Most Innovation Teams Don’t Lack Talent. They Lack Essential Competencies.

I had never had someone unexpectedly break into tears in my office before, so when one of our innovators, only a few months into the role, came in and broke down, I was genuinely caught off guard.

He was clearly frustrated and had been bottling it up for a while. When I gently asked what was going on, he said, “Taking this innovation role was a big mistake. I’ve thrown everything at this. I should have stayed in marketing.”

Red lights started flashing in my head because from my perspective he was doing a stellar job and I thought I’d been clear about that. He was super smart, switched on, worked hard, and people genuinely liked him. So we slowed the conversation down and tried to understand what was really happening underneath.

In his career, especially in sales, he’d been able to muscle through problems until he landed on the right answer. He was a wizard at analysing promo effectiveness, a P&L master, and could wrestle PowerPoint with the best of us. He was used to working the angles and making solid calls with confidence.

In innovation, he suddenly felt like a fish out of water. He was being asked to do all of that without the certainty he was used to. Trying to make decisions about a future he couldn’t fully see, and it was doing his head in.

That was the moment it clicked for me.

He was an excellent high potential in sales and marketing, but he had never worked in innovation. He assumed that hard work and the skills that had made him successful so far would naturally carry across. My blind spot was different. I’d been in innovation long enough that I’d unconsciously started taking the required skills for granted. I’d lost sight of how different innovation feels when you’re new to it.

Raising this with our leadership team, we realised it wasn’t an isolated moment. There was a pattern where new people coming into the innovation centre were often stressed and feeling lost. Most of them bottled this up inside because they didn’t want to look like they couldn’t hack it.

The problem wasn’t them, it was a leadership one.

We hadn’t done the work of clearly defining the competencies needed to have in order to succeed in innovation.

Culturally, the organisation tended to see innovation as a subset of marketing with some insights layered in. To truly excel, innovation must be treated as a distinct discipline with its own skill set, just as marketing is distinct from sales, insights, or finance. There are crossovers, of course, but if we wanted someone performing at their best, we needed to be explicit about what skills the role actually demands.

So we sat down with HR and workshopped “what are the competencies a great innovator needs to master?”

Two broad buckets emerged quickly.

There were the technical skills, like discovering and integrating insights, writing compelling concepts, strong project management,etc. These are teachable skills, go to a course etc.

Then there were the so-called soft skills, which is a terrible label because they are usually the hardest to learn. These are the leadership competencies that allow someone to operate when the path is unclear and the organisation, and the future, are pulling in different directions.

After a lot of healthy debate, we narrowed it down to seven Innovation Leadership Competencies.

1 Self-Awareness and Personal Impact: Understanding your own mindset, biases, and behaviours, and how they land with others. Being clear on what you know and what you don’t. Staying grounded in uncertainty and acting with integrity.

2 Leading Through Change: Using uncertainty as a catalyst for progress. Spotting what needs to shift and setting direction. Keeping people aligned as the path evolves.

3 Consumer and Customer Centricity: Keeping genuine consumer and customer needs at the centre of decisions and trade-offs. Acting on evidence, not assumption. Using insights to enable better decisions.

4 Collaboration and Team Lift: Creating an environment where people share early and challenge respectfully. Breaking down silos and fostering a collective win mindset.

5 Learning Through Experimentation: Turning uncertainty into progress through small, smart experiments. Learning quickly and adjusting without ego. Protecting space for testing that improves outcomes.

6 Influence and Practical Negotiation: Building trust and moving conversations toward outcomes. Securing fair trade-offs. Holding the line on what matters while staying constructive.

7 High-Quality Execution: Turning intent into delivery. Eliminating low value work. Setting clear ownership and following through on commitments.

We built these into onboarding so new innovators had a much clearer understanding of what the job really demanded and which competencies they needed to develop to thrive rather than simply survive. They also became powerful anchors for development conversations.

Results came almost immediately, and fortunately no more tears were reported. New team members found their feet faster and with far more confidence. Productivity lifted and the quality of our innovation work improved markedly.

The bigger lesson for me was to invest early in defining essential competencies, and engage these across the team early to build the foundations for success.

As for my frustrated team member, he has gone on to become a shooting star in the organisation and now runs a major commercial region, with strong innovation leadership skills as part of his repertoire.

If this resonates and you’re seeing capable people take longer than expected to find their feet in innovation, it may be worth stepping back and clarifying what the role truly demands. I’ve helped teams work through this in a practical way that lifts confidence and performance quickly. If you’d like to explore what that could look like in your context, feel free to reach out.