Innovation isn’t exclusively the executive team’s responsibility. Still, it’s vital that senior leaders actively encourage generating, testing, and adopting innovative ideas.
How can your executive own this role?
Here’s a four-item gameplan executives can embrace. Implementing the gameplan will spur generating ideas and setting the stage for responding more positively to employees’ innovative ideas.
Saying Yes to more ideas depends on linking the organization’s direction to where innovation is focused. It’s up to the leadership team to broadly share where the organization most needs innovation to move ahead. Whether it’s growing revenue, expanding into new markets, reducing costs, boosting customer satisfaction, or something else entirely, providing clear targets orients employees toward innovating where there’s heightened organizational interest.
Innovative ideas come in diverse sizes. Your leadership team’s appetite for change sets the expectation for how significant your innovation initiatives should be. Amid a major transformation, incremental ideas are decidedly ho-hum. If you’re seeking tweaks to what’s working, though, organization-shaking ideas are DOA.
You can adapt an idea continuum like this one to describe your innovation target:
Identifying leadership’s preferences among these options frees employees to focus and align innovation to the right risk and change profiles.
Communicate how the leadership team prefers to see innovative ideas emerge and move through the organization. Here are several possibilities:
In any organization that has multiple layers, chances are that managers are in place who reached and solidified their positions through killing innovative ideas. Their fatal objections? Claiming that innovative ideas mess with efficiency, buck conventional wisdom, or needlessly rock some boat somewhere.
The executive team must help innovators circumvent this hidden internal resistance. Here’s a starting list:
Fostering an organizational culture that ignites new thinking and ideas depends on communicating the organization’s innovation preferences. C-Suite executives are the gatekeepers for sharing strategic priorities and maintaining open dialogue to focus and support innovators who are creating positive change.
Reach out to me directly, and let’s talk about how to introduce the gameplan within your organization to ignite innovation, implementation, and results! - Mike Brown