Successful leaders must be innovative to continue their success. Managers, bosses, and entrepreneurs who have longevity often, create or facilitate new ways to make themselves and their businesses betters, and they motivate their teams to do the same. Becoming complacent is not an option in today's world where the sky is the limit and the competition is fierce. Finding better strategies to do what you do best is key to expanding your professional horizons and ensuring your personal and career advancement.
Inc.com offers five steps to upgrading your "Way-Of-Working (WOW).
1. Begin with a brainstorm.
"Hey, what if we tried X, I bet it would improve our success rate." We play it out in our heads a bit, see if it passes the sniff test-namely, the leap of faith or logic we have to make to believe in a new WOW is reasonable.
2. Find an opportunity to test the new WOW.
We look for a situation where we feel very comfortable taking the risk, or where we have nothing to lose.
3. Set preliminary goals and a timeframe to met those goals.
4. As the initial timeframe expires, check the results to determine whether:
a. We have achieved our initial goals with flying colors and are ready to scale our WOW and add it to our permanent arsenal.
b. We have achieved some of our goals, but need to tweak the WOW and try something new. If so, set a new timeframe and some new goals, and check again then.
c. We have not seen the success we wanted and need to discard the new WOW.
5. Lather, rinse, repeat.
With so many different approaches, we have no choice but to discard those that are not working. We simply do not have the time to become overly attached to any particular WOW. If it isn't working, fix it or discard it quickly. If it is working, scale it
and tweak it to get bigger, better results.
This approach has allowed us to become a quickly evolving, entrepreneurial organization. We are very pleased with our successes to date, but still feel we have so much to learn and grow. We will undoubtedly have a very different (and, we hope, more successful) WOW two or three years from now than we have today.