Leadership Challenges: Innovation

As the calendar flips into 2022, businesses and leaders are still negotiating the ongoing challenges of the Covid pandemic, along with other factors. Leadership challenges have continued, and will continue, to evolve in this rapidly changing and often tumultuous landscape.

While innovation may have taken a backseat, at times, during the pandemic, it remains one of the core drivers of business success and sustainability.

Fostering Innovation

What can leaders do to foster greater innovation and creativity amid these changing circumstances? Can remote teams or hybrid ever hope to approach the levels of creativity on face-to-face teams? The good news is that leaders can still drive innovation, whether their teams are spread across the globe or sitting together in a conference room. In fact, remote and hybrid teams may gain benefits in the area of innovation from not being confined to the office space — if leaders are willing to look beyond the status quo and imagine a future of work that actively encourages and supports innovation and creativity.

What are some ways that leaders can foster that innovation?

Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is one way of encouraging innovation after the pandemic has made businesses play it safe.

Psychological safety gives teams the space and support to fully engage in innovation. Without it, ideas are withheld, productive conflict languishes, and ideas centralize with a status quo that fails to break through to true innovation.

Bright, bold ideas and solutions require trust among team members and the assurance that taking risks—and failing—are part of the process.

Reimagining Work

Leaders who want to foster innovation and creativity must also be willing to reimagine “work.” Many of our current corporate practices, policies, and structures are not designed to support innovation. In a pandemic and post-pandemic world, opening up to new possibilities and ways of working offer the best route to innovation.

Innovation and creativity can thrive in remote and hybrid spaces — if allowed to. For leaders, that may mean listening to team members about what helps them be creative and fostering that. While some team members may find creativity in face-to-face sessions, others may value time to gather ideas and reflect on how those ideas might fit together and propel innovation. Some teams may relish more regular creative meetings, while others may need a meeting-free day to focus on innovation and creativity without interruption.

Shift to an Innovative Mindset

Believing that innovation only takes place face-to-face or that innovation will suffer in remote or hybrid teams sets up your team for innovation malaise. As with many other parts of life, our mindset and beliefs determine our reality. A self-fulfilling prophecy can stunt your team’s innovation or allow it to soar.

Worried that your hybrid or virtual team won’t be innovative enough? Innovation and creativity start with leaders. If you believe that they can and will be innovative, put the practices in place to encourage innovation, and encourage your team to shift to an innovative mindset too, you’re likely to find more innovation and creativity than you first expected.