Leadership style and innovation: secret sauce

Your capacity for innovation is directly influenced by your (choice of) leadership style.
What is the style (and accompanying process) that your company has implemented?
Or is your innovation process suffering from a case of "leadership by default style"? It is surprising (ok let's just say shocking) how often this default mode comes up in teams, projects, strategies... entire company structures. What can you do about it, to get the best innovation results?

Know the difference between leadership styles.

There are a myriad of resources to educate yourself quickly and easily about different leadership and organizational communication models on the internet. Check them out, and you will see more clearly which style you are using now, and how this impacts your business.

For example, a "transactional" leadership style and a "human resources" oriented leadership style have been found to be more conducive to rapid innovation and creation of new products and services. Transformational leadership allows for horizontal communication among team members, and this style is often used in virtual organizations or geographically dispersed teams.

The human resources model takes a team-oriented, participative approach to employee-management relationships. Employees are expected to be active in decision-making, both operational and strategic. You can imagine how these styles encourage teams to take the space to input and realise new ideas and contribute to change in an organization.

"Transactional" leadership style, on the other hand, is more suited to modifying existing products in an incremental way or managing the status quo. Not much room for radical innovation in this style, which may be just as well if control is the name of the game. Transactional leaders set up a team with a traditional hierarchy, and believe that people are motivated mainly by reward or punishment. These leaders give clear instructions to followers about what their expectations are (rather than asking for input), and when those expectations are fulfilled there are rewards in store for them and failure is severely punished. They allocate work to subordinates whether resources are there or not.

So in comparison, transactional leadership is essential to getting the job done but transformational leadership and HR focused leadership is what provides the emotional glue that causes organizations and the people in them to excel.

Knowing the difference, how these leadership styles affect business, and how to develop the needed skills to get the innovation you aimed for, is key. It's like the secret sauce. Chicken is chicken, but it's the sauce that makes everyone want to savour it. Your secret sauce is the mainstay of your strategy for innovation as a leader.

Have you made the right choice? What's your situation?

We'll go into more on how to develop a new leadership style for your company, and the options of adjusting your own leadership style and developing the needed skills, in my next postings.
Contact me if you want to get a head start in your current project.