How you lead impacts how you innovate

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You may think that leadership is a static object, born from a job title, bestowed by your employer, printed on a business card or listed on a social media profile. You’re wrong. Leadership is only alive in action. It becomes evident in how you talk and how you listen. How you make choices in response to success and failure, certainty and uncertainty. Your behavior sets an example and a permission structure of whether the embrace in working toward a shared goal is a joyful act or a rote one. Odds are you’ve had experiences with both types of leaders, and you’ve probably succeeded due to one and despite the other.

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Innovation also lives through action. It animates at the sight of a problem that impacts your customers, members and stakeholders. Listening to what they say about that problem, as well as listening for the untold in what they don’t say. Innovation explores the landscape to see how current solutions are failing to meet the market’s needs and collaborates to design, develop, manufacture and implement prototype solutions. Those solutions undergo testing, iterating and retesting until prototypes are ready for production. After finally delivering the solution, the work of innovation continues as it observes how the solution does or does not work to solve the intended problem.

Innovative organizations succeed because they seek new problems to solve or seek new ways to solve old problems. Innovative organizations seek to engender an innovative culture. And innovative cultures thrive because innovative leaders support their teams’ ability to thrive in a space of change. Whether you lead an organization, a team of many or a team of one, leadership is a power skill that is integral to impactful innovation.

Styles of leadership

Before we explore the traits of successful leaders in the context of impactful innovation, we need to discuss the most common styles of leadership today. Author, psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman, whose work we’ve discussed in previous power skills articles, outlines six different styles of leadership, referred to in this 2024 Harvard Business Review article “6 Common Leadership Styles — and How to Decide Which to Use When.”

• Coercive. Demanding immediate compliance.
• Authoritative. Mobilizing people toward a vision.
• Pacesetting. Expecting excellence and self-direction.
• Affiliative. Building emotional bonds.
• Democratic. Creating consensus.
• Coaching. Developing people for the future.

Similar to how we all try on many clothing styles to reach a place of comfort with our own personal style, leaders will try on each of these different leadership styles in one form or another until they settle on the style (or mix of styles) that works best for them in the effort to achieve desired results.

If we take a cursory glance at these different leadership styles, we can suss out which styles may be more inducive to a culture of innovation than others. “COME UP WITH A SUCCESSFUL NEW WORKFLOW RIGHT NOW OR ELSE,” might scream something, but it isn’t innovation. “Let’s all sit in a circle and vote on the new product we should produce,” might build consensus, but it isn’t going to build an innovative product.

Setting the goal to put a person on the moon by the end of the decade mobilized one of America’s most innovative decades in aerospace and technology. Giving everyone in the company 20% of their time to pursue their own personal projects on behalf of the company drove multiple decades of successful innovations at 3M. Like a conductor who knows how to navigate an orchestra through the ebbs and flows of a Beethoven symphony with a brisk tempo in some parts and a soft encouragement in others, innovative leaders know how to lean into or away from various styles of leadership to guide their team through the cacophony of uncertainty and doubt to the sweet music of successful product or process innovation.

Characteristics of an innovative leader

Innovative leaders don’t share a look, but they definitely share a feel of how their leadership is perceived by those on the teams they lead. In a 2023 University of California, Berkeley ExecEd article, “The Leadership of Innovation: Discovering What Makes Some Leaders Better Than Others at Driving Innovation,” the authors explore four key characteristics leaders of innovative cultures need to exhibit:

• Authenticity. Inspire trust, encouraging people and teams to step outside their comfort zones to contribute their best ideas.
• Servant leadership. Put the collective good above personal ambitions to create an atmosphere of unity and cooperation.
• Growth mindset. View failures as opportunities for growth and instill this mindset within the team.
• Innovation mindset. Be open to novel ideas, processes and approaches to inspire creativity and risk-taking. 

Think back to the leaders you’ve worked with in your career. At which of these traits did they excel? How did they mix the different leadership styles we discussed to encourage a growth or innovation mindset? How did they inspire trust and put the collective good above personal ambition? How did their approach to leadership enable or inhibit your own work to improve processes or products?

The importance of innovation in this moment (and what you can do about it)

Every one of us, no matter our zip code or bottom line, is being asked to do more with less.  To figure out how to turn parking lots into points of care and help our communities respond to fires and floods, hurricanes and haboobs. We need to settle into understanding the age we all live in and prepare ourselves to embrace the opportunity this state of affairs offers us. We have always lived on the edge of what is possible, standing in contrast with the temptation to dwell on the plains of what lies behind us. Those that succeed focus on what’s in front of them. Those that don’t, do so because they spend their time with their head turned, wishing for what was.

So, what can you do now, right now, to lead your organization toward a culture of innovation? Glenn Llopis, author of the book “The Innovation Mentality,” describes five actions leaders can take to build and maintain a culture of innovation within their organization. He lays these five steps out in a 2014 Forbes article “5 Ways Leaders Enable Innovation in Their Teams.”

• Trust yourself enough to trust others. Break the habit of doing other team members’ work for them because “It's just faster that way.” Trust your team members to exhibit the value they bring to the organization each day. Work to make sure they trust each other as much as you trust them.
• Collaborate and discover. Build on that trust to actively listen, to share in the exploration of what is possible, to leap together towards the unknown, and to discover new ways to deliver on your team’s and your organization’s value proposition.
• Communicate to learn. Talk about what worked. Talk about what didn’t. Talk about your kids, your pets, your hobbies, your hopes and fears. Talk, because when it comes down to it, what else do we have but to talk, to bring people together, to work toward a shared goal? And make sure it is face-to-face. Innovative cultures wither in email or chat chains.  
• Be a courageous change agent. Leaders lead because they are called to that place in the pack that marks out the new path through the brush, that sets the pace for the race, that sees the whole field. In this rapidly evolving age, innovative leaders need to embrace cycles of continuous improvement. Make peace with change. Help your colleagues to do so as well. View all successes as opportunities to explore potential failures, and all failures as the nourishment for future successes.
• Be confident enough to course-correct: The best clinicians don’t continue to prescribe treatments that don’t work to heal the patient. They are confident enough in their observation of the results of the first approach to reassess and try something different. To be a leader of an innovative culture, work with your teams to know the signs of when a current approach to solving a problem isn’t working and have the tools to adjust toward a solution that does. If you see the edge of the cliff ahead, be self-assured enough to tell everyone to stop before you all end up taking that perilous drop together.

Acknowledging the desire to make a difference

Seconds, minutes, hours, days, years. We are all given a precious few of these in which our actions can work to positively impact ourselves, our loved ones, our confidants, colleagues and community. We all make choices with what we do with that time, and deep down, I believe we all want to be able to look back at that time with a record of difference that we manifested. Of change we have brought into the world and mementos of our own embrace of what could be in the face of what was.

The building we built and maintained where countless lives were saved, were born and were made comfortable for those last breaths. The processes that made the delivery of care easier so that someone could spend more time pursuing a dream, whether that dream was a novel approach to curing cancer or a new opportunity to teach their grandkids about their life experiences. That’s what innovating enables in the part of the world and the field of health care to which we devote our time and energy. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, years. What difference are you making with yours?