Analysis of Leaders in Innovation free essay sample

The ability to be creative and think outside of the box is fundamental in today’s more challenging and competitive business landscape. Organizations today are looking for business professionals who have the ability to lead through innovation. Innovation is the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, unarticulated needs, or existing market needs. This is accomplished through more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are readily available to markets, governments, and society. In order for organizations to stay fresh and up to date they need individuals who are able to innovate and inspire new products or ideas. CEO of HCL Technologies, Vineet Nayar, is most notably known for his approach to leading innovation and transforming his at-risk IT services company into a global leader. By examining Nayars innovation model, and that of other leaders like him, we can learn more about the skills and behaviors of such leaders and how they prepare their organizations to be more innovative. In this essay, the author will analyze research studies conducted on leaders of innovation and expound on the discovery skills of successful leaders in innovation. In the article, Strategic leadership for the 21st Century, the premise of the article is based on the notion that the 21st century was predicted by scholars to bring a highly competitive and challenging landscape in the business community. Scholars and practitioners alike argued that managers would be required to think creatively and be more innovative in developing a vision for their organizations in order to survive the changing and more challenging competitive landscape. The first decade of the 21st century was one of significant turbulence in American history. The key to thriving in the business community during this triumphant period in America’s history and even now today, is for individuals in the business community to take initiative and use their inherent capability to think creatively and be innovators in their field. Hitt et al. (1998) and Ireland and Hitt (1999) described the capabilities needed for effective strategic leadership in the new competitive landscape expected for the 21st century; all of the following traits were exhibited by Nayar at HCL Technologies. They argued that effective strategic leaders had to: (1) develop and communicate a vision, (2) build dynamic core competencies, (3) emphasize and effectively use human capital, (4) invest in the development of new technologies, (5) engage in valuable strategies, (6) build and maintain an effective organizational culture, (7) develop and implement balanced controls, and (8) engage in ethical practices (Hitt, Haynes and Serpa, 2010). The five discovery skills that comprise an innovator’s DNA are associating, questioning, observing, networking and experimenting (Dyer, Gregersen Christensen, 2011). A leader who is supporting innovation within an organization should inspire team members to develop these five discovery skills. Society’s general consensus is that the ability to think creatively and be a leader through innovation is genetic and one must be born with the gift. Innovators are supposedly right-brained, meaning that they are genetically endowed with creative abilities. Most of the population is left-brained and more logical, linear thinking individuals. Though everyone may not have the natural ability to think outside of the box, everyone has some capacity for creativity in terms of how they proceed in their business practices. In the article, â€Å"How I did it: A Maverick CEO Explains How He Persuaded His Team to Leap into the Future,† CEO of HCL Technologies, Vineet Nayar, explains the aforementioned title. Nayar had to use innovative thinking to persuade other top dogs in his company that HCL Technologies needed to make strategic changes in their business practices in order to better position the organization for success in the future. Nayer took persistent action in transforming HCL Technologies through innovative thinking and he followed four of the discovery skills associated with innovative thinking that is outlined in The Innovator’s DNA textbook. Specifically, innovators engage the following behavioral skills more frequently: Associating, Questioning, Observing, Networking, and Experimenting. In the article by Nayer, Nayer exhibited all of these discovery skills as an innovator in his organization. Nayar travelled worldwide to visit different offices in his company. He met with senior managers in small groups and at larger gatherings discussing the issues that he saw needed to be fixed within the company. Nayar also met with customers who gave him subsidiary feedback which helped him to better create an action plan to innovatively transform his company. In July 2005, Nayar convened a meeting with his top 100 managers in order to collaboratively develop a strategy to reinvent their company. Nayar proposed that HCL transform itself from an IT services vendor into an end-to-end global IT service partner that could compete against the likes of IMB, Accenture, and EDS. At first, everyone was not on board with Nayar’s strategy, but after three days of intense debate, Nayar was successful in swaying company top dogs to go along with his innovative strategy (Nayar, 2010). Nayar began holding informal meetings with frontline employees, engaging them in discussions about the kind of company they wanted to work for and how they saw their jobs. These meetings became more formal in 2006, with a series of companywide meetings called â€Å"Directions. † These meetings still continue within the company today in order to promote harmonious work relations (Nayar, 2010). Leading through innovation requires one to be both a leader and an innovator in their field, both which Nayar successfully executed as CEO at his company. The meaning of innovation has been discussed earlier in this essay. Now, for one to be recognized as a leader they must realize first, to lead involves influencing others. Second, where there are leaders there are followers. Third, leaders seem to come to the fore when there is a crisis or special problem. In other words, they often become visible when an innovative response is needed. Fourth, leaders are people who have a clear idea of what they want to achieve and why. Thus, leaders are people who are able to think and act creatively in non-routine situations – and who set out to influence the actions, beliefs, and feelings of others (Doyle, Smith 2001). In The Innovator’s DNA textbook, Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen highlight the five aforementioned discovery skills for successful innovation: associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting. They also highlight four delivery or execution skills which include analyzing, planning, detail-oriented implementing, and self-disciplined executing. Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen researched and tested the assertion that innovative executives have a different set of skills than typical executives; the researchers used the innovator’s DNA assessment to measure the percentile rank of a sample of high profile innovative entrepreneurs on both the five discovery skills and the four delivery skills. The researchers averaged their percentile rank scores across the five discovery skills to get an overall percentile rank, and then did the same thing across the four delivery skills to get an overall percentile rank. The researchers refer to the overall percentile rank across the five discovery skills as the â€Å"discovery quotient† or DQ. While intellectual quotient (or IQ) tests are designed to measure general intelligence and emotional quotient (or EQ) assessments measure emotional intelligence (ability to identify, assess, and control the emotions of ourselves and others), discovery quotient (DQ) is designed to measure our ability to discover ideas for new ventures, products, and processes. The conducted research analysis showed that the high-profile innovative entrepreneurs scored in the eighty-eighth percentile on discovery skills, but only scored in the fifty-sixth percentile on delivery skills. Essentially being just average at execution. The same analysis was then conducted for a sample of non-founder CEOs (executives who had never started a new business). Which concurred that most senior executives in large organizations were the mirror image of innovative entrepreneurs: they scored around the eightieth percentile on delivery skills, while scoring only above average on discovery skills (sixty-second percentile). In essence, they are selected primarily for their execution skills. This focus on execution is even more pronounced in business unit managers and functional managers, who are worse at discovery than typical CEOs. This data shows that innovative organizations are led by individuals with a very high DQ. It also shows that even within an average organization, discovery skills tend to distinguish those who make it to the highest levels of the organization (Dyer, Gregersen, Christensen, 2011). In conclusion, Vineet Nayar was able to transform his company by executing the discovery skills of associating, observing, questioning, experimenting, and networking. The key factors implemented by Nayar in the transformation of HCL Technologies were (1) talking with people and facing the truth and acknowledging that there is an issue that requires addressing. (2) Finding ways to build a culture of trust so that people will entertain the plan for change. (3) Making support functions and executives accountable to frontline employees versus the other way around. (4) Lastly, transfer the ownership of change from the office of the CEO to the employees and allow the CEO to ask as many questions as the employee answers.