How can you promote innovation by engaging senior leaders?

Serving as an management and HRD Specialist in the federal government the number one step must be to gain executive management championship, buy-in and commitment. Senior managers also known as middle management tend to focus on achieving whatever the executive management establishes as the organizational standard. Incorporating performance innovation standards in senior managers' performance evaluation criterion is the most effective way to ensure commitment to implementing innovative initiatives design to align with executive management's organizational goals and objectives. Ensuring senior managers are taking action to implement innovative strategies within the organization must be measurable and achievable.

The overall business vision, strategy and objectives must align with the overall innovation plans to ensure business success. Given innovation is about the creation and delivery of new products, new services or new approaches for business processes, they all have a tangible impact on delivery of the business results, thus must be aligned. The alignment is not a one way process, both the vision, strategy and objectives; and the innovation plan can be iterated, updated, revised and suitably changed for alignment. To ensure clarity across the business, communication must be aligned. The reasons for creating and delivering those new products, new services or new approaches for business processes must be clearly supported by senior leaders

Es uno de los recursos funcionales que es necesario considerar en un proceso de cambio e innovación, ya que en su mayoría el talento senior trae muchos recursos, experiencias y conocimiento que en muchos entornos laborales no se permite expresar o consolidar por falta de una canal objetivo en el que transfiera. El rol con apoyo y formación pueden llegar a tomar el rol de mentores para las pruebas pilotos o bien de influencia en el hacer.

Senior leaders should be seen rewarding innovation and appreciate failed attempts of innovation. In that case, people will have a great appetite for innovating and look for better ways to do things.

Innovation behaviours include creation of relevant experimentation, seeking feedback through transparency and healthy challenge, assessing risk for people, process and product, and following the agreed innovation approaches of the business. To help these behaviours succeed, then the behaviours should be explicitly described and updated, plus senior leaders must take the opportunities to positively reinforce their value. The role of recognition and rewards must be consistent to the values of the business for the positive reinforcement to be meaningful. If the culture and the rhetoric do no keep pace through demonstrable change then recognition and reward programmes can feel insincere and not drive behaviour change

Encouraging risk-taking and learning from failures is pivotal. Empowering them to innovate requires not just support but also a conducive environment where experimentation is celebrated. This approach drives a culture where innovation is not just an abstract concept but a tangible, daily practice.

Progress requires innovation; innovation requires experimentation; experimentation involves risks, and will sometimes fail. While success is the goal, it is fallacious to assume that can be achieved without the collateral damage of failures en route. That means the PROCESS, regardless of the outcome, requires to be celebrated - not only accepting the inevitability of mistakes, but actually welcoming them as learning opportunities. Senior leaders are critical agents in this process. They are key components in both creating and leveraging a psychologically safe environment, which allows people to bring their full selves to bear, and to learn and contribute to the broader mission without fear of negative personal repercussion.

Depending upon the industry, scale and strategy of the business the approach to innovation will be different. For example, 'failing fast' helps identify problems quickly for rapid learning, but the risks of failing fast with an innovation can be different, thus the in some situations the failing has to be through simulation and internal testing, versus other situations where failing can be done live with the product in use...