How to Have Innovation in Your Career
With change being a constant in our business communities, I have found my coaching practice is in constant creation mode along with most of my clients. Companies are looking for ways to grow innovation in their leaders and talent. Innovation is a component of a good career strategy and builds resilience in these challenging and ever-changing work environments.
Your career innovation strategy needs to have the following components:
- Pursuing what you are passionate about
- Leveraging your strengths
- Embracing your weaknesses
- Differentiating yourself
How can you leverage your strengths to differentiate yourself?
What weakness will help you refine your strengths and support the innovation of your career?
The old paradigm of growing one’s career was all about mastering a specific function, working with a good company that developed you and provided more opportunities to keep you engaged and growing.
Today it is a co-creative process where people are responsible for taking action and putting a plan in place for how they will innovate themselves, their businesses and their teams.
As a small business owner, innovation for me means creating new content, programs and products that my client base is requesting. It is not always comfortable and easy; I do have resistance to it at times because it is easy to coast along in a job that I love and feel I am contributing in a meaningful way.
However, if I am not innovating, it is hard to stay relevant in today’s ever-changing market. The more I innovate, the more I leverage my skills, embrace my weaknesses and create new skills that can serve my clients. Innovation allows me to differentiate myself as a coach in a field that I love and teaches me to be agile.
In my newsletter this month, I offered a 3-step process for taking an honest look at what you want to grow in yourself that has meaning to you.
The more we tap into the areas of ourselves that are creative, resistant, and uncomfortable, the more we allow for innovation to lead us down a career path that is rewarding. Innovation is about doing something you haven’t done before – coming up with a new idea and how to make something better.
In the career exploration process I conduct with clients, it is all about getting clear on their values. What is important to them in their work? Then we examine how can they leverage their current expertise, and what weaknesses they need to embrace such as networking, learning a new software, getting a certification, or building mentors inside their organization.
The same applies if you are navigating your career through the corporate structure and positioning yourself for the next promotion.
Putting your attention on how you plan to build innovation into your career strategy is a must in creating a career that thrives in these changing times.