Creating the Innovation Culture: Leveraging Visionaries, Dissenters and Other Useful Troublemakers

Chapter 9. 9 Coaching Dissenters

The anager is a valuable political buffer between the dissenter and the rest of the organization. However, dissenters can be so single-minded that they damage themselves and their projects. The manager needs to convince them to acquire some rudimentary political skills and to help them do so. This chapter provides tips on how to do this.

Introduction

In the last chapter, I discussed being a political handler for your dissenter/ innovator. This is an important role managers should continue to play but sometimes you need a little more from the dissenter. While you can try to substitute your political acumen for his, you probably can't be a total replacement.

Her lack of skill may have you working at cross-purposes. If you're busy building coalitions for her idea while she's ticking off the very people you're cultivating, you're going nowhere fast. A dissenter who is too far outside the norms can threaten your effectiveness. But forcing her out or into the fold will lead to less innovation. You need to walk a fine line.

Two problems

You know that a modicum of working well with others can help enormously. Research on emotional intelligence shows that this quality is twice as important to success as raw intelligence or technical know-how. Of course, this argument is unlikely to hold water for dissenters. Since much of their view of themselves is tied up with their pride in their technical competence, they are not going to give much credence to anything that ...