How do the Best Business Leaders drive Innovation?

Have you ever wondered why an old-school, power-driven, leadership style is no longer effective in an AI-focused, complex, and cross-functional business world? And why something that has previously sustained business leadership and management for centuries has no relevance in the current and ever-changing economic climate?

Because it deters innovation.

It creates one-dimensional vision in a multi-facetted complex world.

It takes the power away from people to co-create the business with you.

The top business and management experts who understand the critical nature of innovation in business has named 3 specific roles required to lead innovatively referred in a Podcast on Harvard Business Review. If you miss applying these 3 roles towards leading your team or a project through and through, it can be detrimental for your organisation to innovate or to bring the agility that your
project needs.

The three roles known to be climacteric in leading a business requires innovating – Innovating the ways a business is strategised, innovating the ways it understands and positions its customer value proposition and innovating the ways a business inculcate its culture for the people who work for the business as well as the people the business works for.

First of them is to be an Architect – building a culture and capabilities for people who would be able to collaborate, experiment and grow in-line with your mission and vision, says Linda A Hill, an American ethnographer and business leadership expert.

She then goes on to introduce Bridger as a second leadership role a business leader needs to take on. What she means by Bridger is to get out of your organisation to create partnerships with external talents, tools, and resources. This will enable you to outsource specialised resources to deliver your project beyond your limited capacity. This in result will bridge the gap between you and unlimited business opportunities you may have missed by staying in your box and build multitudes of business communities.

Lastly yet unequivocally important is to become a Catalyst. And what it means to be catalyst as a business leader is to then really reap the benefits of designing the culture and capabilities and bridging the gap by co-creating the business capabilities on a larger canvas of eco-system. What this says is to use the trust and influence we have built to accelerate new organisation units without having a formal authority but mutual empathy, growth and real connections.

To lead your business innovatively, the Help to Grow Management course at Kingston University is a great way to develop an in-depth understanding of Strategy and Innovation.