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How Emotional Gearing Influences Innovation Outcomes

I am writing this edition from my office in Vancouver. The morning sun illuminates a blank wall. My mind searches for a single aha moment that frames this introduction to Emotional Gearing.

Instead, what comes to mind is two years of research with over 500 innovation leaders across five continents. Rather than buzzwords, gimmicks or clickbait, what slowly emerged was a simple repeatable mechanism described with plain language.

Emotional Gearing didn't come from my aha moment. Instead, it comes from hundreds of research participants' aha moments.

Allow me to explain why this goes against the status quo of innovation, strategy and management literature.

Leadership Needs More Science

Let’s address an awkward truth: a lot of leadership behaviour theory doesn’t hold up to reality, especially if we look at innovation leadership more scientifically. 

There is no single profile of who makes an innovative leader in all situations. Nor is there a list of tasks or a single leadership mechanism that unlocks success, every time. 

Admittedly, we all love a heroic case study and their seductive hacks and acts. However, the reality is that each leadership situation is just too different. Heraclitus comes to mind: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”

We need better leadership science that more realistically accounts for the tremendous behavioural and technical complexity, variability and uncertainty any professional faces when trying to drive change through a new idea of any size.

The Comparative Method Advantage

This mission for better behavioural science in a specific situation speaks to me. I was part of a similar paradigm shift in high-performance sports. Thirty years ago sport started to move beyond folk theories, gimmicks and gurus.

The goal was to scientifically understand and manage the cognitive pressures and mechanisms of performing under pressure when it matters most. 

Today, we deeply understand and apply evidence-based methods that better enable athletes to perform their best under pressure. These practices and mechanisms have become familiar to informed youth and recreational athletes (and their coaches) as much as Olympians representing your nation.

In my organizational leadership research, I borrowed a fundamental aspect of performance development from sports: the comparative method, where athletes religiously and rigorously study their performances between and within competition, as well as in training. 

Using the Innovation Leadership Map framework executives in my research compared multiple innovation leadership experiences good and bad. 

Comparison enabled individuals to see their response range when operating in emotionally charged environments of innovation. This response range operated at two levels, how they responded and the responses of others in their team and/or the organization. 

The aha moment came when they saw that their feelings, thoughts and actions when leading innovation are dynamic rather than a static good or bad binary.

That statement may seem obvious to you. Yet, these highly accomplished executives I was working with had almost universally not previously compared like-for-like leadership situations such as innovation processes let alone other routine work tasks. 

Sure there was ongoing ad hoc reflection, executive coaching, line manager feedback and annual performance reviews. However, a reliable, candid and experiential analysis method comparing multiple situations to illuminate the range of ways they operate as a leader was almost universally new.

The benefit of this personal performance insight was that while a leader of innovation will never know precisely what will happen as their work progresses, looking at their past through the comparative method insightfully illuminated how they might respond in the present through the inevitable ups and downs of innovation in their future.

The repetition of these individual aha moments led to a broader observation. 

Centred, Surging or Stuck

In 2023 a clear pattern emerged across participants suggesting a strong correlation between an emotionally balanced position and positive outcomes. 

Equally, extremely high or low emotional energy was often strongly correlated with negative professional or personal outcomes for individuals, teams and/or organizations. 

However, at times strong emotional surges were helpful and even necessary to drive progress for individuals, teams or entire organizations.

For example, surges could inject highly energized bursts of enthusiasm, idealization, optimism and motivation to break through setbacks, frustration or resistance.

Or, a surge could subtract energy to bring down to earth an unbounded ambition, misaligned vision or reckless risk-taking to reconnect with reality.

While these surges could be helpful, the more costly and regressive situations occurred when individuals became stuck in extreme highs or lows.

Like climbing 8,000+ meter mountains, one ventures into extreme conditions to accomplish great things. However, even expert mountaineers can’t stay in this “death zone”  for too long as the body can only be deprived of oxygen for so long and still function effectively. 

“Emotional gearing” is a practice for how innovation leaders can intentionally work with behavioural demands and dynamics by actively shifting when needed between centred, surging and stuck positions. It's a mechanism that can proactively interpret and influence the responses of individuals, teams and/or the organization.

What’s Next for Emotional Gearing

I hope to deploy and further test this mechanism with executives, coaches, advisors and L&D professionals like you supporting the innovators in your organization. 

The aim is to reduce the costs of people burning out while increasing the benefits of innovation to their organization, stakeholders and society.

If you have ideas for adopting Emotional Gearing or suggestions on who should hear about it please get in touch. 

Also, thanks to research participants and those who provided feedback to prior editions of this newsletter. Every act deepens our knowledge to reduce pain and increase gain.

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