“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower”
Steve Jobs (founder of Apple)
Creating a unique company needs a creative and innovative leader at the helm. Having the courage and self-confidence, innovative leaders know how to bring out their employee’s best strengths, skills and talent to generate, create and produce business breakthrough results. An innovation leadership revolution has been brewing for some time.
Leaders are accountable to assemble teams and lead them to optimal performance outcomes. An effective leader recognizes the importance of embracing differences in people and knows how to connect the dots amongst those differences to get the best outcomes from the team.
Bringing out the best in your people is the essence of your effective leadership and how your employees prefer working with you than any other employer. Beyond this, your employees generate, create and produce their best results as their way of saying “thanks”.
The word “innovation” most people think of as extraordinary breakthrough inventions created by solitary geniuses. Yet, businesses today are the opposite of this and thrive by the collaboration of a free exchange of ideas by others
“My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.”— Steve Jobs
Leaders are accountable to assemble teams and lead them to optimal performance outcomes. An effective leader recognizes the importance of embracing differences in people and knows how to connect the dots amongst those differences to get the best outcomes from the team. Innovative leaders break from tradition and prefer more non-traditional or unconventional ways of getting this done.
Guiding your team of employees with your knowledge, vision and ideas, you know how to achieve what you set out to do. How you develop your employees has a lot to do with your leadership style as well as your trust in your employees. This trust extends to allow your employees to generate ideas and create those ideas for an innovative business breakthrough for your clients and customers.
Embrace the Challenge
Innovative leaders do not delegate creativity and innovation; they lead it. And innovative leaders cultivate a culture of critical and creative thinking that takes on challenges.
The stimulus for new ideas comes from being forced to focus on solving a problem. Enable people to solve their own problems.
One way to activate the creativity of employees is to develop an environment where problem-solving is encouraged. We are all inclined to innovate and problem-solve, so empowering employees to see the workplace shows the confidence they need to bring new ideas to the table.
Engaged Employees
“Great leaders of innovation . . . see their role not as take-charge direction setters,
but as creators of a context in which others make innovation happen.”–Jane Porter
Innovative leaders know how to engage employees to be interested and focused on the work their need to accomplish. Employees are much more satisfied in the work they do with having a leader who is innovative.
Innovative leaders treat their employees as entrepreneurs. They also roll up their sleeves and sometimes work side-by-side with their teams in completing specific projects they are interested in.
Stretch Goals
Innovative leaders get people to use stretch goals to achieve, what may seem impossible. Setting stretch goals can help your team to challenge the status quo, question ways of working and look to create new processes that help you to reach goals that might not seem achievable right now.
An innovative leader is great at setting stretch goals – because these are the goals that will help you realize the impossible.
“Failure is an option. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” – Elon Musk
Leaders must foster a commitment from the team to embrace an innovation mindset where each employee learns to apply the differences that exist in one another for their own success and that of the organization.