Challenge 3: Do you show your personal commitment to innovation?

Diagnosis

If you want your employees to behave innovatively, take the necessary risks, share their ideas and invest precious time, you need to send a clear message that it is relevant, valuable and that you are serious about it. That starts with you. As a leader you need to show your own commitment to innovation. Your team needs to notice that you participate and are engaged in innovation activities and/or genuinely advocate and support their involvement in innovation. You need to show you are willing to take risks and embrace change, if you want your team to overcome anxiety related with change and exposing themselves to risk and be willing to buy into your innovation strategy.

Positive aspects	Negative aspects
You are participating in innovation activities, as brainstorming, ideation sessions, meetings for analysing needs, opportunities and failures etc.	You delegate all innovation tasks to others and engage purely in management tasks.
While participating in innovation sessions you show collaborative attitude taking position as an equal team member, rather than ‘a higher power’.	When discussing innovation, the main person speaking is you.
You show interest in ideas of others.	When you discuss innovation with your team you personally define what the innovation will be.
You encourage others to speak up, provide feedback and point mistakes in your reasoning.	Your colleagues/employees never criticise your ideas or pouch holes in your reasoning.
You treat your own ideas with same dose (or more) of criticism, as of the others.	In your company employees are expected to contribute to innovation as soon it is established as the new strategic direction.
You are willing to provide resources for your employees to be able to innovate (e.g. training, time, connections, managerial support)	I/in the company we believe everyone is an innovator and no resources are necessary for our employees to start contributing innovation ideas and engage in innovation activities.
Your team is aware of your vulnerabilities.	You believe that your role as a leader is to be the smartest person in the room.
Your team knows about failures in your past and what have you learnt from them.	You share only your personal success stories.
You are not afraid to ask your team for advice and show that you don’t have all the answers.	You believe that your employees need to regard you as a flawless person with high success ration.
You understand the need to surround yourself with people more competent than you and you are willing to recognise this act and respect them for their valors.	You consider that asking for advice line workers could be problematic for your reputation as a leader.

1. Assess your own performance in the areas mentioned before.

Can you identify the positive aspects in your activities as a leader? If you think you do, make sure by relating positive aspects to specific examples from your working experience.

Do you also spot the negative aspects in your leadership, attitude, believes and behaviours? To avoid bias, ask people in your environment that you trust to be honest to provide you their point of view.

1. List the positive aspects that you are not complying with and negative aspects that appear in your case.
2. Think about which will be the most difficult to overcome (negative aspects) or implement (positive aspects). Order the list in a way that the aspects most challenging for you will land on the top while the least problematic on the bottom.
3. Then assess how impactful on your team is each of those behaviours/aspects by assigning importance in the 1-5 scale (1 – little relevance, 5 – highly relevant).

Actions for implementation

Inspiring innovation as a leader and being a role model in this aspect requires discipline and work on developing proper behaviour, attitudes, and methods to inspire rather than obstruct innovation efforts. As a leader you need to be prepared to lead by example. One of the key obstacles to innovation is our natural tendency to fear failure and seem weak. However, real leaders are strong enough to show their strengths as well as weaknesses. Based on the list above you identified your strongest challenges in becoming an effective innovation leader and role model for your employees. You should focus on overcoming your biggest weaknesses on this list. Search for solutions to overcoming your specific barriers. But despite your results never underestimate the power of personal, inspirational stories and showing trust and vulnerability to your team.

Hence, organise a meeting to discuss your current challenges related to innovation, or in strategic management or operational issues. Explain current issue you are struggling with (e.g. threats from the competition, lack of proper market knowledge to define new solutions, or difficulties in adjusting company vision or strategy to changing market reality) and ask for support in finding a solution. If your employees will be confused and won’t show willingness to provide you their inputs, encourage them by bringing up your past mistake(s) that resulted from making decisions without consultations of others, and underlining how their inputs are expected to improve decision-making and performance of the company. Be genuine and open to the inputs. Make sure that you show your vulnerable site and don’t create false or adjusted version of real events. Let the participants talk and express your gratitude for every input. Receive them without judgement and note them to calmly think them through after the meeting.

After you design solution for your issue organise the meeting to share it with your employees. Ask them to point shortcomings in your reasoning and help you improve the initial approach to optimise it with use of different visions, skills and knowledge of your employees.