Fielding high-performing innovation teams
Fielding high-performing innovation teams
Innovation is a team
sport. For projects to succeed, they must be staffed with the right combination
of talent. Here is how to ensure your initiatives have the players they need to
win.
The CEO of a globally recognized bank is frustrated with the lack of innovation
performance delivered by her company. She sets up an incubator charged with
developing a portfolio of new high-growth businesses. Inside this incubator,
she places teams of high performers from the core businesses of the bank in
part-time roles. Recipe for success, or a road to nowhere?
CEOs of other companies
face similar challenges around innovation. They struggle to identify
“intra-preneurs” within their organizations who possess the rare mix of
commercial and technical skills to shepherd new products to market. Employees
within R&D groups may not have the external orientation to uncover valuable
customer insights, while commercial leaders often lack the technical acumen to
translate client needs into product attributes. Hiring “innovators” from the
outside isn’t always an effective solution as newcomers may struggle to
navigate complex, operationally focused organizations.
It can be tempting for
executives accountable for the delivery of critically important innovation
initiatives to believe that simply assigning an initiative to high-performing
talent will yield success. However, when it comes to innovation, it is rare to
see individuals who possess the full range of skills needed to lead an
initiative.
For starters,
innovation initiatives require skills and mind-sets that are under-developed in
even the highest performers. The obstacles that arise in optimizing an existing
dominant business model, such as boosting same-store sales or making a factory
more efficient, are well-understood. History can be a useful guide in mastering
performance in these environments. Scaling a new business successfully, on the
other hand, often requires the experience to respond to and navigate new
contexts where the rules of success are yet to be written. Innovators must
craft bold but realistic visions, conceive entirely new value propositions that
sync with customer challenges, and manage extreme uncertainty. In essence, the
team must operate more like a start-up that can adapt development and
commercialization plans based on continuously challenging assumptions and
learning what will propel their business to scale.
It’s unlikely that one
person will possess all the capabilities such initiatives demand. The
likelihood is even lower in large, successful organizations. Instead, our
experience shows that a well-constructed team that brings together the needed
abilities of a world-class innovator can compensate for the lack of “founders.”
To do this, first you must understand what the critical traits are that drive
the most successful innovators, and second, you must have a method of assessing
your employees against these traits. With this information in hand, companies
are able to form high-performing innovation teams.
Ten traits of successful innovators
Over decades of
combined experience working with companies pursuing innovation-led growth and
start-ups, we have identified ten traits that distinguish the most successful
innovators (Exhibit 1). While many of these capabilities are well-recognized,
we have seen that reframing the discussion from individuals to teams helps
tremendously to unlock performance in most organizations.
Exhibit 1 SEE
THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Assessing each team
member’s innovation aptitude can help you build a stronger whole. The ten
traits can be grouped into four categories. We find that a successful team
needs a base level of competence in all four.
Vision
The first group of
traits highlights the ability to identify opportunities and inspire others to
pursue them. Articulating a compelling vision, and the skill to translate it
into a differentiated value proposition that breaks through the noise of the
marketplace is a talent in itself. Uncovering is an intrinsic
curiosity to see the possibility in a given context and distill the most
valuable insights. “Uncoverers” use these insights and pattern recognition to
interpret unmet needs and define highly valuable problems to solve. Generating is
the ability to develop meaningful value propositions that solve significant
customer problems. The most successful “generators” meld the big-picture market
context with a thorough understanding of an organization’s strategic position,
including its underlying capabilities. Selling is the ability
to explain the nuances of what creates the value for a new proposition and
carefully tailor it to the target audience. “Sellers” are compelling enough to
motivate people to sway internal stakeholders on the value of pursuing a given
innovation opportunity and marshaling the required resources to drive
commercialization. These people are also gifted in crafting the marketing
elements of a new proposition.
Collaboration
People with the second
collection of traits foster effective teamwork and change management, bringing
cohesion to a group. Those strong at motivating tend to be
charismatic leaders adept at spurring action by creating a work environment
that tolerates failure as a necessary aspect of the innovation process. Networking is
the essential skill in maintaining connections among all the stakeholders in a
project. Successful innovators seek input from outside the team and—as
importantly—outside the organization, linking with ecosystem partners such as
universities, other start-ups, or incubators. Orchestrating,
meanwhile, refers to the ability to supply projects with the needed resources
and to monitor the team’s activities to ensure these resources are effectively
deployed; in other words, that workloads are distributed appropriately and the
team can “do more with less.” People with this skill combine attention to
detail and the ability to anticipate roadblocks with an ease in developing
relationships, talents that make them adept at resolving conflicts.
Learning
Most entrepreneurs
exhibit absorbing, a quality manifested in a deep curiosity about
anything that could help their venture succeed and a willingness to explore
leads as they arise. Such individuals continually pursue new ideas and quickly
incorporate lessons from multiple sources.
Execution
The final group of
traits enables quick decision-making amidst uncertainty while maintaining a
realistic pace of progress. Pioneering skills enable
individuals to break down ideas into an achievable sequence of activities.
These team members tend to be the first to challenge the status quo, have
resilience and perseverance when faced with setbacks, and quickly adapt plans
to new input or conditions. Deciding encompasses strong
critical-thinking skills that enable people to draw conclusions from imperfect
information. “Deciders” blend pattern recognition with a high degree of
pragmatism which enables them to synthesize insights, draw implications, and
get things done. Tabulating, meanwhile, is the ability to apply
financial modeling to size an opportunity and then use scenario planning to
de-risk a given project. “Tabulators” use their quantitative orientation to
accurately judge risks and payoffs as they plan their initiatives.
While some of these
traits are complementary—for example, pioneers are often good decision makers,
owing to their ability to forge paths and make judgments amidst
uncertainty—almost no individual will possess all ten. Some leaders are great
at inspiring others, but poor at timely delivery of results. Others excel at
planning but need help with selling the vision. Just as the best entrepreneurs
know what qualities they lack and surround themselves with individuals who
complement their strengths, so corporate innovation teams must ensure that the
group as a whole represents all the key capabilities. A team lacking people
with uncovering skills will likely end up focusing on incremental change. A
group without networking capabilities may end up tackling a problem outside the
company’s core competence without spotting an opportunity to bring in a
partner.
Staffing innovation projects right
Turning back to our
banking incubator, was the CEO able to assemble the best possible teams to
execute her vision? Six months into the projects, one of the innovation teams
had built a minimum viable product (MVP), but its members struggled to
articulate the offering’s value to users. While the MVP had lots of
functionality, each team member voiced a different interpretation of the product’s
ultimate purpose and the team lacked a cohesive plan for where to focus
development. Amidst this confusion, progress slowed and the team failed to
reach project milestones. Initial customers weren’t adopting the new product
and the team was unsure how to respond. Meanwhile, the bank continued to spend
on digital development to add functionalities in the hopes of improving the
strength of the value proposition.
Up-front analysis had
defined a substantial profit pool associated with this idea. The promise of
strong financials was one of the core reasons the business case was approved.
However, the unforeseen roadblocks suggested that even this initial perspective
was flawed. But was the idea the problem, or was it perhaps the team’s
inability to find the “path to profit” that was the challenge? Carefully
constructing the team with the right mix of skills could have dramatically
changed the odds of success.
Roadblocked, the
company decided to assess the team against the ten traits (Exhibit 2), scoring
each team member.
Exhibit 2 SEE
THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE
This survey revealed to
the bank that the team composition was relatively strong in its ability to
identify the customer problem (uncovering) and would likely be able to
execute a robust development plan, judging by its average scores on traits
related to execution. However, the overall scores showed the group to be
lacking real strength in any of the ten traits, and highlighted substantial
gaps in generating and selling. It turned out that
this “profile” was mirrored in many of its incubator teams. As a result,
project teams repeatedly needed interventions to keep initiatives on track.
Once the bank recognized its deficiencies, it launched an external talent
search to identify talent to fill in the missing skills, and developed an
intensive “entrepreneur academy” to identify internal innovators and build
their skills.
To minimize innovation
failures, companies should be more strategic in the composition of their teams.
One large consumer packaged goods company made the Innovation Talent Wheel
assessment an explicit part of its innovation team onboarding process. It has
found that innovation ideas often originate from individuals who accel in generating, orchestrating,
and deciding. As a result, this company’s innovation governance
board now insists on evidence that a project leader has built a well-rounded
team before it will fund a project. Moreover, teams are re-evaluated at
critical points, such as when a project is about to scale. This helps ensure
that the team make-up fits each project phase, and that as members master new
skills, they are challenged with greater responsibility. Since instituting this
policy, the rate of innovation “false starts” has decreased markedly—from more
than 50 percent of projects to fewer than a quarter.
One additional insight
from the bank’s experience is that the progress of a project has to be balanced
with ensuring the well-being and motivation of your people. When individuals
are pushed to work across too many dimensions of the wheel that are not their
intrinsic strengths, such “stretch” roles can easily turn into exhaustion that
reduces productivity. Innovation high performers should be encouraged to build
from core strengths while learning new ones through a combination of being
surrounded by team members with complementary strengths and proactive training.
Getting this balance right will energize your organization as people work “in
the zone” a higher percentage of the time.
Understanding the
traits of innovation talent and the need for project teams to have balanced
combinations of these traits will help companies get better and faster returns
from their innovation investments. What’s more, by identifying and encouraging
people who possess these traits, then steering them into supervisory roles,
organizations can build a ready cohort of innovation leaders who can drive
projects in the future.
By Matt Banholzer, Fabian Metzeler, and Erik Roth
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/fielding-high-performing-innovation-teams?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck&hlkid=e70a61859b89486ca8efaadfc8dcc019&hctky=1627601&hdpid=690230a3-dfa1-4698-9580-1a6205e16d93
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