How can companies create a culture that will allow innovative thinking to thrive?

Let’s face it – innovation is what investors pay for. Innovation is the source of competitive advantage and profits because it reduces costs, raises productivity, improves products, and attracts customers. Both customers and businesses benefit from innovation, and when the business benefits, so do investors.

Why is it that two companies can sell the same products or offer the same services, and even use the same marketing techniques and still get two completely different results?

Internal environment

The thing that has the most significant impact on a company budget – but never shows up in a budget – is morale. Positive employees impact customer satisfaction, loyalty, supply costs, turnover, sick days, project completion, quality and more. Positive employees treat the workplace with respect, managing their projects and employees as if they were their own.

Demoralised employees go out of their way to make your costs higher, your projects fail and your reputation in the marketplace suffer. They jump ship when the next best thing comes along and waste valuable training dollars.

Even two departments or teams can be virtually the same. But when the foundation to build and maintain a positive, high-energy workplace is absent, failure is virtually certain.

Traits of an innovative leader

Innovative leaders have great self confidence, yet they are very humble. They are willing to admit that they don’t know, and can’t possibly be the best at, everything. That’s why they persistently seek to courageously learn as much as they can, because they know that they’re not done yet. Nor will they ever be.

Great innovative leaders have a high degree of determination. They don’t give up. If they are stopped from achieving on a mission, they find another way. If people don’t see the value of their idea, they find another way to help people see that it’s a smart solution. If that doesn’t work, they try another way. And still another way until finally people see the wisdom in what they’re proposing. And because they are humble, and surrounded by people who will challenge them if they start becoming arrogant, their determination does not turn to stubbornness. They flow through challenges rather than push through challenges.

Involved people make for better innovation. Passionate involvement can make you happy sometimes, and miserable other times. You want people to be involved and engaged. Involved people can be quiet, loud, or anything in-between. What they have in common is a restless, probing nature: “I want to get to the problem. There’s something I want to do.”

Company innovation

For companies that attempt to foster innovation from within the ranks, a number recognise the importance of strong disagreement or of being a “maverick”. They often try to limit the fear of failure and promote risk taking. Based on experience abounds, such as when Robert Johnson (Johnson and Johnson) is reputed to have congratulated a manager who lost money on a failed new product by saying, “If you are making mistakes, that means you are making decisions and taking risks”. Coca-Cola actually celebrated the failure of its sweet “New Coke”, the venture in 1985 that proved to be ill-advised – except for the fact that Coca-Cola learned something important: Coke’s strength was its image, not necessarily its flavour.

Driving innovation requires that action be taken even in the face of fear. For innovative leaders, courage is not fearlessness, but a willingness to act even when fear is present. Many managers are afraid to ask a question that exposes lack of knowledge, but innovative leaders do it all the time, and their people may at first laugh at their ignorance, but more times than not, ideas are borne from the resulting answers.

Like most of us, great innovative leaders have fun learning new things. Whether it’s taking classes, reading books, attending presentations, engaging in dialogues or looking for new information on the web, they do it because they want to learn more.

If there’s one thing successful innovators have shown over the years, it’s that great ideas come from unexpected places. Who could have predicted that bicycle mechanics would develop the airplane or that the US Department of Defense would give rise to a freewheeling communications platform like the Internet?

Great innovative leaders have a very high level of integrity. And by integrity, we mean, “doing what you say you’ll do”. They understand that this is the foundation of leadership on all dimensions, not just innovation. It is a critical component to inspiring trust in leadership. Because of this, you can count on a steadiness of behaviour. They behave this way not as a tactic at work, but as a value driven behaviour pattern in every part of their lives.

The first step in achieving the impossible is to believe that the impossible can be achieved.

David Wee

Founder and CEO

DW ASSOCIATES

www.dwassociates.blogspot.com