Slow Hand Leaders Needed
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.
Gadflys, Gossips, and Go-betweens
ThreePercenters need a lot of help when they set out to change how people organize themselves, do business and live their lives. And the things they need most are good advice and careful connections.
Most ThreePercenters know this, and they crave good counsel to the point of telling everyone they meet about their hopes and dreams. I would argue that this can be disastrous, or at least counterproductive, two out of every three times. The reason is in what Warren Bennis calls “People Judgment” (Judgment, 2007). ThreePercenters are often not equipped to distinguish between several types of go-betweens.
I’ve mentioned in previous posts that innovation is more about constructing a new pattern of intentions rather than simply inventing inventions, but intentions can not be patented. They are fragile and can not be protected from predation or dilution when exposed. Nevertheless, the innovator can not hope to develop strong intentions by working entirely in his own head. The growing intention needs the oxygen of others’ experience and the nutrients that come from mentorship and connection with other peoples’ insights and knowhow.
So in whom do you confide? “People I trust,” you might say. But this is not a sufficient distinction to avoid disaster. You can trust someone to be a friend, to be a good parent or partner, to be an honest person. But even the honest person can be a poor instrument for certain jobs. You can trust someone with your life but not expect them to be able to climb a mountain to save you, if they happen to be a quadruple amputee! Likewise, you may trust a friend implicitly, but if they are incapable of keeping their mouth shut, best to leave them unburdened of your most fragile intentions.
There are three types of ‘go-betweens’ out there: gadflys, gossips and intermediaries. The innovator needs to connect with other people, and on the surface, gadflys and gossips seem to fit the bill. They “know everyone,” and have a reputation for spreading ideas around. They are the pollinators. Many bloggers fill this role. The problem with gadflys and gossips is that their often sizable egos are fed mainly by the satisfaction they get from being in-the-know. And the only way for them to cash-in on that satisfaction is to tell others liberally what they hear. At minimum, a gadfly or gossip will keep a secret but still prance about signaling the adult equivalent of the classic schoolkid’s line, “I’ve got a secret, I’ve got a secret!”
The difference between a gadfly and a gossip is that the gadfly’s ego is stroked most by whom they can claim to know. The gossip’s ego feeds more on what they can claim to know. The gadfly is so universally annoying that they are often easy to spot and can be avoided. The gossip can be harder to identify. Both types, however, can be very useful when you are ready to trumpet your innovation to the world. But beware of them when your intentions are not yet ripe.
What early-stage innovators need most are intermediaries: Intermediaries are go-betweens who are well trained or naturally good at keeping secrets, only making connections with others at the right times and with great discretion. A true intermediary has learned to manage his ego. He derives no personal satisfaction from being the person who knows something or someone. She derives satisfaction by honoring the confidence you have placed in her by providing only the information necessary to make quality connections. An intermediary typically will not tell anyone else about your idea at all. Rather, they will simply make an introduction where safe and appropriate. “Joe, I have a friend you should meet.” A trusted intermediary will require no other prompt to get “Joe” to take action. Joe will know that the intermediary only brings him worthwhile connections. He will know from her example that he must also be a good intermediary himself, not a gossip or gadfly. And he will also know that inappropriately taking advantage of the intermediary’s trust will get him excommunicated from that community. So a good intermediary becomes an arbiter of trust, ensuring that ideas can circulate among the right people who implicitly agree not to do violence to each others’ intentions.
It is crucial for ThreePercenters to know how to spot these different kinds of go-betweens in your search for good connections. I have seen other innovators go completely in the other direction, choosing to make no connections and “skunk works” their projects, disconnecting themselves from everything. This is perhaps as certain to cause disaster as being “outed” too soon by a gossip. With blinders on and no help from others with other vantage points showing you where the landmines are, you will inevitably step on one. Or you may never discover that one insight that completes your idea and makes it really work.
Being open about things is a good policy if you know what you are doing, but ironically it seems that the more closed some innovators are about their ideas, the more they make the mistake of choosing a gadfly or gossip, not an intermediary, as their confidant when they do finally open up to someone.
Relentless Innovation
There is a huge difference between relentless innovation and what might be called “stubborn innovation.” Innovators are rule-changers, and the relentless innovator continuously changes the structure of rule-changing ideas to embrace, extend, leverage, circumvent, neutralize and crush barriers to the viral spread of their idea. Stubborn innovators, on the other hand, cling to an idea as if it were a precious gem, refusing to stop pushing it but also refusing to change it.
Roger Martin: Innovation as Leadership Trait
Roger Martin, the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, has penned a terrific piece in the Harvard Business Review. Here is a link to an excerpt and a link to where you can get the article.
In classic ‘hit-you-over-the-head’ HBR style, the title of the article is “How Successful Leaders Think.” Bit over the top in my view, and I nearly passed it over as a result. I’m glad I tucked in and read it anyway. Lesson: never judge an HBR article – including mine – by its sappy title. <humble apologies to the great editorial team at HBR>
Roger takes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous quote for his premise: “The sign of the truly intelligent indivdual is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” He points to Red Hat founder Bob Young as an example of how successful leaders use this principle. In Martin’s account, when presented with the option to pursue one of two prevalent business models – proprietary-software or free-software – Young squashed both concepts together and arrived at Red Hat’s winning free-software-as-fee-service approach.
Martin suggests that while conventional thinkers focus on obvious relevancy, linear, sequential relationships, and either-or choices, ‘successful leaders’ seek “less obvious but potentially relevant factors” and embrace complexity. They are more non-linear, see problems in a holistic way, and most important, they turn opposing ideas into completely new directions by changing aspects of each so they can work together.
That sounds to me like the mark of an innovator. Have a conundrum between two opposing ideas? Innovators don’t just pick one – they change the rules so that they can get both without compromise.
The bit that isn’t really discussed in the article, however, is how such a thinker can lead organizations full of people who lean toward simplicity and certainty. There are many examples of leaders whose complex, holistic, non-linear thinking led them on journeys that lost their people along the way. Perhaps the article should have been entitled, “How Innovative Leaders Think.” I’d like to read the follow-up: “How Innovative Leaders Manage to Stay Innovative Leaders.”
Still, in a world where leaders are expected to sacrifice innovative thinking for black and white (black or white?) decision-making , it’s terrific to see an article that paints innovation as a leadership trait.
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