With the complexity and uncertainty of business today, it is important that you encourage and develop the important “leadership attribute of innovation” in all levels of your team. Innovation is Important for Business Success!
Many businesses talk about innovation, but only a few truly embrace it. Are you embracing the uncharted path of success that calls for moving forward where you have not yet been?
Why Does This Matter?
Making conscious choices by inspiring alternative considerations and options in your current business circumstances is KEY to SUCCESS TODAY! Surfacing “unconscious habits” based on “how we have always done things” is important in order to truly address your current business needs.
You may face seemingly big challenges to your basic business plan for 2023. You need everyone on your team to be thinking about innovation in order to secure the positive opportunities inherent in those challenges. You can start today by supporting and developing your team to think in new ways as they perform their roles. Encourage their creative thinking by asking questions and inviting them to share their thoughts. Together you can create and continually foster a psychologically safe environment where innovative thinking can flourish.
Innovation- The Key Ingredient For Business Success
Innovation is defined as the introduction of something NEW; new ideas or methods in your business
There are four types of innovation to keep in mind for your business:
Research based
Consider the current external environment, what has changed? And will any of these changes impact your business plans? How should you respond? What new action is being called for in your business? (remember to think short and long-term).
Sustaining
Undeniably this is anchored in solid “business thinking”—which includes, analysis of your business metrics, taking into consideration business cycles and trends, projections, and producing step by step actions based on current market trends. Allow this solid business thinking to inform and guide your choices so that you can stabilize the business and keep moving forward in positive ways.
Breakthrough
Expand your thinking by contemplating is this a “breakdown” or a “breakthrough”? As a team, when you surface what is not working as expected, look for the positive shifts you can make with the new information. Collectively, you can free yourself from crisis mode by developing a business growth mindset. By taking in real time circumstances, and embracing them for learning and growing, you create the space for amazing opportunities and innovation to emerge. When you work together to incorporate the best information available at any given time, and are able to effectively shift your plans in response to what is happening, without derailing your long term vision, you have what it takes to be a sustainable and successful business.
Disruptive
This may feel “high risk”, yet in some ways is the safest way to approach business actions in our current economic times. What feels safe and familiar is based on what you experienced when your business was at an earlier stage of growth, and the external environment was more predictable. Disruptive Innovation calls for doing the “illogical or unexpected”—basically what is counterintuitive in your current business situation. Calm your nerves and take calculated risks. What you know from the past is not necessarily what is needed for your current and future business success.
To illustrate this, my team created an infographic to help you keep these different types of innovation top of mind. You can download it here.
The Path Forward
Another key point is that leadership is all about achieving results through others. You have a part and the team has their part. When you harness your ability to think about your business together—seeking out emerging opportunities and harnessing all your good critical thinking to catch the wave of innovation, you have a winning approach.
Start today. Invite your team to share their thoughts from their perspective of your business. Is there anything they are thinking could be done differently and perhaps achieve better results? Take note.
This is Leadership! You’re doing it!
Warmly,
Annie
