Supporting Your Employees to Make Time for Innovation
Companies often claim they value innovation, but in practice, creative time is the first thing to go when workloads pile up. As a leader, it’s your job to lead your team to their best performance. Yet, too often, employees are so consumed with daily tasks, meetings, and endless reporting that there’s no time left for creativity. To change this, leaders need to defend innovation time as fiercely as they would any critical business initiative.
While you may not have the authority to implement sweeping changes across your organization, you can still take meaningful steps to make a difference within your team. Here are a few you can start today:
Establish Regular Innovation Blocks: Dedicate specific days or hours each month for employees to focus exclusively on creative projects. Make it clear that these are non-negotiable.
Reinforce Its Importance: Communicate to teams that this time is essential for long-term growth, not a luxury. While each employee is provided the time, this is available as long as their base performance and role requirements are met.
Set Broad Themes or Challenges: Instead of leaving innovation entirely open-ended, provide prompts like, “How can we improve the customer experience?”
Celebrate Lessons Learned: Make it clear that not every idea needs to succeed to be valuable. Reward the effort and insight gained, not just the outcome.
Lead With Empathy: Encourage managers to support experimentation and model resilience when setbacks happen.
Don’t Silo Work: Work doesn’t need to be perfect or complete before it’s shared with the team. While it may feel counterintuitive, collaboration thrives when everyone has the chance to contribute. Sharing ideas and progress, even when they’re still in development, creates opportunities for input, innovation, and stronger results.
Here’s the most important lesson: Employees will mirror the way you work. If you defend time for creativity, celebrate collaboration, and handle setbacks with grace, your team will follow suit. Leadership isn’t just about talking the talk—it’s about walking alongside your team and showing them the value of balancing structure with creativity.
By taking these steps, you can cultivate a team culture that values and defends innovation, no matter the constraints of the broader organization. The payoff? A team that feels empowered, engaged, and ready to tackle challenges in new and meaningful ways.
