When it comes to innovation, both leadership and management matter, but they influence different parts of the innovation process. The most consistent evidence from innovation research, including Google’s Project Aristotle, suggests that team-level management is often the most decisive factor in determining whether innovation really does happen.
Leadership sets direction, but management enables innovation
Senior leadership may declare that innovation is a priority, but this message is abstract until it reaches teams. But clarity of purpose is needed, so leaders will play an important role by:
- Defining the vision and ambition for innovation
- Allocating investment in resources and priorities
- Creating a culture that tolerates experimentation and failure
However, these leadership contributions are indirect. Leaders create the conditions, but they rarely determine whether a specific idea becomes a useful innovation. Without management, strategies remain largely rhetorical.
It is common to declare ambitious innovation strategies, sometimes supported by comprehensive innovation frameworks, but see little change. Senior leaders announce innovation goals, but if management incentives are measured using short-term project or operational performance indicators. this creates a conflict. Teams are encouraged to innovate but their managers are rewarded by avoiding risk.
Team-level management determines execution
Innovation happens within teams, not executive suites or boardrooms. Managers at team level influence:
- Translation of an organisation’s strategy into practical work
- Psychological safety that allows people to speak, challenge assumptions, and admit mistakes.
- Decisions about the time and space for experimentation
- Collaboration across different areas within a business
- How quickly ideas move from concept to prototype
Research by organisations such as Google, notably its Project Aristotle study which looked at the different practices and results in over 180 of its teams, found that team dynamics and management behaviours were the strongest predictors of team performance, including innovation.
Teams with supportive and well-organised managers consistently outperformed others. They might be described as the gatekeepers of innovation, and a manager willing to experiment can accelerate an idea; whereas a cautious one can stop it before the innovation process of turning those ideas into sustainable value begins.
The reason why teams in the same company perform differently
Managers must deal with the tension between:
- Delivery of current products and services within time and budget constraints
- Exploration, experimentation, and testing of new ideas and ways of working
- Strategy and its translation into work
Managers sit precisely at the point where this tension is most acute. They must deliver operational targets while also creating room for the experimentation needed to meet targets. How they balance this tension affects innovation outcomes.
The importance of management style helps explain a common phenomenon. There can be very large differences in innovation outcomes between different teams within the same organisation despite the organisation sharing the same strategy, leadership, funding environment, and innovation enablers such as technology.
Performance varies because teams experience different management practices. A team with a manager who encourages experimentation, protects time for creative work, and removes bureaucratic barriers will typically generate more innovation than one that focuses solely on short-term delivery milestones and budgets. This behaviour is often described as protecting or insulating their team from influences in the organisation that would undermine their performance, but this is a negative opinion. A more positive positioning would be that these managers are creating an environment where what matters gets done, and results get delivered.
Conclusion
Leadership without good team management rarely delivers successful innovation. Innovation is rarely driven solely from the top or the bottom. Instead, it emerges from the interaction between leadership vision and managerial practice.
While leadership defines the possibility of innovation, team-level management determines the reality. Differences in how managers run teams are a major reason why some teams in the same organisation innovate far more successfully than others.
Managers can be described as the “hidden engine” of innovation because it is this level where strategy, people, and the actual work intersect. While senior leaders define ambitions, it is often frontline employees that generate the ideas with the most impact, and their managers determine whether these ideas are explored and survive long enough to become innovations.
In practice, innovation is less a function of inspirational speeches and more a function of everyday management behaviour.
Leaders need to be acutely aware that the quality of team-level management is often the single most important factor when it comes to explaining why some teams in their organisation consistently innovate, while others do not.
