Our Archive

Blog Archives

Dropinceo > Blog > 2024 > November

Guest Writer: JL Heather

The Innovation Toolkit: Key Strategies Every CEO Should Know

Media3L is the media arm of The Drop In CEO Brand which stands for Lift, Light and Lead. I like to shine a “Light” on valued partners in my network for which I have the pleasure of knowing JL Heather, Managing Partner and Principle Executive Coach at Centered. Enjoy his through leadership on Innovation and I encourage you to reach out to him and add him as a valuable resource to your network!

Innovation is the lifeblood of long-term success. Yet for many organizations, it remains elusive—a buzzword that sounds great in strategy meetings but struggles to deliver tangible results. Why? Because innovation isn’t a single initiative or a job title. It’s a system—a series of deliberate, interconnected actions that foster creativity, collaboration, and execution.

As a CEO, your role is to ensure that system works. It’s not about micromanaging ideas or dictating solutions; it’s about creating the conditions for innovation to thrive. Based on what we’ve seen at Centered, here are three key strategies to drive real impact from your innovation programs.

1. Understand Your Organization’s Innovation Readiness

Before you can foster innovation, you need to know where your organization stands. Are your teams aligned around shared goals? Do they have the resources, autonomy, and psychological safety to explore new ideas? Understanding these dynamics is critical, yet many leaders skip this step and dive straight into initiatives without assessing their starting point.

Take the time to evaluate your organization’s innovation readiness. Look at the alignment of your culture, processes, and leadership behaviors. Ask tough questions: Are teams encouraged to experiment, or is failure quietly punished? Do your systems and structures make collaboration seamless or stifle it? Knowing these answers helps you identify where to focus and how to unlock your teams’ potential.

2. Embrace Agile Problem-Solving Frameworks

Innovation isn’t a linear process. It’s iterative, messy, and often requires rapid adaptation. To move fast without breaking the wrong things, CEOs should champion frameworks that encourage structured experimentation, such as design thinking or agile methodologies.

These approaches allow teams to prototype, test, and refine ideas quickly, reducing the risk of overinvesting in solutions that don’t work. By embedding agile problem-solving into your organization, you create a culture of progress over perfection—a mindset that helps teams focus on outcomes rather than bureaucracy. Encourage experimentation, celebrate learning from failure, and model the value of adaptability.

A great way to dive in is with a Design Sprint!

3. Build a Leadership Culture That Enables Innovation

Innovation thrives when leadership inspires it. As a CEO, your behavior sets the tone for how teams approach risk, collaboration, and creativity. Are you creating space for exploration, or are your priorities sending a message that execution always outweighs experimentation?

Focus on building a leadership culture that balances vision and trust. Ensure your leaders know how to foster collaboration across silos, encourage open dialogue, and provide psychological safety for teams to take smart risks. Invest in developing leaders who can empower their teams and remove barriers, rather than micromanaging outcomes.

Your Role as the Innovation Enabler

As a CEO, you don’t have to be the source of the best ideas—but you do need to create the conditions for those ideas to emerge. This means understanding where your organization is today, equipping teams with the right frameworks to move forward, and setting a leadership example that prioritizes growth, experimentation, and adaptability.

Innovation isn’t just about big, flashy ideas; it’s about building the systems and practices that make creativity a repeatable, scalable process.  By focusing on readiness, agility, and leadership, you can build a system that delivers innovation not as a one-time win but as a repeatable, scalable process.

The question isn’t whether your organization can innovate—it’s whether you’re building the system to make it inevitable.

About Centered

At Centered, we empower your organization to innovate boldly.

By fostering a culture of experimentation, inspiring leadership, and building high-performing teams, we ensure your business continually adapts and thrives in a changing world.

Comments

 

 

 

Read More

Ban Two-Way Communication and Adopt Two-Way Understanding

When my husband announced we would have new hardwood floors & carpeting on the 2nd floor in our home, I was elated with the change. When my entire world was disrupted that Monday and had to re-arrange all my plans, I did not respond well. What happened? My husband communicated the change. He gave me the details of what to expect. He was frustrated we did not appreciate the process for which I felt really bad. The breakdown came because communication fails when we don’t have two-way understanding of the impact. Let me share more so you don’t make the same mistake in business.

Leaders cascade initiatives and deploy change agents so communications happen throughout the organization. The presentation is polished, videos are recorded and townhalls arranged in hopes that the organization understands the impact. The key word is “Hope”. Where leaders fall short is they invest the communication and not on the outcome of understanding.

A few ideas that can help a leader though this issue to avoid conflict, irritation and dissention among the rank and file.

Invest in Understanding as the outcome of what you’re trying to achieve. The communication is simply the vehicle towards understanding.

  • Ensure you cascade in detail the change and the expected impact
  • Ask people if they can articulate the impact to their work; confirming understanding.
  • Ask people to raise issues associated with the event that were not considered and with open discussion, you can ease the tension.

It’s not rocket science, but when we ask people to think in terms of outcomes and impacts from the end user perspective, we realize we have a lot to learn about communication. Remember the telephone game where what starts out as one message is degraded by the time it gets to the last person.

As leaders we have a responsibility to assure that what we communicate is understood; else we fail to be leaders.

Getting back to my situation; I was banned from my office for two days and could not function in a noisy home that transcended all three floors. There was no escape, so I needed to adapt. I found work arounds, including my basement for which I was able to continue doing business. I later recorded a video thinking I had a virtual background that later failed and I was recording my basement background! How embarrassing, but it added to the humor of the situation and I might say a fun recording!

The next time you have to communicate, change your mindset that you’re in the business of effecting understanding for a better outcome!

If you’d like to discuss how we can build this competency into your team, let’s talk!

Until then, wishing you better Two-Way Understanding!

-Deb

Read More

When “It must have gone to my spam folder” is no longer acceptable in business

I was a bit upset when I facilitated an introduction that would be beneficial to both parties and one person did not respond. I gently reached out to them wishing them well and asked if they had received the introduction. They responded quickly saying it must have gone to their spam folder for which they quickly retrieved and did the follow up. I’m grateful my intervention may help in the conversation, but how often is this the ‘excuse’ that we give to others?

While SPAM folders provide a purpose to protect us from unwanted messages; given we know there are things in there that may not belong, why do we not manage that? In the end, when we don’t mitigate the risk of potentially missing a communication and blame it on the SPAM folder, what does that do to the relationships we do want to nurture? Quite frankly, it sends a bad signal when we give that as an excuse.

As leaders, we need to put in place systems that assure us that we reduce risks in missing transactions or communications. Customers don’t accept communications going to SPAM. Then why do we think it’s acceptable to use this as an excuse for our other interactions? I simply want you to think about your lack of managing your systems reflects poorly to those who are impacted by them.

Instead, I recommend the following:

  • You or designee review the SPAM folder daily and any missed communications, send your apologies for the delay and take ownership of it.
  • Create additional rules in your mail system that “if” and “from” important people or entities, to send them to another folder or mark them for follow up.
  • Unsubscribe from all mailing lists that you don’t want so your name / email is not shared with other mailing lists; causing more SPAM to go to that folder and possibly missing something important.

While technology has become a life savor for us from an efficiency perspective, over utilization and dependency can be our demise and ruin relationships.

So, the next time you find an important communication in your SPAM folder, what will you do? Blame the system or will YOU take accountability for the relationship?

For more opinions from The Drop In CEO, consider reaching out to me for a conversation and maybe I can provide content value for you and your platform or organization!

I offer panel discussion, speaking, content writing and internal podcasting for your organization. Let’s talk about the offers that provide you or your organization value!

-Deb Coviello, The Drop In CEO

Comments

Read More