Growing Your Business With Innovation and Divergent Thinking



Sinead Connolly, CEO and founder at Lotus People, has been running the office support and HR recruitment agency for eight years. Owing to its creative approach to recruitment, the agency has tripled in size since early 2021, with more than 20 staff members across its Sydney and Brisbane offices. 

Empower Everyone to Contribute

“To manage growth, we’ve implemented committees for diversity and inclusion, performance and continuous improvement, corporate social responsibility, and social get-togethers. Each of these committees pulls everyone into a room to talk about what’s working, what’s not and brainstorm ideas. In my mind, creativity in leadership is about giving people space to come to the table and feel empowered.

We've seen huge results from this approach. Some of it is around clarity and communication of policies. Some of it is simple changes that impact the day-to-day, like occasionally moving our regular morning meeting to the afternoon to encourage team bonding, which can be impacted by hybrid working. 

‍Use Technology to Innovate and Inspire Business Growth

Investing in automation software is helping to improve our marketing. It’s not necessarily an innovative approach in marketing, but it’s innovative and inventive in our sector. The software produces a ‘hot leads’ list that shows us how, say, 250 potential clients have engaged with us: perhaps they’ve downloaded reports, clicked a particular link or revisited the website. Having this data and being creative in how we use it to go out to market [by the sales team being able to contact people in a more targeted way] results in an immediate lift for our sales team.”

Sinead’s creativity tip: “Give your team time and space to be creative. We tend to fill our diaries and schedule our days, which can get in the way of creativity. [American business magnate] Warren Buffett always said he never had anything in his diary other than an appointment for a haircut!”

Read more at officeworks.com.au!