Ethos Issue 5, Nov 2008

Creating Hot Spots of Innovation
and Energy in Your Organisations
Lynda Gratton

Leaders can ignite creative energy by asking incisive questions and nurturing cross-boundary collaboration, writes Lynda Gratton from the London Business School.

Walk around any organisation and you will see people going about their daily routines. Sometimes as you walk the corporate corridors, you will come across something different, something that causes you to pause and consider how you might encourage it to happen throughout the organisation. It might be an excited debate among team members where enthusiasm and commitment is tangible. It might be an overheard conversation about a brilliantly simple idea. It might be a conference call on which, instead of being separated by time zones, people appear to be energised and working to the same goal.

For leaders and their human resource (HR) partners, these moments are organisational magic. For all the grand debates in the boardroom, the strategy retreats, the visions, this is what leaders strive for: the crackle of imagination in pursuit of organisational goals. I call these Hot Spots. They are when our energy and excitement are inflamed through an igniting question or a vision of the future. They are times when positive relationships with work colleagues are a real source of deep satisfaction. They are the times we remember and when we add the most value—personally and professionally.

I began my exploration of the phenomenon of Hot Spots over a decade ago at companies like Nokia, BP and Goldman Sachs. Since 2006, my colleagues and I have significantly widened our research base and we are now studying organisations and teams across the world—and have recently launched a major research project on Hot Spots in Singapore¹.

Our interest is in those companies and teams that have more than their fair share of Hot Spots and, in bringing this about, we believe that leaders and their HR partners can play a crucial role. First, let us take a closer look at the role of the leader in creating a context in which Hot Spots of energy and innovation emerge.

THE ROLE OF LEADERS IN HOT SPOTS
We have discovered that leaders create high energy and innovative Hot Spots by asking difficult igniting questions, creating a network of friendships and opportunities for boundary-less cooperation, and championing and supporting the unique signature processes that create the context for the emergence of Hot Spots.

The Leader as Questioner
Some companies have developed an internal environment in which any form of doubt is perceived as ignorance or weakness and all forms of questioning are interpreted as either manipulation or affront. This kills the spirit of inquiry and reduces conversations to ritualised, dehydrated talk. The first task of the leader and their HR partner in creating good conversations is to institutionalise questioning and expressing doubt as a normal and routine part of the way in which the company operates. The ability to ask incisive questions requires careful cultivation. Spotting potential weaknesses or fallacies in an argument is a bit like luck; both need prepared minds.

To be effective questioners, leaders need to constantly expose themselves to a variety of information and stimuli inside and outside the company so as to be able to generate independent and insightful thoughts. To encourage and support this, there is an important agenda here for talent development strategies. For example, the professional firm PricewaterhouseCoopers encourages potential leaders to spend time developing their networks outside of the firm by encouraging potential partners to spend significant amounts of time outside of the firm in the community.

Asking igniting questions can also be supported through management practices. Take, for example, Lou Gerstner’s approach as CEO at IBM. In his very first meeting with senior managers, he made a new rule: no overhead projectors and no slides would be allowed into the room. In IBM, meetings had become totally ritualised, with formal presentations of information using well-crafted colour slides. Managers spent an enormous amount of time preparing these presentations, which took up all the available time during the meetings. Instead of fancy presentations, Gerstner wanted quality conversations. Hence his new rule: no slides.

Individual habits and organisational inertia lead to the persistence of poor conversations in companies. Most leaders can think of any number of such simple rules that break habits and inertia. What matters is that the leaders and their HR partners consciously ask the questions: "What is blocking quality conversations in our organisation? What can we do to eliminate the blockages?"

The Leader as the Creator of Friendships
Creating friendships is also crucial to the emergence of Hot Spots. Our research on cooperation has shown the creation of a culture of cooperation begins with the quality and depth of relationships the members of the leadership team have with each other. Poor-quality relationships have a profoundly negative effect on the capacity of the company to thrive. But more than this, they send out strong messages to the other members of the organisation about what is legitimate and what is not.

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