Hiring to Lead Innovation
A key question to be resolved at the start of an innovation effort is who to hire to lead.
The leadership hiring decision is a very important one, because no matter whether you’re building a central innovation team or one which is distributed and responsible for creating an innovation culture, what happens next will be very dependent on the mentality the leader brings to the table.
One possibility is to hire an entrepreneur. Such individuals have usually proved they are able to make small ventures successful. They know how to run an enterprise on a shoestring and are able to match limited resources to big problems. Entrepreneurs have usually proved they can take an idea and turn it into something valuable.
Or, instead, do you hire someone with lots of experience managing a portfolio of projects, who knows how to start-stop-continue things, but doesn’t have much depth in the intricacies of making individual projects successful? Someone who’s more like an investor than a project manager?
Generally, given the choice, most people would hire the former. Its an easy choice to make: select someone who you know will at least make a few things they concentrate on succeed.
But the easy choice is not always the best choice.
Entrepreneurial innovation leaders are highly motivated to make their personal choice projects successful no matter what it takes. This, after all, is a proven formula for them. They are experienced in taking good ideas and driving through to value, often because of personal heroics. It is not unusual that their whole careers have been based on a few lucky successes.
Individual heroics are one thing, but the fact of the matter is most innovation projects fail for one reason or other. This happens despite the amount of effort applied. Entrepreneurs accept this intuitively, so they cancel a projects which don’t seem to be progressing well. They live in the hope that their next project will be a hit.
For innovation teams in larger organisations, however, this is a very bad strategy. Innovation leaders usually last about 18 months before their stakeholders get sick of waiting for results. Doing things in the sequential order of the entrepreneur means that that time runs out way before there are decent result. The implication is that hiring an investor is usually sensible.
Investors understand immediately that the name of the game in innovation is avoiding concentrations of risk. They make sure to do so in order to get a predictable return, and most of the time this means doing many simultaneous projects, rather than concentrating on a few.
Is this the time you commence planning an innovation program and are mulling over your hiring decisions? James Gardner’s free online resource has genuine advice on how to hire an innovation leader.
