Where does innovation fit in your leadership priorities and your business? Is it icing on the cake—or the cake itself?
Some business leaders drive relentlessly toward effective execution and achieving cost and efficiency goals. But strong leaders know that innovation is the key to breakthrough products and services and a happy, challenged team. Forward-thinking leaders admire and learn from companies like Apple and Google that reconfigure or create completely new markets. Leaders constantly ask themselves “how do I bring THAT special sauce of thinking and behavior to my business?”
A lot of research has focused on the characteristics of innovative people and companies. With hard work and focus, you can transform the innovative orientation of your business. In the Innovator’s DNA, Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen describe five key discovery skills that highly innovative people and companies share:
Questioning: Challenging assumptions. Asking why? Why not? What if? Showing tolerance for all answers, pushing others to imagine the future, playing devil’s advocate.
Observing: Intensely observing the world, customers, technologies, and competitors to gain insights about new ways of doing things.
Networking: Actively seeking new ideas and feedback. Meeting people with diverse backgrounds, perspectives and skills.
Experimenting: Testing, testing, testing. Taking apart products, ideas and processes. Piloting (prototyping) ideas to test a hypothesis to answer questions that can’t be answered through observation or networking.
Associating: After exhibiting the above four behaviors, the ability to connect seemingly unrelated ideas and put them together in new ways.
So, how do you cultivate innovation in your leadership approach and your business? First, ask yourself two fundamental questions to help determine your readiness for the journey ahead:
- As a leader, do you naturally focus on execution or innovation?
- Do you personally feel responsible for developing innovations to drive your company forward or do you delegate this to others?
Research shows that highly innovative companies are led by leaders who set the tone and exhibit the discovery skills described above. In the most innovative businesses, senior leaders don’t delegate innovation; they are personally involved in the process. They feel personally responsible for rolling up their sleeves and contributing innovative ideas, in addition to hiring and building processes that encourage innovation.
Leadership engagement in innovation encourages a climate of experimentation. The leader sets the expectation that innovation is required for advancement within the company and works to embed a culture and practice of innovation to the core of the business.