Leading from the Front: A Trust-Based Approach to Innovation Leadership
Culture is what’s built in those seemingly insignificant moments every day. Culture is how your team solves problems when you’re not in the room. Culture is how you scale.
As a leader who has built and transformed innovation teams across multiple industries for over 25 years, I've learned that trust is the foundation of any high-performing team. While technical expertise and strategic vision are crucial, the ability to create an environment of deep trust - between leader and team members – is what truly enables breakthrough innovation.
Leading from the front isn't what most people think it is.
It's not about micromanaging or being involved in every decision. Instead, it's about demonstrating through your actions that you don't consider yourself "better than" or "above" anyone else on the team. It’s being willing to do any job, no matter how trivial. It's about creating psychological safety where team members know their leader has their back.
When team members see their leader willing to roll up their sleeves and tackle challenges alongside the team, it creates a foundation of trust that enables true innovation.
Reflecting on the most successful teams I've led, from R&D in specialty chemicals to process development in pharmaceuticals to corporate innovation in building materials, this foundation of trust enabled us to tackle ambitious challenges and navigate uncertainty together.
Two behaviors I've seen consistently erode trust are second-guessing and deep diving. Second-guessing is questioning results in a way that undermines confidence rather than seeks understanding.
Deep diving is jumping into the details to redo work rather than collaborating on improvements or working together to understand something more deeply. When a leader questions the team’s results in a derogatory way rather than seeking to understand or redoes a team member’s work rather than collaborating on improvements, that leader risks breaking the team's confidence and creativity.
Both actions send a clear message that a leader doesn't trust the team's capabilities, and both will quickly destroy the psychological safety needed for innovation. Instead, leaders must respect their team's expertise while asking thoughtful questions that drive better outcomes.
I learned this lesson early in my career, watching my father transition from an hourly worker to a manager in the telecommunications industry. He showed me that effective leadership means maintaining respect for your colleagues even as roles change.
In my first leadership role at a specialty chemicals company, I put this into practice by starting each day in the laboratory with my team - many of whom were older and more experienced than me. We'd have coffee together, discuss the day's challenges, and solve problems as equals.
Team members need to know they can raise concerns or challenges at any time and work together on solutions. As a leader, providing "air cover" — protecting the team from organizational politics and managing up — gives them the space to focus on innovation. Equally important is fueling their momentum through encouragement, context-setting, and helping them see how their work connects to larger goals.
This trust-based foundation becomes especially critical when pursuing disruptive innovation.
Teams working on transformative projects need different incentives and expectations than those doing incremental improvements. This gives them the space to focus on what they do best: innovating.
They must feel empowered to take smart risks knowing that even if they fail, they'll be recognized for bold thinking and learning and have a safe place to land. Without this psychological safety, breakthrough innovation rarely happens.
Trust isn't built through grand gestures – it's built through consistency, transparency, and open communication.
This trust-based approach becomes especially critical when pursuing disruptive innovation. A colleague at a previous company once gave me valuable and lasting feedback about my leadership style.
He said, "Grieco, what you do is tell us what we need to do and why we need to do it, and then you let us figure out how to do it. You let us be the experts."
This insight helped me understand that true leadership is about setting clear directions while giving people the freedom to apply their expertise.
The impact of this leadership approach became clear to me in one of my early leadership roles when I inherited a team of talented scientists and engineers who had lost the trust of company leadership. Over 12 months, we rebuilt that trust through consistent delivery and open communication. By the time I left, they were handling all new process R&D and product development for the company. More importantly, the team regained their confidence and excitement about innovation.
The legacy we leave as leaders isn't measured in patents or product launches — it's measured by the people we've developed.
Every organization I've led, I've tried to leave stronger — with more empowered teams, greater confidence, and deeper trust. That's how we create sustainable innovation cultures that outlast any individual leader.
Looking back at my career, my proudest moments aren't about technical breakthroughs — it's about the teams we built and the people who become exceptional leaders themselves.
Think of the most significant innovations in history — rarely do those come from lone geniuses, but rather from teams who trusted each other enough to venture into the unknown together.
When team members truly believe in themselves and each other, when they feel truly supported to take risks and push boundaries, they don’t just solve today’s problems — they imagine and create tomorrow’s possibilities.
That's the kind of sustainable innovation culture that outlasts any individual leader and tackles the seemingly impossible challenges that will shape our future.
This is the kind of leadership our world desperately needs right now.
As we face unprecedented challenges, we need teams who can think bigger, move faster, and innovate more boldly than ever before.
But this only happens when leaders focus on their most important task: building cultures of trust where everyone feels empowered to bring their full potential to the table.
Because, in the end, the greatest innovations don't come from managing people — they come from unleashing them.
Bill Grieco is an accomplished entrepreneur, innovator, and business leader with 25 years of experience leading R&D and commercialization organizations across the chemical, pharmaceutical, clean tech, and specialty materials industries. Bill is the CEO of Refinity, an Innventure subsidiary business focused on commercializing waste-to-value opportunities, and previously served as CTO of Innventure. Prior to Innventure, he served as CEO of The RAPID Manufacturing Institute®, a public-private partnership revolutionizing process manufacturing through modular intensification. Bill serves on the Advisory Boards for Georgia Tech's School of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the FSEC Energy Research Center at the University of Central Florida. He holds a PhD and Master's degree in Chemical Engineering from M.I.T., and a Bachelor's degree from Georgia Tech.
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