Leadership and Its Influence on Innovation

Innovation is when a company works to create new, useful ideas. As a leader, you can make this happen. Your choices influence the way people in your organization act, think and work, but the first step is understanding what innovation means for businesses.

Innovation is a controlled process of coming up with new ideas, deciding if those ideas are going to work and putting them into action. That means your innovators aren't just thinking things up. They are working to achieve a single vision of success.

Practicing Innovation

 The emphasis here is on "working." It's exciting, energizing and maybe even a little fun when a team hits on a great idea. However, focused practice is what creates groups that consistently generate useful ideas. That practice all starts with you and your leadership team.

First things first: In order to have a chance at those breakthroughs you're looking for, you need a vision everybody shares. But you can't stop there. 

It's true that vision alone may be enough to motivate one person. Not so for organizations. For a team, you need to implement a culture that will support the innovative practices you want. 

Choosing Your Culture

There are different types of innovation. The environment you create — your culture — will determine what type of creativity flourishes in your organization.

In a way, creating an innovative culture has some parallels with the game of golf. You need to practice all of the skills you have — you can't just rely on two or three to get you past every challenge. You undoubtedly have your strengths, but you also have much more than that as a leader.

Leading Differently 

You may need to develop some versatility, both in your own leadership style and in the culture of your teams. You have to support the type of innovation you need, and that's true even if you're leading multiple teams that all innovate differently.

Fostering certain types of innovation may require you to reinforce your weaknesses. You want to promote a specific culture for an engineering team developing improvements to existing products. It would be different from the culture of a sales team tasked with identifying new opportunities. 

Continuing that example, it might be easy for you to encourage the sales team if you're naturally an open and interactive leader. However, you may have to practice some other leadership skills for the engineering team that performs the exacting, low-risk-tolerance work of perfecting products.

Working Towards the Future

As a leader, you have more influence on innovation than almost any other single factor. The harder you work to share your vision and create an appropriate culture, the more of those breakthroughs you can expect.