If you're like most corporate innovators, you're always looking for ways to be more impactful in your organization.
A career in innovations requires a unique mix of several skills. Yet most companies' professional development programs are rarely tailored to your needs.
As part of our recent Innov8rs Connect on Careers & Personal Development, participants were taught 8 fundamental “power skills” for any corporate innovator to be more effective and resourceful. Here's an overview of what we learned.
1 - Purpose
Philip Horvath, International Keynote Speaker, Trainer and Advisor, gave an insightful presentation on Making Purpose Practical – How to Start Living Your Calling Every Day. As a partner at LUMAN, Philip creates immersive, transformational experiences that help executives prepare for the future. His approaches are rooted in emphasizing the importance of purpose.
What is Purpose?
The future holds a lot of uncertainty, so it’s essential to be aware of recent years’ trends. These include transparency, diversity, values, contracting, consequence, and ecosystems. At the center of many future dynamics lies purpose. Purpose can be defined as “making life-cycles meaningful.”
The reason there’s purpose is so that you have a clear why. Think about it: Why do anything if you don’t know why you’re doing it?
When you have purpose, you’ll find it creates:
- Urgency
- Resilience
- Enrollment and alignment
- Integration and conflict resolution
- Distributed decision-making
- Foundation for scaling
How to Develop Purpose-Driven Leadership
Purpose comes into play because people must create together. In addition, culture has become an emergent phenomenon in which each individual is creating ripples. You can create a future-ready organization when you optimize your teams’ culture.
Purpose-driven leadership requires the following:
- Purpose (a clear why)
- Vision (engaging narrative)
- Portfolio (clear outcomes)
- Progress (defined measures)
In the process, you align and focus around a common purpose to inspire and empower team members by creating rituals and projects that always ask, “Why?” Using collaborative platforms and systems leads to One Truth shared by all. Moving forward, shift how you plan for the future.
2 - Political Savvy
Jane Horan, Founder at The Horan Group and Author of Now It’s Clear: The Career You Own, discussed Developing Political Savvy. Jane points out that political savvy is one of the most misinterpreted or misunderstood words, even though it’s a critical leadership skill that drives careers, innovation and organizational efficiency.
What is Political Savvy?
By definition, politics is about building coalitions for the good. When it comes to being political savvy from a competency standpoint, it can be described in the following research-based context:
“Navigate complex organizational situations effectively, sensitive to how people and organizations function, understand where the land mines are and plans approach accordingly, views politics as a necessary part of organization life, works to adjust to that reality, is a maze-bright person.” – Lominger Competency #48
A maze-bright person understands the interconnections across functions, departments and networks, along with who’s influencing who. However, people can also take a negative side of political savvy as in office politics, which is why many employees leave their jobs.
How to Foster Political Savvy in Your Organization
Jane found politics in every single competency network. Although some large organizations (e.g., Walt Disney, Credit Suisse, PepsiCo and INSEAD) facilitate political savvy workshops, the skill is rarely taught. At the same time, everybody has some level of political awareness.
Political savvy relates to visibility, credibility and, most importantly, informal networks. Everyone should understand the interconnected and social networks inside their organization. To be more political savvy, start by analyzing your network.
- Make a list of your connections
- Identify categories of people
o Connector
o Expert advisor
o Savvy advisor
o Mentor
o Balance - Measure your connections
o Breadth – ensure diversity among all connections
o Connectivity – avoid limiting interconnectivity and groupthink
o Dynamism – use connections to help boost your career
3 - Sponsorship
Chloe Williams is the Founder of 8th Day and London Chapter Lead at WIN: Women in Innovation. In her session, she uncovered The Secret of the Sponsor. Why? Because Carla Harris, Vice Chairman of Wealth Management at Morgan Stanley, said it best: “Having a mentor is optional; a sponsor is essential.”
What is Sponsorship?
Sponsorship can be defined as “a mutually-beneficial relationship between two individuals typically in the same company focused on actively accelerating one’s career.” A sponsor is vital, because they can fast-track your career by using their seniority, influence and capital (social, political and organizational). Without a sponsor, finding opportunities and making connections can be more challenging.
Although you may have always been told that you’ll get ahead if you work hard, that’s not always the case when advancing your career becomes highly subjective due to the human element. A sponsor with influence can advocate your behalf, which is more effective than going it alone. The two-way relationship between sponsor and sponsee pays off, pays back and pays for itself.
How to Find Sponsors
As an innovation leader, you can be a sponsor, a sponsee or both. Depending on your goals, there are many ways to find a sponsor or sponsee.
If you’re looking for a sponsor, first make sure you perform top-notch work. Then find someone who:
- Knows your work and understands your career goals
- Is in a position of power and influence, not just similar
- Continues to add value to your career
If you’re looking for someone to sponsor, consider a sponsee who:
- Embodies the same company values and vision
- Can promote your legacy as a future leader
- Doesn’t fall under your biases of being similar
- You can communicate with clearly
4 - Storytelling
Stephen Taylor and Meredith Singleton, Chief Operations Officer and Training Director at Untold Content, gave us an inside look into Unlocking Storylines for Innovation Success. They help everyone, from engineers and scientists to clinicians and entrepreneurs convey their best ideas through storytelling.
What is Innovation Storytelling?
Stephen defined innovation storytelling as “the art and science of communicating strategic narratives about new products, systems improvements, groundbreaking new thinking that drive innovative organizational innovation objectives.” Storytelling can occur from the time you have an idea to when it’s being developed, and beyond.
Internal and external storytelling for innovators offers many benefits that can inspire, motivate and increase buy-in — as well as impact brand perception, trust, and collaboration. Storytelling can serve to share both successes and failures, which is less demoralizing when innovations aren’t implemented.
How to Go About Innovation Storytelling
Innovation storytelling has a different structure than fictional stories. A nonfiction story structure involves telling many small stories to make up one storyline. Innovation stories focus on the rise and fall of cognitive tension linked to problems and solutions.
Story development involves different frameworks, patterns, and techniques. The following three components are part of Untold’s Innovative Storytelling Toolkit:
- Frameworks act as a “blueprint," making up the story’s basic structure. The phases of an innovation story can be defined using two standard frameworks: the A.B.T. (And, But, Therefore) Story Framework and the C.A.R. (Challenge, Action, Result) Story Framework.
- Patterns are like “decorations in the house.” They’re interesting pieces in the story that repeatedly appear in innovation processes.
- Techniques are concepts, strategies, templates and exercises designed to create high-impact stories faster.
5 - Conversation Design
Daniel Stillman, Executive Coach, Conversation Designer, Lead Facilitator at The Conversation Factory, gave an overview of The 9 Elements of Conversational Leadership. He helps teams, organizations and individuals transform their worlds, one conversation at a time.
What is Conversation Design?
Herbert Simon, Nobel Laureate, once said: “To design is to devise courses of action to change existing situations into preferred ones.” We all design conversations all the time. They can take on various forms, including one-on-one conversations, one-person-to-many conversations, many-to-many conversations and conversations with self.
Conversations can be difficult to design, since defining conversations we can or can’t have is often a subjective process. Leaders must create conditions to design the shift that transforms conversations.
How to Design Conversations
As a leader, you can create transformative using a tool called The Conversation OS Canvas. It highlights components that are easy to see and shift. These elements of conversation design include people, invitations, power, narrative, turn-taking, interface, cadence, threading, goals and error and repair.
Good conservation design requires being intentional and knowing how to control each aspect of the interaction. Of all elements, Daniel suggested focusing on three based on the MeetING anagram:
- Invitation – Consider how someone enters the conversation
- Narrative – Consider what shapes the conversation
- Goals – Consider where you want to get to
6 - Decision-Making
Anne Caspari, Complexity Partner at EZC Partners, helps people make sense of complex environments. Her session on Decision-Making in Complexity provided insight into a topic that’s not well understood.
What is Decision-Making?
Most people don’t have a solid decision-making process and rely on intuition or gut feeling. However, research has shown the approach to be mediocre, except in the case of trained intuition. The best way to make a good decision is by having a solid decision-making process. The decision-making process typically involves several steps:
1. Identify the goal of the decision-maker
2. Gather information realistically
3. Organize information and perspectives
4. Do the actual act of deciding
5. Communicate and implement the decision
6. Learn from experience
How to Make Decisions as an Innovator
The problem with decision-making often lies in the context; context is king. To be more effective at the decision-making process, you can use a framework that takes context into account. The Context Analysis with the Cynefin Framework involves five framework domains designed to help guide you on how to make decisions:
- Clear Domain (known knowns) – This domain has clear cause-and-effect relationships and involves a process in which you sense what’s going on, categorize the gathered information, and respond using a single “best practice” such as a checklist, standard operating procedures, etc.
- Complicated Domain (unknown knowns) – In this decision process, you’ll sense the problem, analyze it and respond by getting support to fix it. This might involve using “multiple good practices” such as scenario planning, systems thinking, etc.
- Complex Domain (unknown unknowns) – Complex domains occur in situations you can’t foresee. In this instance, you probe, sense, and respond by experimenting to see what works. This domain often involves an “emergent practice” related to pattern recognition, innovation, etc.
- Chaotic Domain (unknowable unknowns) – This domain is common during infrastructure breakdowns and other high-energy states. You act, sense, and respond through a “novel practice” such as crisis intervention, fast actions, etc.
- Confused Domain – The confused domain falls in the middle of complex, chaos, and complicated domains. Confusion exists due to a lack of understanding or mistaken context, which can be alleviated through coaching, mentoring, training and similar.
7 - Creating Space
Susie Braam, Founder at Mulberry Retreats, and Sonja Kresojevic, Founder at Seedtime Collective, present ideas on Creating Space for Innovation. The following question was posed: “When you think of innovation – in your organization’s innovation efforts that you’ve been involved in – what sort of feelings emerge for you?” Based on audience responses, it became clear that leading innovation can evoke a roller coaster of emotions, from feeling like “you’ve seen the light” to “pulling your hair.”
What is Creating Space for Innovation?
Being an innovator leader exposes you to all sorts of uncertainty that can lead to these emotions. In reality, transformation is more about changing mindsets. That’s because visible symptoms appear on the surface like a partially submerged iceberg. Underneath lies three hidden layers: systems and structures, values and beliefs and paradigms of thought. Before something new can emerge, those underlying issues must be understood to create space for innovation.
How to Create Space for Innovation
Most businesses focus only on the visible symptoms, rather than fixing the underlying causes. This keeps leaders from asking the right questions. To create space in your organization, you must focus on the following steps:
1. Uncover what’s hidden
2. Let go of what’s not needed
3. Find the clearing to create space
4. Generate new insight
5. Build alignment in the organization
6. Arrive at the best questions
7. Let the new emerge
8 - Leading Through Risk Ambiguity
Have you ever looked at other innovators and asked yourself, “How can they do it, but we can’t?” Well, that’s precisely what Brett Macfarlane, Founder at Innovation Leadership Map, asked himself after seeing Adidas grace the cover of Time Magazine for launching the same concept his company created but failed. Years later, he found that innovation leadership can be developed using his research-based Innovation Leadership Map.
What Are the Pressures of Innovation Leadership?
Like most innovative leaders, you probably accept the technical challenges you face without question. However, it’s rare for innovators to manage the internal and external pressures surrounding them. Instead, leaders tend to focus on what to do while limited on how to do it.
Surprisingly, it’s not uncommon to find unrealized potential, missed opportunities, and wasted time even among major players like Amazon and Google. That’s because innovation is as social as it is technical. Leading innovation activates deep-seated feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.
Success Boils Down To How You Respond to Challenges
Leading innovation can be frustrating, but rewarding too. The main difference between unsuccessful and successful leaders boils down to how they respond to challenges, whether with constructive or destructive frustration. Brett’s Innovation Leadership Map is a developmental tool and process that centers on the following four dimensions of a leader:
- Look back at past experiences
- Look within at the behaviors that are drivers and detractors
- Look around at the situation you’re in
- Look ahead and start to develop development plans and tangible, concrete actions
The approach lets you map out individual experiences and identify leadership performance drivers and derailers. When scored, mid-range performance zones represent constructive frustration, and the high and low extremes indicate destructive frustration.
