Innovation and Power Make Strange Bedfellows
Leaders increasingly understand that innovation requires people's genuine engagement: their ideas, imagination, willingness to speak up, challenge assumptions, and experiment.
However, leaders face an unacknowledged paradox: they hold positional power, yet the very thing they need from people for innovation is something that power cannot compel.
You can assign an employee to a project or require attendance at a meeting. Genuine creative engagement can't be commanded the same way. So, we tell leaders to invite dissent, coach rather than direct, and create psychological safety.
Except the leader issuing that invitation may still control an employee's pay, promotion, and whether a failed project is remembered as a smart bet or a black mark on someone's career.
How safe, then, is it really to fail? That question stayed with me after a recent Drucker Forum panel with Linda Hill (Harvard) and Gianpiero Petriglieri (INSEAD), moderated by Harvard Business Review senior editor Julia Kirby.
Petriglieri argued that leadership isn't coercion or even influence, but an invitation to help teams build a future together, one that requires people to feel free to think and act. He named anxiety and shame as the two things working against that freedom. When people are anxious or worried about how they'll be seen, they fall back on familiar habits and protect their image rather than risk creating something new.
Hill, drawing on 25 years studying leaders of innovation, made a related case. Innovation is an emotional journey as much as an intellectual one, and leaders need to build community, make failure survivable, and foster real differences of thought rather than politely suppressing them.
Both put agency at the center of innovation, which left me with a further question: What happens to that freedom when the person extending the invitation still controls the consequences?
This is close to what self-determination theory calls autonomy: our need to experience real choice in what we do. Autonomy isn't something a leader can grant just by saying "I want you to challenge me." Their teams have to believe they can actually disagree, or fail, without disproportionate cost.
So perhaps the question isn't whether leaders should give up their power, but how they use the power they hold.
Hill's example of Ajay Banga at Mastercard is a good illustration. He told his employees that if they killed their own underperforming project, he'd give them a bonus. He didn't just invite people to feel safer about failure; he used his positional power to change its actual consequences.
Psychological safety matters. But it may not be sufficient. Maybe the question leaders should ask isn't only "How do I create psychological safety?" but also "How can I use my positional power to create the conditions in which employees want to innovate?"