I’ve noticed that being a healthy means different things to different types of organizations.

• To a small business, health means cash flow, strong teams and hard work.
• To our new-born, health means a lot of mom’s milk and clean diapers.
• To a family, health means a strong marriage, good nutrition and an active lifestyle.
• To a church, health means that Jesus Christ at the center and supreme of all that happens.
• For an R&D organization, one that is innovating and developing new products. I think health to a great degree means mostly open teaching.  Researchers teaching one another, researchers teaching their management and researchers teaching the manufacturing and business leaders exactly how to produce novel and new products. Researchers are essentially professional learners and if they don’t learn to teach their usefulness is limited. Patents if written well are designed to teach, in exchange for this teaching the government gives the patent owner a limited-time monopoly on the invention.

When turf wars, politics, secretiveness and credit stealing is the norm the health of the R&D organization is poor and its usefulness to a company diminishes quickly.

Being intelligent and hiring smart people is only so important, intelligence is undermined and made of little effect if the culture is toxic. To hear a lot more on this from Patrick Lencioni on this click here.

Leaders of innovative R&D organizations can encourage health by being a self-less teacher and by encouraging teams to teach. To teach continuously and with generous passion.  And remember to give credit when they do so.

What else does healthy look like in R&D organizations?