Innovative Leaders – 3 Steps to Becoming an Innovative Leader

Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.
– Tom Peters

Are you ready to compete in the modern business world? Today’s leaders need to be highly skilled at business thinking and also incredibly knowledgeable in many areas. If you want to rise to the top of the heap, you also need to learn how to be truly innovative, as a successful manager and a successful leader must know how to combine both business thinking and innovative thinking. You should constantly seek out the new processes and products and use them creatively. This technique, when combined with the right collaboration, will help you rise to the top.

Start with innovative thinking and use this to imagine what you are trying to do with the startup and where you want the business to be in the future. Think of the various potential paths you could take to reach this goal and the possibilities each of the paths contains.

Once you have these ideas in place, the business thinking comes into play. This side of the brain is much more logical and research-driven and can analyze the realities of the current market. Use this side to identify which path is the right one to take. Accelerators are very useful in this stage to help you hone your plan.

By combining these two ways of thinking, you will be able to problem solve effectively.

Once you harness the art of thinking like a modern manager, you can use innovation in three distinct ways.

Redefine the issue

Sometimes we can’t solve a problem because we aren’t looking at it the right way. By introducing innovative thinking into the mix you will start to see the problem in different ways, which will allow you to discover new solutions to the problem.

Consider Square, a company that started the mobile payment craze with their smartphone Square Reader, which can process credit card information or Apple Pay, as well as send receipts through e-mail or text message. Thanks to its innovation and presence as a frontrunner in the burgeoning Fintech business, the company is valued at over $6 billion.

Pay attention to the customer

 A truly successful company will have a deep understanding of its customer base and innovative thinking can help create plans to fully understand this base. Pay attention to your customers’ habits and use that information to improve your product and marketing plans. Do they respond more positively to e-mail notifications of sales or television promotions? How would they prefer to contact the company for further information? Learn about these and similar elements and you can dramatically increase your customer satisfaction rates.

Practice rapid prototyping

A hands-on, try-it-out approach is invaluable to innovation. Rapid prototype-building and testing a new product or concept is a much more productive technique compared to an endless analysis of the product and prototype-building can quickly provide a kind of feedback and knowledge that would typically take months or years to collect.

As well, manage your team and coach them to bring forth their knowledge and expertise to improve the product and the process. Their input will help you pinpoint what works and what doesn’t.

Once you master the art of innovative thinking and become a true innovative leader, you will help lead the business to a place of prominence in the world of business. After all, the businesses that stand out as trailblazers are the ones that create the biggest impact and are remembered as the market changes. So put on your thinking cap and get ready to innovate!