Five ways leaders can support innovation

Most organisations want to be more innovative.

Innovation appears in strategies, transformation programs and leadership conversations. We know it's important. We also know it's becoming more important as organisations respond to changing community expectations, technology and increasingly complex challenges.

But innovation is the outcome. The starting point is creativity.

As leaders, the pressure is real. We often feel short on time, unsure of our skills, or think of innovation and creative work as something that happens in projects or dedicated workshops.

This was my experience too.

When I first started working in the innovation space, I ran design thinking pilot projects. At the time I was short on time, skill and experience in embedding this new way of working across the organisation.

The projects generated ideas and enthusiasm. But one thing I learned is projects will only take you so far. The other is that to be innovative, we should be focused on creativity.

Innovation is the harvest of cultivated creativity. Photo: Markus Spiske, Unsplash

Leadership is a creative act

When I think of something creative, I often think of something artistic or novel. If you search online for images of creativity, you're most likely to find paintbrushes, coloured pencils and lightbulbs.

But creativity shows up in everyday work too.

We move across a spectrum of creativity depending on what we're doing, and the supports we need change with it.

Leaders play a big role in that.

Not just in bringing creativity into their own work, but in shaping the environment where their teams can be creative too. If that's the case, then good leadership might be one of the most creative acts there is.

There's a lot of discussion about creativity as a future skill. But if creativity itself is complex and context-dependent, perhaps part of the challenge is that we don't always recognise what it looks like or understand how to enable it.

Creativity makes innovation possible

To build truly innovative organisations, we need to cultivate the conditions for everyday creativity; the conditions that let people observe, think, experiment, reflect and grow.

There's some great research shows that creativity is a key factor driving organisational success. It builds adaptability and performance - and boosts staff satisfaction while reducing stress.

Creativity is the work that makes innovation possible. It's the everyday habit of observing, experimenting, reflecting and sharing.

Everyone is creative. The question is how we create the conditions for that creativity to emerge.

Five things leaders can do to cultivate creativity

If innovation is the goal, here are five places leaders can start.

1. Encourage creative practices and mindsets

Creativity grows through practice.

Make space for people to ask questions, explore different perspectives, observe what's happening around them and reflect on what they're learning. Creativity isn't always about generating completely new ideas. Often it's about seeing familiar problems differently.

2. Empower people to shape how the work gets done

Innovation rarely comes from following every process exactly as it has always been done.

Where appropriate, give people ownership over how they approach their work. Clear outcomes combined with flexibility often create far more opportunity for creativity than prescriptive steps.

3. Share knowledge and encourage collaboration

Ideas improve when they move.

Create opportunities for people to learn from one another, work across teams and build on existing thinking. Many creative breakthroughs happen when different experiences and perspectives come together.

4. Practice leading relationally

Creativity depends on trust.

People are more willing to share ideas, challenge assumptions and test possibilities when they feel heard, respected and feel safe to do so. Relationships don't just support innovation - they're often what makes it possible.

5. Normalise experimentation and learning

Not every idea will succeed.

Treat experiments as learning rather than success or failure. Small, low-risk experiments help teams build confidence, develop capability and discover better ways of working over time. Also consider what gets rewarded and what gets penalised – this is what the culture says it values – and people know.

If innovation is the harvest, creativity is the green shoots.

As leaders, we don't create every new idea ourselves. We create the conditions where new ideas are more likely to emerge.

So cultivate the soil.