Leadership and Innovation: two sides of the same coin

When faced with challenges of this nature, which involve high levels of risk and uncertainty, we tend to postpone the decisions and choices that scare us the most.

It becomes more reassuring to pause, retrace familiar paths and patterns, and limit us to managing today’s business, despite the urgency and importance of acting quickly and embracing change.

The crucial point is that this ‘paralysis’ occurs not only when dealing with choices linked to the evolution and deep transformation of one’s business model, but also when approaching innovation, particularly high-impact innovation.

This type of innovation pushes companies to explore new and unknown territories to attract non-customers. The resulting path is therefore paved with uncertainty and obstacles to overcome before successfully developing an innovation that is truly high impact. Indeed, it is not uncommon for even the most successful innovations to have faced enormous resistance before being understood and accepted, or before finding their place in the market. Think, for example, of Nespresso and its capsule system. It took several years and continuous adjustments to the business model before this innovation gained traction and revealed its full, disruptive power.

The danger lies in facing a paradox: on one hand, we seek high-impact, disruptive innovation that opens new markets; on the other hand, we risk failing to pursue it to the end out of fear of facing the risks and difficulties along the way.

How, then, can we create an environment favorable to high-impact innovation? How can we cultivate and build this leadership and culture of innovation?

Below are 4 practical insights that can help with this journey.

1. Create the Vision

A fundamental ingredient for high-impact innovation, and for developing new leaders capable of mobilizing the organization toward it, is the ability to imagine a future and a way of doing things that differs from what is universally accepted today as the standard for a company or an industry.

Building this ‘vision’ is the most important and rare resource that a company and its management team must develop. We live, in fact, in an era where knowledge and ideas have never been so abundant. This risks causing paralysis and leading people to postpone decisions for fear of making mistakes.

What becomes essential is the ability to make sense of this massive amount of information, shaping all available knowledge and ideas into a coherent vision that designs a better future for the customer compared to the present going beyond the patterns of the past and imagining what does not yet exist.

The importance of defining a clear and engaging vision to mobilize people into action is also demonstrated by the results of the 2019 HR trends and salary report 2019, conducted by Randstad in collaboration with the Agostino Gemelli Advanced School of Psychology at the Università Cattolica.

Indeed, the report highlights how the leader’s role must change compared to the past to embrace the major shifts of our time and truly be able to drive business evolution and high-impact innovation. According to 69% of HR managers, high-impact innovation starts with the ability to inspire and motivate others; unfortunately, today only one in three leaders possesses this capacity to inspire and motivate.

2. Act and set a cadence for realizing the vision

Defining a vision is not enough to convince others to embrace it, nor is it enough to persuade an organization to adopt high-impact innovation. Simply communicating it and training people on the importance and inevitability of change is also insufficient. Training courses are full of examples of failed companies that couldn’t embrace innovation; however, once the emotional impact of the training fades, people go right back to their old habits.

Instead, it is necessary to act immediately, starting with a few small steps to transition from vision to execution, overcome obstacles and fears, and kickstart the cultural shift within the company.

One of the most effective solutions tested in this regard is to create a dedicated team and task them with generating disruptive innovations around the corporate vision. This way, people begin to feel ownership of the vision rather than seeing it as something imposed from above. They enrich it with their own insights and knowledge, making it their own and starting to truly embrace the change.

Furthermore, breaking down silos between different company departments accelerates the flow of ideas and brings unexpected solutions to light on the problems that will inevitably arise along the way. Structured and moderated recurring meetings can do a great deal to build an environment favorable to high-impact innovation.

3. Define the behaviors you want to achieve

This is a fundamental step to bring about a lasting change in company culture and thus create an environment favorable to high-impact innovation. Cultural change programs have always placed great importance on educational and training aspects, explaining why it is necessary to change. Unfortunately, however, once back in their offices, people tended to return to the patterns that had brought them success in the past, thereby neutralizing any cultural shift.

If you want to create a culture suited to high-impact innovation, you must instead work on behaviors. This means establishing a feedback system (both positive and negative) that incentivizes correct behaviors and discourages those you do not want to see spread.

Acting differently and demonstrating the success of this new way of operating will lead to a profound shift in the values and beliefs of the team members, ultimately transforming the culture itself.

It is crucial that the defined behaviors are clearly observable so that a reliable feedback system can be built. In fact, asking people to ‘be more proactive’ does not work. What does be proactive mean? Are we sure that different people interpret proactivity in the same way, allowing the individual to receive consistent feedback?

Instead, it would be much more useful and practical to ask: ‘when faced with a problem, present at least three alternative solutions.’ In this way, you can deeply influence the corporate culture, transforming it into a true enabler of high-impact innovation.

4. Create small, protected areas to develop behaviors

Cultural change takes place only if new behaviors are consistently practiced over a sufficiently long period of time. The risk of reverting to old ways of thinking and acting at the very first sign of difficulty is always very high.

It becomes essential to create small but protected areas where these new behaviors can develop, shielding them as much as possible from external disruptions. This is, for example, what happened with one of our clients, where we decided to pursue a specific innovative project by applying new behaviors. This project is defended and protected by the organization as a sort of incubator, where new habits can take root to generate the seed of a new culture that favors high-impact innovation.

Obviously, creating an environment favorable to high-impact innovation by building a culture of innovation and distributed leadership is a long journey fraught with difficulties, where strength and consistency in pursuing it are fundamental. If you want to find out how to facilitate this journey, do not miss our workshop on February 12th at Kilometro rosso where we will address how to bring higher performance and greater well-being while fostering a culture of innovation.