Building A Culture Of Innovation | IDEAS

‘Leaders’ aren’t leading when there is nothing new as a result of their leadership. When they’re at this point, they’re mere status quo managers.

A leader that doesn’t have innovation and ‘new’ at the core of his values doesn’t deserve the position. Innovation must not only be a value, but a culture of organizations that will thrive into the future.

Building a culture of innovation may not be easy, but the starting place isn’t complicated. Heretic leaders start with a disdain for the status quo.

Besides that:

Ideas

A culture of innovation must be built on an appreciation of ideas. Every great thing once started as an idea. For leaders to build a culture of innovation they must give room to their teams to table and explore ideas.

Ideas are innovation currency [Click to Tweet]

Leader, when your team brings ideas, don’t attack them. Make it clear that it is ideas you’re about. You can kill innovation by mistaking people for ideas.

Attack the idea while appreciating the people who bring it. When you attack people and not the product of their thinking you make they shy away from bring things up in the future.

Give ideas room to breathe. Don’t be too quick to dismiss ideas because they aren’t your style as the leader.

To borrow a phrase from John Hunt, ideas enable “the pursuit of unexpected relevance”. You only discover the relevance of ideas when you pursue of engage on the possibilities they could be bringing.

A culture of innovation is a culture of loving, appreciating, shutting down and pursuing ideas [Click to Tweet]

Give attention to ideas and don’t be afraid not to pursue them. Innovation is not synonymous with pursuit of every idea that you may come up with or your team may present.

Innovation is built on willingness to entertain ideas & courage to drop them if wanting [Click to Tweet]

 Love ideas, encourage them, explore them, abandon if they’re irrelevant. Pursue them if they are what you need where you are. Bank them if they are good but not for now. If you’re going to be innovative, don’t ignore them. Be bold. Be /ˈherətik/.

[Photo Credit: Julián Santacruz]