An Innovation Focus

“Maintain an Innovation Focus.”
-McKinsey & Company

This brilliant advice is important to share with you all. I believe that the more innovative you are, the more your clients will think well of you and want to follow your lead to help them recover from our global dislocation. And there has been no time in recent history when it is more important to be innovative.

Let me make one distinction…being innovative does not mean you have to recreate everything you do, all the time. However, it does mean that you are always looking for ways to improve and are ready to pivot when situations demand it. Case and point…during this pandemic shutdown, I realized I could no longer video record my clients giving their presentations/recommendations, which is an invaluable part of my sessions. With no more in-person training, I had to find a substitute. I needed a solution that would still provide value and let my clients see how they are presenting themselves. In short, I had to innovate. My solution was having each client record themselves via their phone, playing it back for themselves, and then initiating my coaching recommendations. Voila! Challenge solved.

I should note here that nothing I used for this solution was, in itself, innovative. Phones with cameras exist. Sharing videos between people is easy. But what’s important to understand is that I used these technologies to innovate a new way for me to do something that I’ve done for years…just never in this way.

And that’s the point. When you look at current challenges, it’s important that you assess the resources you have to meet each challenge and use your creativity to innovate a new way to accomplish the result you want. As you look at your business, determine where you can innovate your client deliverables. By doing this you establish a new protocol that gets noticed. Whether a client accepts your innovative idea or not, you have credentialled yourself as someone intent on leading the way out of this dislocation into a recovery that works for everyone.

Let me know if you’ve had any “light bulb” moments of innovation recently!  – sg