As the leader of a cross-functional innovation team within a large pharmaceutical company accelerator, I’ve noticed a recurring challenge: team members struggle to balance their innovation tasks with the demands of their regular roles.
Our team brings together individuals from multiple departments, each contributing a portion of their time—typically 20% to 50%—to the innovation project.
While this approach leverages diverse skills and perspectives, it also introduces significant challenges:
The Core Issue: Insufficient Time and Focus
Team members often express difficulty managing their dual responsibilities. At its heart, their feedback boils down to:
“I don’t feel there’s enough time to do my best work on the innovation project and fulfill my primary job responsibilities within the available hours.”
This is a common issue in innovation teams. The unpredictability of innovation work makes it hard to predefine tasks or timelines. Meanwhile, team members are still tethered to the routine demands of their departments.
Underlying Challenges
- No Reduction in Core Workload:
Despite their involvement in the innovation team, department members’ regular departmental responsibilities often remain unchanged. The same departmental meetings, goals, and projects persist, and often the team members also working on innovation are expected to continue taking part in all of these as well. This leaves little room to truly focus on innovation tasks. As a result, the workload of the innovation team members is even higher than it was before. - Conflicting Expectations from Managers:
Line managers may implicitly expect the same level of output from team members as before their involvement in the innovation project. This can stem from a perception that innovation activities don’t directly benefit the manager’s own team or priorities. This is also because managers and leaders are also human and suffer from the same biases as everyone else, leading them to prefer the status quo, not want to lose the productivity of their team members and feel any negative impacts on their team more strongly than the overall gains to the company. - Split Attention and Diminished Productivity:
With competing priorities and limited focus, team members are often pulled in multiple directions. This fragmentation not only impacts the innovation project’s quality but also diminishes the individual’s effectiveness in both roles. Research has shown that having your attention split dramatically reduces your productivity, your ability to focus and prevents you getting into a flow state for optimal productivity for innovation.
The Impact on Innovation
For innovation to succeed, team members need both time and focus. Without these, the process becomes less effective, and the organization misses out on the value such initiatives are designed to create.
Next Steps to Address the Challenge
To overcome this issue, organizations must align expectations across all stakeholders, reduce competing demands, and create an environment where innovation can thrive. This involves:
- Clearly defining and protecting the time allocated for innovation work (one way of doing this is defining manager time and maker time).
- Educating line managers on the value of innovation and how it benefits the broader organization as well as their own team
- Adjusting departmental workloads to reflect the redistribution of responsibilities.
By addressing these challenges, we can empower team members to contribute their best work to innovation while maintaining a healthy balance with their other responsibilities.
Creativity & Innovation expert: I help individuals and companies build their creativity and innovation capabilities, so you can develop the next breakthrough idea which customers love. Chief Editor of Ideatovalue.com and Founder / CEO of Improvides Innovation Consulting. Coach / Speaker / Author / TEDx Speaker / Voted as one of the most influential innovation bloggers.
