Fostering Innovation and Leadership for Your Organization

Our February 16, 2007 FountainBlue's Connections panel was on the topic of Leadership Matters - Fostering Leadership and Innovation for Your Organization.

An organization's success ultimately rides on the leadership abilities of its key decision-makers, particularly in Silicon Valley with its heavy profile of fast-moving technology companies. These organizations must innovate both their technology and business model continually in order to prosper.

The fact that few organizations rise to be clear stars and long term winners is testimony to how difficult it is to create and sustain a climate of leadership and innovation. For those who have, what are they doing right and how are they doing it? What do you need to do to do to create your own culture of leadership and innovation?

Our panel represented the HR, Strategy and Executive Management perspective on what it takes to foster that dynamic, engaging and exciting culture which attracts and retains the best and the brightest.

• Facilitator Linda Prowse Fosler, Linda Prowse-Fosler and Associates
• Panelist Barrie Novak, Director of Organization Design & Development, Global Technical Services at Cisco Systems
• Panelist Donna Novitsky, partner from MDV
• Panelist Ramon Nunez, CEO of MetaLINCS

Each panelist spoke on:

• The cardinal rules of leadership and why leadership is more important now than before
  What your organization is doing to maintain its competitive talent and maintain their edge in innovation
• Advice and suggestions on how to foster leadership and innovation

In the meeting, we thought deeply about their recruitment, retention and development strategies and also the overall about developing a corporate culture centered around innovation and leadership. Below are notes from our session:

Thoughts on Leadership

• Have a vision you are passionate about
• Focus on the needs of the customers - ask them what they want and adapt your business strategy based on customer needs
• Communicate it clearly, passionately and often. Seek buy-in.
• See clearly who can contribute to the vision in what specific ways - even if they don't see it themselves
• Empower others: Give people the room, space and time to innovate in their own way
• Affirm your people; be proud of who they are and what they do, and communicate that to them regularly
• Adopt a common mindset of empowerment rather than 'victim' or 'blame' as empowerment helps people focus on how they are involved with the situation, what can be changed and how their perceptions might be skewed.
• Distinguish between when alignment is important and when agreement is important. Alignment means everyone buys in even if it isn't their first option and agreement means that the choice is everyone's first option.
• Assess three areas of trust within a relationship: competence, reliability and motive. Consider what makes your assessment of the relationship as high/low as it is and what needs to be done to change that assessment from both sides.

Thoughts on Innovation

• Develop a process for taking ideas and transferring them into commercial value
• Communicate the process and be transparent about the process
• Ensure that the process is within the parameters of the law (employment laws and IP laws, for example), but don't let legal compliance issues be an obstacle to innovation
• Leverage hiring and layoff discussions as opportunities to manage your IP. This sets the expectation up front and also at the end of an employment agreement without infringing too much on day-to-day innovative activities of the typical employee.
• Make it part of the organization's culture to innovate - communicate innovation at all levels of the organization
• Treat everyone as an innovator
• Believe that everyone has the best interest of the company in mind
• Have an 'open kimono' perspective on communications: Communicate the successes and
• challenges for the organization and engage others in addressing challenges and leveraging successes
• Find ways to say 'yes' to someone's ideas
• Welcome creativity and innovation in start-ups; don't squelch that natural tendency in start-up employees by enforcing too much process, discouraging out-of-the-box thinking, etc.,
• Spend more time with the early adopters of change, and less time with the resistors. The early adopters will help turn around the mind-sets of those who are in the middle of the bell curve.
• Separate innovation from implementation
• Allocate the funds and resources for innovation
• Ensure that innovation is in alignment with business goals
• Innovate in all areas, from technology to business models to HR, etc.,
• Balance resource management/bottom line with need for continual innovation.

See also an article about Barrie Novak's leadership alignment project at Cisco by visiting an HR Forum article available at

http://www.hrforum.com/pdf/hru/advisory-board-profile-barrie-novak.pdf.