Leadership Principles That Produce Game-Changing Teams

How innovation team leaders can elevate their teams' skills: Peter Boatwright, Shantha Mohan, and Mark Sanders offer perspectives and expertise.

Teams are often defined by their leaders, and those leaders can shape and cultivate their teams to create meaningful impact. 

“A leader sets the tone and shows the way to make sure that their team understands the culture.” - Shantha

Innovation team leaders are granted an especially difficult task: lead effectively while balancing competing demands, constraints, and the need to stay ahead of the innovation curve. 

“Innovation is creating value. All businesses, in essence, create value. Innovation is an eye to see what people outside your business still need and what you can be doing about it.” - Peter

At the Integrated Innovation Institute (iii), individuals with different perspectives are brought together to innovate through the lenses of business, design, and engineering. Peter Boatwright, Shantha Mohan, and Mark Sanders, all leaders within the iii and Carnegie Mellon community, share insights from their years of experience leading innovation teams.

The Importance of Cultivating Team Culture

Cultivating a healthy, productive culture is crucial for those leading innovation teams. A team, especially one creating breakthrough products and services, must trust one another to work together effectively. 

To create a strong sense of community, leaders need to establish open lines of communication early on and prompt conversations about work dynamics, values, expectations, and goals across the team. Beyond what they say, leaders need to be role models for the behaviors they want to see across the team, encouraging feedback and taking accountability when things don’t go as planned. 

Leaders must set aside their egos to foster innovation. Empowering team members as decision-makers creates an environment where ideas flow freely, and solutions emerge more quickly. This open approach encourages dialogue, welcomes questions, and ultimately builds a more agile and capable team.

Leaders must also create psychological safety, a “shared belief held by members of a team that it’s OK to take risks, to express their ideas and concerns to speak up with questions and to admit mistakes – all without fear of negative consequences.” 

“Leaders have to create a culture where failure is seen as a learning opportunity. You have to encourage your team to take risks. You do that by celebrating even ideas that fail and taking those lessons to the next experience. Experimenting and failing are fundamental to being innovative.” - Shantha

If team members feel unable to take risks, their innovation is hindered. Innovation rarely occurs without failure first, so failure needs to be encouraged as part of the process. Casting a net of psychological safety over a team can do this. Psychological safety can be created by ensuring all team members feel respected and heard, knowing they can offer their ideas and feedback without fear of retribution.  

Many team members might fear reaching outside their specialties because of this fear of failure. Encouraging people to reach outside of their silos to work with others will allow for teams to reach new heights together. “People who are in a team should not be constrained by communication within their team, they should invite opinions from other teams and attend their meetings to gain a general understanding,” said Shantha. 

By encouraging this curiosity and integration of skills within their teams, they showcase their value for the diversity of thinking while setting a precedent for their team members to extend their skill sets and work with others.

Diverse Experience Makes the Difference

To innovate, teams need a diversity of expertise and experiences. When teams have more representation, they have a better sample of personal and professional experience to build on for their products and services. 

“Products and services are designed for humans. Humans are very unique creatures. What we try to do with products and services is try and find a unique thread through a lot of individuals with their shared commonality about something.” - Mark

Mark describes making the perfect product or service as a “moving target.” Leaders who value diverse teams invest in better solutions and a better work environment for their teams, making that target a bit more stable.

Diverse teams also lower the risk of uncertainty in innovation. Their varied skill sets, experiences, and perspectives allow businesses to innovate more effectively while minimizing associated risks.

Innovation Without Risk Isn't Innovation

While many leaders instinctively shy away from change, clinging to proven methods, this level of caution can be fatal for their organizations.

Mark captured this paradox perfectly: "If we don't innovate, we die." His words cut to the heart of modern business reality. Like money gathering dust in a piggy bank, losing value day by day, companies that choose comfort over innovation are choosing slow decline over potential growth. The question isn't whether to innovate, but how quickly we can adapt to an ever-changing world.

“If you do nothing, you devalue every day.” - Mark

Innovation isn't always about moonshots and revolutionary breakthroughs. Often, it's the small, daily victories that build a foundation for lasting success. Think of it as compound interest for your organization—tiny improvements, consistently applied, that accumulate into significant advantages. By breaking down innovation into daily practices, teams can navigate market changes with agility and confidence.

Fear of innovation is far more dangerous than innovation itself. It's not a question of whether disruption will come, but who will lead it. Mark's insight cuts to the chase: "If you don't disrupt your own industry, someone is going to come around and do it for you."

Collaboration vs. Integration

The most powerful innovations aren't born in isolation – they emerge from collective wisdom. When teams learn to honor both their own expertise and their colleagues' domains, something remarkable happens: knowledge boundaries become bridges rather than barriers. But simple collaboration isn't enough. True innovation flourishes when teams move beyond mere collaboration to genuine integration.

“Collaboration takes place in a group with people that are different from them. Integration means there is no us and them, there is a we.” - Peter 

Collaboration involves a back-and-forth approach to completing work. Instead of working together at the same time, tasks are assembled like a collage. In contrast, integration means that work is done together, side by side. While both methods have shared goals, the key difference lies in how those goals are achieved.

When teams share their knowledge, they gain insights and develop better solutions. Leaders should look to encourage integration over collaboration, as this approach fosters a more egalitarian work environment and unlocks true innovation.

The Integrated Innovation Institute stands at the crossroads of possibility. We know that innovation isn’t built on individual achievements but on the extraordinary power of integrated teamwork. The next generation of leaders is built within our classrooms through their values of innovation. Want to learn more? Join us.