Innovation

Yesterday my calendar pop-up alerted me of an important date in history … the creation of the first ATM. Specifically, the first ATM (albeit not on the network) was introduced to the world via a patent (GB1329964) filed September 1969 (and granted in 1973) by the Burroughs Corporation. Within a few minutes of the pop up, I had a conversation with an architect on the topic of Green IT and was inspired by this individual’s enthusiasm on the topic, his out of the box thinking, and by his motivation to show others WHAT is possible if each one of us alters a few of our behaviors. The two in concert made me think about innovation as related to our core competencies and Extraordinary Leader.

I started to look up the Guiding Principles and found one encouraging team members to “embrace empowerment and improvement”. Smells like innovation, don’t you think?

Next, I started to think about innovation and StrengthsFinders? Three themes are notorious innovators:

• Activators can make things happen by turning thoughts into action.
• Futuristic are inspired by the future and what could be. They inspire others with their visions of the future.
• Ideation people are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.

Innovation and our inner animal? Who can forget that “the sky is the limit” is a key theme for the owls among us. Innovation is also core to the beaver and fox specifically as it relates to “anything is possible, as long as we can execute on it”.

From the book, Extraordinary Leader, some of the behaviors demonstrated for innovation include:

•  Consistently generate creative, resourceful solutions to problems.
• Constructively challenge the usual approach to doing things, and find new and better ways to do the job.
• Champion ingenuity at all levels.
• Generate creative solutions by bringing together the most talented people.
• Work to improve new ideas rather than discourage them.
• Come up with creative, resourceful solutions to problems.
• Create a culture of innovation and learning that drives individual development.
• Provide support and encouragement to others when they attempt to innovate – even when they fail.
• Integrate ideas and inputs from different sources to find innovative solutions.
• Build on other people’s suggestions and ideas.  (Doing so often leads to new approaches and improvements.)

© 2010 Zenger Folkman.  All rights reserved.

Here are some ideas that other leaders identified on how to improve effectiveness in the Innovates competency.

• Every week ask each one of your colleagues to give you an idea on how to look at things differently.
• Conduct brainstorming lunches with teams using market trends.
• Understand the current state of the activity/task and document current and future benchmarks.
• Provide brainstorming and whiteboard sessions to identify options (pros/cons) to meet an objective or reinvent a process.
• Connect with leaders and other resources (websites, journals, etc.) to see current activity and future trends.
• Conduct periodic meetings with partners to challenge what we know.
• Find a team or meeting that’s focused on taking risks; get an invitation to participate.
• As you make innovation a focus, share your successes with your management or offer up at team members for shared learning.

Thank you for letting me share!

~Stacy