Post navigation

← Fresh Bread: Using The Bible In Missional Communities Teens on Mission →

3 Steps Towards A Culture Of Innovation

Posted in Leadership permalink

• Is your team around you constantly come up with new ideas?
• Do fresh opportunities bubble up and flow forth in many of your conversations?
• Are you often reminding your team that this is a marathon, not a sprint?

Or, alternatively, are you frustrated at the lack of innovation in your culture? As you look around, do you see people who have a J-O-B or task to do, but little passion or desire to think outside of the box and to improve what you do?

Either way, you as a leader must respond! I believe that there are 3 keys postures that you see in leaders who foster a culture that values innovation, fresh thinking and new ideas.

“Let a thousand flowers bloom”

1. Engagement

A smart leader should always engage with new ideas that people bring up. There is nothing more frustrating for a team member than someone in power not even being open to their suggestions — if done repeatedly, they will soon be looking for a new outlet for their creativity, usually nowhere near to you! This will leave your culture, as well as your outcomes, poorer for their loss.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you have to say ‘yes’ to every new fangled idea that passes within range of your hearing! Great leaders are focused, and have the ability to discern what will really make a difference in their specific context.

But if your starting posture is one that truly engages with suggestions and ideas, including those that you’d never even have dreamed up by yourself, you communicate a great deal to those you lead. “I respect you as an individual. I value what you bring to our community. I am for you and want to help you be successful and fruitful.” This may sound like you are abdicating authority and power — but actually, by laying down control and empowering others, you will end up having a far greater influence.

In several churches now I have operated as the leader of missional innovation. This means that I am there to catalyze and encourage the mission dreams that are on the hearts of other people (rather than having to come up with all the good ideas myself!) It has been SUCH a joy to see people step forward with ideas and vision, especially when they would never view themselves as obvious leaders in the church. Unless they are complete lunatics, I always want my instinctive response to them to be one that is positive, welcoming and expecting to say, “YES! You should pursue this idea! Now how can we help and resource you?”

As a leader, you are in a position to enable those you lead to better maximize who God has made them to be. Under Jesus your stewardship is above all of people and for people, rather than being primarily focused on assets or the balance sheet.

If you desire your place of work or ministry to truly become a hub of innovation, then you must recognize that your most important role is to be an investor into people. Some call this growing apprentices, others building a leadership pipeline, while the church talks of making disciples. Whatever your vocabulary, a simple on-ramp is to have an open-door, unusual-suggestions-always-welcome mindset, no matter the age, experience or status of the person.

And as a wonderful by-product, you will gain access to some amazingly creative options that you would never have otherwise thought up!

“YES! You should pursue this idea! Now how can we help you?” Click To Tweet

2. Enthusiasm

If a new idea is one that is worth exploring, the smart leader will be a great enthusiast for it. Their communication will be full of positive expectation and encouragement, both in public and in private.

In my mid-20s I spent four years serving as the leader of a church plant, overseen by the pastor of the mother church. John was always such a tremendous encourager of me in all my ideas and experiments. His posture was one that was open to innovation, even when I seemed to be brewing up complete craziness! He knew how to steer and guide me, and I was able to receive that (as well as the occasional no), because I felt valued and championed under his leadership.

Think back to when a leader spoke words of excitement and enthusiasm over you, your work and your ideas. How did that feel? Probably amazing!

This means that you should never underestimate the role of the leader as cheerleader-in-chief.

There are plenty of ways for bad ideas to be weeded out, and there will always be voices of doubt and negativity (often within the heads of those you lead). However, your leadership should be like a greenhouse, where, under your covering, new and young ideas have a protected environment in which they can develop and grow, especially in areas that have a propensity to fragility.

Chinese leader Chairman Mao once declared that he wanted to “Let a thousand flowers bloom.” Whilst we have very different outcomes in mind, we can still recognize his wisdom in this matter – that, in order to build a revolutionary culture of innovation, we need to spend some of our leadership capital in energetic and enthusiastic support of new ventures.

Too often leaders want to judge the fruit before it has had time to form and ripen. Instead, if the new idea is within the parameters of our vision and values, then we should be eager to invest in it through our support and encouragement.

By making sure that you are a leader who is genuinely enthusiastic about the creativity that is being processed by those around you, with a posture that starts with a “Yes!”, you will see some truly unexpected things grow and develop. Even if at some point in the process you end up having to say no, the innovator will remember that you were a great encourager, and will feel able to bring you their next (and hopefully better) dream.

Never underestimate the role of the leader as cheerleader-in-chief! Click To Tweet

3. Evaluation

In a culture that values empowering others, we do still need checks and balances in the system. Done right, these will actually enhance innovation.

When people know that there is an assessment process, they feel able to stretch further, as there is less pressure to be totally self-regulating and always sensible. They also know that they will receive insightful feedback. Rarely does a great innovation appear in its perfect and final form at the first time of asking. The kernal of the idea might be there, but it will usually benefit from prods, pokes and supportive evaluation.

Google famously used to invite their staff to spend 20% of their time on creative projects of their own imagination – which resulted in such things as Gmail, Google Talk and AdSense (which today accounts for 25% of Google’s revenue). However, many ideas had time and energy, sometimes a great deal of it, invested in them, only for the plug to be eventually pulled. Evaluation is a crucial part of innovation.

You need to make sure that you have relational processes in place that allow mistakes to be spotted, coaching to occur, and lessons to be learned. Learn how to celebrate not just successes but also your honest failures. If people see that those who don’t get it right first time are not being cast out into the outer darkness, they will be more willing to try new things.

As I have watched the planting and development of missional communities, I have witnessed literally hundreds of different groups being started, some of which have just not taken root and have ended up closing. It is a great joy, therefore, when I see a leader come back round for a fresh idea for a missional community, having processed and learned from what went wrong before. That, for me, is a great marker of a culture of innovation!

In addition, by modeling what this looks like, you show those you lead how they should act in the projects that they oversee.

Learn how to celebrate not just successes but also your honest failures—here’s how: Click To Tweet

Your Challenge

If you feel that your church, workplace or team is lacking in creativity and innovation, use these three postures — engagement, enthusiasm, and evaluation — to see if you are more of the bottleneck that you had previously realized! Perhaps ask those you lead to read this article and then send you some feedback on how you can do each of these three things better.