An internal innovation programme or creativity drive is only as good as the people leading it. Encouraging employees to engage in adding extra value to the business will pose quite a challenge without management leading the way with a positive example. That famous phrase “eat your own dog food” springs to mind!
With this in mind I’ve created a list of the 10 principles of innovative leadership:
- Executives and managers are the soul of the company or brand they lead
- Amplify the innovative thinking and creativity in everyone they work with
- Continually distort reality and make the impossible seem possible
- Be relentlessly optimistic, exuding positive, infectious energy
- Create a culture of curiosity, never stop asking or learning, and have the best questions
- Establish trust, honesty and belief by giving away credit
- Empower employees
- Make unpopular calls to do the right thing by the work
- Inspire risk
- Celebrate success and failure
Comments 3
“5.Create a culture of curiosity, never stop asking or learning, and have the best questions”….. Very apt!
Sadly, most Nigerian banking institutions thrive on using consequence management to the extreme which kills the spirit of curiosity and the urge to learn because failing brings about sanctions that are more punitive that corrective.
Wish these 10 principles could become my organization’s mantra, especially No. 5.
Your principles are awesome. Permit me to borrow them too. I am most fascinated by no. 10 – Celebrate success and failure. I understand the first half but how do one celebrate failure? Is it by the learning points of the situation or what?
All in all, great principles!
These principles are perfect but what I liked most are #5, #6 and most especially #10 to celebrate success and even failure. I’ve read somewhere that if we can learn to celebrate our failures as steps toward eventual success, we will continue to put in effort, keep trying, and eventually achieve the results we want.