Paradoxes of Innovative leadership

Leaders Must Obtain Domain Expertise While Also Gaining Necessary Leadership Skills
Leading for innovation requires domain expertise The challenge to leaders, however, is in gaining domain expertise yet also obtaining requisite leadership skills necessary for managing people and resources in an organization development of expertise, in any form, takes time. In fact, some researchers have suggested that expertise requires upward of 10 years to obtain

Leaders Must Be Evaluative of Project Direction, but Also Generative of New Ideas
Leaders of innovation must serve as the gatekeepers of ideasbacking those ideas that may be most successful for the team and organization At the same time, however, leaders must also be supportive of out of the box thinking. This support is particularly necessary for creative endeavours where reactions to originality are typically critical and negative

Paradoxes of Innovative leadership

Leaders Must Develop Team Cohesion Within a Team of Creative Personalities, yet Still Encourage Creative Conflict
leaders face a unique challenge in managing a collection of individuals who would likely prefer working alone. Put more directly, leaders face difficult conflict in that they must develop cohesion among team members who often possess traits of autonomy, need for achievement, hostility, and dominance

Leaders Must Provide a Vision and Direction to team Members but Also Allow for High Levels of Team Autonomy
it is essential that leaders provide guidance and direction to the team the tension occurs, however, when we consider the nature of creative individuals and the nature of the creative task. Providing too much structure can be met with significant backlash from teams and individuals who prefer freedom in their tasks

Paradoxes of Innovative leadership

Leaders Must Allow for the Timelines and Resources Necessary for Creative Thinking yet Avoid Complacency by Providing Requisite Restrictions and Pressure Necessary for Performance
tension between managing the work and allowing members the requisite autonomy to think and perform creatively. That is, while the creative process can sometimes result in working toward problem resolution in an iterative and deliberate fashion, in an organizational setting, there is often a sense of urgency for result creative endeavours need time to develop, particularly when projects are team-based yet leaders need to provide some degree of pressure to meet team-level goals

Leaders Must Frequently Be Evaluative/Critical Within the Team, but Champions for Ideas With Organizational Decision-Makers and Stakeholders
as very few creative ideas make it to production stages, leaders must be critical of the majority of creative ideasat least in an evaluative sense (Mumford et al.,2003). Conversely, however, leaders must also sell ideas to upper-level management and other organizational stakeholders, touting the strengths of the ideas and highlighting potential financial upsides of team projects

Paradoxes of Innovative leadership

Leaders Must Pursue Multiple Ideas While Keeping Project Costs Low
Organizational needs, businesses frequently succeed by operating efficiently and keeping costs low Innovation, however, is hardly an efficient, predictable endeavour. creativity requires significant time extra time to pursue ideas that are likely to fail is a difficult strategy to pursue

Leaders Must Facilitate Openness With External but Also Protect the Organization's Competitive Advantage

Networks,

Leaders have to develop broader collaborations with external net-works which helps ensure an influx of valuable information as well as fresh perspectives on potential innovation opportunities This can sometimes lead to emergence of a learning race that can occur in collaborations where both entities attempt to learn as much as they can about one another before terminating the collaboration. Thus, leaders must develop open external relation-ships, but also be aware of the need to protect emerging ideas.