What makes a "Creative Leader"?

Creative Leadership - Part 1 The leader of a creative team journeys down the same road *he’s trod himself, alone, before. This road is the creative process and the metaphor is apt because the process is, indeed, a journey. And like any good story, the journey has a beginning, middle, and end. On our way, we encounter complications, hardships, setbacks. We ascend the mountains of ecstasy, then sink into the valley of despair. We get into jams. We get lost. We reach a place where we can’t make any forward progress at all. We have no choice but to stop. To wait, to think, to get our bearings again. We know things can end well or ill and so we do our utmost to prepare from the outset. We consider the pitfalls. We make provision. We mete out our resources carefully lest we run out half-way to our destination…. These analogies can go on, but their point is to say that the creative leader has experience in this process, he’s been down that road before. The difference now is that he’s become Sherpa to a team that follows his lead. He’s perhaps a bit wiser than the team by virtue of his experience. He’s gained confidence as result of his hard-won familiaritywith the process and all that it brings. Now, there shouldn’t really be a distinction between a “creative leader” and any other kind of leader. But there is, if only because creative leaders have a leg up on the creative process. They understand how nothing begets something. (This process is a mystery to most folks. Authors and artists are sometimes regarded as demi-gods because they appear to possess some preternatural ability to create worlds so real that many of us wish to live in them. Questions like, “How do you do it?”, “Where do you get your ideas from?” abound.) The creative leader has learned to perform such “miracles” as a matter of course, seemingly on-demand. And most remarkably, having first become intimate with the process by himself, alone, he can now perform these feats through other people. And that’s what makes a leader a creative leader. Having first learned to work the creative process in and through himself, he now does it through others. — * Note: Forgive the masculine “he”-construction in this article. It is meant in an objective, gender-neutral way.) Creative Leadership - Part 2 We said in Part 1 that there shouldn’t really be a distinction between a “creative leader” and any other kind of leader. But there is, if only for the fact that creative leaders have a leg up on a process wherein they create something out of nothing, where rabbits are seemingly pulled from hats. And having first learned to work this creative process in and through themselves, creative leaders are now able to do it through others. And this is key. Creative leaders manage a very special process, but they do it through people. How daunting this can be! The creative process is hard enough when one has only one’s self to manage. The prospect of coordinating it through others, multiplying the problem across a group of individuals, might well strike terror in the heart of a new creative leader. Anyone with experience in the creative process knows it to be a messy, non-linear affair that can take unexpected twists and turns, and is not subject to the convenient, predictable, industrial ideal of the production-line. But even widget-stamping is preceeded by the creative process. Before there can be a clothes-hanger factory, endlessly twisting wire after wire into shapes from which shirts will hang, someone must size up the problem and solve it through trial-and-error. An act of creativity must occur. So, while creativity can produce an entire factory, it is not the product of one. Conventional leaders don’t always “get” this. And so we can’t manage creativity in the standard ways. Theory-X, command-control hierarchies don’t work. You can’t intimidate people into being creative. It isn’t produced by brute force. This is true on the individual level, and truer for groups. In The Tao of Leadership (1985, Bantam Books), John Heider writes, The leader who understands how process unfolds uses as little force as possible and runs the group without pressuring people…. Leaders who push think that they are facilitating process, when in fact they are blocking process…. Your job is to facilitate and illuminate what is happening. The more coercive you are, the more resistant the group will become…. Group process evolves naturally. It is self-regulating. Do not interfere. It will work itself out….The leader knows how to have a profound influence without making things happen.” And most heretical of all, Heider says, “Good leadership consists of doing less and being more.” Sound too lasseiz-faire? A modern call to managerial laziness? What’s really being said is that, after we’ve done all we can to cultivate creativity, we ought to stay out of the way. Seeds we’ve planted will take root in the group’s collective mind and begin to sprout. In this we can learn from the farmer, who sleeps soundly in the knowledge that he’s done all he can do. He knows the process will take over and that further interventions will yield nothing. So we mustn’t mistake cultivation with production. There’s a time to go into production-mode. But creativity, the design-phase, is the first half of the job, and it’s characterized by research, ideation, trial-and-error, drafts, and other acts of cultivation that will, in the outworking of time, give rise to a fully-formed thing. Wise creative leaders understand all this, and this is how they differ from other kinds of leaders. And having first learned to work this process in and through themselves, they now do it through others. 2009-06-11T22:49:31Z

2009-06-12T15:37:59Z

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