Lighting the Fire: Leading Creativity in Organisations
Organisations are only going to change to the extent that their leaders are personally willing to change. This is challenging because senior executives have spent a lifetime learning to succeed in a certain way, in many cases emulating the leaders above them. If corporate life requires a different style and direction from our leaders today, that could certainly be perceived as risky or even threatening. But we also know that customers and colleagues crave and expect their leaders to be more human at work. In addition to practicing new personal habits and ways of leading innovation and adaptability, becoming a creative leader must also be about taking your people with you on this journey: communicating emotion, creating clarity and the right environment for a human-forward company.
When leaders suddenly change without providing context, their teams can be confused or frustrated. Practicing a creative mindset is also about laying the foundations for an organization that is as human as any individual within it. Achieving this will require five steps to ensure personal and collective success:
1. Develop an inspiring personal vision;
2. Incorporate emotion into communication;
3. Attract the unusual;
4. Manage initiative lightly;
5. Be kind.
Taking these one by one:
1. Develop an inspiring personal vision.
At a fundamental level, this requires you to redefine for yourself what it means to manage and lead in a way that serves your team and organization rather than solely serving the history of management science. What, how and why do you do what you do, and what are the intended consequences? OK, you’re changing your leadership mindset and manner? To what end? These are questions that most managers have never asked themselves even after years of doing the job. Clarity is not only helpful and comforting for the leader but for their people. Change often fails because the vision and tactics aren’t specific enough.
2. Incorporate emotion into communication
The late U.S. poet laureate Maya Angelou wrote, ‘I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’[i] Emotion is key to making messages stick. If you truly want your team to understand and practice creativity as a new normal, make sure they see how much that means to you, not only rationally but emotionally. You may have heard the maxim by Canadian neurologist Donald Calne that reason leads to conclusions while emotion leads to action. Well, research has demonstrated that this is true and not only a nice sounding meme on social media.[ii] The funny thing is that once you have made the message emotional in how you deliver it to your people, you will automatically have made your own commitment infinitely greater.
3. Attract the unusual
It is human bias to cluster with those who are like us. This is primarily because to do so feels comfortable and safe. It is not, however, a recipe for innovation. If there is one maxim on which all organizational behaviour literature agrees, it is that creativity increases with diversity and decreases with sameness.[iii] That’s why diversity has to be more than a passive tolerance for differences. It must become an active search for the idiosyncratic, odd, peculiar and colourful.
Every time you get to hire someone, you have a wonderful opportunity to find a new perspective to challenge your and your team’s mindset. Embrace that opportunity. Understandably, you will seek certain competencies or proficiencies when hiring for a specific role, but don’t look for a ‘company person’. Find the rebel, the piece that doesn’t quite fit. It is then your challenge and gift to make sure your team accepts rather than rejects the ‘otherness’ of their new colleague.
During his time as chairman of Pixar, the world’s most successful animated film studio, the late Steve Jobs regularly hired irregular people. One of these was Brad Bird, an ex-Disney animator and famous for getting The Simpsons off the ground. When he was approached to join Pixar, Jobs told Bird that ‘The only thing we’re afraid of is getting complacent. We need to bring in outside people so we keep throwing ourselves off balance.’ Encouraged by Pixar’s appetite for the non-conforming, Bird signed on. Soon afterwards, he explained the logic of his appointment to a journalist: ‘I was brought here to cause a certain amount of disruption. I’ve been fired for being disruptive several times, but this is the first time I’ve been hired for it.’[iv]
You can also retain and even enhance diversity by thinking differently about onboarding. I must admit I’m not a fan of that phrase ‘onboarding’ in the first place. Onboarding implies ‘get on board, get with the programme, get in line,’ in other words, ‘Conform fast!’ As part of their recruitment and orientation, most companies have incredibly detailed diversity and inclusion policies, but in reality they’re usually at least decent with the ‘diversity’ part but poor with the ‘inclusion’ piece. That’s because you can hire for diversity; that’s a policy challenge which companies, as sophisticated bureaucracies, are pretty good at. But inclusion is a cultural challenge; you see it in behaviours and habits which are much harder to change. Of course, diversity has little value if individuals aren’t free to be different. Conformity neuters diversity. Despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, companies often put much more effort in training the diversity out of people through programmes that indoctrinate employees in the ‘one best way’ than in encouraging fresh ideas.
Too many orientation programmes focus solely on teaching new hires about the company and team they are joining and demonstrate no curiosity whatsoever about these people with all their different backgrounds, education and life experiences. Orientation should be a lot more about them and very little about you! And keep their external perspective for as long as possible. Before the biases, lenses and preferences of the organization creep into their consciousness, do not fail to ask them at every opportunity: ‘What are we doing wrong? What could we do better? What are we missing? How would you have tackled this issue or challenge in your last company? How would you compete with us? Why would you buy from us?’ and so on.
4. Manage initiative lightly
If fostering creativity is about allowing a high degree of agency, the leader still manages the guardrails but perhaps not in the traditional way in which most organizations manage their people. Two vanguard companies, W.L. Gore and Morning Star, have made great strides to manage their people lightly, and they could not be in more traditional industries: the first is in the consumer and industrial materials industry (they make GoreTex for example), and the second is in the tomato processing industry. These organizations prompt their employees to think and act as if they owned the company. There are no titles, no hierarchies, and colleagues write their own objectives. But they are held to high standards by their peers and must always demonstrate that they are improving their outcomes and impact. With a high degree of autonomy, each person becomes their own personal change management department, innovation centre and entrepreneurial unit.
W.L. Gore is a company that is both incredibly innovative and highly disciplined. This corporation has never posted a loss in its seventy-year history. How do they pull off this trick? One of the keys to Gore’s innovation performance is the great amount of freedom that people have in choosing what they work on and with whom they work. This freedom, however, comes with strong accountability to one’s peers. As a Gore associate, your performance and compensation are not determined by a single boss, but by several colleagues who clearly know what you’ve done and how you’ve interacted with others on a daily basis. This approach ensures that autonomy is used wisely, for example asking yourself, ‘How does my idea turn an either/or trade-off into a both/and?’
If someone at Morning Star feels that they’re not contributing enough value, they can change their role or even move to another team. There’s not much chance for serendipitous, creative interactions if reporting relationships and job definitions force people to work with the same small cluster of colleagues for months or years at a time. These types of companies prove that it is not work itself that strips initiative and inspiration but the way in which the majority of corporations engineer how that work is organized.
5. Be kind
My final entreaty is also the most personal and dear to me. My mother taught me many things, but above all she reminded me to be kind. I honestly am not convinced that there is a higher human virtue. We know the world lacks human kindness, and there would never be a world where we would have ‘too much’. At some point, though, the practice of management drove a schism between kindness and leadership. Sure, you sometimes have to encourage and incentivise performance, but you can always do so with empathy and kindness.
Recall that if you as a leader are personally willing to change to make creativity, adaptability, innovation and inspiration part of how you show up every day, and you are excited about encouraging the same from your team, you will still encounter fear because you’re messaging and role modelling what is yet unknown or uncomfortable. Your team doesn’t yet know if it will be risky for them to embark upon a new path. Your kindness and understanding, acknowledging that it’s new for everyone, that we will all stumble sometimes and learn together, will be the strongest signal that they will be encouraged and even rewarded to take different steps.
[i] Carmine Gallo, ‘The Maya Angelou Quote That Will Radically Improve Your Business,’ Forbes, 31 May, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2014/05/31/the-maya-angelou-quote-that-will-radically-improve-your-business/.
[ii] Chip and Dan Heath, Made to Stick (New York: Random House, 2007).
[iii] With thanks to my late mentor Gareth Jones for emphasising this point.
[iv] Kevin Coupe, ‘What Planet Pixar Can Teach Retailers,’ Morning Newsbeat, 3 August, 2004, https://morningnewsbeat.com/2004/08/03/what-planet-pixar-can-teach-retailers/.