i n c o nv e r s a t i o n w i t h

How to Lead Innovation
Linda Hill, Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business
Administration at the Harvard Business School in dialogue with
Greig T. Schneider, Egon Zehnder Boston.
Getting People to Co-create a New Future with You
Greig T. Schneider: I’m delighted to be sitting here today with Linda Hill, Professor of Leadership at
Harvard Business School. Linda’s research has focused on leadership innovation and globalization,and her most recent book, a bestseller called Collective Genius, focuses on how one leads innovation.
My first question would be: You’ve written about what it takes to lead innovation. Do you feel the needfor this is growing substantially? Why focus on this?
Linda Hill: Yes, I think it is growing. I do research, as you said, on leadership innovation andglobalization. And when I go around the world, what do leaders tell me everywhere, no matter where I
am? “We don’t have enough leaders who know how to lead innovation.”
They used to say to me, “We don’t have enough leaders who know how to lead change.” And now
they’re talking about innovation. And innovation or leading innovation is in fact different fromleading change.
Greig: So this feels like a very different way of thinking about leadership. Does this feel like a paradigm
shift to you? Is it that different?
Linda: Leading innovation is different. It’s not about being the visionary and communicating thatvision to people and getting them to be inspired to fulfil that vision. As one of the leaders said to us,“Leading innovation is not about you getting people to follow you. It’s about getting people to cocreate a new future with you.” And that means really focusing on you as a leader being the architect
who creates the space in which people are willing and able to do the hard work of innovation.
Greig: So is there still a role for having the big vision? Is that still part of being a leader when it comesto innovation?

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Linda: The role of being a visionary still exists. And in fact, all the people we studied were visionaries.
And one of the challenges you face when you are a visionary is you’ve got to make the space for otherpeople to participate in that co-creation process. And you have to learn as a leader how to collaborate.
The other thing we know about innovation is innovation does not happen from someone like an
Einstein having an ‘aha’ moment. It really is a collaborative act. So one of the organizations that we
had the privilege of studying – and actually one of our collaborators came from that organization –was Pixar.
So it took Pixar 20 years to create the first full-length computer-generated movie. It’s really, really hard
work, both intellectually and emotionally. And one of the things that they point out to us is, to make a
Pixar movie takes them four to five years and about 250, 300 people to get that done.
So when you really step back and think about what it does take to create something that’s reallybreakthrough, it is not something that one individual leader is going to do or know how to do. It’s bydefinition a collaborative process. It’s also a discovery-driven learning process. You cannot plan yourway to innovation. You have to actuate.
And the final thing about innovations is they’re usually the combinations of ideas, not just one
person’s idea, but bringing together in a new way some old and new ideas to solve a problem oraddress an opportunity that you’re trying to work on. So when you think about that, it is a morecollaborative kind of activity. And you as a leader are creating the environment in which that canhappen.

Abrasion, Agility, Resolution – Creating the Right Environment
Greig: So when you look at the leaders that have to acquire the ability to do this, are there certain
things that stand out that are different from what old leaders used to need to be able to do?
Linda: I’m an ethnographer. I do my research by really observing up close and personal leaders as
they’re doing their work with their colleagues.
We looked at leaders in a range of different industries all across the globe. And what we found is there
were commonalities in what they did and why they did it. There were differences in how they did
it. And those differences reflected both their own individual leadership styles, their organizational
culture to some extent, and national culture.
Three capabilities that we found were creative abrasion, creative agility, and creative resolution.
Creative abrasion is about creating a marketplace of ideas through debate and discourse.
Creative agility is about really being able to experiment, test ideas, get feedback on those ideas, andthen adjust accordingly and work your way through, discover your way through to a solution.

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And creative resolution is about how you do decision-making. You have to do decision-making in a
way that you actually utilize what you’ve learned. And that means making sure you can combine ideas,
so to do “both/and” kind of decision-making [vs.] “either/or” decision-making.
So with regard to that last piece, you talked about what’s most important, it turns out that many of us
are very used to – in terms of our decision-making process – either allowing the experts or allowing thebosses to make the decision, on the one hand, or else compromising, just kind of going along to getalong.
And we don’t necessarily know how to work through the conflict that is inevitable when you’re trying
to do innovation, because you rarely get innovation without diversity and conflict.
So I think that, in terms of importance, having leaders who actually understand how to lead when
you’re in fact going to amplify the differences in your group as opposed to minimize them – finding
leaders who can do that in a constructive way, not so many are skilled at it.
And if you aren’t comfortable amplifying people’s talents and passions and still working throughthat conflict with them to leverage those talents and passions to come up with innovative solutions toproblems, as an organization, I think you’re not going to be able to flourish.
And the other thing I think I should say about it that we really did find in these organizations is they
had a very broad definition of innovation. Innovation is anything that’s both new and useful. It can beincremental. It can be breakthrough. It can be a product, a service, a process, a way of organizing.
Greig: I guess a question I have is the importance of the team members, the qualities of the teammembers. So is it up to the leader to bring this out of the team members, or is it important to find theright kind of team members who can operate in an environment like this?
Linda: Well, there are two parts to the story. One is, talent does matter. And you know that. Obviously,
your partners here know that very much. And so you do want to get the most talented people you can
to work on whatever it is.
But the other part of it is that you actually have to get those talented people to be able to collaborate
together and do the kind of problem-solving I described where you’re just doing discovery-driven
learning, where there’s going to be failure and misstep, and then where you’re going to try to makedecisions and combine things.
But as you know, there are many, many groups in history that had very talented people working in
those groups, and they’ve not been able to be very productive.
And often, that is attributed to there were too many cooks in the kitchen, particularly if you have lotsof talent, big talented passionate people, right? They can’t work together. We can’t afford to have too
many.

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i n c o nv e r s a t i o n w i t hWhat these leaders know how to do is to attract, retain those – that kind of talent, but also figure out
what kind of environment they need to create for those people to be able to cook a really wonderfulmeal together.
So I do remember when one of the – actually, a couple of the leaders said to us, “You’ve got to be
comfortable with having people in the group who are smarter than you, better than you, and thereally best people you need to have because it makes a difference, particularly when you’re tackling
real breakthrough innovation kinds of situations.” And you as a leader need to know how to get thosepeople to collaborate together. So I think it’s not only their raw talent about whatever it is that you’retrying to solve as a problem, but also their openness to being able to do collaborative work.

Identifying Talent to Lead Innovation
Greig: If you think about spotting – you mentioned earlier spotting the leaders – is there anything
you’d specifically look for? The leaders you found were ones that had already proven it. And you
studied them over time.
If you were just trying to see if someone had the ability to do it, what would you look for?
Linda: Well, that’s one of the reasons we’ve partnered with you, because we have looked at somethings. We looked at about 30 leaders over time at this point. And we have some sense of what that is.
When I look at your potential model in particular, it’s very consistent with what we found in terms of
the qualities, the personal qualities of these people.
So what we found about our leaders, on the one hand is they were very, very demanding. And many
people describe them as the most demanding boss they’ve ever worked with, but they were also very
generous.
They were also extremely curious people, which is something I know that shows up in your model.
The other thing is they’re quite idealistic, but yet practical. And I bring this up because one of thethings that I think is difficult, and you want to look for, is that the leaders that we studied actually do
believe, as they say at Pixar, that everybody has a slice of genius.
And frankly, not so many people believe that everybody has a slice of genius.
And so when you’re looking to select leaders who can do this, I think you are looking for people who
are fundamentally pretty optimistic, maybe you’d even call idealistic, that they do think everyone hassomething to offer.

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There is that optimism, again something that I see in what you assess when you’re looking at leaders as
well. So I think some of those fundamental qualities that I see particularly in your potential model arevery consistent with what we found about our leaders.
It is really people who do understand about creating context, who actually understand a lot about
how you manage complex dynamics because, as I mentioned earlier, you rarely get innovation without
diversity and conflict.
I teach at the Harvard Business School, as you know – when I gave a speech to our alumni about thiskind of leadership, one alumnus raised his hand and said, “You taught me to be a performer, nota stage-setter, Linda. You taught me to be out front. And now you’re asking me to make space forothers?”And I was able to share with him a story of a time when I had the absolute privilege of spending a daywith Nelson Mandela, who deeply believed that you had to create space for others. And that’s where
it actually came from, that the energy that other people have, the ideas they have, have to be brought
to bear when you’re trying to take on really complex, tough problems. And he had probably the
toughest, the most complex, etc.
But even a leader like that talks about, “My job is to create the environment in which those who are
nimble can get done what needs to get done.”Managing Paradoxes
Greig: And it sounds like, that built into all of this is the ability to manage paradoxes, to find where
the pendulum should be between two things, neither of which is right, and turning those dials
appropriately to get it right in a given situation.
Can you talk a little bit about paradox and its role in being a leader of innovation?
Linda: Yes, so what we found is that there really are six tensions inherent in leading innovation.
And I’m not going to go through each and every one of them, but there are these paradoxes, as you
described.
So on the one hand, you have to unleash the individual talents and passions. On the other hand,
you have to harness them so they’re – for the collective good. On the other one hand, you have to besupportive. If you’re not supportive, you’re not going to provide an environment of psychologicalsafety. People aren’t going to take the risks necessary to actually innovate.
On the other hand, you kind of got to be confrontational. And you’ve got to make sure that you
perform and you get done what you need to get done, right?

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On the one hand, also, you have to – most innovation is very bottom-up. But you know what? To getthings done on time and make sure they get implemented properly, you often have to be top-down.
So I think that what you see is that you’re always moving back and forth between these different –what we would say – extremes of unleashing and harnessing. And helping a leader understand where
you need to be on those dimensions, on those paradoxes, in terms of their own style and how they’re
behaving, I think that’s one of the things that we can help them with, either in our practice of helping
leaders when they come to our programs or need coaching, etc.
On the other hand, we also know that those six tensions are actually connected to the threecapabilities that I talked with you about earlier because it is an integrated model. So we need to help
leaders understand how you actually maneuver across these paradoxes in any given sort of encounteror what’s going on in their organization.
And since we’re interested in organizations that can routinely do this, it’s about the embedding ofthese capabilities to deal with these tensions that we really want to help leaders with.
Greig: So having defined the model and brought to life the paradoxes and these necessary capabilities,
is it possible to measure a team’s ability to do this? Is that something that can help them get their arms
around how to get better?
Linda: The reason why we wanted to collaborate with you is because we had an idea of a diagnostic
to help people figure out whether or not they have the right culture and capabilities in theirorganization.
We’re also working on a diagnostic for a leader to figure out whether he or she actually is able to leadinnovation, since it is different from what people mostly think about.
The other piece of it is a new kind of leadership development program that is aligned that will help
them understand the model. But actually as they’re learning the model, which as I mentioned was very
integrated, they are at the same time – are sort of practicing innovating in a collaborative way withothers.

The Role of the Board
Greig: Linda, can you talk to us a little bit about where the board falls in all of this? What is their role
when it comes to helping companies lead and be effective in innovating?
Linda: The board has an incredible role to play. I was invited by Bloomberg to come speak to his clients
about the role of the board in innovation and saw that there’s not a lot of research on that question.

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But in doing that work, I ended up coming to talk to one of your partners to see if we could collectsome data together on this question. And we’re finding fascinating results with this work.
We’ve started first by looking at the role of boards of public companies. But a lot of interest fromprivately held companies, investors in Silicon Valley, venture capitalists who are trying to figure out
whether or not they should invest in this company or not.
And so I think there’s a lot of – a lot more to be looking at with regard to that whole line of researchand I’m hoping that we’ll find ways to work with you and learn from you on that as well.
Everyone that we talked to, all the different constituencies you can imagine, whether it’s the CEO or
the senior team or various board members, understand that they have an important role to play. But
many are finding it difficult to figure out exactly how to do it properly.
So one piece of the puzzle is, for instance, in succession planning, are we looking at leaders who aregoing to be able to lead innovation? How do we build that into our succession planning? How do
we have conversations, board meeting conversations, where we get to explore in a productive way
together whether or not we have the kind of culture and capabilities necessary to actually be able toinnovate?
Or even more basically, one of the things that we’ve come to find out is that, when you look at all thepressures on boards and all the things that they have to be concerned about with these days, are theymaking the time to really engage constructively with management when you’re talking about things
that really involve lots of risk? So the whole question of risk management and how boards think
about that relative to when to attempt big-bet kinds of innovations as opposed to simply continuous
improvement kinds of innovations, because there’s so many companies out there that are very worried
about being disintermediated by technology, for instance.
Greig: Well, Linda, it’s been a great pleasure working with you on this. Thank you so much forspending the time. And we look forward to the insights and the breakthroughs to come in thisextremely important area.
Linda: Thank you very much. It’s been really a pleasure to speak with you.

Contact us:

Greig T. Schneider

Egon Zehnder Boston
greig.schneider@egonzehnder.com
Tel +1 617 535 3500

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Since 1964, Egon Zehnder has been at the forefront of defining great
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