Fostering a culture of curiosity, customer empathy, and cross-functional collaboration
If your IT team isn’t part of shaping the future of your business, you’re leaving innovation on the table. Most IT departments are structured to react, tackle problems fast, keep systems stable, and minimize downtime. That’s fine. But if you want exponential value, you have to give your IT staff space to explore, question, and contribute to growth. You build better systems when your team really understands the customer and the business from end-to-end. Fixing bugs is good. Rethinking old processes and designing something better is where progress lives.
According to John Kreul, CIO at Jewelers Mutual, when you encourage your team to dig deeper into how the business works and really learn what the customer experiences, something shifts. Your IT engineers start identifying friction points and fixing problems you didn’t know existed. You should also be tearing down barriers between IT and other departments. Run joint problem-solving sessions. Co-design solutions. It’s not just about giving IT “a seat at the table”, it’s about making cross-functional work the default, not the exception.
That’s where things start to accelerate. In 2018, Harvard Business Review reported that companies practicing sustained cross-functional collaboration saw up to a 20% lift in innovation outcomes. Momentum builds quickly when silos fall apart and knowledge moves both ways, from business to tech, and back. It’s a high-leverage way to unlock new thinking without restructuring your organization chart. Just change the behavioral cues. Make curiosity and knowledge-sharing standard practice.
Creating psychological safety and open communication for effective idea-sharing
In tech, bad ideas are part of the path to great ones. But you’ll never hear those good or bad ideas unless you create an environment where people are free to speak without overthinking the consequences. For IT teams, this starts with the signal from leadership: “We don’t punish creativity, even if it doesn’t work the first time.” Once that principle is in place, innovation can surface from every level of your organization.
John Russo, VP of Healthcare Technology Solutions at OSP Labs, says the change begins with regular, structured chances to ideate, no judgment, no hierarchy, just contribution. It’s not complicated: host a weekly or monthly session where your team feels safe throwing out ideas. The value of this is compounded when you actively listen and show appreciation in real time. That feedback loop promotes a deeper sense of ownership. People stop self-censoring. They start solving bigger problems.
Karishma Bhatnagar, a product manager at Upwork, backs this up. She points out that without a clear and accepted “safe zone,” you’ll never hear the most important ideas, the ones that come from observing inefficiencies people have stopped questioning. And that’s the danger. Innovation doesn’t usually announce itself. You have to seek it out and give it room to show up.
Executives need to reinforce the culture they want. It isn’t enough to say “share ideas.” You need to make it standard in meetings, up and down the organization, that ideas are welcome, not shot down. Do that, and show people you’re listening, and they’ll keep talking. Ignore it, and they’ll stay quiet. And with that silence, you lose competitive edge.
Utilizing recognition and appreciation to sustain innovative momentum
If you want your team to keep showing up with ideas that push the business forward, recognition isn’t optional, it’s a core function of leadership. People respond to signals. When someone shares a good idea and that contribution is acknowledged, publicly, genuinely, and without delay, they understand that innovation is a real part of their role, not just an extra.
John Kreul, CIO of Jewelers Mutual, emphasizes how recognition works across multiple levels. It doesn’t start and end with an email or a gift card. Meaningful recognition happens through conversation, leadership visibility, team-wide celebration, and tangible growth opportunities, like awards or professional development funding. This kind of reinforcement isn’t about culture props; it sets the rhythm for how your team operates.
In practice, recognition raises the energy in the room. When people see their ideas lead to change, or simply get taken seriously, they stay engaged. They increase the quality of their contributions. They encourage others to do the same. Over time, this becomes a culture multiplier. High-performing teams want to be in environments where good thinking gets noticed. If they’re not in that environment, they’ll find somewhere else that offers it.
Leaders who overlook this do so at a cost. When effort and originality go unrecognized, momentum slows and creative thinking shuts down. Recognition is direct feedback on value creation. If you want that value to grow, you have to make that feedback consistent.
Implementing constructive feedback and transparent rejection practices
Not every idea will fit the strategy or resources at hand, but how you reject an idea shapes whether your team keeps contributing. Great innovation cultures don’t accept everything; they reject with clarity, context, and encouragement. That’s how they keep the flow of ideas strong while maintaining focus on what matters most.
John Russo highlights a key point: the rejection of an idea should never feel like a rejection of the person. When you offer specific reasons, “right idea, wrong time” or “good direction, but current resources don’t allow it”, you keep that line of communication open for the future. You protect trust. Often, a well-reasoned response is as valuable as acceptance. It signals that leaders are paying attention and thinking critically, not just brushing things off.
Karishma Bhatnagar, Product Manager at Upwork, adds that transparency is critical. She underlines the importance of being explicit about what’s holding an idea back. Budget, timing, or execution gaps need to be shared candidly. This clarity helps people refocus without becoming discouraged. It also allows promising ideas to stay on the radar for future revisit rather than getting lost in silence.
For leadership teams, the message is simple: feedback isn’t just evaluation, it’s instruction. Teams operate with more precision when the boundaries are defined, and when rejection isn’t treated as final, but as redirection. That creates resilience. Over time, the quality of ideas gets better, not by imposing strict filters, but by encouraging thoughtful iteration.
Avoiding leadership pitfalls that inadvertently stifle creativity
Innovation depends on the behaviors of leaders more than most executives admit. A team won’t keep proposing bold ideas if leadership dismisses, delays, or ignores their contributions. You can have a capable team with original thinking, but one quick shutdown, delivered without clarity or follow-up, can stop that flow for months. These aren’t soft issues, they’re real impediments to performance and progress.
John Russo, VP at OSP Labs, underscores this point by warning against the void, when employees share ideas and leadership simply doesn’t acknowledge them. Silence is a decision, and the effect is predictable: disengagement. It tells people their input lacks value. It lowers energy and reduces discretionary effort. And once that slide starts, it takes significant effort to rebuild that trust.
Karishma Bhatnagar at Upwork goes deeper into the leadership blind spots. She points out that failing to provide a reliable space and process for sharing ideas shuts down proposals before they even surface. You have to have routines in place where team members know their thoughts will not just be heard but considered. That requires structure, not sentiment. It means putting idea-sharing regularly on the agenda and having clear criteria for what gets review and what doesn’t.
For senior executives, the key takeaway is straightforward: habits at the top shape behaviors across the organization. If leadership is too fast to critique but slow to follow through, the cycle of innovation breaks down. New ideas stop coming. You don’t need to accept every suggestion, but you must create visible procedures that show how ideas are taken seriously and acted on. That’s what keeps people contributing.
Empowering teams to drive continuous innovation and breakthrough solutions
Real innovation isn’t an event. It’s not born from a single moment or team. It’s continuous, and it happens when you give people space, permission, and confidence to shape how work gets done, then back them to act on it. Empowering your IT teams to do that kind of thinking consistently means trusting them to move quickly, adjust when needed, and generate ideas that scale across systems and customers.
John Kreul of Jewelers Mutual ties innovation directly to empowerment. He argues that innovation is about people first, technology second. When you invest in cross-disciplinary teams that have a clear mandate to solve real problems, the result is richer thinking and more adaptive execution. That’s where customer experience becomes a product of internal alignment, not a department’s responsibility.
John Russo reinforces this strategy by reminding us that the value isn’t just in the immediate results. Even ideas that don’t launch right away can create the foundation for larger shifts. He encourages leaders to celebrate experimentation, embrace forward movement, and use past attempts to inform future designs. When the organization builds that kind of muscle, larger transformations become easier to manage and more sustainable.
Executives focused on scale and speed need to build systems that don’t limit progress to big initiatives alone. Empowering teams to think and act without waiting for permission unlocks lateral innovation: improvements that show up where no one was looking but matter deeply. It’s not just about moving faster, it’s about shaping the conditions where speed and creativity are normal.
Key highlights
- Foster curiosity and collaboration: Leaders should embed curiosity, urgency, and cross-functional collaboration into IT culture to unlock disruptive ideas and tie technical solutions directly to customer and business needs.
- Create psychological safety: Build structured, judgment-free environments where IT staff feel safe sharing ideas, this increases engagement, surfaces diverse thinking, and supports long-term innovation.
- Recognize contributions, reinforce value: Visible and consistent recognition, individual and team-based, reinforces a culture of innovation and encourages sustained creative output within IT teams.
- Give clear, constructive feedback: Rejected ideas should receive timely, transparent, and respectful explanations to maintain team morale and keep valuable contributions flowing.
- Avoid disengaging leadership behaviors: Leaders must avoid idea dismissal, inaction, and lack of follow-through; these behaviors undercut trust and discourage future participation in innovation.
- Empower teams to innovate continuously: Trust teams with autonomy to act on ideas, reward iterative thinking, and view experimentation as a pathway to meaningful breakthroughs and long-term growth.
