Leadership for innovation requires a certain leadership style – Do you have what it takes?

Leadership is one of the most written about yet still mystical topics in management literature. The terms leadership and management are very often mixed up and corporate environments are too often dominated by bureaucratic management systems instead of empowering leaders.

Yet leadership is essential for successful innovation since not just processes, methods and techniques are relevant but the key is the creation of the right environment. This has a far greater impact on the success of innovation projects than jumping on the next creativity technique to generate new ideas. The problem that large corporations face is not that their employees don’t have good ideas – the problem is that they are reluctant of sharing them because the environment doesn’t support them.

Leaders for innovation projects should ensure that the environment allows the emergence of these ideas. The first step to better understand leadership is to understand the different types of leadership.

Leadership Styles: Coordinator vs. Innovator

One such taxonomy of leadership styles has been developed by Quinn in 1984 which identified eight leadership roles organized around the two dimensions flexibility vs. stability and internal focus vs. external focus as shown in the following figure.

The definition of these roles are:

• Innovator Role: The innovator is creative and inhibitions, encourages, and facilitates change.
• Broker Role: The broker is politically astute, ex-virus resources and maintains the units external legitimacy through the development, scanning, and maintenance of a network of external contacts.
• Producer Role: The producer is the task — oriented, work — focused role. The producer seeks closure, and motivates those behaviors that will result in the completion of the groups task.
• Director Role: The director engages in goalsetting and role clarification, sets objectives, and establishes clear expectations.
• Coordinator Role: The courting Nader maintained structure, does to scheduling, coordinating, and problem solving, and sees the rules and standards are met.
• Monitor Role: The Molitor collects and distributes information, checks on performance, and provides a sense of continuity and stability.
• Facilitator Role: The facilitator encourages the expression of opinions, seeks consensus, and negotiates compromise.
• Mentor Role: The mentor is aware of individual needs, listens actively, a sphere, supports the to be made requests, and attempts to facilitate the development of individuals.

Looking at this will it becomes obvious which kind of leadership style is supportive for innovation, change and empowerment off employees. Let’s dive a little bit deeper with another framework for leadership functions.

Leadership Functions: Directing vs. Empowering

Another approach to better understand the different types of leadership is to focus on the functions that leaders provide. Pearce et al. analyzed scientific literature and identified four types of leadership:

1. Directive leadership
2. Transactional leadership
3. 3. transformational leadership and
4. 4. empowering leadership

For each of these leadership types they have identified typical functions that are aligned with it:

Source: Pearce et. al., Transactors, transformers and beyond: A multi-method development of a theoretical typology of leadership.

The right leadership style for innovation

These two taxonomies of leadership styles help to understand which type of leadership is supportive for innovation. A flexible, internal oriented, empowering leadership style is necessary to help innovation teams achieve high performance where as a monitoring, controlling stability oriented leadership style will limit the emergence of breakthrough ideas.

Nevertheless concluding that externally focused, controlling leadership styles are useless would be superficial. A corporation is not just made up of departments delivering innovation but also of operations departments that staffed with managers who ensure that the corporation and administration keeps working. And there are enough projects in an organization that require a rigorous control and analysis as well as strategic projects that require externally oriented directors that present an organizations interest. Yet when you are aiming for innovation, when you are aiming to develop breakthrough products and services you will not succeed but creating a tighter controlled environment with more milestones and better reporting and a leader who wants to make decisions by himself.

Empowering employees, facilitating idea creation and experimentation as well as individual development of employees are necessary to lead an innovation team towards success. With these frameworks in mind it becomes easier to understand why it might be hard for managers in an organization to create innovative environments but it will also help to understand which group of managers can act as leaders for innovation projects and which group of managers is better in managing operational aspects within an organization.

Sources:

Quinn, R.E. (1984), Applying the Competing Values Approach to Leadership: Toward an Integrative Model

Pearce et. al. (2003), Transactors, transformers and beyond: A multi-method development of a theoretical typology of leadership