Sunday, August 3, 2008

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.

5 comments:

Ben Simonton said...

Cindy,

I positively love your statement of "Deeply understanding what it takes for an organization (or a team or a department) to go from "surviving change" to "thriving on change"".

That is so perfect.

I managed people for over 30 years using the traditional top-down command and control approach for my first 12. I was aware that the performance of my best people was far above that of the majority and knew that there must be a better tool set than what I was using. A very large organizational theory book led me to believe that my people were more important than I and that I should be listening carefully to these VIPs, something I had never really taken the time to do.

I found that they had a ton of complaints, suggestions and questions, most of which were valid so I set about responding to them as respectfully as I could. The more I responded the better their performance became, almost in lockstep.

After a few years I was using a management approach diametrically opposite to top-down. Using this new tool set, I was able to very successfully turnaround 4 different management disasters including a nuclear-powered cruiser and a 1300 person unionized group in New York City.

I was literally stunned by the huge amount of creativity, innovation and productivity I had unleashed.

At the end of your article, you wrote - "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."

I could not disagree more. What they need to do is get rid of the top-down approach and adopt its opposite. To better understand please read the article "Leadership, Good or Bad"

To learn how I escaped top-down after using it for 12 years, read an Interview of me.

Best regards, Ben
Author "Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed"

Dr. Cindy Gordon said...

Hi Ben
Genuine appreciation for the perspectives. Thank -you. I likely need to rephrase the blog given your comments. I am not a proponent of top down command and control leadership styles as we are experts in collaboration strategy and leadership approaches. I will revise the posting - but don't think my comments on innovation are incorrect or misleading - you are simply talking about the leadership context for empowerment etc. I will pick up your book as I love to read - so thank -you for this. What are you researching now? We are doing two new books on virtual worlds and social mediated technologies due in the Fall :)

Thanks for the sharing - love to learn and grow and help make the world a better place.

Dr. Cindy Gordon said...

Hi Ben
Genuine appreciation for the perspectives. Thank -you. I likely need to rephrase the blog given your comments. I am not a proponent of top down command and control leadership styles as we are experts in collaboration strategy and leadership approaches. I will revise the posting - but don't think my comments on innovation are incorrect or misleading - you are simply talking about the leadership context for empowerment etc. I will pick up your book as I love to read - so thank -you for this. What are you researching now? We are doing two new books on virtual worlds and social mediated technologies due in the Fall :)

Thanks for the sharing - love to learn and grow and help make the world a better place.

Dr. Cindy Gordon said...

Hi Ben
Genuine appreciation for the perspectives. Thank -you. I likely need to rephrase the blog given your comments. I am not a proponent of top down command and control leadership styles as we are experts in collaboration strategy and leadership approaches. I will revise the posting - but don't think my comments on innovation are incorrect or misleading - you are simply talking about the leadership context for empowerment etc. I will pick up your book as I love to read - so thank -you for this. What are you researching now? We are doing two new books on virtual worlds and social mediated technologies due in the Fall :)

Thanks for the sharing - love to learn and grow and help make the world a better place.

Ben Simonton said...

Thanks for your appreciation and comments, Cindy. Glad to hear that you are not a proponent of top-down since from your post that was not clear. I believe that every manager dearly needs to know that top-down is a big part of the problem and must be rejected. Authority is not a problem, actually a necessity in view of the need for responsibility and accountability, but top-down is a misuse of authority.

As for what I am researching now, I am not a researcher and my only connection to it was directing the research and development of all naval surface ship weapon systems years ago. As a professional manager of people, I admit to having spent years searching for knowledge that would help me to better manage people. I searched in every possible field including history, psychology, psychiatry, religion and management, the last being the least fruitful probably because most writers had never proven what they preached. The commandment to love my neighbor as myself was my most valuable guide.

You wrote - "...love to learn and grow and help make the world a better place." I share that. The lower level people who go to work every day are the ones who need the most help since so many have to endure the damage foisted on them by top-down so-called "professional managers". "Thriving on change" always becomes the employee's natural state given proper leadership.

Best regards, Ben

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