Premise
I watched this short video in which HBS professor Linda Hill shares her experience from engaging a Life Sciences company and how they went about building teams and leading for innovation. You can watch the full video here.
I have written many times about this topic (here, here, here, here, here, here and on innovation here).
As leaders, we need to adapt and change depending on what we are trying to achieve and what our objectives are.
Leading for Innovation
If we want to drive innovation, we need to foster a culture that enables, engages and encourages the team to design and run experiments, knowing fully well that some of them will fail and some will succeed but most will be neither.
In this case, the focus is about finding out what could be your next product, service, business model or whatever gives us an edge in the marketplace.
Leading for Efficiency
If you want to drive efficiency, you need to foster a culture that rewards and recognises efficiency and places more importance on execution of what the team already knows as working well.
While it is important to run experiments in this case as well, it is much more constrained and limited to further improve efficiency rather than anything else.
Leading for Growth
If we want to lead a team for driving scale and rapid growth, we are better off creating a culture that enables our teams to work closely with the markets and run experiments that allow us to scale existing products or services.
We explore how our product or service can exapt or look for new distribution channels. This work is outward focused while leading for innovation or efficiency is primarily inward focused activity.
Leading for Transformation
When we are trying to lead a transformation, we need to be able to create a culture of openness and trust. We need to be able to paint a picture of why we need to transform and what we need to be able to transform to.
We need the ability to understand the formal and informal structures of our organisation and how decisions are made and acted on. This needs a lot more focus on our ability to manage stakeholders and exercising influence (with or without formal authority). Again, this is a lot of internal focused work.
Conclusion
In conclusion, good leaders are able to specialise in one of these types of leadership. Great leaders are able to perform well in any of these situations.
The difference is in being aware of what we are trying to achieve and the ability to make that mindset switch to what is required.
In some situations, leaders might need to do this switch multiple times as they lead multiple teams and each one of them is focused on something specific, which is why becoming and being a great leader is so tough. This ability comes with awareness, practice, experience and a lot of battle scars.
