Leadership Tip #4: The importance of leadership to innovation

Brought to you by Pinstripe

Innovation has to come from the leadership. If a CEO preaches and promotes a culture of innovation, the employees will follow their lead. But to effectively build innovation into your organization, you must reward new ideas, client service approaches, product development, technology, and then accept the risk, failures and challenges that sometimes come with them. Equally important to the CEO and top leadership fostering innovation, middle managers must relish it and not be threatened by it. And when something fails, celebrate the failure! Microsoft and Apple have done a great job at this. HR is vitally important to encouraging innovation. HR leaders can:

• Reinforce the organization's innovative intent
• Establish clear metrics and measures for innovation
• Create effective incentives and rewards for innovating; and
• Provide the necessary resources and tools to help employees innovate more successfully such as

1. developing programs for cross-pollination (different functional teams within your organization coming together to solve problems);
2. making available to the employees external influences they can tap into, such as boards, industry experts, customers, and associations; and
3. implementing training systems that allow companies to get extraordinary results from even their more ordinary employees.