Manage the Partnership: Leading an Innovation Team-the Importance of a Positive, Persuasive, and Collaborative Approach

By: Chris Trimble and Vijay Govindarajan

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Synopsis: As an innovation leader, you walk a narrow and thorny path. You must create a dedicated innovation team that is distinct from your company's ongoing operations. But at the same time, you must treat operations personnel who are working part-time on the innovation-team members the authors call "shared staff"-like the strategic partners they are. You cannot alienate them or allow your interactions to drift into rivalry or hostility. This is tough: There are real and substantive conflicts between the dedicated members of an innovation team and those members who are also involved in ongoing operations. In this chapter, the authors stress the importance of a positive, persuasive, and collaborative leadership style as the key to successfully implementing any innovation initiative. They describe three major challenges the innovation partnership is likely to face: 1) Competition for scarce resources; 2) The divided attentions of shared staff; and 3) Disharmony in the partnership. Using real-life examples from Dow Jones, WD-40, and Infosys, they show why attending to the health of the partnership-by anticipating and mediating tensions and conflicts-is the foundation of successful innovation. This chapter was originally published as Chapter 3 of "The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge."