Unleash your Innovation Power: Combining Design Thinking, Agile, and Lean (Part 4/4)

Humanize Leadership to Transform Your Team

A lot has changed since I published the third article of this series. During the last year, we all have seen how fast the outbreak of COVID-19 changed our lives, both on the private and business side. Once more, the power of innovation became obvious! In my previous publications we have learned how important it is to involve customers right from the beginning in co-innovation projects, and how powerful the combination of Design Thinking and Agile can be in a lively culture of innovation. The last of the four learnings? Humanize Leadership. In today's often virtualized work environments, this has become an even more important element when leading and motivating teams.

Tapping into the value of humanized leadership

I admit, humanism is a fundamental, wide-scope concept. The human-centered philosophy has ancient origins and splits up into various intellectual streams. These, however, always share a common foundation: the emphasis on the individual and collective potential and abilities of humans to realize progress under the condition of freedom. I strongly believe that leaders can learn a lot from these values. Translating them into leadership practice ensures constant transformation and utilization of innovation potential. Empirical studies, for example, found a positive correlation between individual and organizational performance, both strongly related to customer satisfaction. For the global SAP AppHaus team, we have established a humanized, transformational leadership style from the very beginning. Especially in the technology-driven innovation sector, I consider this to be key for a truly collaborative team culture. In the end, it is a prerequisite for realizing and managing successful customer projects that create tangible value for the customers’ teams and users, and bring, as we always call it, innovation into the hands of people. From my own experience, these three leadership principles are head and front for innovation: 

1. passion
2. egolessness
3. empowerment

1. Lead with passion

Passion starts directly with the leader and requires excitement, enthusiasm, commitment, and - visionary thinking. This mindset usually inspires team members to share their visions and innovation ideas, intentions and approaches to make innovation real. Our former SAP AppHaus member Tobias Haug was particularly enthusiastic about passionate leadership. Back in 2018, he launched a monthly breakfast session at the SAP AppHaus, where every SAP employee was invited to debate the future of work and leadership. Today, Tobias is the Head of Humanizing Business at SAP, scaling our incubated values company-wide. It must be emphasized that a top-down culture does not foster passionate leadership; it tends to divide leaders and employees. Thus, it is essential to flatten the hierarchy as much as possible, which leads us to the next principle.

2. Lead egoless

The human ego is a given. The talent of a leader, though, can focus on creating a team atmosphere of trust, fairness and appreciation that helps decrease the need for personal promotion and agendas and helps grow team spirit and truly collaborative mindsets. I consider this to be particularly crucial, as I perceive the ego as a preserving element that allows little change. When I, as a leader, try to minimize the ego and simultaneously inspire employees through passionate leadership, I create the basis for change. However, the change does not come from top-down decisions, but from open discourse and the competence of the individual team members. Here we are at the role of freedom, praised by humanism, which releases individual as well as collective potential. It's not me who delivers results, no, it's us, the team.

3. Empower employees through creative freedom

Lastly, another important aspect to transform teams and organizations is through empowering employees and giving them creative freedom. This freedom allows team members to take on new responsibilities and evolve both personally and professionally. Creative freedom fosters employee engagement by moving away from micro-management to team-based decision-making. To give an example, the SAP AppHaus team jointly designed and set up the whole space including workshop and office areas. Throughout this creative process, I realized that giving all team members the opportunity and freedom to contribute and incorporate own ideas encourages them to get things done even more efficiently. Did this customization drive up the cost of the space? No. But it meant a lot to the team as they were able to decide themselves and design the space as functional and creative as they wanted.

Allow for trial and error

To summarize the previous suggestions, all leadership and team activities are ultimately a process of trial and error. To continuously innovate and humanize one’s personal leadership behavior, it is important to try out new models and approaches, to find out what works for a specific team, and what should be further iterated or improved.

While giving employees the freedom for creativity it is essential to also ensure that the team knows and is committed to their shared objectives and works in a goal-oriented way. During my 30 years of work experience at SAP, I figured out that the best way to ensure that the team does not lose sight of their goals is to let people be creative. At the same time, it is important to define clear boundaries that help the team stay focused and achieve its common goal.

Unleash your innovation power

To finish off this article series, I hope that I could provide valuable insights into what can be achieved through the powerful combination of Design Thinking, Agile, and Lean. Now having the full picture, the main learnings to help you unleash your innovation power are:

• Learning #1: Involve customers from the beginning
• Learning #2: Combine Design Thinking and Agile
• Learning #3: Foster a culture of innovation in your organization
• Learning #4: Humanize Leadership

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Sources:

Wang, Chich-Jen, Mei-Ling (2010). Effect of leadership style on organizational performance as viewed from human resource management strategy. Journal of Business Management, Vol. 4 (18), pp. 3924-36.

Kuchinke, Asrar-ul-Haq (2016). Impact of leadership styles on employees’ attitude towards their leader and performance. Future Business Journal, Vol 2 (1), pp. 54-64.

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