When I think about innovation, I think about a new way of doing things that will improve services to customers and/or the bottom line and gaining competitive advantage through new processes or product/service offerings.

As a leader, innovation is about creating space where people can share ideas and building excitement in others to innovate. Great ideas will come from involving a diverse range of people.

So how do you develop innovation as a leadership competency?

• Question how things have been done before.
• When setting goals and targets, give your team the autonomy to be creative as to how they can be delivered.
• Advocate for innovation to be given regular time and space within an organisation to grow. Put it on your team meeting agenda as a regular point for discussion.
• With new hires, add innovation as a competency on your job specification and/or have interview questions to explore this with candidates.
• Look to simplify processes that may slow the speed by which you bring an idea to fruition.
• Be prepared to fail. Being prepared to get it wrong is another competency that is good to develop especially when thinking about ground-breaking approaches. Look to reduce your risk through thorough analysis and testing of any new idea or concept and agree with the team when it’s time to pull the plug, if necessary. The important question to ask is what did we learn?
• Facilitate brainstorm sessions with your customers, suppliers and partners. They see your organisation in a very different way to you and will bring insights on how they experience your internal processes as well as your products.
• Consider the environment. It needs to be on your agenda no matter what your role is.
• Consider putting together a cross functional project team to solve large challenges you may have and to take advantage of the opportunities the market presents.
• If you’ve not lead a large project before, consider doing a basic project management course.  It will cover things like project life-cycles, stakeholders, risk management, reporting and attributes of a successful project team.
• Be brave.

Call to action

How you can take the lead in developing a culture of innovation within your organisation or hotel?

What do you need to be more innovative?  Who can help with that?

How can you create an opportunity to practice and develop your innovation skills?

Sources

Kornferry.com Leadership Competencies
https://www.inc.com/articles/201106/josh-linkner-7-steps-to-a-culture-of-innovation.html
https://hbr.org/2013/07/how-to-innovate-faster

Copyright Andrea McKay 23 February 2021. All rights reserved.