Leading and Managing HEROes: How to Encourage Employee-Driven Innovation Based on Social Technologies

By: Ted Schadler and Josh Bernoff

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Synopsis: The business of leading and managing HERO employees-Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives-is tricky. Innovators create disruption. Their ideas can threaten others, and a lot of those ideas will fail. In this chapter, authors Josh Bernoff-coauthor of "Groundswell"-and Ted Schadler outline three things a HERO-powered business must do in order to thrive: 1) Encourage innovation through leadership, as part of a strategy that everyone understands; 2) Allow HEROes to test their innovations rapidly, kill off what's not working, and scale up the rest; and 3) Encourage HEROes to collaborate across organizational boundaries, because the best ideas almost always cross those boundaries. Managers who succeed in HERO-powered businesses learn to tolerate a lot of trials and half-baked strategies while coaching their people to keep them in step with corporate goals. Using examples from Intuit and Dell, this chapter shows you what to do when your HEROes go into high gear-and how you can turn their innovations into scalable, companywide, collaborative activities. This chapter was originally published as Chapter 9 of Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business