Creative Leadership

Driven by Design

Rama Gheerawo

• Publisher: Lund Humphries
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781848225114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design General

The changing realities of our time - especially the unprecedented situation in 2020 - calls for leadership that moves beyond outdated models or frameworks that are driven by the tired rhetoric of management, business or patriarchal notions of commandment. There is a need for new forms of leadership that are more empathetic and expansive, conversational and communal, and above all, creative. This informative and accessible book examines whether designers can actually be leaders and, if so, whether they can be better leaders because of their creative capability. It then examines how the tools of design, particularly in its most human-centred and collaborative form, might actually hold the key for the next generation of leadership. Creative leadership is based on three values that give everyone leadership potential: creativity, clarity and empathy.

1

The Leadership Landscape

Everyone can be a leader.

I honestly believe this. Regardless of age, ability, gender, race or any other human attributes. Leadership is not about being the tallest, loudest, proudest, most alpha or most militarised figure. It is not about training to be a CEO, or winning the management relay race. It is about open-sourcing. It is about all of us, no exceptions. This means the democratisation of leadership, not falling into the historical trap of letting a few people define it, and a select few live it.

So … what if most of what we were taught about leadership was wrong?

Well, what has gone awry? Many things – from what leadership looks like, to who we hold up as leaders. From the mechanisms that tell us how to be a leader, to imposed definitions of what leadership is. This question has been growing in me over the years in potent silence, and it made me realise a simple truth:

We need to create new cultures of leadership that stand beside the existing ones. Radically and immediately.

This has led to a path of deep enquiry and lifelong learning around leadership.

Two ideas emerged that have driven me since. The first, drawing on the opening statement above, is that:

All of us have leadership ability: leadership is not the stereotype of the suited CEO, the elected President, the medalled General or the ‘letter of the law’ Manager. All of us have leadership qualities and capabilities within us that need to be recognised, grown and enabled. Every day, we all have to be leaders in different aspects of our lives, so we have to expand recognition of leadership from the realm of business to the home, the community, the neighbourhood and the individual. Every person leads. Every parent knows and grows leadership skills, for example. Every person’s accomplishments can help both themself and others. If you can influence just one life, even if it is your own, you are a leader.

The second realisation is that:

True leadership starts with you: lead yourself, and you can then lead others. Leadership is not only upskilled by someone else, or imbibed from organisational culture. It does not just sit in structure and strategy – it thrives in the emotions and intentions of the individual as well. We are the best incubators for our own leadership. After all, we are experts in our own lives, and we have lived through our own experiences. Authentic leaders have a sense of self, and that gives them an open-armed ability to embrace others. A catalysing change can be external, but real evolution starts within. It is not just the external system that needs to progress, it is also your own internal system. It is developing your values, your abilities, your perceptions and your truth. Then any inner change that you make will have great outer external effect.

However, most taught leadership is aimed towards formal business and management. Traditional notions of leadership can seem very top-down, very exclusionary and reinforcing hegemony. It is even in the language, with terms such as ‘at the top’, ‘big cheese’ and ‘being a boss’ still being heard in boardrooms, Zoom rooms and communities across the globe. Accepted synonyms of the word ‘leadership’ seem to postulate and threaten with ‘command’, ‘control’, ‘authority’ and ‘superiority’ presented as alternatives. With this posture of abject power, leadership can feel somewhat alien and inhuman.

Many of us in the creative industries have felt doubly excluded as we seem to have a less articulated role in economic leadership. Yet research from organisations such as the UK Design Council shows otherwise. The design economy generated £85.2 billion in gross value added (GVA) to the UK in 2016. This is equivalent to 7 per cent of UK GVA and equivalent to the size of the distribution, transport, accommodation and food sectors.² It is time that Creativity had a seat at the leadership table, and as all humans are creative, this means every one of us can evolve, humanise and democratise leadership.

Leadership is often presented as having to be larger than life or to have the loudest voice. It has been acceptable to bark orders, lord it over others and inflict negativity, all in the name of effective leadership. So what happens if we agree that it can also be humble, self-reflective, human and quiet, and be even more effective because of these characteristics? As Isabella says in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: ‘Tis excellent to have a giant’s strength, but ‘tis tyrannous to use it like a giant.’

Leadership has been commonly presented as belonging to a certain gender, body size or skin colour – one study that sampled around half of the Fortune 500 companies showed that American CEOs are up to three inches taller than the average height.³ In the general US population, around 4 per cent of adult men are 6'2" or taller, but in the CEO sample, a massive 30 per cent were 6'2" or taller. And most of the Fortune 500 CEOs were male. The same can be seen in politics. In 2020, The Economist noted that in the US, the ‘taller the candidates relative to their opponents, the greater the average margin of victory’.⁴

So why are we seeing certain characteristics such as height and gender as desirable, and what happens if we open leadership pathways to everyone without compromise? This book charts a pathway of learning, sharing discoveries, ideas and observation from the thousands of people who I have met, worked with, grown with and learnt from. New intentions are needed in a world where we have to drive diversity and accessibility for everyone – right into the realm of leadership.

Whether you run a start-up or an SME, a family or a Fortune 500 company, twenty-first century leadership can be a daunting place, one that is constantly challenging and subject to a moving and morphing set of rules. The competitive world of business, however, rarely recognises this, preferring to maintain the status quo of outdated and outmoded forms of leadership that are top-down, process-driven and inflexible. This definitely does not account for people, or their natural creativity, which is typically relegated to the area of softer skills, and then deemed as less necessary and even irrelevant in the hard-hitting world of business. We do not need to turn the page on this idea. We need a different book.

So the ideas in this publication are for all leaders, especially the emerging leader or the ignored leader. They are especially for those who were never encouraged to be leaders, and definitely for those who want to redefine leadership. They are for those people who were never propelled onto the paved pathway of the corporate fast-track. They are for our fellow humans and fellow creatives – entrepreneurs who live for their idea, designers who can use their skills to improve life but are rarely given the leadership opportunity, and every single person who uses creativity in their life – and that includes all of you.

Leadership belongs to you. It is not alien to you. Challenge it. Change it. Embrace it.

Many people have engaged with the Creative Leadership concepts in this book and have found them useful in defining and developing their own personal and organisational pathways. A large number have felt liberated by being given the opportunity (and sometimes even permission) to talk about leadership on their own terms. Some have communicated realisations that are humbling and empowering at the same time, saying that these ideas have given them the belief that they can actually lead, despite being told differently for most of their lives. So many have spoken about the impact that they now make externally, simply facilitated by a change that they made internally. The words of two people are below:

‘If you want to change the world quietly, carefully and kindly then this Creative Leadership is for you.’

‘Creative Leadership is a learning experience truly celebrating people at its heart. I discovered that anyone can be an extraordinary leader when we choose to consciously opt into our humanness.’

When I say: ‘most of what most of us have been taught about leadership is wrong’, people nod. They stand up and say: ‘I was never told that I could be a leader, because of my gender, or because I was Indian, or because I was in the lowest percentile at school, or because I could not do maths, or because I had the wrong accent, or because I look different, or because I have a stutter.’ I wish all of these were hypothetical examples of things I have heard, but sadly, they are all true. Discrimination happens across the globe, but in leadership it appears even more pronounced.

However, there is an encouraging discrepancy that I have seen when looking at leaders around me. Many successful people who were not considered leadership material when they were younger, grew into empathic and inspired enablers. Years ago, the leadership privilege always seemed to go to the tallest, loudest and most alpha-presenting figures in the room by default, something that I have observed in both personal and professional life. However, many of us do not fit that narrow and exclusionary description and those ignored individuals now fuel my faith when I see their leadership achievements outstripping those that were seen as ‘anointed’ leaders.

Leadership should not be a separated landscape for a predestined few, sitting aloof and inaccessible to the majority. It has to be inclusive rather than exclusive, open-handed and open-hearted in order for our planet to thrive. In my work as a designer, I have addressed many social issues and critical challenges from health inequalities to ageism, from obesity to political invisibility. I have always wanted to redesign and rethink how we approach and express leadership. Because it needs to be done. And because now is the time for all of us to create and recreate new approaches.

The World Economic Forum agrees. In a talk entitled ‘Humane Leadership Must be the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s Real Innovation’, it said, ‘We have a problem: something is broken here. The old leadership model does not work and is actually getting worse. A big shift in management and leadership is a long-overdue change.’⁵

The start of the 2020s only reinforced this, with leaders increasingly called into question as we navigated pandemic, pandemonium and protest. Different forms of leadership, particularly those that showed the deep and gentle strength of Empathy and the direct communication of compassionate Clarity, were being headlined and heralded as more successful than top-down, authoritative egos, that sterilise opinion with false bravado and confusing statements broadcast from a podium.

That kind of leadership can be described as many things, but it primarily functions as a way to ‘manage the minions’, infantilise and ignore citizens, and is often inflated as a hollow attempt to depict authority. Unfortunately, many of us are conditioned to accept this type of situation as leadership, speaking to the projected idea of ‘being a boss’, using fear to enforce efficiency and efficacy in an organisation. This style seems more relevant to Marlon Brando’s brutal patriarch as depicted in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather or Meryl Streep’s icy, inhumane stare that affixed screen audiences in The Devil Wears Prada. I am not sure which one terrifies me more. As a cultural commentary, they entertain. As a reflection of leadership, they horrify.

Leadership is often seen as a professional accomplishment, with little attention paid to personal development. In an organisational setting, we seek management consultants or leadership coaches. To improve individually, we turn to activities such as yoga, self-development or healthy eating. However, carrots or consultants are not an answer in themselves. The personal and professional should not be seen as separate, as this can lead to a split persona where someone is kind at home and cruel at work – and true to themselves in neither context. We have all hoped that people who are forceful, hurtful or dismissive managers treat their personal connections with greater care, love and patience, but this is rarely ...