Send to KindleI was talking to someone recently about my membership in the New Mexico Innovation Alliance when he asked, “How do you encourage innovation among employees.
It’s a good question and one that leaders in all types of organizations should be asking themselves – what’s the link between leadership and innovation?
The answer isn’t magical or complex. Here are 4 steps to encourage leadership and innovation in your organization.
1. Understand what you mean by innovation. Are you looking for leaps forward or just trying to find new, more efficient ways to accomplish those tasks that are part of your organization’s mission? It’s best not to define this down to a gnat’s eyelash. I think of innovation as simply finding new and better ways to accomplish the mission. Along the way you may discover the cure for the common cold; but unless that’s your mission, it shouldn’t be your goal. Once you begin on the path to finding new ways of doing business, it will become normal operations and amazing things can happen if you can…
2. Accept risk. With innovation comes risk which is often difficult for senior leaders. New ideas fail sometimes, but if you, as the leader, can’t handle the prospect of failure your people will quickly become risk averse too. Leadership for innovation requires accepting failure as a component of success. Embrace the effort, learn from the failure, and then try again. Of course it helps if you have established trust between you and your employees which means you must…
3. Hire the right people. This doesn’t mean the person with the most technical qualifications specific to the particular position. Though technical qualifications can’t be ignored what you’re looking for is someone with that spark which will energize everyone else. When I supervised operations in a large aircraft maintenance organization, we regularly moved our branch managers not by technical area, but with an eye towards new thinking. For instance, the jet engine branch manager was an avionics specialist and the metals fabrication branch manager was a ground equipment specialist. They were chosen based on leadership skill and ability to think. The result was a fresh look at standard practices and more innovative branches. Besides the leadership qualities of the people involved, an important reason this worked was that everyone understood the need to…
4. Have good vision and mission statements and live by them. In strategic planning I always encourage the senior leader to develop a vision statement that is a little audacious. Leaders must articulate a vision that is something that encourages people to set out on unchartered waters. With that should go a mission statement that clearly states why the organization exists and what it does. The mission statement must not only be clear, people in the organization must understand how they are a part of accomplishing that mission and they must know that the boss understands their contribution. That understanding goes a long way toward encouraging innovation.
The connection between leadership and innovation is simply that leadership encourages innovation. Do you?
