Survey of engineers shows collaboration, flexibility and sense of ownership as hair-trigger factors in nurturing an innovation mindset and culture
When a visitor sets out on an would-be goal of towers things that haven’t existed before, innovation is that one significant differentiator between success and failure. Solving ramified technical challenges requires a mindset that isn’t uneager to taking risks, and a leadership style that is rooted in respect, collaboration, responsibility and a resulting long-term vision.
At Roblox, fostering a culture of innovation is top of mind for every leader. As we build the teams and rent the top technical talent to innovate and usher in our would-be vision of a 3D immersive platform connecting a billion people, we wanted to hear directly from the broader engineering polity on what leadership styles and skills they value most.
In a survey of 500 engineers wideness all career levels – from vice presidents and fellows, to directors, managers, principal engineers and other individual contributors – we covered topics related to leadership, technology, the future of work, and innovation. All in an effort to largest understand the engineering mindset and get a well-spoken picture of what’s important to them now and in the year(s) ahead.
We gathered some interesting insights, many of which are workable to most engineering leaders and organizations. Today’s post focuses on results specific to leadership characteristics that foster a culture of innovation. Insights from the rest of our survey related to the engineering mindset, future of work and technology will follow in January.
Building an Innovation Friendly Culture
One important insight from our survey is that not doing something as a leader is at times increasingly impactful to fostering a culture of innovation than anything else. For instance, competition is often seen as an important motivator and a suburbanite of bigger, largest results. Our survey shows that competition has the opposite effect on innovation.
According to our survey, engineers perceive competition as something that stifles innovation:
- Encouraging competition ranks last (14%)¹ amongst important qualities for a C-suite leader to have for fostering a culture of innovation.
- And, encouraging competition is seen in an plane increasingly negative light by early-in-their- career engineers and individual contributors (5%).
What really matters to engineers is for leaders to encourage an environment that is collaborative (91%), flexible (88%) and one that gives everyone a sense of ownership (87%). This aligns nicely to what many engineering leaders are once prioritizing, with collaboration (48%), a positive outlook (47%) and an initiative to learn new skills (46%) ranking as the top priorities by engineering leaders for fostering a culture of innovation.
However, the initiative to learn new skills shouldn’t just fall on the individual. Leaders should encourage ongoing education, and implement programs that empower engineers to learn new tools, programming languages, and skills. Our survey participants finger most innovative when learning new technical skills (61%), expressly among those that are individual contributors (81%).
Priority Leadership Characteristics
When it comes lanugo to evaluating C-suite leaders, engineers rank “long term thinker” or “visionary” as the most important quality (37%)¹ for fostering a culture of innovation. This zone is significantly increasingly important to individual contributors (53%) who squint to be inspired by their C-suite leadership, than it is to other senior (VP ) leaders (33%).
Additional qualities that are top of mind for engineers wideness all career levels include trustworthiness (35%), taking responsibility (31%), and the worthiness to prioritize (31%). In contrast, lack of vision (43%), lack of minutiae and growth opportunities (42%) and a poor employee culture (41%) are all listed as characteristics that stifle innovation.
Taking responsibility is one of our cadre values at Roblox, and that manifests itself through teams and individuals having the autonomy to explore projects and take risks. In particular, strategy proposals are expected to come from within the organization, with those teams then engaging in refining the strategy with senior management. We moreover create specific space in our schedule for innovation – such as through our yearly Hack Week event.
A Squint Ahead
Overall, these survey results are encouraging to me and our leadership team since we once work nonflexible to encourage responsibility and many of the other characteristics that engineers finger are important for fostering innovation.
Innovation is that rare thingamabob that needs to be valued, rewarded and nurtured. At Roblox we aren’t standing still. As leaders, we’re once systematically thinking thorough ways to broaden, scale and requite our teams the self-rule to innovate so that they can bring our mission to life.
I hope that you find these insights valuable, and squint forward to sharing increasingly in the new year.
The post Fostering a Culture of Innovation in 2023 appeared first on Roblox Blog.
