Leadership and Innovation Characteristics - Transforming Your STEM Career Through Leadership and Innovation - page 81

necessitate a change in your path. When this happens, use the same tools that
you began with as a leader: knowledge of the issues, knowledge of the people
involved, and your experience and input from your team to make additional
decisions that address the situation. Be open and honest in this process as your
team will value your honesty, openness, and willingness to accept responsibil-
ity when the decisions you made weren't as successful as planned.

Willingness to Think Outside the Box
As STEM professionals we often base our decisions, methodologies, and ideas
on historic research, literature, and existing theories - thinking creatively and
outside of the box can be a challenge for us. Additionally, the business com-
munity - prior to the innovation era - is comfortable with “what's been done.”
So being a leader requires a concerted effort to resist this mindset in pursuit of
“better, faster, and more creative ways to accomplish our goals.”
Leaders must be willing to do things in ways they have never been done
before as well as encouraging the team to do the same. This is why innova-
tion and leadership are so related. Innovation and new technologies have made
it easier to accomplish our goals in untraditional ways. Leadership consultant
Kevin Eikenberry [24] suggests the six steps below for leaders to encourage
creative or “out of the box” thinking in your organization:

Reward creativity when it's evident and encourage it with tangible or intan-
gible rewards or recognition

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Have a clear and positive expectancy for new ideas from employees l

Allow time for people to be creative as it takes time to do things differently
and ponder how to apply new ideas to solve a problem

l

Provide a safety net by talking about the risk involved in new ideas and encour-
aging the team to innovate now and think about the risk later

l

Provide stimuli that encourage creativity such as new experiences, articles, or
questioning

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Model the behavior as the leader; if we want others to think outside the box
we must be willing to model the behavior as this will signal sincerity from the
leadership in seeking creativity

l

The application of out of the box thinking also applies to personal and career
development outside of the office. A personal example of how technology has
changed the way we do things is in distance education. Years ago when people
wanted to go back to college, distance learning programs were rare. Thus, an
aspiring student with a family had to make sure their kids were old enough to
be left at home or they had to find babysitters. It was also necessary to find a
college near them that was convenient. Today, classes can be taken from the
comfort of your home - you don't even have to get in your car - you can get
a certification that can propel you to the next level. This kind of innovative
thinking could not have happened without the widespread use of technology,