774: What Innovative Leaders Do Different, with Linda Hill

We all wanna think of ourselves as innovative, but it's often not easy to know exactly what that means in practice. In this episode, what leaders do to drive innovation successfully and how each of us can get just a bit better. This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 774. Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is coaching for leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren't born, they're made. And this weekly show helps leaders thrive at key inflection points. An inflection point so many of us are at is thinking about innovation. How do we do a better job as innovative leaders, and what do innovative leaders do differently? Today, I'm so glad to welcome one of the top experts on innovation to help us think about this in a new way from what we often think about it traditionally and also some great invitations and distinctions to help us innovate inside of our organizations better. I'm so pleased to welcome Linda Hill to the show. Linda is the Wallace Brett Dunham professor of business administration and faculty chair of the Leadership Initiative at Harvard Business School. Globally recognized as a top leadership and innovation expert, Linda has been named by Thinkers fifty as one of the world's top five management thinkers. She is the coauthor along with Emily Tederts and Jason Wilds of Genius at Scale, How Great Leaders Drive Innovation. Linda, a pleasure to have you on. Pleasure to be here with you. I was I've been thinking about your work and looking at all the research you've done. And one of the words that just keeps coming up for me is distinctions. And so many distinctions came up in thinking about innovation and what the what innovative leaders are doing. And one key shift, I think, is rather than looking at what innovative leaders do, there's an invitation from the three of you to really look at how they do it. What's significant about that distinction? What I think is distinctive about what you learn when you focus on how leaders go about building organizations that can innovate time and again, is that you discover that leadership and leading innovation is actually different than leading change. And it comes up really when you look at what they're doing over time. So as you know, I am an ethnographer, so I use the methods of anthropology to do my work. And I tend to do longitudinal studies of leaders in context working with their colleagues over time, usually for maybe three to five years. And one of the things that you and your colleagues have uncovered is the different types of ways of looking at this. And there's architects, there's bridge builders, and there's catalysts. Could you tell us a bit about those three different types and and what's significant about them? Yes. So the first book that we wrote on leading innovation was a book called …