Coaching offers real benefits for innovation. For instance, in Leadership Coaching, the results offer an ROI on the initial investment of nearly SIX times on average.
Can you imagine this X return factor going through the roof, going way beyond the initial investment if the innovation outcomes ‘take off?
One that delivers the level of growth across the organization’s business, partly gained from a greater awareness of innovation through coaching and how to then apply these different levers within its application to achieve this X return?
It often puzzles me the lack of investment we make in coaching, mentoring, or even facilitating innovation with the use of an external innovation expert. That should change and this is one of my personal goals to contribute to this intent as outlined in my Building a Strong Advocacy Practice on the launch of this site and service.
Let’s look at a possible innovation coaching methodology here
Are you aware we all pass through 4 distinct stages when it comes to learning and being coached?
Unconscious Incompetence – which is the Self-reflection stage
Conscious Incompetence – where you Gain insights with tested tools & techniques
Conscious Competence – we explore Alternative approaches matching to individual’s circumstances and need
Unconscious Competence– gaining the necessary (automatic) Responses for Impact, Behavior change patterns and Results
Coaching innovation is no different
All new learning needs structure and innovation are no different. The critical recognition is it can be often highly specific to the innovation challenges as well as to the individuals or the team’s needs, appetite and conditions to learn. Those that want to develop stronger innovation competencies and capabilities need underlying support from their management, it needs to be embedded in the organization’s need to innovate.
Here I outline a structure that takes a path for innovation change as a triggering point for future discussions if you wish:
If we break down these stages with a set of examples of what makes up the stages, it could possibly look like this
You would look to evaluate progress in each of these but by drawing up a ‘dynamic’ evolving ongoing report card you can quickly pick up on what is having an impact and what still needs that work to be done.
This always needs adapting to each organization and individual or team’s needs, as each has very clear and specific innovation challenges, constraints and context so as to achieve, relate, learn, explore and exploit what is (highly) relevant to them as well as within the whole innovation management process. It takes dedicated focus and time.
Coaching innovation accelerates the potential, it informs and provides a new set of perspectives, and it allows individuals and teams charged with innovation, to adopt a more ‘holistic’ view through this engagement with an external innovation expert.
Are you interested to take this further and explore this more? Imagine the return on your innovation coaching investment when you deploy what you learned into those innovation outcomes that grow your organization’s business exponentially on this investment.