Innovative Leadership
Innovative leadership involves leaders using different leadership styles to influence employees to produce creative ideas, products and services.
It aims to help you support the mission or vision of your company by recognising that businesses need to be able to think innovatively to adapt to change, to ensure continued success, and remain competitive and relevant.
Ideas be they new, or ways to improve on the existing are generated, evaluated and implemented in a dynamic and constant process.
Innovation can be looked at as value added innovation where existing ideas are modified and improved or exploratory where (useful) brand new ideas are generated.
Generation stage – a safe environment is needed for novel ideas to be voiced, for original thinking to occur and resources need to be provided to support this effectively. Leaders adopt a transformational leadership style with behaviours that encourage risk taking and experimenting.
Evaluation stage – ideas must be constructively assessed so the right ones are pushed toward production. Leaders adopt a more transactional leadership style with behaviours that ensure fine tuning and progress toward a goal.
Implementation stage – continues with a transactional leadership style to ensure implementation of ideas.
More information on how you could build innovation into your workplace are given in the guide below
