The Leadership Roles In Bringing Innovation Into Your Practice

Terms like visionaries and thought leaders are very common in Optometry. We often meet with visionaries or act like industry leaders when advocating Optometry at conferences and exhibitions. What is often required from visionaries and industry leaders is to present and talk about the latest innovations and breakthroughs that successful Optometrists are being able to introduce in their practices that benefit both the patient and the business. Recently during and after the pandemic, many leaders started talking about agile companies and how they have been able to implement different innovations to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. Even though defining the problem may bring half the solution, however, most practices still find it hard to transform into agile organizations. The key ingredient to becoming agile is based on innovation at different levels requiring collaboration and co-creation starting from leadership, to teams, and going up to the whole supply chain.

Historically leaders in organizations were the most concerned about innovation. During the past century after the introduction of the principles of scientific management by Frederick Taylor which put the system at the center of emphasis in the corporation, leadership innovation shifted its focus from being strategy oriented to vision and lately to culture to improve productivity and economic efficiency. Hundred years ago when leaders focused mainly on strategy their aim was to build the approach the organization will take to realize the desired future position or structure. A while after visionaries discovered how important it is to focus on the vision that explains what kind of place the organization will be and why it will matter. So while strategy consisted of the blueprint for the foundation and framing of the business and organization, the vision became the roadmap that builds upon the strategy to build the future desired company and its operations. Therefore, leadership innovation that used to be about setting a direction and making sure that people went in that direction, by adding up the organization’s vision, visionaries started looking at the bigger picture and trying to explain where the organization is going and why.

Researching innovation, Professor Linda Hill at Harvard Business School, who is the co-author of the 2014 book “Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation“, found that with the increase in the importance of innovation for leaders, the emphasis began to move from vision to shaping culture and capabilities. The focus that used to be on the vision and how to communicate it to people to follow you in the future is now shifting to getting people to co-create the desired future that requires a different kind of leadership.