Innovative Leadership Success Depends on Modeling Strategic Excellence!
Innovative leadership needs concrete ways to envision, define and describe the organizational strategy model for realizing innovation success. Now more than ever, innovative leaders must not fall into the trappings of their traditional leadership behaviors.
When you make the effort to model or otherwise draw out your innovation strategy, the innovative leadership team members and your partners are empowered to put the strategy to the test, they can play with it, they can push it to its limits and proclaim its possibilities to others.
"Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays." - Philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard
Stated another way, the innovation strategy is not what changes, it is we who deploy the strategy to encourage, energize, enlighten, engage, extend and empower our teams to achieve its ends who will change.
The essential purposes for modeling your innovation strategy are to focus you on, guide you into and highlight the granular yet measurable details of your strategic intentions.
Every innovation strategy must give innovative leadership team members the oversight to accomplish three strategic tasks:
- Direct all activities
- Develop all resources
- Discipline all players
- A window on their historical, internal and external realities;
- Mechanisms to help you better respond to and exploit the opportunities brought about by change;
- Focused injections of those positive leadership energies needed to inspire, rejuvenate and educate all your stakeholders;
- Dependable metrics which gives you the ability to expose the mysteries of corporate-wide energy exchanges, dependencies and transfers;
- Coordinating the communications of your vision's beliefs, meanings and feelings;
- Dissecting the relationships between the observed, measured and assumed;
- Selecting opportunity "areas" where the innovation strategy could and should be carried out.
Too many managers believe they can copy an innovation strategy. I've heard some tell their people: "Be more creative!" Unfortunately, those strategies neither inspire, encourage or empower people to use their talents effectively or to trust in the sincerity of their innovative leaders.
In this Age when imagination is the primary driver of competitive advantage, your innovation strategy is the only way to strive for and attain sustainable success.
Innovative leadership performs well when a comprehensive model for the innovation strategy is crafted, shaped and being followed - in a word, innovative excellence happens through a proven model for success.
Copyright © 2007, Mustard Seed Investments Inc., All rights reserved.
Bill Thomas teaches innovative leadership and innovation strategy by applying Imagination Age concepts and methods - his books, manuals, handbooks, Executive Briefings, software and training programs describe sustainable processes which empower leaders to consistently produce measurably powerful results!
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