The Misunderstood Art of Leading an Innovative Culture
Purpose is not what a group does.
It's why they do it.
In her new book, Harvard Business
School professor Linda Hill explains how your company can become
purpose-driven--and why it matters.
Linda Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of
Business Administration at Harvard Business School, is a champion of leadership
through empowerment. Her work often focuses on leaders who've excelled by
enabling others to do the doing.
In
other words, if you seek professorial wisdom stressing vocal displays of
assertiveness are not necessarily leadership, Hill is the professor for you.
Her work on Nelson Mandela's leadership style highlights her
research-based beliefs that in the business world, too, there are countless
benefits to viewing leadership as a collective activity. So do her insights on
the stealth leaders within organizations--those unheralded
members of the rank-in-file who take charge of key initiatives.
Hill's
latest book, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice
of Leading Innovation, makes a fascinating argument that Hill has made before:
Namely, that to lead innovation, you should not view leadership as a
take-charge, bull-by-the-horn-grabbing activity.
Instead, your job should be to
create, populate, and inspire a flexible ecosystem, in which employees feel
comfortable proposing radical ideas and challenging long-held corporate
beliefs.
Find
the Strengths of Your Culture
Coauthored with Greg Brandeau, Emily
Truelove, and Kent Lineback, the book draws on examples from large entities
such as Volkswagen, Google, eBay, and Pixar. Many of its key takeaways,
however, are replicable for smaller organizations. Especially smaller
organizations who are looking to manage through change and foster more
innovative cultures.
For example, there's a
change-management myth that tends to inflate the roles of leaders. The myth
generally involves an uber-leader imported from another company, arriving and
making wholesale changes which produce demonstrable wins in the first 100 days.
But that type of top-down approach
isn't the best way to motivate employees to do what innovation requires. The
best way, note Hill and her coauthors, is to tap into emotions those employees
already feel.
Those emotions could be lie in a
product's quality, or in the overall role a company plays on the world's stage.
Regardless of what those emotions
are, the most important thing a leader can do--early on in a change-management
initiative--is discover where those emotions and pride-points lie.
How
VW Unified its Brand
An example of a leader who performed
this "discovery" research is Luca de Meo, who became CMO of VW Group
in 2010. De Meo was tasked with unifying VW's branding. At the time, VW's
branding differed from market to market, largely because decisions were
historically decentralized--determined by local markets, rather than
headquarters in Wolfsburg.
Here's a short list of things de Meo
did in the service of this emotional-discovery process:
- He learned German, to better communicate with his team and immerse himself in company history.
- He set up 30-minute meetings with everyone on his staff. He listened as nearly 100 of them described their jobs to him in detail.
- He traveled all over the world (154 countries, 24 time zones) for face-to-face meetings with management teams in global markets.
In his travels, he got a firsthand
sense of the problems he needed to fix. But he also learned about the many
cultural strengths imbued in VW's employees. There were two big points of
pride: One was about the company's nuts-and-bolts product engineering, and one
was about the importance of the auto industry to society as a whole.
Fully
Using People's Talents
Using what he learned, de Meo was
able to make his branding goals less of a top-down initiative and more of a
community-based desire, built around a mutual sense of purpose. He did this in
two ways: (1) He directly involved employees in the creation of a centralized
brand; (2) he tied the importance of creating a centralized brand to the
pride-points of engineering and the auto industry.
Specifically, he did this by
organizing a massive three-day off-site devoted to brainstorming about the
brand. Instead of PowerPoint presentations, the off-site--held at a Frank
Gehry-designed building in Berlin--was more like a design lab, filled with
prototyping, testing, and most of all, discussing and arguing.
De Meo recalled it as "artwork
everywhere, loud rock music signaling transitions between activities, snapshots
showing the history of the automotive industry mixed in with conversations
about the future of mobility."
You can see how this approach would
engage employees who were already prideful about their industry and their
product. And there was another piece of the engagement too: De Meo's
inclusive approach made branding something the entire company was involved in.
Employees were creatively collaborating, brainstorming, and participating, rather
than responding to just another mandate from "those guys in
Wolfsburg."
The
Power of Purpose
From Hill's perspective, this is one
of de Meo's strengths as a leader: Spurring participation. "Generally, we
don't use people's talents as fully as we could," she told me in a recent
interview. By contrast, de Meo's approach created a branding effort behind
which an historically decentralized company found unity. "He believes
you build a brand from the inside out," she observes.
As for results, they were tangible:
"By the time de Meo left VW for Audi, the VW brand had risen in the
ranking of all brands worldwide from fifty-fifth to thirty-ninth," note
Hill and her coauthors.
But more than this quantifiable
accomplishment, de Meo had proven that real change can occur when you engage
your employees on a personal level--and find out why your organization (and its
posterity) matters to them. VW became a textbook-worthy case of that
easy-to-preach, hard-to-practice principle of purpose-driven, community-centric
management.
And that's why de Meo and VW became
a key chapter in Collective Genius. "Purpose--not the leader,
authority, or power--is what creates and animates a community," conclude
Hill and her coauthors at the end of the de Meo chapter. "It is what makes
people wiling to do the hard tasks of innovation together and work through the
inevitable conflict and tension."
BY Ilan Mochari http://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/linda-hill-purpose-driven-leadership-innovation.html?cid=em01014week23e
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