A Better Way to Unlock Innovation and Drive Change

A strengths-based approach to building teams can win employee commitment to change and foster an inclusive, agile culture.

- Diya Kapur Misra, Linda A. Hill, Gaurav Laroia, and Christiane Hamacher

LEADING ORGANIZATIONAL change according to the conventional management playbook is difficult and often frustrating, and such efforts rarely stay on track. Executives set out with the sound ambition to transform traditionally hierarchical and siloed organizations into more agile, collaborative, and innovative ones: They formulate a compelling vision, communicate it, and try to inspire employees to do what's required to achieve it. But they often find that people resist change, even when they agree that it's needed. The top-down approach rarely wins engagement and commitment to a new vision.

In our hard-won experience in organizational transformation projects at several companies, we found that the idea of large-scale transformation can leave employees feeling overwhelmed and insecure about their ability to thrive in the new order. But we learned that by deploying a strengths-based approach at the individual level and then using it to constitute and manage diverse teams, we could win employee commitment to transformation. This approach can help reduce anxiety and burnout, increase inclusive and collaborative behaviors, and cut across hierarchical and functional boundaries. It creates agents of change with the power to contribute to a shared purpose and bold ambition rather than victims of change who feel powerless and fearful.

All of those outcomes contribute to a stronger culture of innovation in the organization that enables it to continually adapt to changing market conditions and meet new stakeholder demands. As one of us (Linda) has found over decades of research on leading innovation, it's not about getting people to follow you to the future it's about getting them to cocreate it with you.¹

In this article, we'll explain how we developed our approach, the outcomes and impacts we observed, and what we learned along the way.

Wanted: Capabilities and Courage