No Innovation and No Transformation

Results prove your point.

By Soozy G. Miller, CPRW, CDCC, CDP

Leaders, please stop using the words “innovation” and “transformation” in your resumes and during interviews. These words are hurting you, not helping you.

Let’s start with "innovation." Unless the company is specifically looking for someone to bring innovation (the job description will actually ask for it), innovation is a turnoff.

I’ll dig deeper. Let’s say that you’ve landed an interview, and the interviewer notices that you’ve used the word “innovative” to describe something you accomplished at a company. And let’s say that you describe your innovative solution, and the interviewer says, Oh, we did that three years ago. Now you’re behind the times. Or, worse, let’s say the interviewer says, “Oh, we did that three years ago and it was a disaster, it didn’t work here, we wasted a lot of money.” Do you see the problem?

Next up is “transformation,” which is similarly potential trouble. Again, unless the company needs you to transform something, when a hiring manager sees the word “transformed” or “transformational leadership” on a resume, they might get nervous. They are thinking overhaul, which assumes IT headaches and big expenses. Is this person going to try to change us? Everything is fine here, we just need to replace the last person.

I was working with a CFO who used the word “innovation” on her resume. I asked her to give me an example of how she was innovative. She actually responded, Uh oh, I thought you might ask me that, which is already not a great response. She wanted to claim that she is innovative because she was the first person who succeeded in gathering fellow leadership into a room to discuss a long-standing problem, where others had failed to do this. While she gets kudos for this, that is not innovation, that’s everyday problem solving. She just happened to be able to get it done.

I have experienced transformation. Many years ago, when I worked for Time Warner, the book publishing division went through a transformation. The leadership installed a new database that had a very helpful and very powerful search engine. Now it would be considered totally antiquated, but at the time this was totally transformational. We no longer had to track an email chain or run over to another department to grab a piece of paper and copy it, everything was immediately searchable and downloadable. I’m sure whoever bought it did a lot of research to find the right system, and I’m sure it was mighty expensive. All employees had to go through days of training to use the new system.

Let the executive recruiter and the hiring team call you innovative or transformational. Take the compliment and say “Thank you.” But don’t use these words to describe yourself, because then you have to prove them, and most leaders can’t.

Please step off the innovation and transformation track.

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Better job. More pay. More control.

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