Leading Innovation by Robert Sutton

Leadership Fundamentals, especially for innovation

1. Being in tune
2. Assertiveness
3. Small wins
4. Having their backs

1. The “in-tune” Leader

The best leaders have a great deal of self-awareness – they know what it feels like to work for
them, how they come across to others, and how they come across to others, and how to get
the best out of people given their strengths, weaknesses, and quirks… but this isn’t easy.

Great bosses are self-obsessed

Not for egotistical or selfish reasons, but because staying “in tune” with their people’s opinions
and responses requires honing your self-awareness and empathy. “its not all about you” is a
useful half-truth.

Beware the toxic tandem

The “interesting shoes day” story

A human: After a big promotion

“I realized that life was never going to be the way it had been before, that people were watching
I did. And it wasn’t just going to be about how I dressed. It was about my behavior, the example
I set, the tone I set, the way I carried myself, how confident I was – all those kinds of things.

Baboons too – a typical member of a baboon troop glances at the alpha male every 20 to 30
seconds.

Power Poisoning: Effects of giving people power

 Execution their own needs and concerns
 Focus little attention on the needs of others
 Act like the rules don’t apply to them

The Cookie Study

Three Berkeley students, five cookies. Two students brainstorm and the third has the power to
evaluate their ideas.
 Those with power tended to:
o Take the fourth cookie
o Eat with their mouths open
o Leave more crumbs
 Reading to warm up for your assignment

Robert Sutton’s Harvard Business Review: Some bosses live in a fool’s paradise

Assignment: “Clueless leader”

As we’ve seen, there are lot of powerful forces that cause leaders to be out of touch with the
people they lead, so there a lot of clueless leaders out there:

1. For starters, identify a clueless leader – it could be a past or current boss (change the name
if you like), a public figure, or even a fictional leader. Send us a picture or a short video clip
of the boss if you would like.
2. Please list a few ways in which this boss is clueless – say three to five – and tell us why these
behaviors are destructive
3. Now, let’s make it a bit more personal. If you are a boss, or if you ever are boss, what could
you do to avoid turning into one of these insensitive creeps?

Again use your favorite media, write a story, send some pictures with captions, do a video-
whatever works best for you.

Take the Emotional Intelligence Quiz

This is based on research – as they say, think of it as an empathy training tool! Test Your
Emotional Intelligence

2. Assertiveness
 “the best bosses are rated roughly average by followers on terms like competitive,
aggressive, passive, and submissive – they are moderately assertive.”
 Key: being “in tune” with reactions to your words and deeds, and making the right
adjustments.

“I believe managing is like holding a dove in your hand. If you hold it too tightly you kill it,
but if you hold It too loosely, you lose it.” – Tommy Lasorda

Assignment: Assertiveness

What is a sign that a leader is pushing people too hard?

What is a sign that a leader is not pushing people hard enough?

The best management is sometimes no management at all

 Managers often overestimate their value – and don’t realize the damage – caused
by watching and nagging employees
 “First do no harm” is especially crucial to innovation – mange by getting out of the
way.
 The managers of the most innovative teams…

 Devote less attention to their people

 Allow them to act without asking for permission first
 Don’t enforce rules as consistently as managers of less innovative teams

“After you plant a seed in the ground, you don’t dig it up every week to see how it is
doing.” – 3M’s William Coyne

3. Use a “small wins” strategy

Long term, “big hairy goals are essential – but when people don’t focus on the little steps
required to make constant progress, they freeze up and freak out

Small wins are the stepping stones to success

 Even the biggest accomplishments and victories rest on a series of intertwined small
wins
 The best bosses frame what they do as a series of manageable and doable steps, which
leads to better decisions, sustains motivation, and stops people from freaking out.

The CEO and the sales campaign – her people were freaked out and overwhelmed by crucial
sales campaign until…

Quick Read: Start the New Year with Progress by Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer

Assignment: Honing your leadership skills

Name one tiny thing you will do in the next week to hone your leadership skills In some
small way. Send us a follow-up to let us know how it worked.

Examples from three executives – all lead 100 million plus business

 I started to pay attention during meeting and discussion with team members for signs I
was being too pushy (and how to relieve pressure). (I learned that..) facial expressions
were easy to pick in a one to one meetings but difficult to catch when members become
overly quiet during a group discussion and a meeting with a remotely based team
member by phone.
 “I simply listened more and asked for actions/solutions to the issues that were being
presented to me. The meeting was definitely different. There periods of silence but one
that past the meeting actually ended quickly. It is too early to tell if my team felt more
empowered and more confident they were coming up with the right solutions vs. feeling
that I may have been less engaged. Time will tell.”
 “Being on time to meetings. I tried it but no one else was because they’re used to
starting 5-10 minutes late – but I did get an important side meeting in.”

4. Got their backs?

 The best bosses protect their people from harm, intrusions, distractions, indignities, idiots, and
idiocy of every stripe.

“Someone once defined a manager, half in jest, as someone who sees the visitors so that
everyone else can get the work done.” – Henry Mintzberg

Meetings

 A power grab or performance grab?

 Will Wright of Spore and The Sims fame – an employee centered method
- Used artist Ocean Quigley “like the canary in the coal mine.”

Protecting people from idiocy from on high: An old story about Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith. I
convinced Ed to let me tell on HBR

Assignment: When to Protect Your People

When is it a BAD Idea to shield the people you lead?

Innovation Strategy: How to Find Inspiration by Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn

To get a good idea, you need a lot of ideas. – Linus Pauling, two-time Nobel Prize winner

Filling the Funnel is the job of the innovator

Exploration Funnel Graph 1 and 2

Lever 1 Different Perspectives

Exploration Funnel Graph 1

Non-homogeneous teams are simply smarter. Working with people who are different from you
challenges your brain to overcome its stale ways of thinking and sharpen its performance.

- Rock and Grant, “ Why Diverse Teams Are Smarted”

Patogonia Wetsuit Story

Consider Your Different Duos

Lever 2 Framing
Exploration Funnel Graph 1

Look Though A New ‘Frame’

“Let’s tackle a problem: How can we get kids to eat vegetables? Brainstorm a list of Ideas

Let’s ask a different question: What are places that do exciting things with kids? Brainstorm a list of
Places

Let’s tackle a problem: With a new perspective, How would (place) get kids to eat vegetables?
Brainstorm a list of IDEAS

Let’s try a different perspective: What are place that make food exciting? Brainstorm a list of places.

Let’s tackle a problem: With a new perspective, How would (place) get kids to eat vegetables?
Brainstorm a list of Ideas.

What Changed?

As a neuroscientist, I Have discovered that humans do not use vision to see what is… They only see what
has been useful to see in the past. – Beau Lotto

Building Company Culture by Hayagreeva Rao

Teaming

Objectives

 Share ideas that you need to think about as you compose your founding team
 Discuss some guidelines on how to use teams in your organization as you scale
 Identify ways to manage teams effectively

Allocating Equity

 Allocating equity equally amongst the founders can be problematic if unforeseen

circumastances arise in the future
 Most important thing when founding a team: Don’t allocate founder equity at one time
 Founding team needs to have a prenup or misunderstandings will arise
- Founder equity: Allocate part to founders, earmark part for activities
- Norms: Clearly spell out the sacred and the profane

Knowledge and Functional Diversity

Knowledge Diversity: Diversity experiences working in diverse functions

 Expands the bandwidth of the founding team, notice more, process more, less likely to have
blind spots
 Promotes innovation and creativity
 Flexibility and holism in thinking

Fast vs. Far

 Need game plan

- Speed matters
- Other might want to go far, disrupt an entire industry
 Think about who need in your founding team to help you go fast and go far
 Go Fast: East when people have worked together and have diverse knowledge
 Go Far: Knowledge diversity is super important
 Beware of co-founders that are vulnerable

Founding Team Composition Wrap up

 Allocate some equity and earmark for activities

 Have a prenup, equity and operating norms for organization
 Knowledge diversity
 Mindful about going fast or going far

Multiteam System

 Organizations are multiteam systems

 Component teams all working together with the other teams to execute a project
 Typically has more than two teams, sometimes up to hundreds of teams working together on
various components of a large project
o Examples: SaaS organizations, disaster relief, emergency care

What Makes a Team?

 Rule #1: The team needs a definite project where it can make a difference
 A team is an organization that has defined deliverable, defined problem to solve where team
members need to work well together in order to develop a new product

Teaming Coordination
Coordination: A particular kind of understanding; the ability to work well together

 Easy predictability allows people to seamlessly work together

 Need common ground for communication to be successful
 Coordination is helped where there is common representation of a problem
 Coordination is improved when there’s synchrony, team members are in sync, working in a
pattern or rhythm.
 Better coordination leads to better cooperation

To amp up coordination, teams need to:

 Reduce representational gaps

 Create synchrony

Using Agile to Improve Coordination

 Agile creates synchrony and coordination through the time-boxing of activities

 Scrum:Scrum master is responsible for decomposing projects into sprint planning (or weekly
targets), sprint activities, sprint review
 Product owners are the one responsible for specifying customer requirements
 Team with a certified scrum master
o Increase the ability to coordinate and do projects quicker
o Can do better when they have team members who are diverse in terms of knowledge
and also have familiarity with the team’s history of tasks

Teaming Cooperation

Cooperation: The willingness to work well together

Felt Accountability: People have a sense of ownership and obligation that’s deeply felt, and they will
automatically cooperate better

How to increase cooperation in teams and also improve coordination? Allow employees to choose their
own job titles to showcase their unique personal strength. Coordination can improve because titles
create common representations and allow the team to sync up.

Teaming Composition
  How many team members on a team?
o 5 is the optimal number
 Who should be on a team?
o Knowledge diversity, each person should have different functional experiences
o Mix novices and experts together
o Mix optimists and pessimists

Atlassian Case Study

 Think about how the company uses teams to innovate regularly

 Pay close attention to how teams are organically formed, the problems they tackle, and how
ShipIt Days work

Atlassian Case Wrap Up

 Teams solve different problems

 Customers are involved to evaluate the demos made by the teams
 Pay close attention to how teams are composed, their size and the fact they work under very
sharp time constraint

Teaming Summary

 A team has to have purpose, clear goals, clear deliverables – all of which activate felt
accountability
 Multiteam system has many teams, so think about what connects the teams together, what
brings the teams together, and how information is circulated amongst the teams
 Inter-team coordination, not just intra-team coordination