Three Effective Functions of a True Leader

According to Parker Follet: "The power of integration is the power of leadership. The leader brings out the best in us, bringing together and concentrating what we only feel gropingly and shatteringly. He is a person who gives shape to every man's uncoarctate vitality. The person who has the greatest influence on me is not the one who performs great deeds, but the one who makes me believe that I can perform great deeds."

There are many sources such as podcasts and books available suggesting the effective characteristic of a great leader. However, leaders are made and not born. With proper mentoring and hands-on experience with an added daily dose of leadership knowledge, you can become an effective leader for any organization.

True leaders work side by side with the people they lead to get to know and care about the people they lead. Leaders may lift and encourage their teams by working alongside them. Teaching people involves people management. Team members follow a leader with his instructions and as a role model, and his management style should include the following:

ENGAGE PEOPLE

A true leader can bring people together. They do not want division. Thecommunicate and coach subordinates for optimum performance of a variety of tasks assigned. The mother of contemporary management, Mary Parker Follet, felt that management was the art of getting things done via people. A true leader should engage people in a team. These involve listening to employees' feedback, responding to show empathy, using positive communication between the group, and finding the right solution to a given problem with team effort. Managers and supervisors are leaders where the success of the business is in their hands.

Understand that people you lead want to be valued and challenged.

ENABLE PEOPLE

Companies should have leadership that will enable the full potential of others. Helping people to develop to their full potential is ideal for the success of a business. Leadership is about allowing others to reach their best potential; this is a crucial characteristic of a strong leader; they understand how to get the most out of others. Great leaders become one as great top leaders have mentored them.

ENERGIZE PEOPLE

People may get tired in the daily routine of their job. It is essential to tap on what inspires them, reward their achievement by appreciation, show respect, listen to them and lead by example. Make their daily work energizing. Help people leap from what is impossible to possible. As a leader, be enthusiastic and encouraging with your people. Before implementing some company plan or changes, let the people think out of the box. The people's suggestions and ideas can spark their flame of passion for work. People will get great enthusiasm with the compelling vision from an enthusiastic leader.

INCREMENTAL INNOVATION: STEPPING STONES TO SUCCESS

As a business owner or a leader, you should find granular growth possibilities and enhance performance by innovating products, services, corporate processes, and business models as you create and consistently improve your businesses. Both innovation and growth in the pursuit of corporate stability are necessary for long-term success.

What Do The Executives Say About Innovation?

According to McKinsey Research, there is a significant gap between CEOs' desire to innovate and their ability. Although 84% of executives think that innovation is critical to their growth plan, only 6% are satisfied with their innovation performance. Organizational structures and practices, it claims, are not the answer. Furthermore, while executives recognize the value of innovation, they are frequently dissatisfied and unsure of the problem and how to solve it. 

What is Incremental Innovation?

A sequence of minor improvements and changes to a company's existing products and services that can also include processes and tools referred to as "incremental innovation." In general, these low-cost enhancements help a company stand out from the competitors while also enhancing present goods, services, processes, and tolls. 

These minor adjustments aim to increase its products and services' productivity, performance, efficiency, and user experience (UX). By using incremental innovation, companies can save money and differentiate themselves from competitors.

Businesses can employ incremental innovation to strengthen their market position over time and attract a larger audience to the new and better product features.

GOALS, BENEFITS, AND BEST PRACTICES OF INCREMENTAL INNOVATION

According to Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, the primary driving force behind the release of new products rushed to the market is the rising consumer demand for new products and better results. In reality, new products fail 95 percent of the time. 

By establishing the below three defined goals, incremental innovation can protect against business hazards:

1. Growth of Sales or Profits - Companies may keep their products aligned with current trends, cultural moods, and evolving wants within their market by focusing on modifying the functionality and features of existing products and services.

2. Preserve the Existing Business Models - This method may not offer the same significant returns as other types of innovation. Still, it is a low-risk strategy that reinforces its current position.

3. Create New Business Models To Enhance Existing Models - Incremental innovation has a significant cumulative impact on a company's internal processes and efficiency. This method yields consistent efficiency benefits, allowing you to stabilize existing business models before launching new ones. It also aids in discovering and nurturing fresh ideas used in conjunction with the current business.

Below are the Benefits of Incremental Innovation:

It Reduces Risks: Managers are frequently preoccupied with balancing risks and market share. It is always possible to use an incremental strategy, such as making minor but continual advancements without jeopardizing its budget.

Familiar Products with Upgrades: Consumers are more willing to acquire well-known products with new features. This strategy can help the organization increase its product line while also catering to the tastes of its customers. This can also help keep its cash flow steady as they work on more groundbreaking concepts.

Maintain Your Competitiveness: By keeping top-of-mind in the industry with another update or a new feature, organizations may maintain their market share and current consumers using this incremental innovation strategy. 

Presence in Existing Market: Companies can pitch their ideas for upgrades and unique features into the existing market with less uncertainty and risk, knowing that they'll still be able to provide clients with a high level of accessibility.

Low Budget: An incremental plan will not break the bank because it is cost-effective and allows a company to make tiny improvements without investing significant money.

Best Practices of Incremental Innovation:

Know Your Customers: You won't get far in any business if you don't understand your target market. If your current product does not match your customers' expectations, even a minor update can cost you revenue and client loyalty. Before making any changes, you can undertake surveys, customer feedback, or reviews. As you interact with clients, you'll be able to gather more feedback and learn more about their concerns regarding your products and services. These insights will assist you in determining how to create your models following their desire to enhance the user experience.

Decide Where to Focus: This strategy allows faster outcomes, encouraging more individuals to join the innovation campaign. This momentum has the potential to help eliminate doubts. The difficulty is determining where to concentrate your efforts, as there is always a myriad of incremental innovation ideas.

Collaborate: You may construct predictable pipelines for incremental innovation by spreading the task and making it a collaborative effort. In larger firms, this method is necessary because a single department cannot foster innovation across the entire organization.

Wrap Up: Take Advantage of Incremental Innovation

Incremental innovation refers to a gradual change in a company's products, services, or operations that can take many forms. Incremental innovation is critical to a company's success because it allows it to expand and evolve in response to customer and employee feedback and shifting market conditions. 

Incremental innovation is always a vital component of the most successful businesses. A business culture that encourages continual improvement with low risks is the cornerstone of long-term corporate stability and sustainability.

STEPS TO CREATE AN INNOVATION-DRIVEN LEARNING CULTURE

Every industry and aspect of our life is being disrupted by increased technology, and work is no exception. A shift in demand for human expertise is one of the most significant professional consequences of the digital revolution. It's worth noting that half of today's most in-demand work skills and abilities didn't even appear on the list three to five years ago.

Today, intellectual curiosity and learnability are valued highly. To remain employed, you must be willing to improve and adapt to new skill sets quickly. That is why learning is an essential aspect of the talent management strategy of successful companies like Google and American Express. In a report by the HR industry leader Josh Bersin, he pointed out that "The single biggest driver of business impact is the strength of an organization's learning culture."

What is Innovation Culture?

The work atmosphere leaders create unconventional thinking, and its application is known as innovation culture. Workplaces that promote an innovative culture believe that innovation does not have to flow from the top down and can originate from anybody in the organization. Organizations that compete in marketplaces defined by fast change prize innovation cultures; sustaining the status quo is insufficient to compete effectively, making an innovation culture necessary for success.

What is Innovation Management?

The process of managing an organization's innovation method, from the first step of imagination to the last stage of successful implementation, is referred to as innovation management. It includes all of the decisions, actions, and procedures involved in developing and implementing an innovation strategy. This can apply to an innovation-driven learning culture.

Here are the Steps For Fostering A Learning Culture

Continual Learning Should Be Rewarded - According to a Bersin report, the typical employee got only 24 minutes per week for formal learning among the more than 700 firms studied. It's important to note that rewarding curiosity entails more than just applauding and promoting those who make an effort to learn and grow; it also entails cultivating an atmosphere that encourages critical thinking, challenging authority, and speaking up, even if it leads to conflict. This is especially vital if you want your team to develop something new.

Provide Thoughtful, Helpful Feedback - People, especially those not very skilled, are not conscious of their lapses, ignorance, and limits. Others' advice and feedback are crucial in helping them improve. Negative feedback must be delivered constructively and delicately, as individuals are less receptive to it than praise and admiration.

Manager Or Leader Should Lead By Example - You should do what you teach as a manager or leader. Begin by demonstrating some learning and unlocking your curiosity. Don't expect your employees to perform anything you wouldn't do if told. Take on the novel and demanding duties yourself if you want them to take on fiction and challenging things. Here are some behaviors that can assist: learn a new skill, volunteer to work on a project unrelated to your primary profession, or take on duties outside your comfort zone even if you aren't very good at them - you'll be able to demonstrate that with a bit of curiosity and dedication, you can improve, and this should inspire other people that you lead.

Choose to Hire Curious People - Managers often focus on training and development. They tend to undermine the importance of the proper selection of people to hire. When selection works, training and development are significantly less necessary, and successful selection makes training and action far more effective because it is far easier to augment potential than against someone's nature. You won't have to worry as much about their readiness to learn or be on their case to unlock their curiosity if you hire naturally curious people and maximize the fit between their interests and the function they are in.

To summarize, there's no need to rely on your company's official learning and development programs if you want to foster curiosity and learning in your employees. Reinforcing positive learning behaviors, providing constructive and critical feedback to align employees' efforts with the right learning goals, displaying your curiosity as a leader, and hiring people with high learnability and a hungry mind are all likely to help your team and organization develop a more robust learning culture.

The Importance of Psychological Safety in Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging

A diverse workplace is one in which all employees feel included and valued regardless of rank and status. Diversity in the workplace refers to people's differences in color, religion, gender, age, ethnicity, and sexual orientation being recognized, respected, and valued. A diversified team can help the company to achieve more success in the business. To achieve this, the team must work in a welcoming setting that promotes psychological well-being.

A diverse workplace has advantages, but the task is not as simple as putting together a diverse group. To achieve a successful diverse workplace, people with various abilities and backgrounds must work well together. Psychological safety is a critical component of achieving it. It is a strategy for building diversity, inclusion, and belonging in an organization, whether private or public.

What is Psychological Safety?

Psychological safety is an environment where people feel comfortable sharing their thoughts, questions, worries, and mistakes. It is believed that no one will be punished or humiliated for speaking up with their ideas, questions, concerns, or errors; this is critical for maximizing the benefits of diversity because it can help make inclusion a reality.

In a nutshell, psychological safety is about allowing people to be honest with one another. Further, psychological safety refers to members of a group's shared view that the group is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Psychological safety is achieved in an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust of the people.

How to Cultivate Psychological Safety?

There are ways to cultivate and foster psychological safety in the workplace. Psychological safety in the workplace is the shared belief that it's safe to take interpersonal risks as a group. As a leader, you can check if your employees feel psychologically safe. Input from people from various groups is used to measure diversity, inclusion, and belonging.

As a leader, you have to help people feel comfortable and build the shared belief that the team is safe for risk-taking. The first step is to demonstrate your commitment to your team. Make it clear to employees that you are paying attention when they speak. Let them know you've taken the time to listen, comprehend, and consider their viewpoint. Be open to feedback and, most importantly, show your team that you care about their personal and professional development by supporting them.

Psychological Safety Pays Off

Business organizations that promote psychological safety can reap benefits. Among these benefits are better employee engagement and well-being, greater team collaboration, lower employee turnover, more flexibility to change, high performance of employees, and a more substantial workplace. Further, employees will feel more secure, avoid work burnout, and be more engaged at work as a result. They will have a lower likelihood of quitting their employment. Talented people will want to work for outstanding companies with leaders who understand their employees and value diversity.

Another thing is that the greater the ambiguity and need for learning in a given set of tasks, the more psychological safety is required to complete those tasks successfully. This is where psychological safety comes into play in the workplace as a critical element in predicting team success in various domains involving cognitive, emotional, and complex tasks.

It pays off to invest in psychological safety in the workplace. Overall, an organization will benefit from happier, healthier, and more engaged workers by nurturing a positive work culture through promoting psychological safety.

How Can Design Thinking Help Advance DEI Challenges in 5 Stages?

Today's DEI pieces of training and programs are frequently developed with a one-size-fits-all strategy that focuses on changing the attitudes of others. However, by being more strategic and human-centric, thinking like a designer may help us alter and enhance diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) activities.

Design thinking principles can help us holistically handle today's more complex and interrelated DEI concerns using a five-step road map.

The 5 Stages of the design thinking method as mapped out by Stanford University are the following:

1. Empathize

This is the first stage of design thinking. Typically through user research, you should get a sympathetic grasp of the problem you're trying to solve. This involves research and analysis of the gathered data to understand the company's current DEI state.

Empathy is the starting point for design thinking. People are at the heart of DEI's activities. We must have a thorough awareness of our people's wants and feelings to produce value through DEI efforts. It is essential in a human-centered design approach like design thinking. It helps you put your worldview aside and acquire meaningful insight into consumers and their needs.

2. Define

This is the stage of DEI where the problem is defined. To generate the most authentic and emotionally resonant solutions, we must put our associates at the center of the problem-solving issues. We must have to state and define the critical roadblocks that hinder sustainable progress.

The information acquired while in the Empathize stage is compiled. We then have to analyze the fundamental issues that the company and the team have identified. Problem statements are what they're termed. The proper measures to perform are asking the correct questions, selecting the right indicators, spotting the suitable patterns, and coming up with the correct answer.

3. Ideate

This stage is the time to bring in various viewpoints to identify the root of problems and potential solutions. Because we have a strong foundation of information from the last two phases, we can now begin to "think outside of the box," look for new perspectives on the problem, and develop creative solutions to the problem statement constructed. Brainstorming is especially effective in this situation.

4. Prototype

This stage is to start to create and develop solutions. The goal of this stage, which can be an experimental phase, is to find the best potential answer for each problem encountered. We can deliver a program prototype to test the solution's efficacy and relevancy by knowing which elements work and which don't.

5. Test

We pilot the solution to test results and evaluate the next iterative that expands on the existing components during the test stage.

Always pilot a solution with controllable groups before rolling it out on a big scale to test the results and learn from the experience. We have the opportunity to modify early prototypes into solutions with more promising potential based on the collected feedback and observation.

The Changing Leader

The shifts in technology, migration, and globalization have resulted in a new kind of leader. Like the rest of the world, the average leader has become better informed, better connected, and empowered through digital and social channels. This change is accelerating globally, as power, information, and influence are democratized through technology. 

What is Leadership, then?

A simple question, and yet it remains to trouble famous consultants and laypeople alike. I've now written articles s on Leadership for employee engagement, and finally, it occurred to me that I never actually reflected on establishing Leadership.

Let's start with what Leadership is not…

Leadership has nothing to do with ranking or one's position in the hierarchy of a company. 

Too many talks about a company's Leadership, referring to the senior-most executives in the organization. They are merely that, senior executives. Leadership doesn't automatically follow when you reach a particular pay category. Hopefully, you discover it there, although there are no guarantees.

Leadership has naught to do with titles.

Comparable to the point above, just because you have a C-level title doesn't automatically make you a "leader." In all of my talks, I stress that you don't need a title to lead. You can lead in your workplace, your community, and your family, all without possessing a title.

Leadership has naught to do with individual characteristics.

Say the word "leader," and most people imagine an authoritative, charismatic take-charge individual. We often imagine icons from history like Donald Trump. But Leadership isn't an adjunct. We don't need extroverted charismatic traits to exercise Leadership. And those with charisma don't automatically lead.

Leadership isn't management. 

This is the big one. Leadership and management are not identical. Do you have 20 people in your downline and P&L accountability? Great for you; hopefully, you are a good manager. Good management is demanded. Managers need to coordinate, plan, measure, monitor, hire, fire, solve, and so many other things. Typically, managers grow the numbers, whereas, Leaders lead and help the people around them rise.

Each spring, I have a vision for my garden, and with loads of work, cucumbers, squash, and tomatoes become a reality. But does that make me a leader? No, it makes me a horticulturist.

So what is Leadership?

DEFINITION: Leadership is a method of social impact, which maximizes others' efforts towards achieving a goal.

Notice critical components of this definition:

• Leadership originates from social influence, not power or authority

• Leadership requires others, and that suggests they don't need to be "direct reports."

• No specifying of personality traits, attributes, or even a title; there are various styles, various paths, to effective Leadership

• It incorporates a goal, not influence with no planned outcome

A lot of my work is in the area of employee engagement and leadership development. 

Technically, a leader could use social impact to organize others' efforts, but I think Leadership is about maximizing effort. It's not, "Hey everyone, let's line up and get to the top of that hill instantly."Yet instead, "Hey, see that hill? Let's see how we can get to the top together as a team.  

Do those key elements work for you?