Leadership and innovation Flashcards
The Innovation-Execution Paradox in Leadership
Leaders need to balance encouraging innovative thinking with maintaining daily operations.
Innovative ideas can disrupt workflow but are necessary for long-term growth and competitiveness.
The Risk-Reward Paradox in Leadership
Innovation involves risks as new ideas may fail or not be accepted by the market.
Leaders must balance taking calculated risks with potential adverse outcomes due to the high rewards of successful innovations.
The Individual-Collective Paradox in Leadership
According to Linda Hill, leaders need to create a culture where individual ideas are valued while encouraging collaboration for collective development and refinement of these ideas.
The Learning-Performance Paradox in Leadership
Leaders need to foster an environment where team members can learn from failures without negative consequences on their performance evaluations.
Involves creating a culture that values learning and growth over immediate perfection.
Adaptive Management of Exploration and Exploitation
Refers to an organization’s ability to innovate (exploration) and improve current products or services (exploitation).
Requires balancing different skills, mindsets, and resources.
Success Trap in Organizations
Occurs when an organization becomes too focused on current competencies, overlooking the need for innovation and adaptation.
Can lead to stagnation and decline in performance if the external environment changes.
Failure Trap in Organizations
Occurs when an organization is stuck in a cycle of failure and is unable to learn from its mistakes to improve.
Can be due to lack of feedback mechanisms, penalizing culture, or lack of resources.
Competing Demands in Organizations
Stability vs. Change
Efficiency vs. Flexibility
Usefulness vs. Novelty
Convergence vs. Divergence
Control vs. Empowerment
Improvisation vs. Structure
Organizational Ambidexterity
Ability to balance exploration and exploitation activities.
Enables management of trade-offs and avoidance of success and failure traps.
Involves shifting focus and resources between exploration and exploitation based on organizational goals, competitive environment, and life cycle stage.
Paradoxical Mindset
Views paradoxes not as problems but as aspects of complex situations to be managed.
Promotes organizational learning, adaptability, and resilience.
Helps to navigate complexity, conflicts, and trade-offs.
Leading Innovation according to Linda Hill
Not about creating a vision and inspiring others but about creating space where others are willing and able to innovate.
Innovation comes from collective creativity, derived from collaboration.
Leaders should foster creative abrasion, creative agility, and creative resolution within organizations.
Managing Diversity in Organizations
Diversity doesn’t automatically bring positive outcomes.
Leaders need to focus on inclusion, equity, and effective diversity management.
This includes creating a culture that values diversity, implementing policies for inclusion and equity, and managing conflicts that may arise from diversity.
Ambidextrous Leadership
Ability to balance and manage opposing activities or demands.
Involves fostering both innovation and operational excellence.
Leaders can foster ambidexterity through balancing exploration and exploitation, creating a supportive culture, fostering communication, developing organizational structures, role modeling, encouraging learning, and managing paradoxes.
