Connecting Dots is the monthly newsletter for innovation leaders by Brett Macfarlane.

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Executive Insights: Legitimacy to Drive Innovation

Innovation leaders fail—not because they lack ideas, but because they lack legitimacy. They're asked to transform organizations while standing on unstable ground, armed with tools and methodologies but without the trust and authority to actually steer change.

Last month, here, I argued that most organizations face a leadership problem disguised as a technical innovation problem. Innovation succeeds when leaders can guide people through new ways of working, not just deploy new tools or processes.

In this environment, one word keeps surfacing: legitimacy. It's relevant whether you carry an innovation title or simply want to improve something with new approaches, ideas, or technologies.

Legitimacy is earning the informal authority to steer your organization's future through trust and results—not just ideas and charisma.

Innovation teams that focus solely on tools, processes, and data often struggle to build that legitimacy. The ones that manage to influence real decisions usually do something more: they learn to work with the social and emotional dynamics of change as intentionally as they work with proposition development, program roadmaps and technical backlogs.

This human-centred approach to innovation management is rarely trained. It's mostly gained through painful trial and error—often without awareness or self-recognition.

In practice, the strongest innovation functions balance investments in technical and social processes. They sense what's happening inside the organization in real time, diagnose resistance, and respond in ways that build trust rather than escalate anxiety. Pragmatically, this means innovation leaders act as translators between strategy and execution, between ambition and fear, between long-term bets and short-term pressures.

When Technical Expertise Isn't Enough

I learned this the hard way, leading the transformation office for a global technology firm. Our team had developed a well-validated innovation proposal backed by solid research and clear plans. The executive mission statement explicitly said this work would drive revenue growth and improve customer adoption. It should have been an easy sell.

It wasn't.

Our proposals weren't gaining executive attention. The numbers didn't add up. The stated priorities didn't match the actual responses. So I asked the team to accept that maybe we didn't know everything. I suggested we treat our next executive update not as a presentation but as a workshop—a conversation designed to understand where our work fits in the broader picture, rather than just selling harder.

That shift unlocked everything.

We learned that our technical expertise was deeply respected. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that executives doubted our interest in the firm's overall well-being.

They saw us as innovation evangelists, not business partners. By shifting our focus to the relational and organizational considerations—the actual headaches keeping executives up at night—we could collaboratively figure out how to get the golden goose to market rather than continue debating the value of the golden goose.

The deliverables didn't change. The innovation didn't change. What changed was our legitimacy to drive it forward.

The Innovation Leader as Archetype Shifter

On a panel recently, I described innovation leaders as "the Olympians of business"—operating under exceptionally high levels of pressure, uncertainty, and scrutiny where success is idealized, and failure demonized. That pressure comes from markets and technology, but also from finance, risk, operations, frontline teams, the board, and even friends and family.

Leaders who consistently maintain legitimacy in that environment don't rely on a single leadership style. Those who endure learn to switch—or mix in teams—the styles and ways of leading others depending on context.

The singular innovator archetype on its own is rarely enough to land innovation. Over the course of a single innovation process or wholesale organizational transformation, you need different leadership modes at different times: strategist, transactor, processor, change-catalyst, builder, communicator, and coach.

You might naturally be "the ideas person," but there are moments when you have to switch into processor mode or into a more diplomatic or challenging posture. Calling that out explicitly—"In this conversation I'm wearing my processor hat," or "I'm going to play the strategist so we can pressure-test this"—helps others understand your intent and reduces anxiety.

A quieter part of the job is helping other leaders shift modes too, particularly in finance, sales, infrastructure, engineering, and executive teams. That involves empathy, framing, and carefully designing meetings so that people can safely move between control, enthusiasm, curiosity, anxiety, and commitment without feeling exposed or dominated.

Capabilities That Build Legitimacy

So how do innovation leaders build this legitimacy? Not through charisma or bold vision statements, but through specific, learnable capabilities.

These aren't abstract virtues. They're skills that repeatedly show up when innovation leaders are treated as legitimate partners rather than as a sideshow.

organizational Fluency

Legitimacy in innovation discussions starts with a grounded understanding of the technologies at the center of your work, beyond the business case or project process, especially if the technologies are outside your domain. Though the fluency isn’t the technology itself, rather it’s the implications on other parts of the business and how to fulfill their obligations. It means grasping basic workflows, data and bias risks, possibilities, dependencies, limitations, and realistic implementation timelines that are concerning in ways unique to finance, legal, marketing, and other areas. It means being able to ask the right questions without pretending to be an expert, dismissing their domain, or arguing that the promise of innovation is more important than their concerns.

Leaders with organizational fluency are better able to puncture over-inflated concerns, avoid over-inflated promises, set realistic expectations, and translate between technical claims and business implications. That, in turn, makes others more willing to rely on your judgment.

Change Leadership

Innovation is always an exercise in change leadership. For executives, that means navigating the human side of adoption: fears about job loss, resistance to new workflows, and discomfort with data-driven decision cultures.

These concerns are consistently at the center of modern innovation. Change-capable leaders communicate a clear and honest vision, stay close to how people are experiencing change, and sustain momentum through the inevitable friction. Over time, this reduces the gap between "what we say we want" and "what we actually do"—a core source of legitimacy.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Most meaningful innovation work sits at the intersections: business, manufacturing, partnerships, supply chains, IT, data, operations, policy, investor relations and end users. Legitimacy here depends on the ability to bridge these groups.

Cross-functional collaboration is about translating between technical and business languages, making constraints visible without weaponizing them, and aligning objectives so that different teams can see themselves in the same outcome. Leaders who can do this repeatedly tend to be invited into more conversations, not fewer.

Probabilistic Decision-Making

As new technologies, material capabilities, and data products become more central, leaders need to become comfortable with probabilistic thinking. That includes understanding confidence intervals, performance metrics, and the conditions under which human judgment should override algorithmic recommendations.

Leaders who can reason out loud about uncertainty and facilitate groups through to good enough certainty—rather than pretending it doesn't exist or being paralyzed by it—help teams make better calls and avoid both blind faith in models and reflexive rejection of them. This models the kind of data-informed behaviour the rest of the organization is being asked to adopt.

Innovation Mindsets

Innovation still requires experimentation, iteration, and a higher tolerance for ambiguity than most corporate environments are designed for. An innovation mindset is less about enthusiasm for novelty and more about the ability to balance experimentation with risk, while maintaining person-to-person engagement that delivers progress through trust generation amid complexity and new ways of working.

Practically, this means creating psychological safety for teams to try things, framing experiments in business terms, and being willing to learn from partial and imperfect data. Leaders who can hold that balance tend to be trusted when they ask for patience and when they decide to stop or scale an initiative.

Ethical Leadership

As data-driven systems become more pervasive or molecular inventions more potent, questions of fairness, privacy, transparency, and accountability move from the margins to the center. Ethical leadership means having frameworks, governance processes, and relational capital in place before something goes wrong, and being willing to slow down or adjust when risks emerge.

Executives who treat ethics as part of strategy—rather than as an afterthought or compliance burden—tend to carry more moral authority when they ask others to take uncomfortable steps.

Sustainable Implementation Strategies

Finally, innovation leaders build legitimacy when they show they can embed change in a way that lasts. Sustainable strategies focus less on one-off deployments and more on building capabilities, processes, and habits that outlive individual projects.

This includes measuring value in ways that make sense over time, scaling what works without over-claiming, and consciously investing in people and processes—often the "70%" of human capital that quietly determines whether the "30%" of tools and platforms is worth anything at all.

Legitimacy as the Quiet Core of Innovation Leadership

Seen through this lens, innovation leadership in 2026 is less about owning a pipeline or being the most creative person in the room. It's about becoming a trusted engine inside the organization—someone who can move between leadership modes, navigate uncertainty, and still be seen as a reliable guide.

Here's what many innovation leaders miss: the primary goal isn't to deliver new things to market. The primary goal is to use innovation to generate unique and proprietary insights that inform strategy and create space for strategic discussion that charts the course of the business. It's about scaling the company first. Often, this will also mean the adoption of innovation—but that's the outcome, not the objective.

I've seen firsthand how even in the most innovative organizations, this work is brutally difficult. Even the best aren't very good when you really interrogate what goes on through innovation processes. The good news is that it doesn't need to be that way.

The capabilities above provide a practical way to build that legitimacy, one conversation and one decision at a time.

Start by auditing which leadership mode you default to under pressure. Then identify which capability gap most threatens your legitimacy—and commit to building it. That's where real innovation leadership begins.

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To go deeper:

"Breaking Down the Barriers to Innovation” by Scott Anthony (HBR, November-December 2019)

URL: https://hbr.org/2019/11/breaking-down-the-barriers-to-innovation

"Collective Genius" by Linda Hill et al. (HBR article, 2014)

URL: https://hbr.org/podcast/2024/02/how-the-best-leaders-drive-innovation

"A Better Way to Unlock Innovation and Drive Change" by Diya Kapur Misra, Linda Hill, et al. (MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall 2024)

URL: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/a-better-way-to-unlock-innovation-and-drive-change/

Questions, reflections and feedback to info@brettmacfarlane.com