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How to Tap Your Innovation Pipeline

3 ways to unlock your organization’s hidden innovation potential

By Rebecca Okamoto

Stress. Uncertainty. Unrealistic deadlines. Unreasonable goals. You know what they are: the enemy of teamwork, creativity and innovation. They're also inescapable. Which leaves today’s leaders in an unenviable position of learning how to build the capability to achieve business goals while dealing with massive uncertainty.

But what if you could grow skills, build resilient teams and accelerate innovative thinking even though there’s no time, few resources and high instability? You can. Because every organization has an untapped innovation engine hiding in plain sight—the “Lost Einstein.”

Your Lost Einstein is a super smart person with a game-changing concept that no one understands. They struggle to explain the strategic value, and because of that, their ideas and potential aren’t seen, heard or commercialized.

You know who they are. The brainy research and development researcher with the meticulous spreadsheets and multi-variate testing results. The super-sharp analyst whose English skills make them hard to understand. The operations leader who didn’t learn to read the room and got a couple of eye rolls at the last C-suite update. Or even the introvert you’ve been ignoring because they never speak up.

Untapped Potential

Does it really matter? How much potential are we talking about?

Consider this—for the past 10 years, the annual Gallup worldwide engagement survey has been reporting that 64% to 70% of organizations are disengaged, and over time that percentage hasn’t budged much, averaging 67%.

To put this into context, if 67% of the players on a professional soccer team were disengaged, that would mean that out of 11 players, seven or eight aren’t playing to win. In fact, one to two of them would be actively disengaged—fighting with their teammates, sabotaging play or even helping the competition. Would this be acceptable, especially if the team wanted to be a championship contender?

And yet corporations routinely battle for market share or scrape for a few margin points with more than half of their workforce disinterested or even undermining the company’s goals.

What if you could tap into that missing capability? And what if the solution didn’t sacrifice short term results, require major culture reset or take years of investment.

Hiding in Plain Sight

You know what makes your Lost Einsteins so valuable? They’re already on your team and want to be more engaged. They have great ideas that are going unrecognized. You just need a better way to maximize their capability.

Don’t overlook them for too long. What makes them valuable to you also makes them invaluable to your competition.

Here are 3 ways you can tap into your Lost Einstein's potential:

1. Invest in executive clarity skills for managers presenting to senior stakeholders.

Your smart managers are excellent at problem solving, running projects and directing day-to-day activities. Which is perfect for interacting with their functional colleagues. But not for communicating with time-pressed senior leadership and influencing business-wide agendas.

Without executive clarity skills some of your best leaders are getting tuned out, uninvited to meetings or hearing “no” to groundbreaking ideas.

Don’t just hand them a presentation template. Give them the skills to:

Explain the strategic and commercial value of breakthrough ideas
Read executive audiences and create messages that resonate with time-pressed executives
Identify, define and pitch the big picture
Pinpoint the strategic barriers to “yes” and shift mindsets
Navigate the executive alignment minefield and influence up

Clarity skills aren’t about speaking better. They’re about being better understood.

2. Improve executive presence.

First impressions really matter. Research shows first impressions can be made in a blink of an eye, by the pitch of your voice or even by how you say the word hello. Don’t just think about what your leaders are saying. Help them with how they are communicating. For example, offer training on:

Concise, engaging introductions to create a power first impression
Executive intonation so they sound more confident
Introducing topics and avoiding hedge words that can damage credibility

3. Enable introverts & quiet leaders speak up more.

Speaking up is a critical skill to get breakthrough concepts recognized for their strategic importance. That’s because the more outside the box the idea is, the more times speakers will hear “no,” get interrupted or provoke a “here’s why you’re wrong” response.

Here’s the thing about Lost Einsteins—they already struggle with speaking up. Drowning out their ideas makes it worse. Instead, try these techniques:

Rotate meeting leadership to equalize the opportunity to build and demonstrate skills like priority setting and conflict management.
Actively moderate meetings to avoid or reduce interruptions.
Adopt an amplification strategy. When a quiet team member, like an introvert or a new or junior member makes a point, another team member repeats their point and credits them. Amplification helps counteract interruptions or crediting the wrong source.

Your Next Step

Lost Einsteins are your organization’s unrealized innovation engine.

Your Lost Einsteins can accelerate innovation and unlock value even when there’s little time, shrinking budgets and mounting uncertainty. You know who they are. And now you know how to develop them and tap into your business’ extra gear.

Rebecca Okamoto is a clarity consultant and the founder of Evoke Strategy Group. She consults with companies on sharpening their competitive edge by tapping overlooked or underutilized talent. She specializes in teaching high-potential and technical leaders to communicate clearly in dynamic, high-stakes situations. Her signature approach is how to introduce, market and influence with a 20-word sound bite. To learn more about pitching big ideas and making complicated ideas clear, visit 20words.com