Leadership is influence. Leadership is complex because there’re so many variables in it, leadership is simple because the substance of leadership is about future and progression. Innovative leadership is when you think, act and enable others with a creative spirit that drives leapfrog changes.
Visionary leaders should inspire people to think bigger and motivate them continually to “reach beyond their grasp”: The purpose of leadership is to grow the business and advance our society. Therefore, vision is critical to steer the organization towards the uncharted water without getting lost in the right direction. Leadership is about change in the pursuit of longer-term goals to be realized through the achievement of nearer-term objectives. So the vision and intention of becoming a leader are to facilitate and encourage, as change is often an uncomfortable, yet necessary part of reaching and maintaining success.
The ultimate criterion of innovative leadership is to envision the future trends in business, technology, and society, explore growth opportunities, develop more authentic and creative leaders, and spread leadership influence. Innovative leaders are the ones who are capable of predicting future trends, managing the presence and delegating the past. In each context, an innovative leader is always conscious of the changes needed to connect the past with the future, identify the proper vision for each cycle in the life of a corporation, and inspire the team to achieve the “art of possible.”
Innovative leadership is essentially anchored on the leader’s overall multifaceted resourcefulness to solve problems in alternative ways: With exponential growth of information, shortened knowledge lifecycle, and continuous disruptions, even the top seasoned leaders admit there are known unknown and unknown unknown. Thus, innovative leaders are more learning agile, recognize their limitations, present the ability to learn, know how to learn, swim in the sea of information effortlessly, build a resourceful team with complementary mindsets, skillset, and toolset, take innovative activities from sowing the seed of creativity, growing the innovation fruits, to reaping innovation benefits.
With clarified vision to innovate and strong leadership to influence, resourceful innovation leaders demonstrate the multidimensional competencies to formulate creative ideas or alternatives solutions to complex problems. In practice, successful capacity planning and management are critical to ensure that resources are available before they are needed. Rebalancing resources helps the organization take advantage of resources effectively, optimize cost, and strike the right balance of “running, growing and transforming” business steadfastly.
Innovative leaders as “creative global communicators’ ‘ are in strong demand to combine with renewed attitudes mixed with cross-cultural cognizance, to make profound influence: Leadership is an influence based on vision and communication, attitude and actions. Today, many leaders have sympathy, but lack empathy. They intend to help and manage people to solve problems. However, sometimes, it goes in the opposite direction. Empathy is a very important soft skill that is frequently undervalued. Innovative global leaders present creative communication skills, culture empathy, build up a positive emotional climate, foster cross-boundary relationships, collaborate relentlessly to amplify leadership influence.
Every leader and organization face obstacles that are difficult to surmount, from corporate executives confronting the complex global marketplace to educators trying to unleash human potential. Innovation leadership is the capacity to think, communicate, and act beyond the boundaries that limit effectiveness, present solid leadership attributes such as “full open communication,” “out-of-the-box-thinking creativity, “integration,“”ownership,” “self-adaptation,” and “resilience.”
The more “innovative leaders” we have, the better for the world. Innovative leadership is the unique combination of leadership mentality, attitude, and behaviors that develops creativity and achieves high quality and meaningful results over a sustained period of time. The collective progress is driven by innovative leadership to leapfrog human society. Sometimes progress cannot truly be considered progress for humans as a species unless it is helping a very large group. Clarify the vision and objectives, show versatility and flexibility in response to unpredictable or unanticipated circumstances, move from sympathy to empathy, scale up leadership capacity, and amplify leadership influence.
