Creative Leadership

Skills That Drive Change

Gerard J. Puccio, Marie Mance, Mary C. Murdock

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781452236377
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Creativity—today?s most important leadership skill

Successful leadership today relies heavily on an individual?s ability to effectively respond to and proactively drive change—in short, to be creative. This book helps readers enhance their creative talents and employ these skills as a leader, providing a concrete set of principles and procedures based in creativity that, once internalized, will forever change how we lead.

Part I

Foundational
principles for Leaders

1

Change, Leadership,
and Creativity

The Powerful Connection

“Leadership is about managing change—whether you’re leading a company or leading a country. Things change, and you get creative.”

—Lee Iacocca

CHAPTER AT A GLANCE

What is the relationship between change, leadership, and creativity? How do these three concepts mutually support one another? Can you imagine how leadership effectiveness is dramatically enhanced when someone is able to use imagination when responding to today’s volatile climate and ever-changing conditions? The purpose of this chapter is to examine more closely the three basic pillars of this book—namely change, leadership, and creativity. To that end, we provide some basic descriptions of these concepts and highlight the degree to which change, leadership, and creativity intertwine like the strands of a rope.

The chapter begins with a description of change, a concept we believe forms a bond between creativity and leadership. We then examine some contemporary descriptions of leadership that highlight a connection to creativity. Next, we provide a review of some definitions, views, and characteristics of creativity. Building on a brief review of the leadership and creativity fields, we conclude the chapter with a description of the concept we call creative leadership.

CREATIVE CHANGE: IT’S NOT CHANGING THE BABY

Quoting from Heraclitus again, “You can never step in the same river twice.” In that respect, whether you are making something that wasn’t there before or responding to what is already new or different, change is a constant process. The water looks the same, but it is different. In actuality, life and the conditions that surround it are always in motion. For example, as a natural phenomenon, your body is always changing, and this change will occur regardless of whether you want it to or not. Did you know that, because the replacement of cells in your body is an ongoing process, you actually have a new liver every 3 weeks and a new skeleton every 2 months?

In its broadest sweep, there are two kinds of change. First, there is change that exists naturally and is ongoing or cyclic. For example, the sun rises and sets, seasons come and go, and your body changes and grows. Second, there is change that people make either on purpose or in response to what is happening around them. Some examples of this kind of change are changing jobs, changing your mind, and changing the way you do things—the order, the purpose, and the method.

In the case of the former, change is a natural phenomenon. In the case of the latter, change may be equally natural, but it has the addition of the human element. The kind of change that is made on purpose engages your thinking process and thus requires your thinking skills. The main difference is that you apply one more deliberately than the other. In this book, we focus on the kind of change that is introduced more deliberately, that is, intentionally engaging in creative thought to develop yourself and positively influence others.

In the introduction, we shared a definition of creativity developed by organizational psychologist Reginald Talbot (1997). He defined creativity as “making a change that sticks (for a while)” (p. 181). The words in this definition were selected with specific intent. Making refers to the fact that creativity is about bringing something into being. It is not enough for people to simply think that they are creative or merely to imagine new possibilities; instead, you must be able to produce both tangible and intangible products. Ultimately, we judge the quality of creative behavior by what we see, the transformation of imagination into a variety of outcomes—art, poetry, services, theories, entrepreneurial ventures, products, and solutions to a myriad of problems from personal to societal.

Change refers to the introduction of something new, which can fall anywhere along the continuum from continuous (i.e., incremental improvement) to discontinuous change (e.g., paradigm breaking). Not all change is creative. It is critical to note that, when we refer to change within this definition of creativity, we are not simply talking about an exchange. A change can take place when an existing item is replaced by another already established and known item, such as changing a broken part in your car with a functioning part. You can change a flat tire, change your mind, change your clothes, and change the baby, but these are not creative acts. When we refer to change within our definition of creativity, we refer to situations in which an explicit attempt is being made to bring an idea into being that has some degree of novelty—a creative change.

Finally, the phrase that sticks means the creative product or idea has some staying power, which occurs as a result of its serving some need or purpose. However, the stickiness, or value, of the creative product or idea may be temporary, thus the final phrase for a while. Creative thinking is ongoing, and at some point in time, someone usually comes up with a better or a less expensive way of doing things—thus, change is ever present.

As we pointed out in the introduction, not only is change here to stay, the pace of change has greatly accelerated. In their Harvard Business Review article entitled “Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis,” Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky (2009) emphasized this point by noting:

Today’s mix of urgency, high stakes, and uncertainty will continue as the norm even after the recession ends. Economies cannot erect a firewall against intensifying global competition, energy constraints, climate change, and political instability. The immediate crisis ... merely sets the stage for a sustained or even permanent crisis of serious and unfamiliar challenges. (p. 62)

In today’s world, stability is temporary at best or, at worst, is an illusion. Therefore, successful leadership relies heavily on an individual’s ability to effectively respond to change and to proactively drive change—in short, to be creative. And, since one change is so quickly replaced by another, leaders need to be continuously creative. Creative thinking is no longer an afterthought in terms of those skills deemed important to leadership effectiveness; instead, many contemporary leadership experts now see creativity as a core leadership skill. The pace of change has increased to a dizzying rate, which brings both challenges and opportunities. To successfully address the challenges and to seize opportunities, leaders must employ their creative imaginations, and since leaders cannot have all the answers, they must also be adept at drawing out the creativity of others. In the sections that follow, we examine evolving views of leadership and describe how contemporary leadership theories underscore the importance of creativity.

EVOLVING VIEWS OF LEADERSHIP:
THE EMERGENCE OF CREATIVITY AS A CORE COMPETENCE

What makes a leader great? The answer to this question depends on when the question was posed. The answer today is quite different than 100 years ago when researchers began to seriously study leadership. More than a century ago, it was widely believed that leadership was an innate quality—a set of traits possessed by a rare few since birth that predisposed these individuals to achieve greatness. These innate personal characteristics included masculinity, self-confidence, and dominance. Thus, find an individual with these qualities, and it was believed that you had a great leader. In this manner, leadership was primarily concerned with identification and selection rather than development. For obvious reasons, this approach has been referred to as the trait or Great Man theory of leadership.

In hindsight, it is easy to see the shortcomings associated with this view of leadership. Indeed, the belief that leaders are born with a set of innate characteristics now falls into the category of leadership myths. Among the chief limitations of this approach is the fact that it ignores the interplay between an individual and the situation. Different situations are likely to require different qualities, thus making it difficult to identify a universal set of leadership traits that are applicable to all situations. And, even if a person had the requisite set of characteristics, he or she must find a situation that would allow this leadership potential to emerge. An old story helps to illustrate this point. Upon his passing, a well-known history professor was granted one wish when he entered heaven. Having a strong interest in military history, this professor asked to meet the person who had the greatest military mind of all time. The professor was then brought to someone he immediately recognized; but rather than being pleased, he was shocked. He knew this person as the local tailor in his town, not some great military mind. Surely, this was some kind of mistake. No, the professor was informed, in fact, this former tailor had the greatest military mind of all time, and if he had found himself in the right circumstances, he would have become one of the greatest military leaders of all time.

The myth that leaders enter the world with a predetermined set of traits leads to a closely aligned misconception about leadership, that is, the belief that leadership cannot be taught or developed. In his popular leadership book, Maxwell (2007) concluded, “Although it’s true that some people are born with greater natural gifts than others, the ability to lead is really a collection of skills, nearly all of which can be learned and improved” (p. 25). To further reinforce this point, in their classic study of senior organizational leaders, Bennis and Nanus (1985) found engagement in ongoing learning and development to be one of the most galvanizing qualities among the disparate group of leaders they studied. They found that the top leaders they interviewed were perpetual learners who had an insatiable appetite to develop new insights, explore new ideas, and entertain new challenges, as well as continuously push the boundaries of their own self-knowledge.

One final misconception about leadership worth noting is the belief that leadership is about position. This view holds that only those in positions of power and authority in organizations and communities can be great leaders. Simply having a title, for example, president, director, principal, manager, or department chair, is no assurance that the person in that position is a leader. Leadership is about what people do, not the title they hold. Furthermore, this is an elitist view that assumes there are distinct roles—leaders and followers. Reality is much more complex. Any member of an organization or community can exert leadership; one does not need a title or permission to demonstrate a capacity to bring about change. Paraphrasing from Betty Reese, an American officer and pilot, those who think they are too small to make a difference have never been in bed with a mosquito.

Moving from myth to reality, and skipping over leadership theories from the mid 20th century, we quickly advance to more contemporary views of leaders that highlight the emerging role creativity plays in leadership effectiveness. We begin with those views of leadership that make implicit connections to creativity and then conclude this section with leadership theories that call directly on creativity.

Some Contemporary Views of Leadership:
Implicit Links to Creativity

As views of leadership have evolved, descriptions of leaders have been more likely to incorporate qualities generally ascribed to creative people. Contemporary leadership theories, particularly when contrasted with the Great Man approach of a century ago, have demonstrated a tendency to include creativity concepts, traits, and abilities. For the most part, these connections to the field of creativity have been implicit. By implicit, we mean that leadership scholars, who are generally unfamiliar with the field of creativity, have unknowingly unearthed well-established creativity characteristics as they have delineated the attributes of highly effective leaders. The fact that these connections are implicit is profoundly important and insightful. Why? It would be easy to conceive that researchers and leadership experts who are familiar with the field of creativity might have a biased view of leaders and thus may be more likely to see creative qualities in the leaders they studied. Leadership scholars have dedicated themselves to the study of leaders and not to the field of creativity and, thus, do not possess in-depth knowledge about creativity. Therefore, it could be argued that their results have not been biased by their knowledge of creativity research and, thus, truly reflect the fact that successful leadership today relies, in part, on a person’s ability to be creative.

The beginning of the new millennium served as a catalyst for a number of projects focused on describing the qualities leaders would need to be successful in the 21st century. Two of these projects, undertaken in association with two of the foremost thinkers on the topic of leadership, Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, provide clear examples of descriptions of leaders that highlight characteristics often associated with creative people. In both projects, a team of renowned leadership experts were asked to forecast the leadership attributes necessary for success in the new millennium (Bennis, Spreitzer, & Cummings, 2001; Hesselbein, et al., 1996). Table 1.1 provides ...