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. [MUSIC PLAYING] 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.