Those who lead innovation face formidable challenges. Often there are multiple and sometimes contradictory goals to pursue, many available levers to shape the innovation context and just as many hands tugging on them. There is no standard formula for success. The good news, though, is that we know what leaders shouldn’t do. In organizations that depend on innovation, whether technical or otherwise, for their competitive edge, certain leadership mistakes are relatively common. Here are four I see often:

1. CONFUSION ABOUT THE LEADER’S ROLE. The most significant error—and one that can drive a host of others—is for technically trained leaders to believe that their role is to innovate rather than to create the context in which others innovate.

Organizations foster this error when they isolate innovation in specific groups, promote only outstanding technical people, expect managers to split their efforts between technical work and leading others, and reward individual contributions at the expense of leadership-level accomplishments.

2. A TOO-NARROW FOCUS. Even when leaders of innovation recognize that their job is no longer to be individual contributors, they still make mistakes as they confront the basic demands of their new roles. In setting direction, for example, some focus exclusively on technical innovation and ignore customer needs and expectations as to functionality, delivery, reliability and cost. Others set direction only in terms of objectives and timetables, without also creating a sense of purpose to excite and inspire those they lead.

Leaders who earlier in their careers were technical project managers sometimes focus on leading downward and managing technical issues, while forgetting (or never realizing) that their leadership position requires them to operate in a broader, more complex environment that encompasses sales, marketing and finance.

There is no more poignant example of the importance of leading upward than what happened in the 1970s at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where an unprecedented number of innovations that later became the heart of personal computing were produced. It was PARC’s scientists who developed object-oriented programming, networked computers, pop-up menus, user-friendly word processing, the graphical user interface, the mouse and icons, among other things.

However, these same scientists at PARC could never convince the executives at headquarters that what they had done would be a commercial success. Instead, they reluctantly showed their accomplishments to someone more appreciative of their technical ingenuity, fellow computer genius Steve Jobs of Apple. Ultimately, PARC provided Jobs with the inspiration that led to the development of the Macintosh computer. According to Michael A. Hiltzik in his book Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (HarperBusiness, 2000), Jobs would later say, “Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today ... [it] could have been the Microsoft of the ’90s.” Instead, Xerox foundered and only recently has been on a path to recovery.

3. MIXED MESSAGES. Leaders who underestimate the symbolic importance of the leadership role are prone to making value proclamations that they aren’t serious about enforcing or that transmit contradictory messages. When those values are tested by subordinates—as they inevitably will be—and a leader’s actions do not support them, the result is cynicism on the subordinates’ part. For instance, if the leader says she values experimentation, risk taking and intelligent failure, but then rewards only those who achieve successful results, the message is clear to everyone that only results really matter.

Many new leaders, especially those with technical backgrounds, seriously underestimate the impact their attitudes and actions have in establishing the organizational values of the people around them. Yet those very values, whether transmitted consciously or not, affect the culture for innovation, influencing such things as the division’s (or company’s) willingness to take risks, the perceived importance of customer service, respect and cooperation across organizational boundaries, attitudes toward personal development...the list goes on.

4. LAISSEZ-FAIRE TALENT DEVELOPMENT. Some leaders labor under the mistaken belief that talented people will always develop themselves and consequently invest little time or energy in helping their subordinates stretch and learn. Research shows beyond question that the immediate boss plays a central role in subordinates’ development.

This often happens through coaching. Beyond one-to-one coaching, though, the leader needs to establish a culture conducive to learning. This means setting talent-development priorities that help determine who gets which assignments, giving people the latitude to make their own decisions, providing air cover for risk taking, setting challenging goals and facilitating access to necessary resources.

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4 common innovation mistakes

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