What it takes to build ‘genius at scale’

That elusive Eureka moment: Every leader strives for it—but it can’t be forced. And as Harvard Business School Professor Linda Hill argues in her new book Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation (Harvard Business Publishing, March 2026), innovation is less about a flash of insight than about creating the conditions for breakthrough ideas to take hold and scale. In this episode of McKinsey Talks Talent, Hill speaks with McKinsey leaders and talent experts Brooke Weddle and Bryan Hancock, along with Global Editorial Director Lucia Rahilly, about the roles and capabilities that successful innovators share—and about how to create a culture that encourages everyone to undertake the hard, risky work of innovation to drive organizational performance.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Lucia Rahilly: Linda, congratulations on your new book, Genius at Scale. I found the title compelling, but it sounds almost like an oxymoron. What does “genius at scale” mean?

Linda Hill: What we found in our research is that everyone has a slice of genius, and the role of the leader is to figure out how to harness and unleash that slice of genius for the collective good. Genius at Scale is about what we’ve learned over the course of almost 20 years of research: it’s very hard to generate innovative solutions, but in some ways, it’s even harder to scale those innovative solutions—to launch them, commercialize them, and have the impact you want.

Genius at scale is about how to ensure that the great, innovative solution becomes a reality. And inherent in how you go about building an innovative organization is the tension between individual genius and what the collective needs or wants.

What kind of ‘innovation leader’ are you?

Bryan Hancock: In the book, you introduce the ABCs of innovation leadership—the architect, “bridger,” and catalyst. Can you explain the model and why these three roles matter?

Linda Hill: In the architect role, as a leader, you’re thinking, how do I build an organization that can innovate time and again? It is about building the right culture and capabilities for that organization to collaborate, experiment, and learn.

It’s critical that we have bridgers, especially now that we have these digital capabilities and data. If you want to innovate at scale and with any speed, you have to build partnerships. 

Catalysts are leaders who know how to build out whole ecosystems where we see lots of innovation. Think electric cars. One of the leaders of Renault said to us, “Even if we make a fabulous electric car here at Renault, we still need to have various private partnerships to accelerate the development of batteries. We need to work with governments to get enough charging stations. We need to work with NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] to make sure people are upskilled so they can do the work necessary to produce an electric car.”

For the bridger role in particular, we’re hearing organizations tell us, “We don’t have bridgers. What are we going to do about that?”

Bryan Hancock: Presumably, many bridgers come from middle management. Many organizations say they have too many, not too few, middle managers. What’s the key to creating more bridgers across organizations?

Linda Hill: Bridgers can be at various levels of the organization. Most leaders’ mindset is, “My formal authority is the source of power I’m using to get things done.” But formal authority doesn’t matter very much in the innovation context. You cannot tell people to innovate or force someone to share their slice of genius, talents, and passions with you. You can only invite them.

Leaders who are good at building organizations that can innovate at any level are those who say, “This is not about followership; it’s about me creating an environment in which people are going to be willing to collaborate, experiment, and learn with me to create the future.” We don’t see it often, which is why so many organizations, particularly incumbents, struggle to innovate.

Time and again in our research, we make sure to study people, middle managers, individual contributors, and senior managers who are good at thinking about how they use themselves as instruments to create environments that allow people to do the hard, risky work of innovation.

Where leaders go wrong

Brooke Weddle: How do I understand the As, Bs, and Cs in my organization? What are the steps to build this out as a culture?

Linda Hill: The architect, bridger, and catalyst roles are interrelated. I’m talking about them as if they’re separate, but they’re not. You need to consider the mindset of the leaders: How do they think?

For example, we wrote about Kathy Fish, at the time head of R&D and innovation at Procter & Gamble [P&G]. She realized P&G wasn’t growing at the pace the market expected. They needed to work on experimentation and learning. So the company enabled lean innovation.

To do this, Fish first defined success differently. She said, “We are only going to pursue those things that are going to be irresistibly superior, that will truly differentiate P&G.” To figure out what that meant, Fish researched times when the company won big. She took a research approach because P&G is a research-based organization. She found that P&G won big when it wasn’t just about the product but about the end-to-end experience. They began to talk about what “irresistibly superior” means and what it looks like.

We then spent a lot of time examining P&G’s environment and the barriers to innovation. Organizations are systems, and Fish and the group had to really look at their own behavior as C-suite executives. They got a coach who counted how many times the C-suite asked questions and how many times they made statements when talking to people about innovation.

The whole C-suite had to get better at inquiry. You can make changes at the system level, but when employees present what they’re working on and leaders exhibit the micro behavior of only making statements and not asking questions, you kill the project right there. It really is from the macro through the micro. When P&G started asking questions rather than making statements, there was greater psychological safety for employees who approached the C-suite with innovative solutions.

Do some industries have it tougher than others?

Bryan Hancock: Are there some industries that are more naturally set up for this kind of collaborative innovation?

Linda Hill: I don’t think so. We decided that the book would oversample regulated industries because everyone says those are the hardest. We oversampled financial services, pharmaceuticals, and airlines. Everyone we talked to in these industries said, “We’re not Pixar.” But a middle manager was able to lead a team that ran trials for the COVID vaccine in 266 days. And when he first stepped into that group, they did not think of themselves as innovators; they saw themselves as executors.

Brooke Weddle: Linda, how do you think about designing a performance management system to really incentivize learning and, by extension, innovation? What have you seen work well?

Linda Hill: We all know you can’t design the perfect system. One of the other companies we studied was The Cleveland Clinic. One of the things the Cleveland Clinic did was move from KPIs to OKRs [objectives and key results], which gave a stretch. If you get 80 percent of a real stretch goal, it’s better than getting 100 percent of something that wasn’t much of a stretch. I’m saying this rather simplistically, but it wasn’t so much about changing to OKRs as about how the Cleveland Clinic deployed them and the conversations they had along the way to encourage people.

They were also extremely transparent about their logic. When you’re talking about building an innovative culture, you want to think about how you’re doing it and why. One thing I’ve seen organizations do is to build an understanding that when you make those shifts, you’re trying to change the culture.

We also looked at how another company assessed innovation over time. At first, that meant simply evaluating whether the company and its employees engaged in activities that might lead to innovation: Are you holding hackathons? Eventually it moved to the second measurement: Are you killing projects? The CEO gave bonuses to people who killed their own projects. Then the company looked at the number of patents. Finally, it focused more on return on investment and vitality indexes. Over time, the assessment became more specific and financial.

How do you create an innovation culture—fast?

Bryan Hancock: A number of examples in the book go back to the COVID era. That brings to mind the speed of innovation, shared urgency, the time it often takes to build trust, and the social fabric that’s critical for innovation. Looking at the lessons of that time, how would you say companies can speedily build trust and the environment to innovate quickly?

Linda Hill: Trust is fundamental. It’s difficult to build trust if there’s no mutual influence. It comes down to the fact that we are social learners, and trust really matters.

Many leaders shared their vulnerabilities more during the pandemic than they would normally. Frankly, some were in shock or fell sick themselves. Some had many people who got sick or died in their organizations.

But more broadly, as a leader, you have to really think about cultivating the right environment for cocreation. If you think everybody has a slice of genius, you can still be a tough leader. These types of people are quite willing to be very top-down when needed. I don’t want people to assume they’re soft leaders.

The way for you to start as that leader is to provide people with evidence of two characteristics: your competence and your character. Innovation is a collective activity, and it won’t be your vision that helps the organization be more innovative. It’s going to be how you build culture and capabilities. And we have a very specific framework about what those capabilities and culture are. Until you understand that that’s your role as a leader and how your behavior has an impact—like the choices you make about structures and systems—your organization is not going to shift.

So, trust is about behaving in ways that assure people that you are not only competent but also know what the right thing to do is, and, more important, that you want to do the right thing. People are looking for signals that you want to do the right thing. Plus, they need to know you can deliver. That’s what makes you a credible leader. Do you know how to be supportive of individuals and let them express their slice of genius while you’re making sure you get what your stakeholders need done?

Innovation is something that is both new and useful. If it’s new, it can be creative, but if it’s not useful, it’s not an innovation.

Which leadership capabilities matter most?

Brooke Weddle:  Linda, you have such a body of research you’ve led over time. Are there just a couple of things that really rise to the top in terms of key learnings?

Linda Hill: Ed Catmull, the cofounder of Pixar, came to class one day, and the students talked about why Pixar was able to innovate so much and on so many dimensions—art, technology, and financial success. The students said, “Maybe you’re just lucky. And you have more talent than most.” Ed said, “We do have talented people, but I don’t think it’s our talent; it’s our teamwork. It’s how we work together.”

So, I think again about the “how.” You do need the talent, but it’s about how that talent works together. It’s about how people develop their judgment, and how you develop your judgment has a lot to do with who you hang out with and the points of view you expose yourself to, even uncomfortable ones.

We’ve been doing a survey of C-suite executives around the world for five years now. We have over 8,000 responses, and the same characteristics keep coming out. What kind of organization do you need to be able to use all these technologies? It must be data informed, not data driven.

And what kinds of leadership capabilities really matter? There are five. The first, which is not surprising, is adaptability. Second is creativity, which refers somewhat to vision, and vision does matter. Third, curiosity. Then, comfort with ambiguity. This now comes up every year. Next—this didn’t come up often in the first three years of the survey, but it did once gen AI was widely available—is data savviness. Those organizations where people perceive senior management as more tech savvy are making much more progress.

For leaders who said being data informed is important, two things happened at those organizations: First, there was less resistance to the acceptance of technology and data. When you say data driven, it sounds like the data knows more about what I do than I know with all my experience and expertise. That upsets people.

The other reason data savviness really matters now is that with gen AI and agentic AI, you need to use your judgment. You need to ask all kinds of questions about data. How people develop judgment is what we need to worry about, no matter what level of the organization we’re looking at, because organizations will become somewhat more decentralized as we use these technologies.

What bridgers have that really makes the difference is contextual intelligence. They know how to enter a situation and read what matters and what’s salient to us as we try to work with this other group.

Bryan Hancock: If you were a CEO and incredibly driven to innovate, particularly in an AI world, what is the one thing that you would prioritize?

Linda Hill: The development of bridgers. Do you have enough people who know how to build robust partnerships built on mutual trust, mutual influence, and mutual commitment to some shared intention?