7 Aspects for leaders to innovate

For leaders to innovate, they need to be part of a number of teams. Start with the team they lead, the other teams within own organization, partners’ teams, academics’ teams and most importantly teaming with customers. That’s said; being part of a team is more important than leading it. Leaders are encouraged to join as many teams as they can. This is the way forward for leaders to keep their innovation leadership.
Leadership based initially on having teams to lead. Teams will remain the most important component of leadership from my point of view. There are thousands of researches on leadership approaching leaders form different perspectives. There are multiple aspects would help make leaders realize the importance to be part of a team to innovate. Here, I try to spotlight seven aspects for leaders to innovate.

First aspect is the need for leaders to interact with teams and be close to the working environment. One very inspiring book is: “The Truth About Leadership, by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner”. This book describe a research has revealed about leadership and how certain aspects of leadership endure over time. This research found that the most important leader role models interact with people frequently and are close to where individuals work and live. Being truly part of a team is the most effective way to interact with people daily. Interactions with people include day to day business activities, as well as social considerations. Daily interactions creates better understating on the types of activities the team is undertaking and help shaping the perception of people.  Socialize with the team is a very powerful tool for team building where leaders get closer to team members. The more interactions the leader creates with the team the more efficient the communications will be. Many of crises situations resulted in miscommunication events, could have been avoided if the leader has efficient and accurate communications with the team. Equally important to interactions, leaders need to know their teams’ working environment in details. Being part of a team positions leader to see, hear, touch, smell and taste the reality of teams conditions. Working environment is key success factor for fostering innovation, enabling creativity and increasing performance.

Second aspect is that: “Leaders Do Not Work Alone”. Simply; leaders cannot do it alone.  “No leader has done anything extraordinary without the help of others”.  An essential attribute of leadership is the relationship between leaders and their teams. Mostly, all the big achievement in organizations resulted from superior team working stories. Leaders heading such achievements orchestrate extraordinary team work. It is not possible to reach their; for leaders who are not really part of their teams. It is a prerequisite for leader to be part of her/his team in order to harmonize the team work. Being part of a team positions the leader to utilize each member experience and pursue all capabilities. The resulted overall team experience is the total incremental experiences of all team members. This is part of the leader responsibilities to integrate individuals’ capabilities into one strong team. A fatal mistake leaders do is being isolated from their team and do critical things by hand. A typical reason for this incorrect behavior is lack of trust as a result of lack of knowledge of team capabilities. There will be always situations where leaders can’t work it alone. Successful leaders will be much better ready for facing hard situations through their teams’ strengths. Getting to know teams from inside enables leaders to strengthen capabilities for achieving and exceeding. Leading changes in organizations is another example of the fact that leaders cannot do it alone. To make changes happen in organizations, leaders must have a strong transformation team. Change the status quo can come from any team member in the organization subject to proper empowerment. If the leader is part of his team, he ensures required level of empowerment to achieve the target changes.

Third aspect is inspiring through lead by example. Leaders must demonstrate to others how they should feel, think, and act. It is also incumbent on leaders to demonstrate that they will engage in the same behaviors that they are asking others to engage in. “Actions speak louder than words. Kouzes’ and Posner’s eighth truth of leadership is that leaders either lead by example or they do not lead at all”. Being part of a team will enable leaders to lead by example. At the same time, team members will be inspired by their leader if they see him in action. Leaders, who give the right example for teams to follow, are most likely to mentor. Those leaders are trustworthy and teams will strongly follow them. Influence a radical change or inject new behavior within teams, requires a true lead by example. People tend to check words against actions, especially when it comes out of leaders. It indicates how consistent the actions are in relation to values and promises. The moment a disconnection highlighted, the less trust the leader becomes. This impacts the team performance dramatically. The more trust the leader has the better performance the team generates. As a result of trust, people get motivated to exert additional efforts. Leaders should carefully look into keep trust up through actions.  Also, create momentum and dynamics within the team need continues lead by example. Agility, flexibility and lean methodologies require a lot of actions from top levels towards ground level operations. Leaders who have the talent to lead by example are in a stronger position to apply these methodologies.

Fourth aspect is learning. “Learning is Essential for Leaders”, Kouzes and Posner believe that leadership is an observable pattern of practices, behaviors, skills, and abilities that can be learned. The best leaders are the best learners. To become a better leader, leaders should spare time to continuous learning and deliberating practices. Teams are unlimited source for learning. Being a part of a team is an opportunity for knowledge sharing, experiences exchanging and on job training. Leaders can access a huge amount of practical information throughout their teams. Definitely the tools for learning will remain vital. Books, seminars, conferences, class room training and other tools are still important. Nevertheless, these tools are not enough for leadership excellence unless learners apply best practices within teams. This kind of action learning process allowing continues improvement in the entire team learning curve. The more engagement the leaders with their teams the more mature the team work as a result of progressing learning. The good news is that, the newest information is available within the team in most cases. The real challenge is to discover them out. The leaders who are close to their teams are promoting information exchange and incentivizing knowledge sharing. Leader is responsible to create a learning culture within organizations. The continuous learning is critical for organizations to stay on top of business evolution. The evolution in business models, processes, methodologies and technologies have to be carefully considered for active learning. Organizations consider active learning in its core competencies are leading trend setting in their industries. Leaders should keep learning on top of continues improvement agenda.

Fifth aspect is asking proper questions. Leaders need to know how to ask proper questions to lead their teams. Being part of a team allows leaders to build the talent of leading by questions. Ultimately, leaders should be using questions to build teams. “Teams are now the predominant unit for decision-making and getting things done”. The traditional leader focuses on control, seeks to minimize risk, and pushes to be the initiator of action. Such a leader tends to give commands via statements, to control change, hoard information, and foreclose debate.  From the traditional perspective, the team exists for the convenience of the leader.  The result is a group that achieves limited development, remains dependent on the leader, asks few questions, and accomplishes relatively little.  That’s exactly the opposite case for leaders who master the use of questions to lead teams. It is a culture shift for the team to be familiar with asking questions and challenge the status quo positively. 
Leaders should spend more time with their teams to understand what type of questions will best fit the team’s culture. Questions are used to shape better thinking, consider more views and ensure details fulfillment. Leaders don’t need to know each and every answer of questions. They rather need to enable their teams to find out the most accurate answers. Alternatively, the team members should be asking questions to clarify objectives and align team work efforts. Thinking of questions as an opportunity to improve rather than a challenge; facilitates team building big time. Thought leadership can be improved using asking questions as a genuine tool. Leaders, who master asking questions, are implementing a rational decision-making process within their teams. The rational and logical decisions yield to get things done efficiently by the team. The reflections of the questions culture on the team work are realized through high quality, proactive approach and effective communication. “Giving Orders Is Very Costly”, Giving orders can trigger resentment and defensiveness in the team. By keep giving orders only, a leader can demoralize and demotivate not only that person but others around him, while eroding her/his authority and confidence. To overcome such disaster circumstances, leaders should maximize the use of asking questions to lead more effectively.

Sixth aspect is work team cohesion. Leaders have to create work team cohesion in order to maintain the team.  Being part of a team is so crucial for leaders to create and maintain cohesion. This aspect is usually underestimated by leaders even those who do very well in team building. To protect the team continuity, leaders should pay attention to the level of work team cohesion. When it comes to cohesion emotional intelligence play a dominant role for leaders. “Emotional intelligence will moderate the effect of specific personality traits on leader and team member interactions”.  As part of the team interactions; emotionally intelligent leaders strengthen the team relationships and create a solid team support system. The leader’s abilities in emotional intelligence keep viable work team. The leader needs to stay on top of strong relationships within the team and carefully grow the team. The team needs to grow and will continue to grow weather the leader like it or not. The smart leader will stay on top of the team growth and keep the team relationships up via emotional intelligence. This is an additional strong reason for leaders to be effective part of their teams.

Seventh aspect is collaboration. Leaders have to promote teamwork towards collaboration. “A business leader cannot innovate alone. So, innovation involves creating cultures and systems that effectively sustain innovation”. The leader is required to work closely as part of her/his team to change mindset towards collaboration. This collaboration includes connections with people and organizations outside (external collaboration) combined with those within the organization (internal collaboration).  Teams are a major tool for promoting internal and external collaboration. Having the leader part of the collaborative team, is the most influential factor for innovation. Significantly, team leaders play the critical role in providing teams with such clearly stated, shared and inspirational innovations. In particular, top leaders work to creating a climate in a work team that supports creativity helping team members feel more comfortable about taking risks, applying new ideas and exchanging information more freely. Leader’s support among team members to look for innovative ideas and practices predict greater levels of innovation, as well as more novelty in those innovations. “Truly innovative ideas do not come out of isolation. They often originate from several disciplines, a combination of quite different technologies or a combination of ideas and inputs from employees, customers, information technology specialists, researchers and business partners”. Leading innovation mandates leaders to crowd-source ideas hand by hand with the team.