As the leader of your organization, one of your primary responsibilities is getting your team to focus on achieving overarching business objectives. Yet you're also likely in charge of fostering and sponsoring innovation which requires a certain amount of unrestricted thinking, right?
This is why many leaders struggle to create an environment that balances the freedom required for innovating with the confines of the existing and carefully crafted business plan.
To overcome this challenge you must consistently communicate, value and promote both short- and long-term business goals to your entire organization and purposefully create the understanding that it's everyone's responsibility to align innovation activities with organizational goals.
In other words, it's your job to make sure a commitment to innovation doesn't take your organization on a chaotic road trip to nowhere. Or worse, a chaotic trip to everywhere.
YOUR ACTION STEPS
First, develop an innovation system that defines and dictates how your organization looks for new ideas, develops those ideas and determines which ideas will be green-lighted.
Your innovation system should be unique to your organization, its culture and its goals. While you can and should seek insights from how other organizations innovate, your system must be an ideal fit. Otherwise, you'll create clashes at every turn rather than viable concepts.
Next, meet with your team to review and reinforce your organization's short- and long-term business objectives, ensuring everyone at the table understands how tightly each objective is related to the overarching strategic direction of your organization. Doing this communicates how clearly your organization knows where it's going and how uninterested it is in pursuing great, but out of alignment ideas just because they're great.
Once your team is clear on objectives, determine as a group which short- and long-term goals might best be achieved through innovation. Then put in place innovation-related Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to assess your commitment to and the value of innovation.
Bonus: Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur share new thinking on the building blocks of innovation in their book Business Model Generation. Click here to get a 72-page peek.
