Successful Innovation requires Strong Change Leadership

The Conference Board in 2008 listed global CEO's top concerns gloabally as organizational flexibility and adaptability to change consistently. Only revenue growth was of higher concern.

Worldwide in the rapidly changing and tubulent economy companies are under pressure to "do more with less." Customers are demanding "better, faster, cheaper" everything. Competition is fierce. The pace of change is accelerating. And employees are increasingly skeptical about committing to business strategies that are constantly being redefined.

Even more challenging is the concept of co-opetition as companies increasingly need to rely on a shifting alliances - competitors one day and partners the next Corporate streamlining is an annual affair. Mergers and acquisitions are on the rise - as companies acquire to shore up short-term revenues and fail to to realize the long term value promised.

This is our current business reality and successful leadership belongs to those who keep their employees resilient, positive, and engaged dealing the constant beat of change.

Irrespective of these realities senior executives continue to make 3 major mistakes when managing change:

o Deeply understanding what it takes for an organization (or a team or a department) to go from "surviving change" to "thriving on change"
o Understanding the difference between incremental and discontinuous change - and the emotional literacy needed to lead people through both
o Recognizing how change really gets communicated through an organization (ie: the power of social networks and the grapevine, and the silent language of leadership (non verbal communication). Too many organizations rely on traditional forms of communication, employee newsletters, emails, town hall meetings, rather than effective dialogue and discovery feedback loops at the grassroots and management levels giving them the tools they need to lead their work teams more effectively.

The Killer Silent Leadership Language

All leaders have a choice in how they communicate their vision and key messages to all stakeholders. They can either express their perspectives with: openess, passion, confidence and warmth - as well as with arrogance, indifference, and displeasure through their facial expressions, gestures, touch, eye contact, and use of space.

When a leader's nonverbal messages conflict with his or her verbal messages, people become confused. Mixed signals have a negative effect on performance and make it almost impossible to build relationships of trust. This is as true for a chief executive officer or a department head as it is for a team leader or a first-line supervisor.

Evidence from psychology, neurobiology, medicine, sociology, criminology, and anthropology has given nonverbal communication new credence in the workplace. Body language is more powerful and primitive than verbal expression. By correctly reading other people's nonverbal cues, you can discover their underlying meaning. And by aligning your body language to support the content of your messages, you become more credible and persuasive.

The Power of Collaboration

"Knowledge is Power" is an old cliché with some truth, but knowledge shared across the organization is a new realization of something more powerful. A company's competitiveness is a combination of the potential of its people, the quality of the information that people possess, and the ability to spread that collective wisdom throughout the organization.

Successful collaboration is more than the technology that supports it, more than a business strategy aimed at optimizing a company's experience and expertise, and even more than a cultural shift from the industrial to the information age. Powerful collaboration is, first and foremost, about people - and their reluctance or willingness to share what they know.

Creating trust in the organization and trust in its leaders is an important first step to creating a collaborative culture.

Successful Innovation requires Strong Change Leadership

Often when we are helping organizations improve their innovation capabilities, we look to see if there is an effective change management competency. More often than not we do not find evidence of a formal innovation change management methodology and leadership program which specifically targets developing expertise in change management discipliens.

Nurturing new ideas requires supportive and collaboration business practices to ensure that new germaine ideas can grow effectively. The leadership behaviors required for innovation require strong change management expertise as an organization's nervous system more often than not treats new ideas like an invading virus and the overall system work to disable or prevent the new innovation from taking stronger roots. This is one of the main reasons organizations often extract new commercialization projects away from the core of an organization's operating practices.

In summary, the objective of this blog is to reinforce the importance of organizations developing innovation programs to ensure that they train their leaders on change management skills in order to improve their innovation leadership skills.