Innovation is not the monopoly of the R&D Department. Everyone of our staff has highly tuned antennae which pick up valuable commercial intelligence about consumer trends, supplier data and client feedback. Just because they are not wearing white lab coats, doesn’t mean their insights should be ignored. Yet that is what we do in most companies. Innovation is the application of creative ideas into practical products and services. The germ of the idea is where the creativity component comes in and this is available to anyone. The journey from creative idea to idea application treads a path which transcends the scope of one individual. This is where the wheels fall off and most companies cannot capitalize on the latent creativity inside their firms.

Our recent global survey on creative ideas at work uncovered some disturbing findings. Given the intense competition in the marketplace for companies, you would expect that leaders would be doing all they could to seize and shepherd creative ideas through to application. Yet the survey showed that only 21% of leaders were really actively seeking ideas from anywhere and anyone in their organisations. Only 23% of survey respondents answered that it is very easy to get support for good ideas in their firm.

That germ of an idea will start with one person, but will it start at all? If you don’t care about the firm and you are not engaged, you don’t care if the mousetrap being built is better or not. Our research on the emotional triggers for high engagement showed that leaders need to make their people feel valued, confident, empowered and connected. These are all leader soft skills and depend on attitude orientation and communication skills to work. However, the numbers do not look promising. Only 27% of respondents said their manager makes them feel really valued, just 24% strongly agree they feel empowered and 62% said they don’t feel particularly confident in their skills and abilities at work.

Purpose is a key word in business today. Are the leaders actively promoting an emotional connection to the team’s work? Are the daily tasks being connected back to the company’s purpose by the leader? You might be thinking, “no problem, I do that”. However, if we recorded your conversations with your staff for a full day, how much time would have been spent connecting work with purpose? By the way the boss waxing lyrical about “shareholder value” won’t cut it, as a defining purpose for the staff. We need a higher purpose here to motivate people to get out of first gear.

Psychological safety is a phrase we didn’t anything about at work until recently. Today, crusty old leaders like me, have to re-invent ourselves and become more skilled at creating, coaching and maintaining workplace psychological safety. This is not that easy. Many of us grew up in the “suck it up” ethos of fight or flight. “If you can’t take it, then leave and we will replace you with someone tougher who can handle the pressure”. Namby-pamby whiners complaining about their lack of psychological safety are an affront to everything we did in our careers, because we did tough it out and we did climb the greasy pole to the top.

So what? That is not the current workplace. Times have changed and we have to change with them. The War for Talent is unending and is actually becoming more intense. We can’t throw people overboard today, because replacing them will be a nightmare. We just cannot afford to ignore people with ideas, because we are running the show like a demented pirate captain. If the environment is considered safe for idea generation then there is a higher willingness to take risks such as putting forward new and original ideas.

We are often leadership practitioners, rather than genteel philosophers, pontificating on leadership issues. Yet, we have probably developed a certain style of leadership nevertheless. We just haven’t focused on it as a methodology, because we are too busy doing it. We leave the books and articles to the academics, who study this stuff with intellectual rigour, complete vast research projects and then write about business from atop their ivory towers. Or we leave it to other successful business people to have ghost writers assemble their mad ramblings into a coherent form and get it published. Or we have that rare bird amongst businessmen, someone who can write their own tome on the subject.

If we think about the concept of kaizen, continuous improvement, it would make sense to apply this to ourselves, as leaders in our businesses. We should take a moment and examine just what we are doing, why we are doing it and how we are doing it. In this way, we can analyse where there are gaps, inadequacies and fluff. Maybe we received our business education in the University of Life or maybe at varsity, but we cannot rest on what went before, because business keeps changing.

Sometimes you will read a book on leadership and think to yourself, “I could have written that”. It is a bit like comparing your kids daubs at playschool with some modern art and see the results as basically the same. The big difference is you didn’t try and product that piece of art and you didn’t write a book.

The process of getting your random thoughts into a clear and coherent story is the discipline of the writer. We don’t have to publish a book on leadership. If we search “leadership” on Google we get one billion eight hundred and seventy million results. On the US Amazon site it lists over sixty thousand books on leadership, so do we really need another book on the subject? However that same discipline needed to write a book is useful to uncover why we do what we do and why we think what we think.

Start by breaking down what you do as a leader. This will be a bit of a shock, because you will quickly realise that you spend a lot of time managing and doing work, but it is not actually leading. That in itself is a good breakthrough to remind us that we need to work on the highest value items. One of those must be getting results through others and that means more time should be spent on leading the team.

We can take a look at strategy. Is this just some fluff we pump out each year to keep HQ happy and we really haven’t spent any significant time educating ourselves on strategies for growing our company? Have we noticed that a lot of what we do is down in the trenches and we are not spending any time standing on a sunny upland contemplating the bigger world and devising a strategy for the future direction of the business?

We might reflect on our communication. Another shocker. We notice that we are telling people what to do most of the time. We are not engaging them to see what they think, to plumb their experience and garner their ideas. We are shouting out orders like a pirate captain. We also notice that we don’t communicate much about the big issues facing the business. We don’t do many town halls or regular update emails to keep everyone abreast of what is going on. If we attended a meeting of the regional heads for APAC or a get together with the top brass back at HQ, we keep it all to ourselves and forget to share the findings with the team.

How much time do we spend on motivating the team? This is a trick question because we cannot motivate the team. We can only create the culture and environment where they motivate themselves. If you don’t believe me, try shouting “be motivated” ten times to any staff member and watch the results. Leaders get the culture they deserve, so what have you been doing on the culture build front as a leader. Nothing much?

It is a simple exercise to break down the various aspects of leadership in your business and then examine just what you are doing as opposed to what you should be doing. Yes, it is a bit scary, but better to be scared by yourself than a rival or the market. If it goes well, it might be time to reach for the search tool for that ghost writer or getting busy typing yourself.