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.