Innovation is a frame of mind. The opportunity to create new value for the customer and the company inspires and fuels the healthy individual producer. The team is a platform for realizing their ideas and ambitions.
The team member nurtures the entrepreneurial mindset of their peers with a “yes and” stance that affirms and evolves ideas into innovations.
Corporate hierarchy is the enemy of the entrepreneurial mindset. It imagines that innovation is driven from the top downward; this takes the form of grand ideas that are disconnected from the team’s insights and productivity. Sustainable innovation comes from highly functioning autonomous teams that are made up of individual entrepreneur producers who recognize value in each other’s ideas and bring those ideas to testable fruition rapidly and regularly.
The servant leader protects and nurtures the entrepreneurial mindset with permission and trust that flows through the team to the individual producer.