10 Top Tips for the Innovative Leader

As a leader, it is important to keep pushing the boundaries and exploring new possibilities. In today’s fast-paced business environment, standing still is not an option; innovation is crucial to success. Here are 10 top tips for the innovative leader, to help you encourage creative thinking, develop new ideas, and drive your business forward.

1. Have a Vision for Change

To inspire your team to be innovative, you need to have a clear vision that defines the direction for the business. A great leader spends time explaining the goals and challenges, and shows how each team member’s role is essential in fulfilling the vision. It’s important to inspire your team to become passionate entrepreneurs, finding innovative routes to success.

2. Fight the Fear of Change

Innovative leaders constantly evangelize the need for change. They replace the comfort of complacency with the hunger of ambition. While taking new ventures is risky, standing still is riskier. They must paint a picture that shows an appealing future that is worth taking risks to achieve. The only way we can get there is by embracing change.

3. Think Like a Venture Capitalist

Venture capitalists (VCs) use a portfolio approach, balancing the risk of losers with the upsides of winners. They consider a large number of proposals and are comfortable with the knowledge that many of the ideas they back will fail. Executives must adapt this mindset and embrace more proposals, even if some fail.

4. Have a Dynamic Suggestions Scheme

Great suggestion schemes are focused, easy to use, well-resourced, responsive, and open to all. They do not need to offer huge rewards. Recognition and response are generally more important. Above all, it needs the whole-hearted commitment of the senior team to keep them fresh, properly managed, and successful.

5. Break the Rules

Achieving radical innovation requires challenging all the assumptions that govern your business industry. Business is not like sport with well-defined rules and referees. It’s more like art. It is rife with opportunity for the lateral thinker who can create new ways to provide the goods and services that customers want.

6. Give Everyone Two Jobs

Give all your people two key objectives. Ask them to run their current jobs in the most effective way possible, and at the same time, to find completely new ways to do the job. Encourage your employees to ask themselves – what is the essential purpose of my role? What is the outcome that I deliver that is of real value to my clients (internal and external). Is there a better way to deliver that value or purpose? The answer is always yes, but most people never even ask the question.

7. Collaborate

Many CEOs see collaboration as key to their success with innovation. They know they cannot do it all using internal resources. Therefore, they look outside for other organisations to partner with. A good example is Mercedes and Swatch, who collaborated to produce the Smart car. Each brought dissimilar skills and experiences to the team.

8. Welcome Failure

The innovative leader encourages a culture of experimentation. You must teach people that each failure is a step along the road to success. To be truly agile, you must give people the freedom to innovate, the freedom to experiment, the freedom to succeed. That means you must give them the freedom to fail too.

9. Build Prototypes

People’s Bank has a refreshingly original attitude to new ideas. “Don’t debate it, test it” is the motto of this innovative American financial services organization. Try the new idea at low cost in a section of the marketplace and see what the customer’s reaction is. You will learn far more in the real world than you will in the test laboratory or with focus groups.

10. Be Passionate

Focus on the things that you want to change, the most important challenges you face, and be passionate about overcoming them. Your energy and drive will translate itself into direction and inspiration for your people. It is no good filling your bus with contented, complacent passengers. You want evangelists, passionate supporters; people who believe that reaching the destination is really worthwhile. If you want to inspire people to innovate, to change the way they do things, and to achieve extraordinary results, then you have to be passionate about what you believe in and communicate that passion every time you speak.

Conclusion

An innovative leader has a clear vision, encourages change, thinks like a venture capitalist, welcomes failure, and inspires through collaboration and passion. Keep breaking the rules, and give your employees the freedom to experiment and to find new and better ways to achieve their goals. Follow these tips, and you will encourage your team to unleash their creativity, take risks, and drive your business to success.