The sales training expert Robin Fielder says, ‘Never, ever forget that people [...]]]> People will not follow an unenthusiastic leader.  They will follow someone who has a vision and is passionate about it.  Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela showed great passion for what they believed – it was what made them great leaders.

The sales training expert Robin Fielder says, ‘Never, ever forget that people are more persuaded by your convictions than by your arguments.’

Jim Collins puts it like this; the good to great companies did not say, ‘Okay folks, let’s get passionate about what we do.’  Sensibly, they went about it the other way round entirely: We should only do those things that we can get passionate about.  Kimberley-Clark executives made the shift to paper-based consumer products in large part because they could get more passionate about them.

Here is an exercise that we sometimes conduct on leadership courses.  Think for a moment about a key component of your vision for what you want to achieve for the business this year.  Choose a single important goal that you as a leader want to accomplish.  Now imagine that you expressed that goal to your people in a dull, boring, unenthusiastic way.  What would happen?  Now consider how you could communicate the goal again, but this time with passion, with energy, with commitment, with enthusiasm.  If you were receiving those two kinds of messages how would you react?  Which message would inspire you to change your behaviour, to do something extraordinary, to go the extra mile?

Focus on the things that you want to change, the most important challenges you face and be passionate about overcoming them.  Your energy and drive will translate itself into direction and inspiration for your people.

It is no good filling your bus with contented, complacent passengers.  You want evangelists, passionate supporters; people who believe that reaching the destination is really worthwhile; people who are on a mission to make the world a better place.  This drive and enthusiasm starts with the leader.  If you want to inspire people to innovate, to change the way they do things and to achieve extraordinary results then you have to be passionate about what you believe in and you have to communicate that passion every time you speak.

Paul Sloane

Within larger organisations one of the biggest obstacles to innovation is poor internal communication. A ‘silo’ mentality develops so that departments guard information and ideas rather than share them. People work hard [...]]]>

Within larger organisations one of the biggest obstacles to innovation is poor internal communication. A ‘silo’ mentality develops so that departments guard information and ideas rather than share them. People work hard – but in isolated groups. Internal politics can compound the problem with rivalry and turf wars obstructing collaboration. It can reach the ridiculous stage where the enemy is seen as another department inside rather than the competitors outside.

The leader has to tear down the internal fences, punish internal politics and reward co-operation. This sometimes calls for drastic or innovative actions.

Nokia has an informal rule that no-one should eat lunch at their desk or go out for lunch. People are encouraged to eat in the subsidised cafeterias and to mix with people from outside their department. They have found that the informal meetings across departments are beneficial in sharing ideas and understanding. Every organization has to find ways to promote internal communication and collaboration and to fight internal division and competition. Here are some ideas for breaking down barriers to communication:

• Publish everyone’s objectives and activities on the intranet so that people know what other people are working on.
• Organise cross-functional teams for all sorts of projects. Make them as loose or as formal as you see fit but be sure that there is good mixing and that all the departments involved contribute.
• Arrange plenty of social and extra-curricular activities e.g. sports, quizzes, book clubs, hobby clubs, special interest groups etc.
• Have innovation contests where cross-functional teams compete.
• Have frequent secondments between departments.
• Deliberately rearrange the office layout from time to time so that people move desks and sit with new groups (or adopt a hot desk approach).
• Organise a cross-functional innovation incubator.
• Encourage department managers to look for ideas, input and solutions from outside their departments. Publicly praise managers who do this.

It is natural for departments in organisations to become more insular. As the organisation grows, good internal communication becomes more and more difficult. There was a saying in Hewlett Packard – ‘If only HP knew what HP knows!’ Very often the knowledge and skills needed to solve your problem exist elsewhere in the company. Knowledge sharing and collaboration are essential for innovation success. A key responsibility of the innovative leader is to constantly fight the silting up of the internal communications and to force contact and sharing between departments.