With millennials increasingly taking over leadership roles, it’s important to train them to increase their ability to help their teams to be more innovation-effective.
Samuel Bacharach, in The Agenda Mover, notes three leadership competencies that future leaders should have:
- Innovation Competence. Since not everyone is naturally good at ideation and innovation, leaders need to understand the process of ideation and know how to create safe environments where teams are free to risk and discuss ideas while collaborating with one another.
- Political Competence. As we all know, not everyone will love a new idea. Therefore, the leader needs to navigate the company’s political terrain, anticipate resistance, decide how to handle it, especially by building effective coalitions. Remember, the goal is buy-in by other leaders with the political power.
- Managerial Competence. Once someone on your team has passed the early stages of development – continuing to get resources and keeping the team motivated for as long as needed is the management challenge. Enabling teams to continue working together, during good and bad times, through collaboration and support is critical. Momentum must be sustained to achieve results.
What’s your experience as an innovation leader with these three competencies? What’s your experience with training new leaders to gain these competencies? Share with us.