How Treating Your Employees Like Turtles Can Smother Innovation

There are typically two ways companies unintentionally discourage innovation: preventing employee growth and paying too much attention to the highest paid person in the room. Here's how to promote creativity instead.

What do turtles have to do with innovation? Not much, we thought, until we ran across a retail manager at a big box store in San Diego during the course of our research and clinical work for Judgment on the Front Line. That manager pulled us aside to explain that most employees--particularly those at the bottom of the hierarchy who serviced customers--were treated like turtles at many companies.

If you buy a turtle and put it into a small aquarium, it will stop growing to accommodate its limited living space, regardless of how large it might have potentially been. This is a phenomenon that often outrages animal activists because urban apartment dwellers who fancy diminutive turtles typically don’t look after them very well. In truth, the turtles stop growing because they not only have limited room to reach their potential but are also malnourished and poorly treated.

Here is the Link with the article….