And how did he know that? Because, he said, he himself had gone through the same procedure back in Africa when smallpox visited the little village from whence he was taken slave, and that the procedure had saved his, and many of his village mates’ lives. Mather decided to test the idea with some medical experts who instantly ridiculed him.

The idea was so unpopular because it came from a slave, so much so that someone even tried to kill Mather for spreading ideas that would, according to the good Boston medical folk, put the citizens’ lives at further risk.

Luckily for him though, a physician named Zabdiel Boylston opted to listen to him and gave the procedure a shot starting with his own son and his slave population as well as a few other volunteering Bostonians.

The result: The death rate among his trial patients was much lower than that among those who did not receive the treatment, and thus the medical practice of inoculation was born, out of a suggestion from a mere slave!!

Too many times the ideas of those considered too junior are written off before they are given a chance to see the light of day, this being the case even though it is recognised that many of those ‘junior’ staff are frontliners who see and feel customer issues in more real time than their leaders do and would therefore be best placed to suggest new innovations and ways of working.

This is a typical leaders’ paradox which manifests itself among leaders who have failed in the core leadership task of building trust between themselves and the people they lead.

Such leaders are self-focused and egoistic, grow too used to doing things ‘their way’ and hardly give others a chance to shine. Lack of trust causes them to view ideas from anyone outside their ‘circle’ with suspicion and they thus miss out on innovative solutions from the shop floor.

Among others, allowing everyone a voice drives employee engagement and retention, and as we know, these are key contributors to great organizational wellbeing. Furthermore, engagement drives proactivity and initiative. Companies that practice a culture of proactivity and initiative lead their competitors in delivering winning innovations and this in turn leads to sharper bottom-line performance.

There are many ways to deliver a culture that will help you derive these benefits starting with proactively widening the net from which ‘great’ ideas are fished to include the whole organization through encouraging free speech. Encouraging openness and transparency is a good way to win the trust of those whose ideas you seek, and this is best achieved by openly discussing the issues that you face and ‘opening the door’ for everyone, even those who ordinarily would not speak up, to contribute to the possible solutions. For those who don’t ordinarily speak up you need to create a safe environment where they too can contribute through a process that does not involve too many formalities and expose them to too many questions as you ‘open the door’. Furthermore, as the ideas begin to roll in, because they will at this point, it will be worth your while to set up a process where you will share all the ideas that have been contributed, making sure that you build on those that are not too sharp in order not to discourage their originators from ever contributing again. It goes without saying though that only those that pass a rigorous testing system which you will have set up should see the light of day.

And finally, as you get into execution of those winning ideas do not forget to celebrate all the contributors and reward the winners. When you do so though, ensure the reward matches the level of your gratitude. In return for his great earth-shaking idea Onesimus was rewarded by being allowed ‘buy’ his freedom by paying for a replacement slave for Mather. Funny though because it’s not really a reward if one must pay for it is it?