A check-list tool for leaders driving rapid change

Are you an entrepreneur leading a rapidly growing company needing to define your innovation strategy, or are you a leader of a team within a larger organization needing to fuel your innovation rate? Then this checklist will help you. Follow these three steps to kick-start your innovation strategy for rapid change.

Define your overall company objectives and your WHY (or run through them one more time).

Even if you’re part of a very big company it’s important that you understand where your company is going and the why behind everything you do as an organization. Before looking at your own team and your challenges you need to make sure everyone in the team understands how your work fits into the bigger picture of your entire organization. 

To get started with this step ask yourself, and your team, the following questions: 

1. What is the why of your organization? This is different from your team goal since it is rather your reason for existing in the bigger world outside your own organization. Try to phrase this in one or two sentences and most importantly make sure everyone in your team understands it. 
2. What is the overall objective of your company? Here we look at the inside of the company. When delivering on your why – how do you do that as a company? That should be defined as your goal.
3. Finally, how do you measure success? How can you measure that you’re delivering on your why and your objective in a way that everyone can understand and break down into projects and responsibilities. 

Define your abilities as a team and the abilities that you lack.  

After having defined the bigger picture it’s now time to look at your very own team and the role you play in reaching the company goals. This is important in order to make sure each and everyone is spending time on what they should be doing in order to get there, but also that you as a leader are providing your team with the right conditions to achieve the goals that you have agreed on. 

In this second step you take a close look at your abilities, and lack of abilities, to reach your why and your goals. Get started by mapping out the following: 

1. What are the required abilities you need as a team in order to reach your goals? List them one by one. 
2. Measure your abilities. How strong are you in each ability? Are there some that you are weak in or some that you don’t have at all? 
3. Define a potential ability gap. Is there a gap between the abilities you have and the ones you need? This is the gap you need to work on before getting started on your growth. 

What’s your action plan? 

After having defined your why, your objective, and your ability gaps it’s time to start building a plan on how you will go about filling the identified gaps in your abilities. This is the very first project you will start working on before you even start building your innovation and growth strategy so make sure you do it right. Get started by going through the following questions with your team: 

1. What gaps have you identified? Define and document them clearly so that everyone in the team understands them. 
2. Why do you think each gap exists? Are there any quick wins in order to fill them or will they take time? List them one by one. 
3. What solutions can you think of? Under each defined gap, start listing potential solutions. 
4. Is everyone onboard? Make sure that everyone in the team agrees on the identified gaps, what the best solution is in order to fill them, and finally divide tasks and ownership and get started.