LINDA A. HILL: We know that one of the key reasons why
organizations aren't able to innovate organizations aren't
as agile as they need to be is they
don't have the kind of leadership they need.
If you came to the Harvard Business School 100 years ago,
great leadership was really about setting direction
and making sure that people went in that direction.
How do you come up with strategy?
When I came almost 40 years ago, we moved a bit from strategy
to, really, vision.
So people like John Kotter and Warren Bennis
helped us understand that people needed
to have a bigger ambition than just the strategy.
What's the vision?
Where are we going and why?
What I've come to see as I've begun
to do research in the 2000s--
yes, you still need to be a visionary.
But guess what?
Because innovation has become ever more important,
that means, really, moving from vision
to shaping culture and capabilities.
You have to move from focusing on, OK, what's my vision
and how do I communicate and get people
to follow me to the future?
Instead, leading innovation is about getting people
to co-create that future with you.
And co-creation requires a different kind of leadership.
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If you want to lead an organization
and build an organization that can innovate
at scale with speed, really, leaders
have three functions they have to fulfill.
The ABCs of leadership--
A, you must be an architect, B, you must be a bridger, and C,
you must be a catalyst.
The first role is the role of architect--
building the culture and capabilities
necessary for a group of people to be able to collaborate,
experiment, and learn.
Innovative work is not about an individual
having an aha moment.
It's really about a collaboration
of individuals with diverse expertise,
diverse points of view and experiences, who figure out,
again, how to collaborate, how to experiment
and learn together with some speed-- what
we call collective genius.
The idea here is that everyone in your organization
has a slice of genius.
Everyone has talents, everyone has passions.
Your role as a leader is to unleash the diverse slices
of genius in your organization and then leverage
and harness them for the collective good.
How do you get everyone in the organization
to understand that they need to work
on not just what they should be doing,
but what they could be doing?
The second is B, or bridger.
We have to go outside the organization to get access
to talent and tools.
You need to be able to bridge, because you do not
have the talent and tools you need inside your organization
to innovate at speed or at scale.
Just don't.
Particularly now that digital is such a big piece of it,
you are always, you and your organizations,
are really embedded in a web of interdependencies.
And that means trying to innovate across boundaries.
So we see many organizations building out new units
or asking leaders to lead units in which they really
are serving as the bridge between the outside
of the organization and the inside.
We've been studying leaders who run innovation labs,
corporate accelerators-- even organizations that were digital
first are finding that they need to partner
with other digital first companies
to get access to the cloud, right?
Because other organizations might be better at it
than they are better at it, and they
need to focus on other things that
are their core capabilities.
And then the third is catalyst.
And this is when you're trying to accelerate co-creation
throughout the entire ecosystem.
And there can be a couple of reasons
for why you want to do that.
One may be that for you to do what
you want to do inside your organization,
you need other people, other organizations to be
able to innovate, because they got
to create something that you need to fulfill your purpose.
The other is, fundamentally, because you're
trying to just create more capability
in the whole ecosystem.
Because when you lift the whole, everyone gets lifted.
It's when your ambition is much, much greater
than your organization and you're maybe
trying to change a country, or the prospects
of a whole continent.
So you have to get the whole ecosystem
active and co-creating if you want to do that kind of thing.
An example would be if you want to be
as secure yourself in your own internet service,
then if you can help your clients be more secure,
have more cybersecurity, that helps you as well.
So that's an instance of being a catalyst.
But when you're actually doing the act of working across,
that is where you're being a bridger.
So these three roles are very interconnected.
We've been studying the leader who runs the trials for Pfizer.
It turns out that Pfizer can only
innovate and be as agile as it needs
to be if, in fact, their vendors are agile and able to innovate.
So we have leaders there who are working across with vendors
and turning those vendors into partners, where, in fact, we
have a real connection.
We do trust each other.
We do know how to influence each other.
We are willing to make mutual commitments.
Because only when we have that deep connection
are we willing to do the hard work together necessary
to actually do something like run those trials in 266 days
and make the impossible, possible.
Now, what you see-- again, the catalyst role of that same
leader--
is working to put together consortia
of people who are in the pharmaceutical industries
to go back and think about, what are some new standards
we want to set?
And talk with regulators about now
that we know what's possible, will
allow us to bring hope to patients even faster if we work
across the industry to raise all of our capacity
to do more innovative work.
So what we see is organizations have to go outside
to get what they need.
What they're really all about is learning
how to exercise influence when you
don't have formal authority.
We've got to let go of formal authority
as our source of influence and power.
Instead, we're using, if you will,
being able to shape culture and capabilities,
being able to forge connections between diverse parties,
real connections where we actually
have mutual trust, mutual influence,
and mutual commitment.
Don't rely so much on your formal authority
as a way of influencing people.
It's not very useful, because with formal authority,
if you're using that as your source of power,
maybe you can control people, but you're not
building their commitment.
And you need commitment if you want
to have people take the risks associated
with trying to do something new and useful,
particularly a breakthrough kind of innovation.
You don't use formal authority as a way to get things done,
because you cannot tell people to innovate.
You can only invite them.
It is a voluntary act.