Leading Innovation Teams: Facilitative Leadership

In today's workplace, command-and-control leadership is not acceptable. This is especially true in innovation where training is needed in leading innovation teams, where developing a facilitative leadership style is critical.

In today’s rapidly changing marketplace and the challenging economic environment, most businesses have cut all the costs they can.  Now, innovation is seen as the strategy most needed in order to move ahead and stay competitive.

However, innovation efforts often fail because innovation is seen as the responsibility of a select few.  Successful businesses in the digital age are learning that engaging the collective knowledge of everyone is the fastest and best way to innovate, create, and improve.  Leaders are sometimes seduced by what seems an “efficient” way of handling innovation in a small, select group. However, this approach tends to fail on two counts: First, it fails to generate the best, most creative ideas. Second it fails to get the buy-in of the rest of the organization.

A more successful approach is to engage large numbers of stakeholders in an innovation initiative, drawing on their collective knowledge and varied perspectives to create a larger pool of creative responses to the challenges. This approach requires the skill of Leading Innovation Teams to facilitate the process.

Innovating through employee teams led by skilled innovation team leaders helps your organization achieve important benefits:

• More ideas and better ideas for making innovative changes
• Increased focus on creating customer value
• Increased employee engagement through involving more people in generating creative change
• Rapid implementation of innovative change through widespread buy-in
• Challenges are addressed by the people closest to the customer, and often the most familiar with the issues and opportunities
• Increased retention of talented knowledge workers who want to play a more significant role
• Shared understanding of what needs to be done and a sense of urgency about doing it

Leading Innovation Teams Training highlights:

• How innovation teams work
• Strategies for tapping into the collective knowledge, perspectives, and experience of the team
• How to generate creative ideas in a team
• How to help the team reject outdated paradigms and “see with new eyes”
• Group processes and tools for structuring the work of the team
• The leader’s role as a facilitator and idea “encourager”
• How to harness the business application of “wild” ideas
• Facilitation skills to help the team work efficiently and effectively
• How to help the team advocate and make a business case for their ideas

Leading Innovation Teams Methodology

Participants in Leading Innovation Teams spend most of their workshop time in practices with coaching and feedback.  They bring their own real situations to use in the practice sessions and gain insight and skills through customized exercises and case studies.

Leading Innovation Teams Customized Solutions

To ensure that training is not just an “event,” but instead produces enduring results, we customize Leading Innovation Teams to fit your unique situation, business strategy, culture, and people.  After discussion with you and other experts within your organization, we select the emphasis, specific skills to be developed, key learning points, exercises, and case studies for practice to create a solution tailored just for you.

Leading Innovation Teams Applications

The following are some of the ways our clients have used custom versions of Leading Innovation Teams:

• To support an enterprise-wide innovation strategy
• To equip team leaders to engage employees in developing creative process improvements
• To support rapid product development and marketing
• To support customer first initiatives
• To anticipate market shifts and prepare for them

Return To Main Training Page