Last week’s Whatif? If Wednesday’s Thought Letter examined the barriers preventing leaders from fully embracing a responsibility-first mindset and horizontal thinking: The Innovator’s Dilemma, inertia, and individual fear of failure. This week, we explore three solutions to overcome these barriers and unlock the full potential of our leadership, teams, and organizations.

1. Incentivize Long-Term Thinking

• Cross-functional innovation Labs: Gather talent from various departments to tackle long-term projects and transcend individual accountability. By incentivizing collaboration across silos, executive teams will see the benefits of horizontal thinking without disrupting short-term results. Your best people will want to participate in them.
• Measure, Reward, and Celebrate Cross-Departmental Success: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that reward collaborative success and individual targets encourage leaders to focus on the broader business needs and enhance rather than abandon tried-and-true methods.
• A Culture of Learning and Experimentation: Embrace experimentation as a learning opportunity rather than a career risk. Celebrate innovation by displaying a pipeline of cross-functional innovations that have been ideated, developed, and implemented. See every setback as a stepping stone to success.

2. Build Agility into Leadership Practices

• Executive Coaching and Mentoring: Encourage executives to seek professional and peer coaching. This practice helps develop a mindset that embraces collaboration and shared responsibility, leading to more thoughtful decision-making.
• Agile Decision-Making Structures: Require cross-functional teams to solve critical business challenges, adopting an all-for-one and one-for-all ethos. This aids faster decision-making, allowing leaders to think and grow beyond their vertical responsibilities.
• Regular Cross-Functional Reviews: Conduct periodic cross-functional strategy sessions to keep departments aligned and leaders attuned to the broader business objectives.

3. Build Psychological Safety

• Culture of Experimentation: Promote an environment where individuals feel safe taking calculated risks and accepting setbacks as part of the innovation process. This will significantly reduce the fear of failure, encouraging a more open and collaborative environment.
• Collective Accountability: Implement structures where cross-functional teams are accountable for broader business, customer, and employee goals. This will lessen individual fear as success, setbacks, and learning are accepted collectively.
• Leadership Development on Emotional Intelligence (EQ): Help leaders develop self-awareness, resilience, and adaptability to be more comfortable with the ambiguity of horizontal thinking.

Putting These Strategies into Action

These strategies require a deliberate shift in leadership mindset. Here’s how we can weave them into the existing executive framework:

• Create Executive Alignment Programs: Establish ongoing leadership workshops focused on cross-department collaboration, risk-taking, and agility.
• Implement Transparent Feedback Loops: Routinely collect and share feedback to help executives understand their impact beyond their vertical responsibilities.
• Prioritize Alignment Between Leadership and Culture: Entrench the principles of agility, innovation, and psychological safety as company core values and non-negotiable leadership attributes.

Adopting these strategies means challenging established leadership principles, company culture, and incentives. What if we promoted cross-departmental collaboration, built agility into leadership practices, and fostered a psychologically safe culture? Could we create an environment where horizontal thinking and focusing on long-term success is the norm? Might such deliberate actions help us pave the way for transformational change?

Let’s continue challenging the status quo and unlock better—together.