COACHING FORORGANIZATIONALCHANGE 169
Business strategy and personal leadership style, the individual and the team,
psychological issues and organizational one, are all intertwined.
We coach five types of innovation leaders:
- Inventors
- Intrapreneurial leaders
- Intrapreneurial teams
- Sponsors of innovation
- Climate makers
Inventors
Inventors often come with built-in headwinds when it comes to getting their
ideas implemented. Either they must become intrapreneurs themselves,
which is a major transition in viewpoint, or they need to learn to enroll and
work with intrapreneurs who can bring their ideas into commercial reality.
Normally, inventors are not given coaches, so we end up coaching them in-
formally as part of some other assignment. However, in some cases, a partic-
ular inventor will be so prolific and important to a company’s success that
they are given their own coach.
Intrapreneurial Leaders
Ideas and inventions go nowhere in a large organization unless someone takes
on the entrepreneurial role of making them happen. We call those who be-
have like entrepreneurs inside a larger organization intrapreneurs.
Coaching innovation leaders generally includes helping them bring out
and /or manage the entrepreneurial side of their nature. Intrapreneurs tread a
narrow path between expressing the impatience needed to overcome the
lethargy of an established firm and the need to avoid being rejected as foreign
to the culture. The coaches of intrapreneurial leaders support the courage to
act boldly and choose ways of behaving that will cause fewer political prob-
lems. They have to encourage both a participatory leadership style that gets
the most from the team and the ability to make quick decisions and rapid re-
versals when something is not working. The best coaches for intrapreneurs
have struggled with these dilemmas themselves. They have been entrepre-
neurs or intrapreneurs long enough to have a deeply rooted understanding of
the issues.
When we are asked to coach an intrapreneurial leader to remove dysfunc-
tional behaviors that are getting in the way of business success, we do not
overfocus on what’s wrong; we spend more attention on increasing our client’s