How Leaders Create the Conditions for Innovative Thinking

HBR On Leadership

In this episode of HBR on Leadership, Professor Linda Hill discusses the shift from individual brilliance to creating environments for scala

Key takeaways

• Innovation leadership is about creating conditions for co-creation rather than just providing a singular vision.
• Effective leaders act as Architects, Bridgers, or Catalysts to connect people and ideas across boundaries.
• Organizations need three specific 'muscles': creative abrasion (collaboration), creative agility (experimentation), and creative resolution (decision-making).
• True innovation requires the ability to manage ambiguity and make decisions even with incomplete data.
• A powerful leadership tactic involves rewarding employees for 'killing' ideas that are no longer working to prevent stagnation.

Main topics

• Scaling innovation
• Leadership roles: Architects, Bridgers, and Catalysts
• Co-creation vs. Visionary leadership

Notable quotes

Leadership is not... about followership when it's about innovation. It's about co-creation.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a strategic guide for leaders looking to move fr

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:04) Welcome to HBR on Leadership. I'm HBR Executive Editor, Alison Beard. On this show, we share case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. We carefully curate this feed from across the HBR portfolio, aiming to help you unlock your next level of leadership. I hope you enjoy the episode. Speaker 3 (0:38) I'm Adi Ignatius. I'm Speaker 1 (0:40) Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast. Speaker 3 (0:50) All right, Allison, so every organization wants to innovate, right? Not just once, but over and over again. And judging from the conversations I have with CEOs, most feel they cannot accomplish this, right? They look inward, they wonder, am I smart enough? Am I clever enough? Can I compete with genius founders? When actually it's not so much about individual brilliance, but about creating an environment where good ideas can be surfaced and tested and ultimately put into action. Speaker 1 (1:16) Yeah, I think we know from research that a lot of the best innovation comes from the front lines as well as R &D departments. But then how do you harness those ideas, create effective experiments, and ultimately scale the ones that work? And if you're a leader, how are you overseeing all of these disparate efforts and then prioritizing the ones in which you really want to invest? Speaker 3 (1:36) So today's guest has been drawing the playbook for innovation for much of her career. Linda Hill, professor at Harvard Business School. wrote the book Collective Genius about a decade ago, and has just published a new one, Genius at Scale, How Great Leaders Drive Innovation. She's going to explain how to create a system and build a team that can innovate and then cascade the new thinking throughout the enterprise. Here's our conversation. Speaker 3 (2:04) So you've written a book about innovation. You know, I would say this is a time when some leaders are in survival mode. A lot are uncertain about AI. How should leaders be thinking about innovation right now? Speaker 2 (2:16) I think innovation is really an imperative, and it is about survival. It is not about, you know, anything extra. Because nowadays, we have to be able to adapt and respond to whatever is happening out there in the world, and it's a very uncertain world. Speaker 3 (2:31) Talk a little bit about the misconceptions surrounding innovation, because I feel you've been spending much of your career trying to deflate some myths about how innovation happens. Speaker 2 (2:41) Well, this is the second book we've written about innovation. The first one was called Collective Genius. And there we tried to understand what do leaders do that create organizations that can innovate time and again. And one of the things that surprised us is leading innovation is not about having a vision and telling people, follow me to the future. Instead, it's about creating the right culture and capabilities to get people to want to co-create that future with you. So leadership is not... about followership when it's about innovation. It's about co-creation, and that requires a different mindset, different behaviors, and a different skill set. After we finish that work, we then begin to understand and spend more time looking at organizations and what were they finding most difficult about really innovating. And particularly now with emerging technologies, how do you get people to adopt these technologies to create value as well as, you know, how do you create an organization that can innovate time and again? So we ended up focusing on what people told us was their problem. Maybe we can come up with innovative solutions, but we can't scale them. They never become reality. We really focused in on how do you scale these innovations? And that means really building not only organizations that can co-create, but also partnerships and sometimes whole ecosystems able to co-create. Speaker 3 (3:54) So if genius requires a collective approach, are most companies even set up to deliver on that? Speaker 2 (4:01) Genius does require more collaborative approaches or collective approaches, and most organizations are not. There are three pieces to the puzzle of what you need to do to innovate. You have to be able to collaborate. which is really about dealing with difference. You have to be able to experiment and learn, and you want to be able to do that in a pretty efficient kind of way, because you cannot plan your way to an innovation. You can only act your way to one. So I think that's the other myth, that we can plan it all out, but no, that's not what you're trying to do. You are trying to create some discipline. So if you look at any single innovation, I suppose, you might find, you know, an individual genius can have an aha moment. But we're really interested in building organizations that can innovate routinely, making innovation a capability in your organization, not something that you happen upon and you do right once. So Speaker 3 (4:47) it sounds like that's partly about process, partly about the skills at the top. What does leadership need to look like to deliver on that? Speaker 2 (4:56) All of the leaders we have studied, and we've studied a lot all around the world, different industries, government, not-for-profits, all of the leaders we have studied have been visionaries. But one of the things we know about visionaries is can visionaries make space for other people? Sometimes they can take up, if you will, the whole room. So they figure out how to behave, how to carry themselves, how to create the space where people will be able to work with them. So one of the conversations I just had with a CEO who's very visionary, he said that he had to learn how, frankly, to be quiet, to be patient. When he's very urgent, he's got lots of solutions and lots of things he wants to say. So he literally ended up saying to his organization and to his team, I'm not going to speak anymore for the first 20 minutes because he needed to manage himself in a different way if he wanted people to be willing to share what we refer to as their slices of genius. Too often, we don't use the talents and passions of the people who are around us, and we can't afford not to use them given the nature of the challenges and opportunities we're trying to address today. Speaker 3 (6:00) All right. Well, let's talk about how to extract that because I feel like companies frequently say we need to reach out. to the leadership team or maybe the entire employee base because the good ideas are going to come from there are going to come from the people maybe who are on the front lines but they have trouble actually eliciting these good ideas that should be there so how do you how do you do that how do you get the good ideas Speaker 2 (6:22) First, I have to feel like it's worth it for me to share my ideas, to share my slice of genius with you. So what are the conditions you create that I am actually going to feel like I want to do that? Because innovation is hard work. It's emotionally and intellectually difficult work. So you as a leader have to create the space where people feel willing and able to do that work. It's not surprising to me that there's so much attention paid to purpose, the purpose of the organization, because people want their work to be meaningful. Why should I take risks trying to work through a conflict? someone who has a very different point of view of mine, has a very different point of view than me, or in fact, you know, we're going to experiment and learn, we're going to have missteps and failures. Why should I do that unless the work is meaningful? So one of the most important things for a leader to do is to create that sense of purpose, a shared sense of purpose. The other part of it, though, is making sure that the people I'm going to be working with are people that I fundamentally trust. So what really you see these leaders do is they think about building the social environment, the social connections amongst people, so they'll be willing to take on this meaningful work that is going to be hard work. And if I think I can trust