Great leadership requires being both a value creator and a game changer. In this episode of The Parlor Room, host Chris Linnane sits down with HBS Professor Linda Hill to explore what that means through the lens of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine development. They also discuss the paradoxes of management and the three roles leaders must play to innovate and meet customers' needs in the digital age.
Linda Hill, Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration
Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB) program (HBS Online's most comprehensive offering featuring Hill's Leading in the Digital World course)
Professor Hill's books:
Related HBS Online blog posts:
Chris Linnane:
The Parlor Room is an official podcast of Harvard Business School Online.
Linda Hill:
They had a notion that everyone has a slice of genius. Everyone has talents, everyone has passions, and you as a manager need to make sure you understand what people's talents and passions are because you need to unleash or amplify those individual slices of genius.
Chris Linnane:
Welcome to The Parlor Room, where business concepts come to life. My name is Chris Linnane. I'm the creative director at Harvard Business School Online. Today's very special guest is HBS Professor Linda Hill. Professor Hill's course Leading in a Digital World is part of HBS Online's CLIMB program. CLIMB stands for the Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business. We talk about Linda's paradoxes of management and what type of leadership it took to produce the Pfizer COVID vaccine in record time. This is a great episode. So, let's get started. Welcome to The Parlor Room.
Thank you, Linda, for being on the show. I'd like to start with your course, your HBS Online course Leading in a Digital World. Can you tell us a little bit about the course?
Linda Hill:
It's a pleasure to be here with you and I'm happy to talk with you about the course. So, for the last number of years, I've been looking at exceptional leaders of innovation, leaders who've built organizations able to innovate time and again. And we know that if you want to be successful these days, you must be able to adapt and innovate and meet the needs of your customers as they evolve. So the course really focuses on "What does it mean to be an effective leader when you actually have digital tools and data to enable you to be able to innovate and meet the needs of your customer?"
And so we look at really three roles of a leader. The first is the role of the architect, the second is the role of the bridger, and the last is the role of the catalyst. So all of these roles are really about how you as a leader, make sure that you're creating the kind of environment, the culture, and capabilities necessary for your team or your organization to be able to adapt. So it's not so much about "come up with a vision and follow the leader to the future." It's really about "How do you create the kind of culture and capabilities necessary for us to be willing and able to co-create that future together?"
Chris Linnane:
So I'd like to transition a little bit to your book, Being the Boss. You have a section in there called the "paradoxes of management." I'd like to run through a couple of those categories. I'll give you the headline from each one and maybe give us a little context for them.
Linda Hill:
Sure.
Chris Linnane:
So the first one is: You are responsible for what other people do. What does that mean? I think I know what it means, but give me a little more context if you could.
Linda Hill:
The first paradox is about the fact that yes, you're the boss. Yes, you have formal authority. But guess what? If you rely on that as a way to influence people who are working with you, you're not going to get their commitment. And today, you need people's commitment. You need them to use their judgment.
So really it's not about you being the boss and using your formal authority. It's more about understanding that when you move into a role of management, you're actually in a role of interdependence. You're dependent on others, and they're dependent on you to get their job done or their jobs done. So you need to understand that your work is really about working with and through others, and they're dependent on you to make sure you create the kind of conditions that will allow them to be successful, and you're dependent on them to help you actually create the conditions you're going to need to be successful.
Chris Linnane:
So the second paradox: To focus on the work, you must focus on the people doing the work.
Linda Hill:
So one of the things that I study is how stars learn to lead. And, as it turns out, people who are stars have more trouble learning to lead than people who are not stars. So what you often see is that people who are stars, because they have so much talent, so much energy, they take up all the space, they become the star producer, they basically pull or push their team forward as opposed to stepping back and creating the conditions that will allow the team to be successful. They actually can abandon the leadership role and simply push and pull as a star until, finally, they'll reach their limit.
Chris Linnane:
That's a tough thing to do. I know often is to figure out how to delegate. What's the first best step to separate yourself from "Only I can do this right"?
Linda Hill:
I think the real thing that worries people often about delegation is they know they don't trust their own judgment yet about "Who do you trust with a particular kind of assignment, particularly when you're a new manager? how do I know they're going to do it? How do I, what's going on here? And I knew I can get it done right." Or whatever that is.
And of course, I think that that's what keeps us from doing it. Plus, usually, if you were a star at it, you enjoy doing whatever that task was. But I do think it's about trust and I think there are a couple of dimensions of trust. The first dimension is a person's competence, and usually not always when you're the manager, you may have more experience and therefore feel you are more competent on a task than the person you're thinking you're going to delegate to.
Don't know, not always because you can have more experienced people on your team as well. The second dimension of trust is really character. So competence tells you they know what the right thing to do is. Character tells you they want to do the right thing. And when you're trying to figure out how to delegate to someone, you are trying to figure out both of those dimensions in some ways. Are they competent? Do they want to do the right thing? What's really going on here? And I think until you've been managing for a while, you're capacity to make those judgment calls, really, you learn how to do it. You learn what is really evidence that someone is competent, what is really evidence of someone's character that they really have that enterprise-wide view. They're going to think about that, the bigger picture as they're working on this particular task and the way that you would've done.
Chris Linnane:
All right, our third point: You must make the group a cohesive team without losing sight of the individuals on it.
Linda Hill:
So this is a tricky one for very experienced managers as well. Of course, you want to make sure that the organization or your team rather has a sense of shared purpose and a sense of shared values, and ideally some notion of rules of how they're supposed to interact with each other and think through problems or opportunities together. So when you create that kind of context, that is what allows you to create the sense of community or belonging of a group of people to a team. So you do want to start with "People need to understand the why and feel like I am a part of something that's bigger than me." At the same time, what we know, particularly if you're trying to build a team that can be very innovative, is you also have to unleash their individual passions. So another book that I was writing when we were writing Being the Boss was a book called Collective Genius.
And the leader that I studied for that book first studied a whole bunch of leaders after was the founder of Pixar. And my co-author was actually the chief technology officer of Pixar. And one of the things I learned when I was collecting the data, I'm an organizational anthropologist, so I go on-site to spend time with these leaders, is they had a notion that everyone has a slice of genius. That's interesting. Everyone has talents, everyone has passions. And you as a manager need to make sure you understand what people's talents and passions are because you need to unleash or amplify those individual slices of genius. So it's really about, on the one hand, unleashing people's individual identities, their talents and passions, and on the other hand, making sure that they're useful to the collective. So if we go back and look at the paradoxes, they all relate to the fact that fundamentally you're trying to use yourself.
So you need to be able to think about matching that intent. The role you have as a leader is to really work with other people to get things done, and the other people aren't simply the people on your team. They're the people in the broader organization. They may be your suppliers, your customers, whomever else you're dependent on to get the job done. And the other piece of it, they're very interrelated, is if you want to be able to work on those other two pieces of the network and yourself, you got to get the team right so that you can leverage yourself and have any time left to actually manage that network or manage yourself.
Chris Linnane:
What's a good example of a leader as a successful change agent?
Linda Hill:
I've been doing a number of cases recently about leaders who've been asked to be change agents because what we know is to be a great leader, it's not enough to be a value creator. You also must be a game changer. You must be able to identify not only what you should be doing, but what you could be doing and then figure out how to deliver on that. So one of the leaders I've been studying, and I'd been studying since 2015, was the man who ended up running the trials at Pfizer for the COVID vaccine. And as you may know, that was an instance of making the impossible possible because those trials were run in 266 days. So Michael, when he came to Pfizer, it was the biggest job in supply chain, global supply chain out there, and he couldn't believe he'd been offered the opportunity because he had been at a biotech company.
So he was brought in to do a digital transformation of clinical supply. And when he got there, he was overwhelmed in some ways by just how much scope and scale he was now going to have at Pfizer, because Pfizer had so many different drugs that were going through trials as compared to the biotech where he had been working before. So his first thing he had to do was build his team and he inherited a team, and many people told him "These were not people who were very digital necessarily, you need to bring in new people perhaps." And he looked and met the team and said, "You know what? No, I need this team. They know Pfizer. Many of them have been here 25 years or more, and I'm new to the company and I need to learn how this company works." So he kept that team and frankly, all these years later, most of the team is still with him except for some who have retired.
And you see many people who come interchange agents and they change out the team. And many of the people on this team were older than him and certainly had a lot more experience than he did at Pfizer in clinical supply. So he kept that team, but he did two things. He said, "You know what? I need to make sure we have the outside end point of view." So he also added to the team what he called a sort of skip-level high potentials. He asked the people on the team, "Who are some high potentials? Can we invite some of them to come to our meetings?" So he brought in fresh, younger voices because he wanted to have, again, understand what was happening and make sure that they always had that fresh perspective. Then he also went to his peers around the organization and he said to his peers, "Would you allow one of your high potentials to sit in on our meetings?"
Now, his peers were like, "Well, why do you want to do this? This is not how we do things really around here, but sure, if the high potentials say yes, then sure they can attend your meetings." No one said no to Michael. So Michael ended up with this very large leadership team. This core group had been there together. He was the new one there. Then these skip-level individuals, some of whom were really in individual contributor roles because depending on which part of the business they came from, and then these people from other parts of the organization. Now his own team was like, "Why do we have all these strangers in these meetings and we're getting to know each other and they're going to air our dirty laundry to the whole organization?" All the things you can imagine if your boss decided to do this.
Well, it turns out that doing that was brilliant for Michael also was a big team. It sort of ended up being like 15 people kind of unruly to think about how you get decisions made, et cetera. So years later when they found themselves having to do the COVID vaccine and run that, one of the things that people told me about why they were able to do it is they were very agile because everyone in the organization knew what they did and they knew what everyone else in the organization did because he had put these people on the team and they had kind of grown up together. So because there was that knowledge and that trust when they needed something, when Michael called or one of his team members called and said, "We need your group to do X, Y, Z for us so we can get this done," they knew the people.
There was already a relationship in an organization that was fundamentally fairly siloed. The second thing that happened is some of the people who'd been put on his team got promoted faster because they had an enterprise-wide view because they had been on his team. So they had been exposed to how Pfizer worked more broadly. Some of those people got promoted much faster than they would've gotten promoted and felt quite indebted to him. When he would call and say, "I need you to do X," they'd think, "Oh, I owe Michael." They told me this because Michael's one of the reasons I got promoted so fast. So because he had built those relationships in part to help him understand the organization, but also he knew they needed to work in a more collaborative way. That was one of the things that many, many people told me led to his being able to be successful. So this whole issue of understanding that leadership is not just about your team, where the people report to you, leadership is also about managing those relationships with people. That context around you is something that he really understood. Now, most people don't think of that network piece as being about leadership. They think about it as being about politics. There are politics, but it is a leadership role and it's critical because, and I know now if you want to execute seamlessly, if you want to innovate, a lot of that work is horizontal.
Chris Linnane:
Are you ready for some questions?
Linda Hill:
OK.
Chris Linnane:
OK, here we go. Here's the first one.
Linda Hill:
I'm supposed to ask the questions.
Chris Linnane:
Usually, but I have the red cards this time.
Linda Hill:
Chris Linnane:
Yes.
Linda Hill:
I'm ready. OK.
Chris Linnane:
You're being very empathetic right now.
Linda Hill:
I am.
Chris Linnane:
Thank you very much.
Linda Hill:
I'm doing my best.
Chris Linnane:
Linda Hill:
So the greatest leaders that I have met are always thinking about how they're preparing for the future as they also deliver for the present. And preparing for the future is really about creating a team or an organization that actually can be agile because the world does change. And so those are the best leaders. So they are leaders who understand you want everyone in the organization to be a value creator and a game changer to work on shoulds and coulds, doesn't matter where they sit in the organization. So they work very hard at creating the kind of context that will allow that to happen, and that's hard to do.
Chris Linnane:
Second question: What is one key tip you would give for building strong relationships with your boss?
Linda Hill:
The first tip I would say is that bosses are human. They are deeply imperfect, just like we're all deeply imperfect. So that's the first thing. They're deeply imperfect, just like you are. And two, they're as dependent on you as you are on them. So recognize that interdependency and take the time to empathize with them as a consequence. But as one CEO said, "Who came to visit? I used to be human, too." But I think we often forget that.
Chris Linnane:
Perfect. I love it. Alright, third question: What do you think will be an important skill for future leaders to focus on?
Linda Hill:
So for my new book that I'm working on, the working title is Scaling Genius. I don't know what the title will be because the publisher gets to choose. This is where you don't have so much influence. Critical scale for the future is bridging. And I have been trying to do lots of stories about bridgers. One is a story about Nicole Jones who works at Delta, and she was asked to create an innovation lab for Delta Airlines to make sure that they had the digital tools and data they needed to create a new kind of customer experience. And so she heads up this innovation lab and finds herself working with government, with TSA, with customs with Clear, because Clear is one of their partners, and I think Delta has actually invested someone in them. And then all the different pieces of Delta to offer us really biometric tickets, et cetera, so that we won't have to touch anything.
We'll just walk through the airport eventually. I guess you can do this at the Atlanta International Airport. You just get out of your car, you come into the airport, don't need any paper, you walk through the whole airport and get on the plane.
Chris Linnane:
Wow.
Linda Hill:
With these new kind of biometric tools now, they started first working with fingerprinting as, I dunno if you use Clear or anything like that to see that, but now they've gone to facial and they had to do that partly because of COVID, because people didn't want to touch stuff. Sure. So we see people in these roles where she has a team of, I don't know, 16, 20 people to really bring in digital transformation in the customer experience. And that requires bridging with all of these different categories of people to get stuff done. So she's an example of what we're seeing.
A lot of people who are asked to come run these corporate accelerators, these innovation labs, et cetera, to make sure that their company has access to talent and tools that really aren't necessarily inside the organization. She's sort of the bridger between if all the startups they're working with to get this stuff done and the internal parts of the organization that have to operate the way an airline needs to operate efficiently and safely, et cetera. So she's a bit of a buffer and a translator because, again, what we see is most organizations don't have what they need inside.
Or Raja who works for the government in Dubai was asked to create an innovation lab on the Metaverse. So she's been traveling, there are other pieces to this, but she's got to figure out how to travel the world, figure out who they should partner with, who they should try to entice to come to Dubai, to work with their financial institutions to deliver the metaverse, which is part of what Sheikh Mohammed wants to see happening. So we see many people being asked to do these roles where they have no formal authority and they're working with people either locally or globally who they have to figure out how to influence and inspire to want to be a part of a new ecosystem that's being created to deliver us new experiences.
Chris Linnane:
So these bridgers, I hadn't really thought about it as such a specific category, but they're so essential based on where we are now, and we'll carry a lot of influence as well.
Linda Hill:
Oh, for sure. They're very, the two that are really fun for me are two airlines. They were engineers at ANA, the airline industry, they came up with the idea of teleportation.
Chris Linnane:
They came up with it, or Star Trek came up?
Linda Hill:
A business, that is.
Chris Linnane:
A real version of it.
Linda Hill:
Yes. A real version of teleportation. So they went and spoke to all the quantum physicists and everything and discovered it'll be another 40 years before we can teleport the whole body.
Chris Linnane:
Oh my God.
Linda Hill:
So they're teleporting instead, human consciousness. So what they're doing, they have these avatar robots and they have one up on the International Space Station, and they're working with really technologists and scientists all around the world, real business to figure out how to send across, if you will, all of our five senses and our consciousness so we can work in places where we're not physically able to get to. This is real business. Everyone wants to invest in it. It's just growing. You wouldn't believe.
But the way that to create that, the ecosystem necessary to deliver this capability, hundreds of different scientists and technologists they're working with. But what I really loved talking about managing your boss, when they went to the CEO of this airline ANA and said they wanted to go into the teleportation business and they thought ANA should, the CEO, he said to them, "You mean like in Star Trek?" And they said, "Yeah, without the body right now, because we can't do that for a while, but we don't think long term." So they're at it.
Chris Linnane:
I have more questions about that.
Linda Hill:
OK.
Chris Linnane:
Forty years until the body can be teleported.
Linda Hill:
Yes. They're actually, we talk about them in the course.
Chris Linnane:
Oh my gosh.
Linda Hill:
We went to Japan and shot and met with a lot of the people they're working with. They're working with any number of players to get access to the technology needed. So they worked with XPRIZE to figure out who were the best people in the world at developing the haptic hand, which you sort of need to touch from when you're not there, if you will, and it's been a blast.
Chris Linnane:
And they're teleporting senses right now.
Linda Hill:
Well, the ones they're working on right now, it's relatively primitive because they're still developing the technology. Even if you think about the wifi issues you and I have. So to try to teleport even voice or site or something to some locations where they're trying to go is not easy and it can be quite expensive until you get that all worked out. So there's a whole telecommunications, they're building out a global platform so that you and I can rent one of these general-purpose avatar robots. Like you'd almost get an Uber or something to do what you want it to do. So people can use them now to go sort of fishing to, there's one up in space. When COVID happened, people, grandparents used their robots, the avatar robots to visit with grandchildren. Again, this is still primitive at this point, but these are the use cases they're working on, so we're going to have fun in the course.
Chris Linnane:
Well, Linda, thanks so much. Thank you. We've covered a lot of ground and I really appreciate you coming on the show, and I'm looking forward to the course.
Linda Hill:
Thank you. I'm looking forward to it, too.
Chris Linnane:
If you'd like to learn more about Professor Hill or her HBS Online course Leading in a Digital World, please visit us at theparlorroompodcast.com. Remember to follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook X, Instagram, and TikTok. My name is Chris Linnane. Thank you for listening.
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