In our last blog, we outlined the 5 key qualities of adaptive leadership. In this entry, we want to look at the creator in more detail. This is certainly the quality we see least in leadership teams, even in relatively mature adaptive organisations. It is also the quality that, in our experience, creates the biggest challenge when missing.
Why is it so unlikely that you have a creator in your leadership team? The traditional approach to management is all about managing outcomes over creating vale. Creating new things is risky and difficult to predict. You can’t put a timeline on it. You can’t mandate it. You can’t easily categorise creators into typical roles. Most of the time, you don’t even know that something was missing until a creator creates it! When we ask creators how they solved a problem or created an opportunity, they can’t clearly articulate the process that got them there.
While concepts of test and learn, experimentation and safety to fail sound appealing to organisations adopting agile, the people, activities and processes that lead to this often make traditional managers uncomfortable. If you don’t see the process, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control or manage it. If you can’t manage it, it is less valuable to the manager-led organisation.
So, if you’re not likely to have a creator-leader, what are you actually missing? We want to be clear that, when we say creator- leader, we mean someone with creativity as a mindset. We do not mean a Chief Innovation Officer. We do not mean a person who manages innovation, defines the process for innovation or holds the budget for creativity and innovation in an organisation. We mean someone who exhibits the ability to create as part of their role within the organisation. It is an important point to make as organisations with a role of this type usually end up confining innovation and creativity as a process or team to the side of usual organisational activities.
We described the remit of the creator as ‘They create a compelling vision of what could be. They will create an alternative to the heavyweight processes you currently follow. They will find ways around problems in your organisation and keep you from becoming static.’
In practise, the creator-leader will do three crucial things for your organisation that no other type of leader can:
- Lead you from disorder to order
There are many frameworks and models that help define the environment in which an organisation finds itself. The Cynefin framework is a great example of how you can categorise the situations you find yourself and your organisation in. Our experience tells us that fewer people are comfortable working in the disordered end of the spectrum. One of the interesting challenges leaders have is how to move situations away from the disordered (Chaos/ Complex) into the ordered (Complicated/ Simple) as quickly as possible.
Creators often find themselves finding patterns where others don’t. This allows others to access a situation and work with more tangible concepts. The most common situation we see with leadership teams is the creation of a vision and associated goals. Often, this the most difficult conversation for leadership teams – they have differing versions of the vision, no way of describing the vision in compelling terms etc. It often falls to an external party (a creator) to extrapolate vision from the things the leadership team say they value. That is to say, the creator crafts a vision where others cannot, taking the leadership from disorder to order, and giving them a direction of travel.
- Be a role model for experimentation, innovation and the pursuit of the unknown
A key strategy in crafting the desired culture of an organisation is role modelling behaviours you want the organisation to value. As noted above, creators represent the kind of innovation, experimentation and learning through failure that organisations so often desire but fail to achieve.
Being a creator and an innovator cannot be taught. However, innovation and creation as a process can be learnt via observation. By seeing many examples of these intuitive leaps, pragmatists and analysts are well placed to extrapolate common triggers and events, such that more people can participate in the creative process. Other creators within the organisation will feel valued, and will therefore feel safe to follow the in the creative leaders’ footsteps.
Added to this, valuing things that are not always tangibly measurable can help break the ‘investment = return’ mentality which stops so many organisations, teams and individuals really embrace an innovation mindset.
- Rev your adaptive engine
As your organisation changes, the creator will prevent you from answering a new question with an old response. This makes them a key part of the ‘A-Team’ at the forefront of change. Creators thrive in highly changeable environments as it affords them an opportunity to try new things.
Finding new and creative ways to have conversations, challenge, build products and services are crucial in today’s hyper-competitive and always changing markets. In a world where replication is easy, standing out or offering something different is often critical in keeping and attracting customers.
Adaptive organisations need something to keep that adaptability revving. Inspect and adapt can happen without creators as it can be encoded within the processes of the organisation. You can look to other organisations, books and teachings to answer your challenges with a known response. But finding the new way, the exiting product, solution or concept that inspires your organisation does not come from a process. It comes from the creators in your organisation.
If you are lucky enough to have a creative mind in your leadership team, you can support them with their biggest challenge. Critics. It’s very easy to critique something, it’s a lot harder to create something where nothing existed before. While not everything creators do will hit the mark, they will still be the ones that keep your organisation from atrophy. This is what Jeff Bezos calls the ‘First Day’ state and equips you to keep in front of the pack.
Interesting stuff. The contrast in approach between creator-leaders is in turns a source of creative disruption and a rough ride for individuals
Here are some reasons why:
– Creator-leaders often have to appoint themselves, because the manager-leaders running the show tend not to understand their value or if they do, lack the courage to risk disruption of the team/org. Even where the CEO or other leader who brings them on board understands their value, they should (but often don’t) help peers on the team to be open to this too.
– They’re often confused (even by those who appoint them) with the more typically “creative” types working in more stereotypically creative roles, i.e. brand or advertising. These roles tend to exist explicitly to create, but the bounds of their creativity don’t tend to take in the organisation itself; or they cover products/services, but not the approach to delivering these. (Some brand folk break this mould – they recognise the value of brand as a true guiding light for an organisation – as much for internal workings as external communications.)
– Where this confusion occurs, there is a tendency to wonder why the jeansy guy/girl is messing with the core offerings and not keeping to the soft stuff like comms or prettying stuff up.
– Where the more traditional manager-leaders don’t get it, they (depending where on the scale they sit) tend to take the existence of the creator-leader as a mystery / threat / affront, and they react with confusion / fear / aggression. Of course this isn’t always true, but in less enlightened environments, tight cultures tend to purge foreign matter in one way or another. And it works the other way around too – creator-leaders need to be sensitive in their approach, to keep a clear line in their own mind between disruption and disrespect.
– The point that “they can’t clearly articulate the process that got them there” is very true, but in reality it’s worse when looking forwards: they may not be able to clearly articulate in advance the process that will get them there. Combined with the above dynamics with the team, this can put the creator-leader in a precarious position until (and even after) they’ve started to deliver.
– The cognitive style associated with creator-leaders may make it hard for them to meld with the rest of the executive team, as the contrast to the predominant style may leave them sitting too far outside the group culturally to be effective.
– A key point about the composition of leadership teams is that the dynamics shift over time. The necessity, approach and efficacy of the creator-leader role changes as the organisation matures. As other models tell us (but organisations still find it hard to put into practice), the right team mix may be not so much “this or that” but “this then that” i.e. don’t force the pioneer to do the town planner’s work as you probably won’t like the results.
These points might go some way to explaining why the presence of creator-leaders in the top team is so rare. And why things can be pretty challenging for these folks.