Good Ideas Make It Harder To Be A Great Leader

The following is a guest piece by Princeton University Professor Derek Lidow.

You would think that good ideas make it easier to be a good leader. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. Good ideas are threatening to leaders. By definition, good ideas mean an improvement over the present, a better way of doing things or even better lives.That’s why people who have good ideas expect their leaders to act on them, which creates an instant test of leadership: do you care enough for those around you to do something positive with the idea? Are you able to do something with it?

Good ideas of your own can be equally threatening. As a leader, how often have you had a good idea and then found yourself unsure how to turn it into reality, how to convert it into something of tangible value for you and for others? The experience can be not only threatening, but ultimately deflating.

It doesn’t have to be. Consider the most extreme and most personally threatening case in which leaders must turn good ideas into reality: entrepreneurship. Fail as a leader in this case and the entire enterprise goes down. And, in my experience, many entrepreneurial failures are failures of leadership, not of ideas.

Successful entrepreneurs, in meeting the stern test of leadership posed by good ideas, have much to teach us. If you can bring to the challenge of good ideas what the best entrepreneurial leaders (ELs) bring to it under threat of extinction, you will likely be able to handle anything that comes your way.

The great news is that the required skills can be learned. Indeed, you can even have major weaknesses, as long as you understand and mitigate them. Leaders who successfully lead the process of turning ideas into valuable, tangible realities are able to do five things uncommonly well:

1. Maintain self-awareness
To lead others, you must first lead yourself, realistically understanding your capabilities. Mastering self-awareness requires that you understand what you are capable of achieving, given your combination of traits, motivations, and skills, all of which are interdependent. You cannot change your traits, but you can change your skills and some of your motivations.

Understanding your traits, motivations, and skills enables you to construct straightforward strategies for leveraging your strengths and mitigating your weaknesses.

2. Build relationships
Entrepreneurial leaders virtually never act alone in getting the world to adopt their ideas – they build strong relationships with the people who will help implement the new idea. Ultimately, successful Els understand that the essence of all relationships is the existence of one or more shared objectives.

Further, there are three categories of shared objectives—cooperative, competitive, or retreating—and our relationships are a dynamic mix of all three types. Understanding when and how to weave together shared objectives that are based upon cooperation, competition, and retreat enables you to structure your relationships to further the needs of your team and your enterprise.

3. Motivate others
Motivation is to groups as relationship-building is to individuals. If you aspire to deal with ideas that will impact more than a handful of people, you must understand how to motivate scores of people to align their actions with your desires. Motivating others requires creating job tasks that make people feel autonomous, masterful, and purposeful, and not controlled, insecure, or inconsequential.

4. Lead change
Implementing virtually any idea requires people to change what they do, something few leaders know how to do. Many leaders themselves fear change and resist it, which only serves to diminish their stature in the eyes of their followers.

Change leadership starts with changing yourself. But you don’t have to go it alone. Experts, as well as many worthwhile books and articles, on leading change are plentiful.

5. Understand enterprise basics
Implementing your ideas or ideas that come from your team requires an understanding of how value can be created from these ideas. It happens in one of two ways: either through a project or through a process.

A project is a one-at-a-time exercise performed by a team assembled specifically for that task – building a better mousetrap, a new software program, or a driverless car. A process accomplishes tasks repetitively, reliably, efficiently, and cost-effectively, as when a project or product goes into full-scale production.

In addition, ideas and the enterprises that house them go through stages of maturity, like infants becoming children, then adolescents, and then adults. In brief, those stages are: 1) validating a “customer” for the idea, 2) validating the value proposition around the idea, and 3) scaling up to deliver that value widely and reliably.

Each stage requires applying a different mix of the leadership skills described here. Without understanding these stages, leaders cannot completely understand what remix of their leadership skills is most likely to get an idea accepted and then to make it self-sustaining.

These five leadership skills apply broadly to any leader who wants to transform an idea into a tangible and self-sustaining reality. This newly created reality could be anything: a small work improvement or a large enterprise; it could also be a rock band.

The payoff for producing value from good ideas is enormous: happy teams, individual fulfillment, financial success, high status, and well-being. The risk, too, is large and it’s not just financial. A leader who fails to create value from a manifestly good idea forfeits trust, feels frustration, and may lose confidence.

What is the chief difference between those who succeed at the task and those who don’t? Those who succeed know that great leadership is a good idea that, like every other good idea, requires work if it is to become a reality.

Derek Lidow is the author of “Startup Leadership: How Savvy Entrepreneurs Turn Their Ideas Into Successful Enterprises” and teaches entrepreneurship, innovation, and creativity at Princeton University. He was the founder and is the former CEO of iSuppli Corporation.