There’s something about Christmas adverts. You know they’ve been written by ad agencies, and you know that they’ve been designed to drive sales, but funny or tear-jerking they somehow manage to convey the culture of an organisation. You can tell which organisations are serious about their offering and which are focused on the product, and it’s also easy to see which are happy to have fun along the way, delivering great customer interactions along with their offering.

But business culture is not just for Christmas and if organisations want to carry on delivering differentiated experiences, products and services then they have to take steps to ensure that the entire organisation is geared to the preferred outcome. For increasing numbers of organisations that means switching to a more innovative culture, moving the emphasis from what you deliver to how you deliver it.

However, you can’t simply build a culture of innovation at the flick of a switch; your people and processes, attitudes, values and behaviour all have to be realigned to a more inclusive and collaborative way of working. And this realignment starts at the top. Put simply, no matter how much effort the top team take in designing a culture of innovation, redefining the business strategies and building the organisational change matrix; unless the leadership team is prepared to showcase innovation through their every action and interaction then there is little chance of culture change taking hold across the organisation.

I’m going to be honest here; leading innovation is very different from leading a rigid hierarchical organisation. So if business leaders are serious about making the transformation then they may have to schedule some training for themselves before they can expect to see a change in others. Areas such as communication, design and development, and people management, ‘innovation leadership’ as we call it, may all need to be revisited. Leading for innovation means leading for empowerment; enabling people to act on their own initiative and inspiring and challenging them to do more.

We know there is an appetite for innovation leadership out there; countless surveys have demonstrated that innovation is generally recognised to be one of the key priorities for businesses. In fact, the Department for business innovation and skills in 2014 said that ‘innovative businesses grow twice as fast as non-innovators and they are also less likely to fail.’ But we also know that business leaders can either be reluctant to take that first step towards innovation differentiation or simply are unsure where to start. And the answer is simple. Just as the Christmas adverts tell a story which is designed to impact and to persuade, so too business leaders need to step up and design and share their ideal innovation story in a way that impacts on employees, customers and stakeholders.

So when you look forward to 2016 and make your New Year’s resolutions, make a determination to take the first step towards building a culture of innovation your top priority. After all, if you don’t shape your future then someone else will.