TheThreePercent

People who are exploring very new things in a corporate environment need to be comfortable talking with their management about their dreams, fears, hopes and doubts. The stresses of pioneering, the duress of massive uncertainty, the inevitable missteps of path-finding take their toll on entrepreneurs.

In a corporate environment, innovators need two conflicting things from the leaders who support them: First, they need the benefit of experience-based intuition and insight into how their plans will impact others in the company. Second, they need to feel they are free and reasonably safe to explore, make mistakes, and follow their own intuition – even when it conflicts with the intuition of your leadership.

A well-intentioned executive can easily sacrifice the latter requirement in order to deliver the benefits of his experience and oversight. At Extreme Blue in IBM, we would attempt to balance this by counseling experienced mentors not to tell their young teams, “We tried that in the 60′s and it didn’t work.” But we also told the teams of young people, “Hey, get Joe to tell you about how he tried this in the 60′s, and find out where he went wrong.” It’s a balance. The key was that the Extreme Blue staff created a safe zone for the project team, constantly reminding them that their boss was not their boss for the duration of their project, that their mentor was not their boss, that they themselves were the only boss for that time period. A funding executive that can convince his innovation team that he is just a guide and they are “the boss” – at least for the duration of the project – is approaching innovation-leadership nirvana.

A terrible challenge that I and many of my colleagues face as we grow from being the innovator to being the one managing innovators is the art of the slow hand. We’ve been paid for years to be the person with the great idea. Somehow along the way it was decided that because we were good innovators, we might be good innovation managers. It’s like promoting a productive scientist to a research management job; you can get lucky sometimes, but often the skills that got them the nobel prize are nothing like the skills needed to foster teams of the next nobel prizewinners.

The slow hand is about style and grace. It’s not just about pausing before you respond to your innovator’s obviously naive, ill-informed and potentially disasterous idea. It’s about letting go, being at peace with the disaster you see them brewing. And then, once you’ve found that moment of peace, you calmly mention a few things they might want to keep in mind as they drive their boat over the waterfall.

In my experience, I’ve only known a handful of leaders who had really mastered this art. Stuart Feldman is one – he’s now at Google. John Seely Brown, the former head of Xerox PARC, is another. I’m told that Brad Anderson at Best Buy is supremely good at this. (He has a couple people like Randy Ross and Rick Rommel who are very good at this, too.)

The reason this is an art-form and not just a guideline is that it is equally useless and destructive to simply be a good listener and not provide any insight or guidance. What innovators need is for their leaders to “have the lights on,” have ideas and insights of their own, but be adept at employing the style and grace of the slow hand in how they deliver that guidance. To paraphrase how a friend recently put it: It’s no good to turn off your own intuition – that only denies your team the benefit of your experience – but you have to be at peace with them deliberately ignoring your advice in order to explore an angle that you might not be able to see from your experienced perspective.

It’s amazing how, as a guide for new innovators, you can get them to take you on their journey and still feel like they are driving the boat when you can let go of that urge to grab the wheel.