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As Paul Cook, former CEO of Raychem Corporation, once stated in the Harvard Business Review, “The business of business is innovation.” But if coming up with new and better ways to do things - the essence of innovation - is so important to business, why are so few managers taught how to be innovative leaders?

Ask more employees and they’ll tell you that their managers seem to want anything but new ideas. Here is a four-step strategy managers can use to help bring innovation to the workplace and become the kind of leader businesses need for success.

1. Focus Attention on Innovation
The most important role managers play in an organization is to focus the attention of employees on what they need to do to make the business succeed. If leaders don’t set that goal, how do employees know what they should be working toward? The best way to focus attention on innovation is to make the concept a part of your business’ mission statement.

Drive this message home by talking about it during every meeting. Circulate articles that feature other innovative companies. Make your employees understand that it’s just this push for innovation that sets apart successful organizations from not-so-successful ones. Actions like these will provide the initial power needed to get the innovation process under way.

2. Conduct an Innovation Audit
The next step is to take a look at how innovative your organization currently is. Where are its strengths and where are its weaknesses? This enables you to build on the good things you already do and make improvements in the problem areas. For example, on the plus side, find out who are the idea people you can call on, what groups work well together, and what innovation successes you already have.

You also need to find out what obstacles to innovation may be in place - does your organization punish mistakes, is there too much bureaucracy, or do you operate in a crisis environment with too many problems and not enough time? Other key questions you need to ask may include how much R&D money is budgeted, if your people are more comfortable reacting to change than creating it, and how innovative your customers expect you to be.

Make sure everyone gets a chance to participate in the audit. Your ultimate goal is to learn whether people believe that their ideas are valued in your organization and why or why not that is the case.

3. Stimulate Everyone’s Innovative Power
To create an environment where new ideas can flourish, you need to open your business environment. Layer upon layer of decision-makers prevents new ideas from moving up an organization. A good rule of thumb is to reduce vertical bureaucratic layers to just three or four levels of management, from the executive suite to the mailroom. Do the same thing horizontally. Don’t allow departments to become little fiefdoms, each running its own show without regard for the impact it has on the other departments. To prevent this, set up ongoing innovation teams where groups of seven to 10 people from different disciplines and different levels, together with a senior manager for support, work together to identify key business challenges, and come up with the new ways to address them.

4. Move Ideas Along Quickly
Putting new ideas into practice will always be your greatest challenge. It was a poet, Johann Goethe, who said that to put new ideas into action is the most difficult thing in the world. As a businessperson, you would be wise to take those words to heart. Strong leadership is critical at this stage of the process. To make sure you not only capture new ideas but actually implement them quickly, you need to clear the way for hot ideas to move rapidly around and up through your organization.

Each proposed innovation that shows promise should be assigned to an idea champion, someone from among the senior ranks who has credibility, respect, and a reputation for getting things done. Give these people “fast-track authority.” For example, they should be authorized to commit seed money to explore an idea. If the idea seems promising they can pull people together to develop it. They can also push timetables up, setting faster deadlines than normal to make sure the innovative project moves along quickly.

Don’t allow too many changes to be made along the way. This well-known stalling strategy plays into the hands of those people who don’t want any new ideas to see the light of day.

In business today, says Louis Gerstner, Jr., former CEO of IBM, there should be “no more prizes for predicting rain. Prizes only for building arks.” Follow these guidelines to become the innovative leader your organization needs to survive the storms of the 21st century.