Developing an Innovation Checklist in Your Leadership Pipeline

A deliberate focus on innovation is critical for organizational growth and development. To truly lead innovation, pay special attention to this checklist:

  • Culture that supports innovation. Culture can kill strategy, so pay constant attention to ways you can build and maintain a culture of innovation. It is vital if you want to ensure your strategy has a chance of survival.
  • People with the right mindset. Having the right tools and developing the right skills without the right mindset is like having a high-performance automobile without gasoline. Leaders must be role models and encourage people to develop their ability to defer judgment, tolerate ambiguity and be genuinely curious.
  • Enabling processes and systems. To break down the organizational barriers to innovation, ensure that people have appropriate governance, funding, resources, support and access to decision-makers.
  • Room to run with ideas. Innovation rarely works according to plan. It flourishes only in a culture where it’s possible for people to try, make mistakes and learn from what happens.
  • A culture of telling “what,” rather than “how.” Finally, remember that the leader’s job is not to tell people how to do things, nor is it to have all the great ideas. Nothing kills innovation more than the “know-it-all leader.” Ensure that you model appropriate humility, offer up your best challenge and then get out of the way to let people amaze you with novel, useful and potentially valuable solutions.

This checklist — along with the toolset, skillset and mindset needed to lead innovation — can be found in “Becoming a leader who fosters innovation,” a CCL white paper by David Horth and Jonathan Vehar. Vehar also writes about innovation on the Leading Effectively blog.

Read more from CCL here.

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Center for Creative Leadership

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL®) offers what no one else can: an exclusive focus on leadership education and research and unparalleled expertise in solving the leadership challenges of individuals and organizations everywhere. We equip clients around the world with the skills and insight to achieve more than they thought possible through creative leadership.

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comment_post_ID); ?> Thank you Ed for sharing your insights into the Church Growth Movement. I have my reservations with Church Growth models because it has done more damage than good in the Body of Christ. Over the years, western churches are more focused on results, formulas and processes with little or no emphasis on membership and church discipline. Pastors and vocational leaders are burnt out because they're overworked. I do believe that the Church Growth model is a catalyst to two destructive groups: The New Apostolic Reformation and the Emerging Church. Both groups overlap and have a very loose definition. They're both focus on contemporary worship, expansion of church brand (franchising), and mobilizing volunteering members as 'leaders' to grow their ministry. Little focus on biblical study, apologetics and genuine missional work with no agenda besides preaching of the gospel.
 
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comment_post_ID); ?> Thank you for sharing such a good article. It is a great lesson I learned from this article. I am one of the leaders in Emmanuel united church of Ethiopia (A denomination with more-than 780 local churches through out the country). I am preparing a presentation on succession planning for local church leaders. It will help me for preparation If you send me more resources and recommend me books to read on the topic. I hope we may collaborate in advancing leadership capacity of our church. God Bless You and Your Ministry.
 
— Argaw Alemu
 
comment_post_ID); ?> Amen!!
 
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