Jeannine Sandstrom and Lee Smith
Collaboration and Innovation don’t happen by themselves. They must be encouraged, nurtured, with opportunities created by leaders. This is not about being creative, it is about being a creator, one who instinctively creates opportunities where collaboration and innovation can flourish. A creator actually causes something to come into being, in this case collaboration and innovation, sometimes through inventive means. The Legacy Leader® becomes an active “opportunity seeker” and possibility thinker. This is an attitude of leadership, not just a leadership action.
Critical Success Skills: Core Competencies
The ten critical success skills that build legacy around Best Practice 2 involve certain behaviors that advance the mere concepts of collaboration and innovation to the place where the leader is responsible for actively and intentionally creating these opportunities. To create collaboration within an organization, the Legacy Leader ensures high levels of trust, develops processes for building and capturing the collaboration, and encourages a team spirit. Creating innovation relies first on the collaborative process, then on a creative environment that challenges new thought, without boundaries.
- Create innovative and sound possibilities for the organization.
- Foster a learning, trusting environment for true collaboration and innovation.
- Masterfully listen for both what is said and not said.
- Be comfortable not knowing “the answers” and learn from individual perspectives.
- Draw out differing perspectives and believe disagreement is a learning opportunity.
- Ask timely, tough questions while keeping in mind the big picture.
- Set the tone for thinking beyond the present in order to innovate for the future.
- Project how ideas will play out in the organization and in the marketplace.
- Discern, and assist others to understand, when change needs to happen and when not.
- Masterfully facilitate conversations so everyone contributes best thinking toward task/goal.
