Harvard's Linda Hill on the Leadership Mistake That's Killing Innovation

Leaders with Francine Lacqua

In this episode of Leaders with Francelle Lacqua, Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill discusses the evolving requirements for effec

Key takeaways

• Linda Hill argues that successful leaders must develop 'contextual intelligence' to understand the specific drivers within their organization's environment.
• The concept of 'creative abrasion' is vital, suggesting that leaders should leverage diversity of thought and manage conflict rather than minimizing it.
• Hill uses Steve Jobs at Pixar as an example of a leader who understood when to remove himself from a room to allow collective action to flourish.
• The 'co-CEO' model can be successful, particularly in tech, provided there is a clear division of labor and high levels of honesty between partners.
• Modern leadership requires 'wayfinding'—the ability to navigate through uncertainty and fog when a clear, predetermined path isn't yet visible due to shifts like AI.

Main topics

• Contextual Intelligence
• Managing Conflict and Diversity
• The Impact of AI on Leadership

Notable quotes

Leadership is about dealing with change and management is about dealing with complexity.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a guide for modern executives to transition from

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) AI is entering its most consequential phase where scale, safety and sovereignty will determine who leads and who lags. Join Bloomberg Tech in London on November 2nd and 3rd as global leaders across business, finance and policy examine the defining trade-offs shaping the future of AI. Thank you to our presenting sponsor, Salesforce, and supporting sponsors, IDA Ireland and Schneider Electric. Learn more at BloombergLive.com slash Tech London. Speaker 5 (0:33) Bloomberg Audio Studios. Speaker 4 (0:35) Podcasts. Radio. News. Speaker 1 (0:41) Conflict is complicated. We've all been in situations where do we bring it up or not? It's there whether you bring it up or not, and it's going to play out in different ways. But I think CEOs or board chairs or lead chairs understand that, you know, nowadays, given what's going on, we need to talk. We need to say, what is our risk appetite as we begin to, for instance, roll out AI solutions? Speaker 4 (1:05) I'm Francie Lacqua, and this is Leaders, the podcast that explores what drives the world's most influential people. Be sure to follow and subscribe now so you never miss an episode. Speaker 4 (1:17) This week, I'm speaking with Linda Hill, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and faculty chair of its leadership initiative. Hill has advised some of the world's biggest companies through her consultancy, Paradox Strategies, and she's written some of the defining books on leadership and innovation, including Genius at Scale and Becoming a Manager. Throughout the season on the podcast, I've been asking industry leaders how they've navigated big decisions. manage crises, and build successful organizations. So in this conversation, I turned that idea on its head. I used my time with Hill, someone who has spent an entire career studying leadership, asking what actually makes a great boss, what characteristics are indicators of success, and how she thinks artificial intelligence could shape the next C-suite generation. Speaker 4 (2:12) Linda, thank you so much for joining us. You've been studying leadership and management for decades. What have you learned that makes a successful CEO, a successful leader? Speaker 1 (2:25) A successful leader, I think, really has to know himself or herself because it really starts with you. You're trying to use yourself as an instrument to get things done. And if you don't know yourself, it's hard to do that in a very deliberate way. So I think that's the first piece. And then I think the second part of it is understanding that your job is not necessarily to have all the answers. Does Speaker 4 (2:45) a chief executive really need to lead differently depending on the journey of the company? Speaker 1 (2:51) I think probably so. What you need to be able to do is you need to be able to go in and really practice what we refer to as contextual intelligence. You need to figure out what's really important in this context and what's salient. And if I don't understand that, those are the levers I need to work on most. Because usually our context is shaping our individual behavior. Too often we think, oh, that person's a good person, bad person, resistant, whatever. No, what is it about their context that is leading them to prioritize? in ways that aren't suited to what the company needs? Or are they constrained in some way that if I relieve that constraint, they'd begin to behave in ways that the company really needs? So I think that first thing you need to do is, yes, you need to have emotional intelligence, but you also need to have that contextual intelligence to be able to read things. They often find that being a little bit more vulnerable actually opens you up to getting more assistance, figuring out how to ask for help. it actually becomes harder as you become more senior. Speaker 4 (3:47) In the chief executives we speak to, I think clarity of mind is always something that surprises me because they know exactly what they want to do. But then you also must be not afraid to get outshone by anyone. Speaker 1 (3:58) Yes. And that's difficult. Yes. What you need is you need CEOs who fundamentally know that they're there for the enterprise. It's not about them. So I almost always start by saying, think about not the rights and privileges that come with being a CEO, but the duties and obligations. And people can tell if you care, if you actually are concerned about the bigger picture or not, because you're going to make many unpopular decisions, or I shouldn't say unpopular, controversial decisions, because they're tough decisions to be made. And you're going to have to deal with trade-offs. And they want to know. about your character? And then fundamentally, do you know how to make connection? If you can't connect with people, then they're not going to want to be, as I talk about now, not so much as following you, but co-creating the future with you. And if you can't get that connection going, that's when you know there's going to be a failure. Is Speaker 4 (4:50) it different if you're an AI? So I'm thinking of Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Elon Musk. They're not traditional chief executives in that sense. Speaker 1 (4:59) I have not studied them specifically, but they don't appear to be. So they would strike me in some ways. You know, when I was doing the work at Pixar, obviously Steve Jobs was someone who was deeply admired. And people have a point of view about Steve Jobs. So Ed Catmull, who's brilliant, was one of the co-founders. Everyone tells me there's no one who knows Steve Jobs better than him. And two of my business partners worked with Steve Jobs for many years. And one of the things that Steve Jobs understood is that most... action that happens is collective action. There would be times when Steve being in the room was not going to be possible because he was going to throw off the dynamic too much. Not because he couldn't behave well, necessarily, but because other people would be uncomfortable with him. So he would remove himself. Other times, you need him there, right? So again, being aware and him trusting Ed well enough to say, not this meeting. Ed has unbelievable emotional intelligence on every dimension, but he knew how to, if you think about the stars they had at Pixar, he understood people and what they needed and didn't need and what the dynamics would be of a group if a certain mix was there. And if they had certain decisions to make and he thought Speaker 4 (6:13) it's not Speaker 1 (6:15) the right mix, then he had no problem saying to you. Steve, you can't come. But as you become more senior, people don't give you feedback. Speaker 4 (6:23) That's mistake number one. Right. Speaker 1 (6:24) You Speaker 4 (6:24) need to be sure that you have an organization that tells you when problems crop up. Speaker 1 (6:28) Right. And many senior people do not have organizations like that. They will tell you that. They will admit it. One of the big issues about this is some CEOs, you can only approach one-on-one. You have to make sure you're not... embarrassing them or whatever. Other CEOs, you can tell them in a group what the story is. So one of the